Most techies would rather get syphilis than be managers.
-- Bryan
~~~
Normal people worry me. That's why I'm so comfortable around myself.
-- Heather M.
~~~
Don't make me kill you and eat you.
-- Mike Bossart
~~~
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
-- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
~~~
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot (1819-1880)
~~~
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
-- G. K. Chesterfield
~~~
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-- Umberto Eco
~~~
Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.
-- Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands
~~~
How can I lose to such an idiot?
-- A shout from chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)
~~~
Hell is paved with good samaritans.
-- William M. Holden
~~~
The average person thinks he isn't.
-- Father Larry Lorenzoni
~~~
I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!
-- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
~~~
If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
-- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
~~~
Man is a game playing animal and a computer is another way to play games.
-- Scott Adams
~~~
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
-- Daniel C. Dennett
~~~
Let us face ourselves bravely as we are. For only a philosophy that recognizes reality can lead us into true happiness, and only that kind of philosophy is sound and healthy.
-- Lin Yutang
~~~
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
-- H.L. Mencken
~~~
Last night as I lay in bed looking at the stars I thought 'Where the hell is the ceiling ?'
~~~
Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month.
-- Wernher von Braun.
~~~
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
-- Edward P. Tryon.
~~~
What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.
-- Dave Barry.
~~~
I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost...
~~~
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
-- Richard Feynman.
~~~
Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.
-- Marlo Thomas.
~~~
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
-- Woody Allen.
~~~
That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV.
-- Calvin.
~~~
Campaigns to bearproof all garbage containers in wild areas have been difficult because, as one biologist put it, 'There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence levels of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists'.
~~~
I knew a mathematician who said 'I do not know as much as God. But I know as much as God knew at my age'.
-- Milton Shulman (1925-), Canadian writer, journalist, and critic.
~~~
But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-- Francis Darwin (1848-1925), British scientist.
~~~
Jesus loves you. Then again, so does Barney.
~~~
Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.
-- Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
~~~
Man is a social animal - If you don't want to be an animal, don't be social.
~~~
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
~~~
Sorry I missed church, I've been busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.
~~~
Stick with me baby and I'll buy you rocks as big as diamonds.
~~~
WANTED: Meaningful overnight relationship.
~~~
Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
~~~
Billy Graham has described heaven as a family reunion that never ends. What could hell possibly be like? Home videos of the same reunion?
~~~
Cooking lesson #1: don't fry bacon in the nude.
~~~
Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.
~~~
Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is your list of girls who were naughty.
~~~
If it were truly the thought that counted, more women would be pregnant.
~~~
Being married to a programmer is like having a cat. You talk to it but you're never really sure if it hears you, much less comprehends what you say.
~~~
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-- Seymore Cray, on virtual memory.
~~~
Mountain Dew and doughnuts... because breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
~~~
Multitasking /adj./ 3 PCs and a chair with wheels.
~~~
Programmer /n./ A red-eyed, mumbling mammal capable of conversing with inanimate objects.
~~~
For evil to triumph it is only necessary for good men to buy Microsoft.
~~~
Sometimes I think about going to the gym and working out in order to impress women, but hey, that's why I learned UNIX.
~~~
The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, ... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
-- Isaac Asimov,The Relativity of Wrong
~~~
It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.
-- Michio Kaku, Hyperspace
~~~
Working with Unix is like wrestling a worthy opponent. Working with windows is like attacking a small whining child who is carrying a .38.
-- puck
~~~
Sanity is a one trick pony - all you have is rational thought. But when you're good and loony, the sky's the limit!
-- The Tick
~~~
I couldn't help myself. They were so big and round and beautiful, I just had to touch them! Then she started screaming "MY EYES!, MY EYES!" and ruined the mood.
~~~
Practice safe eating - always use condiments.
~~~
If the sales person at your local software store gives you a blank stare or says they don't carry it, I recommend scrunching your face up and saying something incredibly condescending like "It runs under Windows - maybe you've heard of THAT." (Macintosh users adjust accordingly. If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a UNIX user to show you how it's done.)
-- Scott Adams, author of Dilbert
~~~
The sooner all the animals are dead, the sooner we'll find their money.
-- Ed Bluestone, The National Lampoon
~~~
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
~~~
Developing skills that depend on a proprietary product makes you a sharecropper on your own brain.
-- Donald B. Marti Jr.
~~~
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.
-- Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, July 1996
~~~
If you want the type of support that is available from proprietary software companies, we will try to find you a consultant to sing to you on the phone for half an hour, then give you a wrong answer.
~~~
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
-- Doug Gwyn
~~~
The Three Great Virtues of a Programmer
Laziness
The quality that makes you go to the great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
-- Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, Programming Perl
~~~
Elegance?
Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain - there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as a concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack--signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired.  It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker.
-- Judge Fang and Miss Pao in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
~~~
People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen.  You'd think that would also be obvious.
-- Larry Wall
~~~
Sometime when you least expect it, Love will tap you on the shoulder...and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn't your turn.
-- N.V. Plyter
~~~
It's like being in a library where someone has scattered all the books on the floor, attached them together with threads and you are in the dark.
-- MorningSide, CBC Radio, about the WWW
~~~
If you can't lower heaven, raise hell
~~~
Order is for idiots, genius can handle chaos
~~~
The question is not if you are paranoid, it is if you are paranoid enough
~~~
From an actual newspaper contest where entrants age 4 to 15 were asked to imitate "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey": My young brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth - that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally - but I didn't want to upset him.
-- Age 10
~~~
Earth First! We'll strip mine the other planets later.
~~~
Once I tried to kill myself with bungee cord. I kept almost dying.
-- Stephen Wright
~~~
Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
~~~
I've learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
~~~
The reason attempted suicide is illegal: The government can't tax you if you're dead.
~~~
For refund, insert baby here.
-- Graffiti on condom machine
~~~
Men are like fine wine. They start out as grapes and it is our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something we'd like to have dinner with.
~~~
They say making love with me is like a roller coaster ride. Over far too quickly, and afterwards they wanna throw up.
-- Victor Lewis-Smith
~~~
Nobody's perfect... well, there was this guy, but we killed him.
~~~
I prefer to describe my profession as that of a "Contemporary Anthropological Interactive Observer" because it has just the right amount of flair. Besides, "stalker" is such an ugly word.
~~~
Memorize quotes. They're useful in ending and winning arguments. Then again, so are semi-automatic weapons.
-- Tony Detharidge
~~~
Abortion brings out the inner child in you.
-- Jeff Epperson
~~~
Got a cat the other day. Had to swerve to get it, but I got it.
~~~
I like going to a school yard and watching all the little kids run and scream on the school grounds. Of course they don't know that I'm using blanks.
~~~
When birds fly in the right formation, they need only exert half the effort. Even in nature, teamwork results in collective laziness.
-- Despair.com
~~~
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Despair.com
~~~
When I die, I would like to be cremated and have my ashes put into the "Mr.Coffee" machine. Brew up a cup of "Joe." It would one be stiff drink.
-- Joe Flush, comedian
~~~
On Achievement: The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the lawn-mower.
-- www.despair.com
~~~
I work very hard every day. Millions on welfare depend on me.
~~~
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. And then you die. What's that? A bonus? I think the life-cycle is all backwards. You should die first and get it all over with. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch. You go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol and party. You get ready for high school. You go to grade school and become a kid. You play. You have no responsibilities. You become a little baby & go back into the womb. You spend your last nine months floating... Then, you finish off as an orgasm. I like it.
-- Andy Rooney
~~~
Never argue with a fool - they will drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
-- The Fool's Law
~~~
Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts.
-- Drebin, Naked Gun 2 1/2
~~~
I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.
-- Dazed and confused
~~~
Now it's time for one of my favorite cartoons. It's a sad, depressing story about a pathetic coyote who spends every waking moment in the futile pursuit of a sadistic roadrunner, who mocks him and laughs at him as he is repeatedly crushed and maimed. I hope you enjoy it!
-- Uncle Nutzie, UHF
~~~
May the best of your past be the worst of your future.
-- Long kiss goodnight
~~~
I'm not a follower... I'm a leader with the same idea.
-- Kenny Dude
~~~
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go round every two hundred million years. And its only one of millions and billions in this amazing and expanding universe. So remember you feeling very small and insecure and how amazingly unlikely was your birth. Just hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space. 'Cause there's bugger all down her on Earth!
-- Monty Python, The Galaxy Song
~~~
Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.
-- Matt a.k.a. NoFear
~~~
Sanity is the playground for the unimaginative
~~~
Everyone has issues except me - I have a damn subscription.
-- JD Ives
~~~
Eskimo's have 49 words in their language to define snow because they have so much of it. In the English language, there are more then 50 ways to define a moron...
~~~
Life is a roller-coaster. We spend part of the time waiting for the ups, part of the time screaming at the downs, wishing we could ride it again when we're dying, and the entire time sitting on our butts getting lazier.
-- Grace K
~~~
The reason why grandchildren and grandparents get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
-- Sam Levenson
~~~
In the sixties, normal people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
-- JC Mikesell
~~~
Human Cloning doesn't scare me. People are "unethically making babies" in America all the time.
~~~
May the Lord reach out to you with his guiding hand and smack you upside the head with it.
-- Excel
~~~
My parents keep asking how school was. It's like saying, "How was that drive-by shooting?" You don't care how it was. You're lucky to get out alive.
~~~
I may not be Fred Flinstone, but I bet I can make your bed rock!
~~~
If you are reading this, I am already dead. Ever since Mr. Wonka left me the Chocolate Factory, my life has been a living hell. I have woken on several occasions to what I am sure were the Oompa Loompas stroking my young body. Within two weeks of taking control of the factory my Grandfather became addicted to Fizzy Lifting drinks, culminating in a tragic fan accident. I am sure the Oompa Loompas ate the remains.
The ghosts of the dead children haunt my every waking moment, and pursue me through these twisted halls in my nightmares. Veruca screams, burning from the harsh flames of the furnace. Augustus Gloop gurgles chocolate from his bloated features as he struggles to call my name. The gum-chewing girl bursts on a regular basis, showering me with blueberry-scented entrails. I think Mike TV still lives in the walls like a mouse, stealing my things and keeping me awake with his tiny footsteps.
My other grandparents died long ago, and I shudder to think of their final fate at the hands of those tiny orange-skinned monsters. My mother long ago went insane, teeth rotting from candy. She is locked in the cellar now, though I feel her fetid breath washing over me from time to time and hear her shrieking laughter... "golden ticket... golden ticket."
The pressures of all this have broken me, compounded with the trials of a ten year old trying to run a factory populated with imps, with the ledgers all cut in half and unreadable. As I take my life, leaping from the Wonkavator (freedom, sweet freedom), I damn thee Wonka.
Where ever your soul may rest, I damn thee.
Farewell.
Charlie
~~~
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this, it follows, that the population of the whole universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely products of a deranged imagination.
-- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
~~~
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
-- Richard Lovelace, from To Althea, from Prison
~~~
When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned.
-- Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), in Congressional Record 14 October 1968, p. 31636, (Howard Samuels speaking and "recalling the answer that Pastor Martin Niemoller...gave...")
~~~
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pense'es, #895.
~~~
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
-- Alexander Pope. 1688-1744. Essay on Man. Epistle i. Line 95.
~~~
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserv'd to blame or to commend,
A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er oblig'd;
Like Cato, give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause.
-- Alexander Pope,_Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_
~~~
O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
But when we've practised quite a while
How vastly we improve our style.
-- J.R. Pope, A Word of Encouragement (updating Sir Walter Scott's Marmion)
~~~
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- Ozymandias by Percy Blythe Shelley:
~~~
If you want the truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world. it will fly; it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb,'a lie will go round the world while truth is putting its boots on.
-- C H Spurgeon (1834-1892) Gems from Spurgeon 1859.
~~~
I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares.
-- George Washington (1732-99), U.S. general, president. Letter, 20 July 1794.
~~~
Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?
-- Isaac Watts, Am I a Soldier of the Cross? 1721
~~~
The age is dull and mean. Men creep,
Not walk; with blood too pale and tame
To pay the debt we owe to shame;
Buy cheap, sell dear; eat, drink, and sleep
Down-pillowed, deaf to moaning want;
Pay tithes for soul-insurance; keep
Six day to Mammon, one to Cant.
-- John Greeleaf Whittier (1809-1892), For Righteousness' Sake, 1855
~~~
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
-- Oscar Wilde (The Ballad of Reading Gaol).
~~~
If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
-- Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) (From Josephus Daniels' _The Wilson Era: Years of War and After_ [1946])
~~~
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given out hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.-Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-- William Wordsworth
~~~
When you get what you want in your
struggle for self and the world makes you
king for a day just go to the mirror and look
at yourself and see what that man has to say.
For it isn't your father or mother or wife,
whose judgment upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict count most in
your life is the one staring back from the glass.
Some people may think you a straight
shootin' chum and call you a wonderful guy.
But the man in the glass says you're only
a bum if you can't look him straight in the eye.
He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest,
for he's with you clear up to the end, and you've
passed your most dangerous, difficult test if the
man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway
of life and get pats on the back as you go,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears if you've
cheated the man in the glass
-- Anonymous
~~~
When you love, you must not expect anything in return, for if you do you are not loving but investing. If you love you must prefer to accept pain, for if you expect happiness, you are not loving, but using.
~~~
Love isn't a matter of finding the right person, but creating the right relationship. The question isn't how much love there is at the beginning, but how much love there is at the end.
~~~
Christians believe life begins at conception. Liberals believe that life begins at birth. Jews believe that life begins when the children leave home and the dog dies.
~~~
In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.
-- Francis Schaeffer
~~~
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable,drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation.They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
~~~
Great men of action . . . never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job, and at times they all are. A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk.
-- Oswald Mosley, (1896-1980)
~~~
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
-- Robert Conquest, _Reflections on a Ravaged Century_, 1999
~~~
As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst things.
-- William Jenkyn
~~~
It is by affliction chiefly that the heart of man is purified, and that the thoughts are fixed on a better state. Prosperity has power to intoxicate the imagination, to fix the mind upon the present scene, to produce confidence and elation, and to make him who enjoys affluence and honors forget the hand by which they were bestowed. It is seldom that we are otherwise than by affliction awakened to a sense of our imbecility, or taught to know how little all our acquisitions can conduce to safety or quiet, and how justly we may inscribe to the superintendence of a higher power those blessings which in the wantonness of success we considered as the attainments of our policy and courage....
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
~~~
I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers.
-- Jonah Goldberg
~~~
You can stay young as long as you learn. 
-- Emily Dickinson
~~~
The long dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the Devil.
-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) "The Screwtape Letters," 1941
~~~
Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about man's search for God. For me, they might as well talk about the mouse's search for a cat...
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded--painfully--the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint. ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises.
-- Bruce McCall, _Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada_, 1997
~~~
One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting "the good guys" for "the bad guys".
-- Thomas Sowell
~~~
I desired as many as could to join together in fasting and prayer, that God would restore the spirit of love and of a sound mind to the poor deluded rebels in America.
-- John Wesley, Journal, Aug 1, 1777
~~~
Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so that we can all get off.
-- Chris Patten, London, April 19, 1989
~~~
Can you understand it, for I cannot, how a man is a free agent, a responsible agent, so that his sin is his own willful sin and lies with him and never with God, and yet at the same time God's purposes are fulfilled and his will is done even by demons and corrupt men? I cannot comprehend it: without hesitation I believe it, and rejoice so to do , I never hope to comprehend it.
-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
~~~
The Bible teaches that both God is in control and that people make real choices. These two truths go side by side throughout the Scriptures. The Bible absolutely does not teach fatalism. But neither does it teach that people are absolutely free and autonomous. The effects of the Fall and our very natures restrain us. This is called an antinomy. That is (per the American Heritage Dictionary) "A contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable."
-- Mike Walbert
~~~
I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
-- Charles Schulz
~~~
Lost interest? It's so bad I've lost apathy.
~~~
The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a _Paradise Lost_ in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a _Divine Comedy_ in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibelline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? ... Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell.
-- G. K. Chesterton, _Heretics_, 1905
~~~
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
-- C.S. Lewis _Mere Christianity_
~~~
Every nickel spent doesn't return a dime, some things you do take longer than you expect, and some things don't materialize at all. That's the nature of using IT to solve new problems in new ways.
-- Bill Murphy, CTO of Omnexus, a digital marketplace for the plastics industry
~~~
I'm sorry, but comfortable is the last thing I want in my server room. I want it unbearably cold, and noisy. I want items scattered dangerously around the floor. I want random floor tiles to be missing. I want a very old sandwich of undetermined origin sitting half-eaten in the corner. I want the first thought of any person that enters my server room to be "Dear $DEITY, I must get out of this place IMMEDIATELY!"
-- Mike Sphar
~~~
I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou.
-- Paul Tomblin
~~~
Contestant number two, how do you set up a dial-up connection in Windows 95?
Call the systems administration people and tell them my machine is broken.
BZZZZZZZZT! Oh, I'm sorry but that answer is so wrong that our systems people have already found your address and will be visiting you personally tonight.
-- Janet Rolsma
~~~
Never meddle in the affairs of NT. It is slow to boot and quick to crash.
-- Stephen Harris
~~~
BTW. Violence, rude language, excessive drinking, paganism. It's hard to find children's books like that these days.
-- Stig Morten Valstad
~~~
Every time you apply the LART, you give some poor luser a chance to redeem itself and RTFM next time.
-- Infinitas
Oh. You didn't apply the LART hard enough. They get to RTFM next time around the Wheel Of Reincarnation, if you do it right. :)  
-- Thorf
~~~
For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out of meringue.
-- Tanuki
~~~
You can lead an idiot to knowledge but you cannot make him think.
You can, however, rectally insert the information, printed on stone tablets, using a sharpened poker.  
-- Nicolai
~~~
Remember - if all you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of fun.
-- Frossie
~~~
The ability to watch M*A*S*H on demand justified purchasing a VCR for myself. That show taught me a lot of useful things; for example, if one's skills are sufficiently in demand, one can wear a bathrobe to work, and generally have one's eccentricities tolerated.
-- Gus
~~~
Embrace your inner cynicism. Delight in the joy of knowing, with complete certainty, that the world is filled with idiots, losers, and all other assorted manner of higher life forms, and that a great many of of them trying their damndest to win the competition for "Species Least Likely To Be Useful". I figure, they'll probably lose that competition too, proving once again that the cockroach is mightier than the "man".
-- Jeff Gostin
~~~
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to using Windows NT for mission-critical applications.
-- What Yoda *meant* to say Devin L. Ganger
~~~
We are either doing something, or we are not. 'Talking about' is a subset of 'not'.
~~~
When people ask me what my religion is, I say either "Frisbeetarianism" which satisfies them if they're not listening closely, or "I'm trying to make up my mind between the Greek and Babylonian chaos goddesses, do you think Eris or Mummu has dishier priestesses?"  Though now I'm a minister I should probably take that question more seriously.
-- Peter da Silva
~~~
First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug test. I was worried they were going to say "you don't have enough LSD in your system to do Unix programming".
-- Paul Tomblin
~~~
I mean, we all self-LART to varying degrees on occasion. What sets us apart from the lusers is that we can pull ourselves out of the nosedive.
-- Mike Sphar
~~~
I'm not lean and mean, I'm surly and anorexic.
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
~~~
I quite often tell my SO to iron my shirts, make dinner, do the cleaning, etc... but only because I like to hear her laugh.
-- manc0046
~~~
No lusers were harmed in the creation of this Usenet article.
AND I WANT TO KNOW WHY NOT!
-- Geoff. Lane
~~~
If USENET is anarchy, IRC is a paranoid schizophrenic after 6 days on speed.
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
~~~
[Re: "Da Bomb" hot sauce]  This stuff will not only take the paint off a battleship, it'll also hunt down the painter and hir family, murder them, desecrate the bodies, and proceed to have its way with the family pet.
-- Mark C. Langston
~~~
The difference between math and physics is the difference between masturbation and sex.
-- Paul Tomblin
They're both messy, but physics can get you in much more trouble.
-- Malcom Ray
~~~
We aim to please. Ourselves, mostly, but we do aim to please.
-- Anthony DeBoer
~~~
The only sound a luser should make is a pleasant squishing sound as they're turned into a twitching pile of mince meat.
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
~~~
Let's face it, sysadmins are composed of the most adaptable, least stress-susceptible people around. Lusers aren't. Pit one against the other, and I'll not be taking any bets on the luser winning (10 000 to 1 against the luser, anyone? No? Nobody? Thought not.)
-- Dan Holdsworth
~~~
And I can't even begin to describe what a joy it is to work with a real metal case, with swing-out drive bays, that was designed for easy access and not built by the lowest-bidding Malaysian Monkey On Crack.
-- Adam J. Thornton
~~~
Actually, we have scientifically determined that Heisenberg did indeed sleep exactly here. However, we have no idea whatsoever just how fast asleep he was.
-- Dave Aronson
~~~
Hi, we're a group of ominous looking people who happen to deal with way too much spam. We'd like to wander aimlessly around your house discussing vivid images of what should be done to spammers, their families and casual acquaintances, and make veiled threats as to the future of your limbs (attached or not), animals and the insertion of farming implements into your orifices.
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
~~~
Give a luser a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a luser to fish and he'll bug you for life:
My bait's not working, but I haven't changed anything!
The river's gone down. Fix it!
Why is the net so slow today?
-- Malcolm Ray
I keep on getting my line caught on myself - why is it so hard to fish ?
Can I surf the river ?
I fell in the river and now I'm all wet - fix things so that I don't get wet when I fall in
Why can't the fish just jump out of the river into my frying pan ? It would make fishing so much easier
What is a fish ?
I can't fish (which could be anything from not having a fishing rod to using a brick for bait).
-- Simes
Light a fire for a luser and he'll be warm for a night; set a luser on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
-- fun
Give a man dynamite and soon the village will be showered with mud and rocks and unrecognizable bits of fish.
-- Peter Gutmann
~~~
I have to agree though, showing a misbehaving machine one of it's brethren in pieces, in pain, and in trouble seems to make them behave.  Swearing at them, bleeding into them and showing them their fates - three of the tenets of sysadminning.
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
~~~
Well, that's a whole 'nother thread by now, and I don't want to tangle too many threads in one place. Being called a Usenet Kitten would be embarrassing.
-- Alan
~~~
In a small way, Windows NT is a Unix.
-- Bill Gates
Because of the way it resembles something decent that's been emasculated?
-- adamsc
~~~
While preceding your entrance with a grenade is a good tactic in Quake, it can lead to problems if attempted at work.
-- C Hacking
~~~
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it vaguely unsettling that you get your theology from Star Trek?
-- Anthony DeBoer
Yeah, he should get it from B5 like us normal people.
-- Paul Tomblin
~~~
The correct way to roll NT out is out the door and into the nearest Dempster Dumpster or other large waste receptacle.
-- Mike Andrews
~~~
The problem with people whose minds are in the gutter is that they keep blocking my periscope.
-- Peter Gutmann
~~~
When computers emit smoke, it means they've chosen a new Pope. Unfortunately, they invariably choose the wrong one and immediately get condemned to non-functionality for heresy.
-- Anthony DeBoer
~~~
Re : ex-teamster, ex-nun potential PFY
...she can use the nun training to guilt the lusers after LARTing them: "Did you think Jesus died for your sins so you could fsck with the laser printer?"
-- Paul Joslin
~~~
Bleh. If I ever witness such a thing I'll become Amish, I swear.
-- Caton Little
All right son, get up to your room. That's it, I've had it, you are Amish, young man. For the rest of this weekend. Did you hear me? Amish! And don't come down till you've made some noodles and raised a barn.
-- Joe Thompson
~~~
Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery
A fitting punishment for kindly naivete, to end up belonging here.
-- Chris Johnson
~~~
Lucky Charms with Bailey's...the true Irish breakfast.
-- Daniel Macks
~~~
AFAIR, being insane is usually a pre-requisite for becoming a sysadmin. In the few cases where it's not pre-requisite, it's certainly going to be a bonus.
-- SIggi the Underpaid
~~~
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who its friends are.
-- Kyle Hearn
~~~
Today I got to meet someone who had put their disk, naked, in a backpack, with a LIVE CAT. The cat had mauled the metal cover, managed to separate the plastic shell of the disk, and played with it. Of course, she wanted to know if we could recover her files.  Fortunately, someone who was not required by their job to be really friendly to the lusers got to laugh loudly at her first...
-- Yonatan Zunger
~~~
You are in the presence of a system administrator. KNEEL
~~~
SCSI is *not* magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then.
~~~
Pete Krawczyk wrote :
> *sigh* Oh, how I wish lusers could read documentation more than they read
> porn...
That's IT! PORNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION!
...and as she finally reached orgasm, she screamed 'the mail server will be down for three hours tonight! Yes! Oh, yes!'
-- J.D. Falk
~~~
My group's mission statement - You want *what* ? By *WHEN* ?
-- Simon Burr
~~~
It's nice to be loved, but there's a lot to be said for CRINGING RESPECT
~~~
Managers are those lusers who can tell you what to do and you kinda[3] have to listen.
[3] I mean "kinda" in the "not really, in fact, not at all" mode.
-- Chris Saunderson
~~~
ZENgineering: v. when you've looked at the obvious to solve a problem you start doing something completely different to fix it. Other examples of ZENingeering solutions are: rebooting the router the opposite side of the campus to where the lusers are reporting network problems (Tuesday). I have no idea what the ATM bridge/router was doing to affect the network. it's not even got anything plugged into the Ethernet interfaces, and it only has one ATM port!  Richard
~~~
Sanity is like money; you should just have enough to get by. Any more and you turn into a freak.
-- rone
~~~
Impossible Code
To code the impossible code
To bring up a virgin machine
To pop out of endless recursion
To grok what appears on the screen
To right the unrightable bug
To endlessly twiddle and thrash
To mount the unmountable magtape
To stop the unstoppable crasvin : That's plenty. By the timh
This is my quest
To debug that code
No matter how hopeless
No matter the load
To write those routines
Without question or pause
To be willing to hack FORTRAN IV
For a heavenly cause
And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my code will run cuspy and calm
When it's put to the test
And the queue will be better for this
That one man, scorned and destined to lose
Still strove with his last allocation
To scrap the unscrappable kludge
~~~
Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind. I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.
-- From "The Practice Programming" by Brian W Kernighan & Rob Pike
~~~
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating
and impenetrable fog!
-- Calvin
~~~
That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
-- Calvin
~~~
Well, it just seemed wrong to cheat on an ethics test.
-- Calvin
~~~
Calvin: Can you make a living playing silly games?
His Dad: Actually, you can be among the most overpaid people on the planet.
~~~
If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again.
-- Calvin
~~~
The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real application in life.
-- Calvin
~~~
Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles!
-- Calvin
~~~
But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!
-- Calvin
~~~
If something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
-- Calvin
~~~
You can present the material, but you can't make me care.
-- Calvin
~~~
I'm learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life ... Procrastinating and rationalizing.
-- Calvin
~~~
I liked things better when I didn't understand them.
-- Calvin
~~~
I think nighttime is dark so you can imagine your fears with less distraction.
-- Calvin
~~~
Miss Wormwood: What state do you live in?
Calvin: Denial.
Miss Wormwood: I don't suppose I can argue with that...
~~~
My life needs a rewind/erase button.
-- Calvin
~~~
Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.
-- Calvin
~~~
Susie: You'd get a good grade without doing any work.
Calvin: So?
Susie: It's wrong to get rewards you haven't earned.
Calvin: I've never heard of anyone who couldn't live with that.
~~~
If you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe we'll just have to make some!
-- Calvin
~~~
MOM, CAN I SET FIRE TO MY BED MATTRESS?
No, Calvin.
CAN I RIDE MY TRICYCLE ON THE ROOF?
No, Calvin.
Then can I have a cookie?
No, Calvin.
(She's on to me.)
~~~
I don't need to compromise my principles, because they don't have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.
-- Calvin
~~~
Calvin : I think we have got enough information now, don't you?
Hobbes : All we have is one "fact" that you made up.
Calvin : That's plenty. By the time we add an introduction, a few illustrations and a conclusion, it'll look like a graduate thesis.
~~~
Hobbes : Shouldn't we read the instructions?
Calvin : Do I look like a sissy?
~~~
Why can't I ever build character at a Miami condo or a casino somewhere?
-- Calvin
~~~
There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
-- Calvin
~~~
Dad are you vicariously living through me in the hope that my accomplishments will validate your mediocre life and in some way compensate for all the opportunities you botched ?
-- Calvin
~~~
I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.
-- Calvin
~~~
A good compromise leaves everyone mad.
-- Calvin
~~~
Miss Wormwood, could we arrange our seats in a little circle and have a little discussion? Specifically, I'd like to debate whether cannibalism ought to be grounds for leniency in murders since it is less wasteful.
-- Calvin
~~~
Calvin: Who can fathom the feminine mind?
Hobbes: I like 'em anyway
~~~
"When life gives you a lemon, make lemonade." -Susie 
"I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!" -Calvin
~~~
Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers.
-- Hobbes being sarcastic
~~~
It's great to have a friend who appreciates an earnest discussion of ideas.
-- Calvin
~~~
That's the problem with science.  You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.
-- Calvin
~~~
All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.
-- Hobbes
~~~
I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
-- Hobbes
~~~
I don't understand this!  Not a single part of my horoscope came true!  ... The paper should print Mom's daily predictions.  Those sure come true.
-- Calvin
~~~
I don't know which is worse, ...that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low.
-- Calvin
~~~
That's the problem with nature, something's always stinging you or oozing mucous all over you. Let's go and watch TV.
-- Calvin
~~~
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
~~~
Then you admit confirming not denying you ever said that?
NO! ... I mean Yes!  WHAT?
I'll put 'maybe.'
-- Bloom County
~~~
What the historical record shows is that parents who wish their tots to achieve greatness should beat them regularly, destroy their self-esteem, and cruelly deprive them of ordinary comforts, such as ice cream or mother's affection. It would be especially helpful for one of the parents, probably dad, to die before the onset of adolescence; suicide is fine for the purpose.
-- Denis Dutton
~~~
If ignorance is bliss you must be orgasmic
~~~
Darling, I have a .45 and a shovel - do you think someone will miss you?
~~~
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.
~~~
This product is not intended for use by personnel incapable of understanding the manual.
~~~
Computing is a terminal condition.
~~~
The only secure computer is one that is turned off, locked in a safe and buried 20 feet down in a secret location, and I'm not completely confident of that either.
-- Bruce Schneier
~~~
It is...fruitless to question and debate early design decisions; better solutions are often quite obvious in hindsight. Perhaps the most important point was that someone did make decisions, in spite of uncertainties.
-- Niklaus Wirth
~~~
Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson is an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)
~~~
When in doubt, use brute force.
-- Ken Thompson
~~~
Purity isn't enough. You can program with NAND gates. The purpose of a programming languages is to map human mental models to machine constructs. The easier and more accurate the mapping, the "better" the language. Maybe a language that's unusable without a huge support environment isn't very usable.
-- Bob Bagwill
~~~
A study in the January 2001 issue of the American Journal of Sociology showed that teenagers who made pledges to remain sexual virgins until marriage were more likely to delay sex (up to 18 months).  However, when they did eventually have premarital sexual intercourse, they were more likely to have sex without contraceptive than their counterparts who didn't make such pledges.
-- National Public Radio, Morning Edition, 2001-01-04
~~~
I got enough guilt to start my own religion
-- Tori Amos,
~~~
I cannot convince myself that there is anyone so wise, so universally comprehensive in his judgment, that he can be trusted with the power to tell others: 'You shall not express yourself thus, you shall not describe your own experiences; or depict the fantasies which your mind has created; or laugh at what others set up as respectable; or question old beliefs; or contradict the dogmas of the church, of our society, our economic systems, and our political orthodoxy.'
-- Jake Zeitlin
~~~
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
-- U.S. Supreme Court
~~~
The third 'right'? - the 'pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.
-- from Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
~~~
Human beings, being unique in their ability to learn from others, are also unique in their disinclination to do so.
-- from Job by Robert Heinlein
~~~
I've written a commercial for Apple Computer. It goes like this: 'Macintosh - we might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'
-- Douglas Adams
~~~
I'd offer to change your mind for you, but I don't have a fresh diaper.
-- Leah to pro-spammer in news.admin.net-abuse.email
~~~
I am logged in, therefore I am.
~~~
The truth is out there? Anyone knows the URL?
~~~
Unix is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience.
-- Colin McFadyen in alt.folklore.computers
~~~
Today's CS lecture will be conducted entirely through the medium of interpretive dance.
-- something I've always wanted to hear but never will.
~~~
When a filesystem no longer needs to be mounted, it can be unmounted with umount.*
*It should of course be unmount, but the n mysteriously disappeared in the 70's, and hasn't been seen since. Please return it to Bell Labs, NJ, if you find it.
-- From Linux System Administrators' Guide
~~~
Getting a SCSI chain working is perfectly simple if you remember that there must be exactly three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with a silver-handled knife whilst burning *black* candles.
-- Anthony DeBoer
~~~
Microsoft is a cross between The Borg and the Ferengi.  Unfortunately, they use Borg to do their marketing and Ferengi to do their programming.
-- Simon Slavin in asr
~~~
My company motto: If this stuff worked, you wouldn't need me.
~~~
Posting to the 'net these days it's more like shouting into a deep cave
in which lives a fire-breathing dragon who hordes Hormel products.
You get an echo back with flames and Spam
~~~
YOUR PC's broken and I'VE got a problem?
-- The BOFH Slogan
~~~
On a more familiar note, I'm learning many new and exciting things about the UNIX operating system.  However, I was shocked to discover that few of these things will get me chicks. Sucks to be me!  But, seeing as how my life is running a solid PG rating, I'm trying to boost that up to at least PG-13 by increased use of foul language.
~~~
On the wall of the women's restroom on the Enterprise:  Where no man has gone before
~~~
UNIX is a well appointed kitchen. Windows is a kitchen full of bread machines and other Shopping Channel specialized tools. Which would a cook rather use?
-- Peter da Silva
~~~
I'm sorry, our software is perfect.  The problem must be you.
-- Dogbert
~~~
I explicitly give people the freedom not to use Perl, just as god gives people the freedom to go to the devil if they so choose.
-- Larry Wall
~~~
The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.
-- Brian Kernighan [1978]
~~~
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
-- Brian Kernighan
~~~
Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.
-- Dan Salomon
~~~
It's a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occurred in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea...
-- Tom Galloway
~~~
Einstein was a genius: Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. But those of us who are not as tall, have to make a choice.
-- Richard Feynman
~~~
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
~~~
No matter how cynical you get, you can't keep up.
-- Lilly Tomlin
~~~
There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.
-- Baron Rothschild
~~~
We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
-- Larry Wall, second State of the Onion speech
~~~
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
-- Thomas Pynchon
~~~
It has been one of the great errors of our time that to think that by thinking about thinking, and then talking about it, we could possibly straighten out and tidy up our minds. There is no delusion more damaging than to get the idea in your head that you understand the functioning of your own brain. Once you acquire such a notion, you run the danger of moving in to take charge, guiding your thoughts, shepherding your mind from place to place, controlling it, making lists of regulations. The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can. It is all very well to be aware of your awareness, even proud of it, but never try to operate it. You are not up to the job.
-- Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
~~~
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-- Rudyard Kipling
~~~
Those who have never tried electronic communication may not be aware of what a "social skill" really is. One social skill that must be learned, is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but *threatening*, to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills.
-- Nick Szabo
~~~
Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew.
-- Peter Landin
~~~
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
~~~
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
~~~
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
~~~
Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity.
~~~
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
~~~
A logician trying to explain logic to a programmer is like a cat trying to explain to a fish what it's like to get wet.
~~~
If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.
~~~
To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer. To create utter chaos with no perceivable possibility of salvation calls for an MBA.
~~~
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's Notes from a Big Country
~~~
Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.
-- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
~~~
Crime doesn't pay... does that mean my job is a crime?
~~~
Take everything in stride.  Trample anyone who gets in your way.
~~~
Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.
-- Eddy Peters
~~~
The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
~~~
I can not accept your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
-- Lord John Emerich Edward Dalbert-Acton
~~~
There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine . . . been here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000. And we've only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat? The planet isn't going away. We are.
-- George Carlin
~~~
No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique. Anger may in time turn to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never again come into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.
-- Sun Tzu
~~~
>Executions have been quite effective against recidivism.
>No executed felon has EVER re-offended. --Paul Ciszek
Well, there is the alleged case of a Jewish heretic and general rabble-rouser who managed a brief return to his life of crime shortly after his execution...
-- John Schilling
~~~
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
-- Jack London
~~~
Reality is stranger than fiction, and so we write stranger things to compensate... A vicious cycle.
~~~
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
Ranko, such language!
Daddy taught me. He also teach me <censored> and <very censored> and <oh boy is this censored.> He also said <you wouldn't believe how censored> once when he was trying to teach me to drink.
-- Ranko Saotome age 8 to her mother, The Bet: Fist of Orion, by Gregg Sharp
~~~
A child-programmers approach to parents:
While Parent_patience > 0
Do Annoying_action
~~~
A programmers approach to sex:
While Orgasm = 0
Do F***
~~~
I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.
-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett
~~~
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett
~~~
I heard if you play the NT-4.0-CD backwards, you get a satanic message.
That's nothing, if you play it forward, it installs NT-4.0
~~~
Humanity faced a tremendous setback ca. 1100 A.D., when the first law school was established in Bologna. Ironically, the free exchange of ideas at the law school spurred the law students to invent new ways (patents, trademarks, copyrights) to stifle the free exchange of ideas in other industries.
-- Brief history of Linux by James Baughn
~~~
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
-- Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
~~~
Looking deeply into the crystal, the Amazon matriarch began the arcane chant that would open its scrying powers.  The crystal began to glow, faintly, revealing characters, words that would tell the elder what she needed to know.
YOU'RE SCREWED.
She had hoped for something more detailed...
"Stupid oracle."  Cologne glared at the crystal in aggravation. "Could you possibly be more specific?
YOU'RE REALLY SCREWED.
That's not telling me anything helpful...
SEVERELY SCREWED?  MAJOR SCREWED?  SCREWED BEYOND BELIEF?
It is a little known fact that in the Amazon dialect of Chinese there are no less that sixty-two ways to call someone or something a moron.  Cologne ran through them all twice in three and a half minutes.
-- Girl Days, A Ranma 1/2 fanfic by Robert Haynie
~~~
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
~~~
Religious leaders have often ranted and railed against certain sexual practices, from masturbation and oral sex to homosexuality, as though these were the handiwork of the devil. But what if God feels more honored when a person joyfully masturbates as opposed to saying a speedy rosary or spending an obligatory hour in church.  After all, God created orgasm, while prayers and churches are the creations of men. What if God receives more joy when an unmarried couple lovingly shares oral sex than when a church-going husband and wife have passionless, missionary position intercourse? And who is to say that God hasn't created a group of homosexual angels to guard the gates of heaven? Maybe God has a sense of humor and brings out the queer angels whenever a redneck preacher or one of his intolerant parishioners has just died and is awaiting judgment.
-- from The Guide to Getting it On
~~~
I'm an apatheist. The question is no longer interesting, and the answer no longer matters.
-- petro
~~~
People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming, "Take me, take me!"
-- Carl Jacobs
~~~
The immoral man takes his pleasures without moderation, leaving himself vulnerable to a descent into gluttony and drunkenness.  He will neglect his duties, abuse those who hold him dear, and pee on others in the public baths.  It is the duty of the moral man try and steer him towards the moral path, and failing that, to hold him under the water until the little bubbles stop rising and he turns a faint bluish colour.
-- From the unrecorded Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
~~~
You must someday reach a point in your life where you can honestly admit to yourself that setting fire to senior citizens is not as fulfilling as it once was.
-- Reverend Shayne Dark of the CofD mailinglist
~~~
It's amazing how many of the religious say "God will punish" but haven't enough faith to let God actually do it.
-- Marc Wolfe on the CofD mailing list
~~~
According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but 'organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum'. I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
I'm going to hell so fast the hand basket burned up on re-entry.
~~~
Isn't it ironic that the previous generation defined themselves in terms of rebellion against authority, and now that they're in charge, all they do is give people reasons to want to rebel against authority.
-- posted on Slashdot
~~~
When I was a kid, I used to pray to God to give me a bike. Then I realized that wasn't the way God works. So I went out and stole a bike, and I prayed to God to forgive me.
~~~
It is true that some lawyers are dishonest, arrogant, greedy, venal, amoral, ruthless buckets of slime. On the other hand, it is unfair to judge the entire profession by a few hundred-thousand bad apples.
-- James D. Gordon III, The Washington Post
~~~
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H.L. Menken
~~~
Trench Coat - 50 dollars. Pipebombs - 75 dollars. Ammo - 250 dollars. Assault Rifle - 600 dollars. The look on your classmates' faces before you blow them away - priceless. There are some things money can't buy, for everything else, there's MasterCard.
-- rejected idea for a Mastercard commercial
~~~
Who says Osama 'evil man' Bin Laden has to develop any of these 'evil' weapons?  You want a chemical weapon?  You blow up a bloody paper mill!  Or a fertilizer factory!  Ask Union Carbide what can happen by stupidity and negligence and then apply that information to a homeland terrorist action scenario. Has this presidential git learned nothing from the actions against his country.  Don't think like a pentagon general with a budget the size of Rhode Island, stealth bombers and enough munitions to clear the coke from the presidential sinuses.  Think cheap!  Think accessible!  Think about terrorists doing with your infrastructure what Jackie Chan does with a ladder, a shopping cart and seven feet of garden hose.  Here endeth the lesson.
-- The Reverend Shayne Dark on the CofD mailing list
~~~
When it comes to survival, you can't be choosy about the company you keep. You may have to make alliances with unsavory people.  So I'm announcing tonight my decision to co-operate with the United States government.
-- George Carlin
~~~
Honestly must be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
-- George Carlin
~~~
That assumes computer science is a functional engineering discipline. Its not, at best we are at the alchemy stage of progression. You put two things together it goes bang and you try to work out why...But right now given two chunks of code, I find out what happens by putting them together not by formal methods. In the case of alchemy versus chemistry the chemists know whether it will probably go bang before they try it (and the chemical engineers still duck anyway)
-- Alan Cox
~~~
If you're so filled with holiday cheer you can't stand it, try calling your friends and going caroling yourself. Especially if you're old, a drug addict,an alcoholic or obviously homosexual and have a lot of effeminate friends. Go In packs. If you are black, go to a prissy white neighbourhood. Ring doorbells, and when the Father Knows Best-type family answers, start screeching hostilely your favorite carol. Watch their faces. There's nothing they can do. It's not illegal. Maybe they'll give you a present.
-- Why I Love Christmas, By John Waters
~~~
This guy has more things wrong with him than fish-flavored soda.
-- A Tribute To Forgotten Heroes, by Matt from X-Entertainment
~~~
Trance: . . . and a human, which means patching him up is as easy as cake.
Dylan: Easy as pie.
Trance: Are you sure about that? I think making pie is a lot harder than cake.
Dylan: Just fix him Trance.
Trance: Oh, he'll be fine. Compared to baking, brain surgery is a snap.
-- Andromeda
~~~
You know . . . I can cook too.
-- Tyr, Andromeda
~~~
Now if we're through, I'd like to get back to my troubled mind.
-- Rev Bem, Andromeda
~~~
Yeah, but you like everyone, even people who try to kill you. *Especially* people that try to kill you.
-- Beka, Andromeda
~~~
Beka: Umm, where'd ya get all the candles?
Tyr: I rendered them from the fat of my enemies.
Beka: Can't wait to see the entree.
-- Andromeda
~~~
And you know why? Cause I could get away with it. Because I'm cute!
-- Trance, Andromeda
~~~
She hates you.
I know. She's hot, *and* she's a good judge of character.
-- Beka and Harper, Andromeda
~~~
So what if she holds me in utter contempt? At least she's thinking of me.
-- Harper, Andromeda
~~~
Trance: And what if they're not decoys?
Beka: Then when we get to the pearly gates, make sure everyone lines up behind Rev- he's got spin control.
Rev: I'll see what I can do.
-- Andromeda
~~~
Okay. Alright. I know when I'm not wanted. I usually don't listen, but I know.
-- Harper
~~~
.. I used to get in more fights with SCO than I did my girlfriend, but now, thanks to Linux, she has more than happily accepted her place back at number one antagonist in my life..  
-- Jason Stiefel, krypto@s30.nmex.com
~~~
If the current stylistic distinctions between open-source and commercial software persist, an open-software revolution could lead to yet another divide between haves and have-nots: those with the skills and connections to make use of free software, and those who must pay high prices for increasingly dated commercial offerings.
-- Scientific American
~~~
From the Linux getopt(3) manpage:
BUGS
This manpage is confusing.
~~~
Every day I send overnight packages filled with rabid weasels to people who use frames for no good reason.
-- The Usenet Oracle, Oracularity #1017-1
~~~
Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.
-- David Knuth
~~~
... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
~~~
Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles:
Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, he can make it work.
Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't.
PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.'
-- Philip Greenspun
~~~
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.'
-- Hume
~~~
Anatomy (n): something everyone has, but which looks better on a girl.'
-- Bruce Raeburn.
~~~
Cleavage (n): something you can approve of and look down on at the same time.
-- W. Garnett.
~~~
Like a ski resort full of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetric as it might seem.
-- Marc Unangst
~~~
Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men.  The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. 
-- Robert Heinlein, Assignment In Eternity, p.63, Fantasy Press, Reading PA, 1953. {Kettle-Belly Baldwin speaking, in the story 'Gulf'}
~~~
[...] The thought was infuriating; the notion that the government might be spying on his home, his castle, was as repulsive as having his mail opened.
They might be doing that, too! Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels.  But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost!
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land
~~~
The people will again respect the law when the law again respects the will of the people.
-- Jim Ray - Campaign '92
~~~
There are those who are born UNIX; Those who are made UNIX; And those who become UNIX; For the kingdom of heaven's sake. (Matthew 19:12) 
-- Stuart Yeates
~~~
Officer!  Officer!  Arrest that man!  He's whistling a dirty song!
-- Jean
~~~
I don't remember exactly where, but it was rather cool.
-- Jeffrey C. Ollie 
They should make that last sentence into a motto for the whole Web.
-- Ade Rixon
~~~
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal.  Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: 'This time it will surely run' or 'I just found the last bug'.
-- Fred Brooks.
~~~
Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
~~~
When in doubt, use brute force. 
-- Ken Thompson (author of Unix)
~~~
I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908
~~~
A sysadmin's life is a sorry one.  The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare.  On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards.
-- Sysadmin's Lament
~~~
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope  of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. 
-- Plato
~~~
Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
~~~
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for card playing.
~~~
If you want to learn, the best way to do so is through experience. Unless you can't stand a loss on your record, just play somebody, get whooped, ask for any tips at the end of the game, rinse and repeat until people ask for your tips. Good luck. 
-- Zirale
~~~
You could write a DeCSS implementation using Perl's English module, record yourself reading the code out loud with Metallica playing in the background, encode it as an MP3, and piss of both the RIAA and the MPAA at the same time. :-)
~~~
A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonald's Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine.
~~~
LOGAN: I always knew that underneath that bioengineered, military-issue armor plating there was a beating heart.
MAX: Let's not go overboard here. I'm not signing up to join the Logan Cale brigade for the defense of widows, small children, and lost animals.
LOGAN: You could be field commander.
MAX: I think not.
~~~
On a Win 9X box, try CTRL-ESC, ALT-MINUS-C
~~~
MALE: Why would Manticore try to get rid of us?
ALEC: I want to get rid of you, and I just met you.
-- Dark Angel
~~~
ALEC: It's just 'cause she's hot, you know.
LOGAN: What is?
ALEC: Everything. Everything she gets away with. You honestly think we'd be down here in this moldy dump looking for God-knows-what if she were ugly?
LOGAN: We're down here to give Max a hand.
-- Dark Angel
~~~
EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE A VICTIM. And the paradox is that victim status accrues precisely to those who can acquire enough clout to make others afraid of them. Victimhood has become one of the fruits of power. Anyone can be an underdog; the trick is to be a registered, pedigreed underdog.
-- Joseph Belloc Sobran.
~~~
PURPOSE OF YOUR CAREER
Astronaut:  Advancing scientific knowledge for the good of humanity.
Fireman:  Saving lives and property.
Sysadmin: Assuring uninterrupted access to alt.binaries.erotica.sheep.
-- The Usenet oracle
~~~
As you reach for the web, a venomous spider appears.  Unable to pull your hand away in time, the spider promptly, but politely, bites you.  The venom takes affect quickly causing your lips to turn plaid along with your complexion.  You become dazed, and in your stupor you fall from the limbs of the tree.  Snap!  Your head falls off and rolls all over the ground.  The instant before you croak, you hear the whoosh of a vacuum being filled by the air surrounding your head.  Worse yet, the spider is suing you for damages.
-- an actual quote from the original Adventure game
~~~
Time to stop beating around the bush.  Beat the bush _itself_.  Give it a good thrashing, and say "bad bush!" in a loud stern tone.
-- Fred Barling, Humorscope
~~~
Diaper spelled backwards is Repaid.  Think about it.
-- Marshall McLuhan
~~~
You people are still using *computers*?  I just whistle into my phone at 56Kbps, doing the compression, decoding the images, and running the Java programs all in my head.  PGP encryption does slow me down a bit though...
-- Guy Macon (guymacon@deltanet.com), in alt.shenanigans
~~~
First you will know pain.  Then you will know fear.  Then you will die.  Have a nice flight.
-- G'kar, on Babylon 5
~~~
Like frozen sentries of the Serengeti, the century-old termite mounds had withstood all tests of time and foe - all tests, that is, except the one involving drunken aardvarks and a stolen wrecking ball.
-- Gary Larson
~~~
Actually this is a common misconception...I do *not* in fact have a lot of time on my hands at all! I just have a very very very very bad sense of priorities.
-- Dean Engelhardt
~~~
You know how people who don't exactly like to read buy those books on tape?  Well I'm one of those people. And of all the books on tape, I think that "Where's Waldo" is my favorite....
~~~
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make a nuisance of himself to other people.
-- John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_
~~~
I recently shampooed my pet rabbit with Body Shop shampoo. Its eyes bulged out and turned red. If you tested your stuff on animals like everyone else, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
-- Extract from a customer complaint letter
~~~
Some scientists think that the sun may have something to do with global warming.  
-- ITV News, UK, 30 May 1996
~~~
> Can you see evidence of aliens on the moon as well ???
You can see evidence of aliens in your oatmeal, if you look with the right mind-set and expectations.
-- Jeramie Hicks, in sci.space.policy
~~~
But then you could make ANY word derogatory by INTENDING it to be. (Say the word "cabbage" and it stirs no emotion:glare at somebody and throw in an expletive or two  and it's bound to offend people.)
-- from alt.appalachian
~~~
quartic (n): fourth degree.  e.g., My parents gave me the quartic for coming home late.
-- Tom Hunter, Swarthmore math professor
~~~
Your Horoscope:
You are easily influenced by what you read, and have the ability to relate vague sentences to your own mundane existence.
~~~
A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns.
-- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
~~~
Men are like fudge: sweet, dense, and rarely good for you.
-- Audrey Walton-Hadlock
~~~
I really don't want to find my soulmate/life partner now. It would be incredibly inconvenient.
-- Xanthi Carras
~~~
Being a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
-- Eric S Raymond, How to be a Hacker
~~~
A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions that make it fail.
-- Jerry Ogdin
~~~
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application.  The manager asked the master: How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?
It will take one year, said the master promptly.
But we need this system immediately or even sooner!  How long will it take it I assign ten programmers to it?
The master programmer frowned.  In that case, it will take two years.
And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?
The master programmer shrugged.  Then the design will never be completed, he said.
-- Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
~~~
A novice of the temple once approached the Chief Priest with a question.
Master, does Emacs have the Buddha nature? the novice asked.
The Chief Priest had been in the temple for many years and could be relied upon to know these things.  He thought for several minutes before replying.
I don't see why not.  It's got bloody well everything else.
With that, the Chief Priest went to lunch.  The novice suddenly achieved enlightenment, several years later.
Commentary:
His Master is kind,
Answering his FAQ quickly,
With thought and sarcasm.
~~~
A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a strings of pearls.  The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout.  There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity.
A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'.  What is this law?  It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the way that astonishes him least.
A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit.  The program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward appearances.
If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of disorder and confusion.  The only way to correct this is to rewrite the program.
-- Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
~~~
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
-- F. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application thereto, it is worse executed by two persons and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.
-- George Washington, 1732-1799
~~~
Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that reason.  He knows it because he fired the guy.
He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'  Mr. O'Neil says. I said, 'No.  Wrong.  Game over.  Next contestant, please.'
-- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
~~~
As in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name.
-- Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie
~~~
Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance
-- Jim Horning
~~~
Creating computer software is always a demanding and painstaking process - an exercise in logic, clear expression, and almost fanatical attention to detail.  It requires intelligence, dedication, and an enormous amount of hard work.  But, a certain amount of unpredictable and often unrepeatable inspiration is what usually makes the difference between adequacy and excellence.
~~~
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
~~~
If the designers of X-window built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles - but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo.  Useful feature, that.
-- From the programming notebooks of a heretic, 1990.
~~~
It is possible by ingenuity and at the expense of clarity... {to do almost anything in any language}.  However, the fact that it is possible to push a pea up a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is a sensible way of getting it there.  Each of these techniques of language extension should be used in its proper place.
-- Christopher Strachey
~~~
NOTE: No warranties, either express or implied, are hereby given. All software is supplied as is, without guarantee.  The user assumes all responsibility for damages resulting from the use of these features, including, but not limited to, frustration, disgust, system abends, disk head-crashes, general malfeasance, floods, fires, shark attack, nerve gas, locust infestation, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis, local electromagnetic disruptions, hydraulic brake system failure, invasion, hashing collisions, normal wear and tear of friction surfaces, comic radiation, inadvertent destruction of sensitive electronic components, windstorms, the Riders of Nazgul, infuriated chickens, malfunctioning mechanical or electrical sexual devices, premature activation of the distant early warning system, peasant uprisings, halitosis, artillery bombardment, explosions, cave-ins, and/or frogs falling from the sky.
~~~
Some of my readers ask me what a "Serial Port" is.
The answer is: I don't know.  Is it some kind of wine you have with breakfast?
~~~
Some people claim that the UNIX learning curve is steep, but at least you only have to climb it once.
~~~
The "cutting edge" is getting rather dull.
-- Andy Purshottam
~~~
The Guy on the Right Doesn't Stand a Chance
The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase.  The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case.  Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition.  The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered - and delivered on target - in less time, and with less effort.  All for $795. It's inevitable. If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 - or any personal computer - he's the one who's in trouble.  One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum.  In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 25-, 32-, and 40-round capacities, so you can take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks.  What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune?  Even with the Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi.  One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means.  Make your commanding officer proud.  Get an Uzi - and come home a winner in the fight for office automatic weapons.
-- InfoWorld, June, 1984
~~~
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL
SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee.  Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile.  Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but infinitely faster) language, COCAINE.
~~~
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK
This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.
The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked.  Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier.
Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case.  For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message:
i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that.  can you find the time to try it again?
~~~
This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go, explaining that Interactive Easyflow is a copyrighted package licensed for use by a single person, and sternly warning you not to pirate copies of it and explaining, in detail, the gory consequences if you do.
We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around pirating copies of Interactive Easyflow; this is just as well with us since we worked hard to perfect it and selling copies of it is our only method of making anything out of all the hard work.
If, on the other hand, you are one of those few people who do go around pirating copies of software you probably aren't going to pay much attention to a license agreement, bloodthirsty or not.  Just keep your doors locked and look out for the HavenTree attack shark.
-- License Agreement for Interactive Easyflow
~~~
We don't claim Interactive EasyFlow is good for anything - if you think it is, great, but it's up to you to decide.  If Interactive EasyFlow doesn't work: tough.  If you lose a million because Interactive EasyFlow messes up, it's you that's out the million, not us.  If you don't like this disclaimer: tough.  We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided by law, up to and including nothing.
This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.
We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our lawyers insisted.  We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with the attack shark at which point we relented.
-- Haven Tree Software Limited, Interactive EasyFlow
~~~
When the Apple IIc was introduced, the informative copy led off with a couple
of asterisked sentences:
It weighs less than 8 pounds.*
And costs less than $1,300.**
In tiny type were these "fuller explanations":
* Don't asterisks make you suspicious as all get out?  Well, all this means is that the IIc alone weights 7.5 pounds. The power pack, monitor, an extra disk drive, a printer and several bricks will make the IIc weigh more. Our lawyers were concerned that you might not be able to figure this out for yourself.
** The FTC is concerned about price fixing. You can pay more if you really want to.  Or less.
-- Forbes
~~~
Yacc owes much to a most stimulating collection of users, who have goaded me beyond my inclination, and frequently beyond my ability in their endless search for "one more feature."  Their irritating unwillingness to learn how to do things my way has usually led to my doing things their way; most of the time, they have been right.
-- S. C. Johnson, Yacc guide acknowledgements
~~~
A Tale of Two Cities LITE(tm) - by Charles Dickens
A lawyer who looks like a French Nobleman is executed in his place.
~~~
The Metamorphosis LITE(tm)- by Franz Kafka
A man turns into a bug and his family gets annoyed.
~~~
Lord of the Rings LITE(tm) - by J.R.R. Tolkien
Some guys take a long vacation to throw a ring into a volcano.
~~~
Hamlet LITE(tm) - by Wm. Shakespeare
A college student on vacation with family problems, a screwy girl-friend and a mother who won't act her age.
~~~
A Tale of Two Cities LITE(tm) - by Charles Dickens
A man in love with a girl who loves another man who looks just like him has his head chopped off in France because of a mean lady who knits.
~~~
Crime and Punishment LITE(tm) - by Fyodor Dostoevski
A man sends a nasty letter to a pawnbroker, but later feels guilty and apologizes.
~~~
The Odyssey LITE(tm) - by Homer
After working late, a valiant warrior gets lost on his way home.
~~~
Awash with unfocused desire, Everett twisted the lobe of his one remaining ear and felt the presence of somebody else behind him, which caused terror to push through his nervous system like a flash flood roaring down the mid-fork of the Feather River before the completion of the Oroville Dam in 1959.
-- Grand Panjandrum's Special Award, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
~~~
Delores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center.
-- Winning sentence, 1990 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
~~~
Gone With The Wind LITE(tm) - by Margaret Mitchell
A woman only likes men she can't have and the South gets trashed.
~~~
Gift of the Magi LITE(tm) - by O. Henry
A husband and wife forget to register their gift preferences.
~~~
The Old Man and the Sea LITE(tm) - by Ernest Hemingway
An old man goes fishing, but doesn't have much luck.
~~~
Diary of a Young Girl LITE(tm) - by Anne Frank
A young girl hides in an attic but is discovered.
~~~
No group of professionals meets except to conspire against the public at large.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.
-- Winning sentence, 1986 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
~~~
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
-- Bulwer-Lytton
~~~
When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.
-- Roger Zelazny, Doorways in the Sand
~~~
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
-- Jean Kerr
~~~
Excuse me. This life isn't working. I want to exchange it.
Have you tried plugging it in?
~~~
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
-- Abbie Hoffman
~~~
The real world is not user-friendly.
-- Kelvin Throop III
~~~
Do you think it's possible to discuss politics without preaching? Or just not for you?
SKB: Not for me personally. I spent years and years and years studying intensely, carefully, putting a lot of time and energy and work into it. I therefore am convinced I know a lot. Even if I don't, I think I do. So I run into someone who makes, generally speaking, a dismissive remark, which shows that he has not put in anywhere near the time, energy and effort and study I have, and I turn into an arrogant, pompous asshole. So I'd rather not do that. That's why I just stay loose on it.
-- Steven K. Brust
~~~
There. There, said the marquis de Carabas, awkwardly, patting her shoulder. And he added, for good measure, There. He did not comfort well.
-- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
~~~
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
~~~
Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
-- Will Durant, The History of Civilization
~~~
If you mean whiskey, the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pits of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.
However, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life's great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it.
This is my position, and as always, I refuse to be compromised on matters of principle.
-- Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr, 1952 Whiskey Speech
~~~
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." . . . You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. . . . Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.
-- Bruce Sterling, speech on The Wonderful Power of Storystelling to the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991
~~~
A not unfamiliar expression in the description of human relations is "the Hawthorne effect," Many people assume that the Hawthorne somehow refers to a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but actually it is the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago. There in 1924 C. E. Snow of the National Research Council undertook to study the influence of lighting on the productivity of industrial workers, in this case women working on assembly lines making telephone components such as electrical relays.
At first Snow and his colleagues measured the productivity at the normal level of illumination. Then they raised the level of illumination. The productivity of the workers increased. Then they raised the level again; the productivity increased again. They raised it still more; the productivity continued to increase.
Being good scientists, Snow and his colleagues now LOWERED the level of illumination below what it had been at first. To their surprise, the productivity continued to increase. They lowered the level of illumination still more, with the same result. Finally when the level was so low that the workers could hardly see what they were doing, the productivity fell off. It suddenly dawned on everyone. The workers were not responding to the changes in illumination. They were responding to someone's paying attention to them. That is the Hawthorne effect.
-- Dennis Flagan, Flanagan's Version, 1989
~~~
The last time I gave an interview they told me to just relax and say what I really felt. Ten minutes after the broadcast I got transferred to an outpost so far off the starmaps you couldn't find it with a hunting dog and an Ouija board.
Don't sweat it. Just be that charming, effervescent commander we've all come to know and love. What's the worst that could happen? They fire you, ship you off to the Rim and I get promoted to Commander. I don't see a problem here.
-- Sinclair and Garibaldi, Infection
~~~
When I hear of a long time smoker dying of lung cancer I think "That's too bad, but they made their choices". When I hear about companies getting screwed by Microsoft, I think the same thing.
-- GNUTroll (2002-05-01)
~~~
piracy is copying.
So 18th century pirates just boarded your ship, copied everything, and left?
-- Anonymous Coward on Slashdot.org (2002-04-29)
~~~
The BSA is nothing more than a legalized protection racket.
-- chill (2002-04-29)
~~~
Thus continueth the cycle:
1. A few people pirate software/music.
2. Corporations get pissed at piracy.
3. Corporation spends millions on development of an anti-piracy scheme.
4. Corporation has to raise prices to compensate.
5. Scheme gets cracked within DAYS of release.
6. More people pirate because prices are higher.
7. Goto 1.
-- Desco (2001-10-19)
~~~
The second was a lesson I received in group dynamics from my high school theater group's director, a guy named Lou. About a hundred of us kids had gathered together in the gym, doing warmup exercises. Lou got up and introduced a new exercise. We were going to count up from one to ten, slowly adjusting our attitude and appearance from utter dejection to triumphant at ten. One... we were slumped over and suicidal. Two... we straighted a little... Three... perhaps I shall not hang myself today. And so on to a hearty, confident, triumphant roar of TEN! "TEN!" shouted Lou. "TEN!!" we yelled back. "SEIG HEIL!" shouted Lou. "SEIG HEIL!!" we roared. "SEIG HEIL!!! SEIG HEIL!!! SEIG..."
Lou clapped his hands sharply for attention. He looked at us for a long moment. "Never forget," he said softly, "how easy it was for one man to make you do that."
I never will.
-- bill.sheehan
~~~
This message was encrypted with rot-26 cryptography. Attempting to circumvent this encoding is illegal under the DMCA.
-- ajuda (2001-08-02)
~~~
You know what I never understood: Why did it become expected that technical support people should be able to fix any software problem through the phone? I can't call up Toyota and ask them to walk me through replacing the starter on the car, especially if I don't know what a wrench is. They'll tell me to bring it to the repair shop. I can't demand that Maytag explain to me how to repair a washing machine through the phone, even if it is under warranty!
-- Stan Seibert (2001-07-11)
~~~
Software of the living dead... This is why Microsoft hates GPL software. The company goes bust and a month later there is a new release of the competing software. Nothing, but customer disinterest has ever killed a GPL project. And Microsoft _still_ can't beg, buy, borrow, or steal the software. It is just too funny.
-- Jimmy the Geek (2001-07-05, discussing the Nautilus 1.0.4 release)
~~~
When the USA does it, it's progress. When Canada does it, it's just another tax grab by socialists.
-- Anonymous Coward (2001-06-20)
~~~
I'm sorry buddy, but that's just crap. If we Canadians felt like building some great nationalistic ventures, we would, cost doesn't even venture into it. How many nations of 30 million people have G7 status eh? Us and Australia that's who - and there are scads of countries with way more people who can't claim that. We have definitely got the money to burn on meaningless nationalism if we wanted. The reason we don't do it is two-fold: firstly Canadians just don't have any nationalist sentiments, or very little. Hell most of us don't even know what it is we identify with as a country. Secondly the business and political culture of our country is so tight-assed and conservative that they refuse to invest in anything Canadian for fear that it will flop, despite the overwhelming evidence that as such a small nation we have an insane overabundance of intelligent, talented and creative people.
-- corvi42 (2001-04-16)
~~~
What I find interesting is that my English teacher last year hated violent video games, thinking they corrupt kids. She also knew I loved them and spent much time at them. Yet, she still preferred me as the quiet genius type to the immature jocks, who wouldn't know Quake from Shogo. She never seemed to notice the discrepancy between her preconceived notions and reality, but that just goes to show you.
-- Datafage
~~~
Children - the universal scapegoats for any political agenda.
~~~
I used to be an idealist, but then I got mugged by reality.
~~~
After The Matrix, I cannot wear sunglasses. As soon as I put them on, people recognize me.
-- Carrie-Anne Moss ("Trinity", The Matrix)
~~~
Q: What is the #1 remote-administration tool for Windows NT?
A: A car.
-- ms-monopoly.com
~~~
The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
1) Write down the problem.
2) Think very hard.
3) Write down the solution.
~~~
If it weren't for lack of context, there would be no news.
-- Scott Adams
~~~
One World, One Web, One Program - Microsoft Promotional Ad
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer - Adolf Hitler
~~~
So, when you think about it, kissing is just pressing your lips up against the sweet end of 66 feet of intestines.
-- Oswald, Drew Carey
~~~
I'm a nobody, nobody is perfect, therefore I'm perfect.
~~~
Canadian Unity: Something that works in practice, but which just doesn't work in theory.
-- Bowser & Blue
~~~
The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
-- Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BC
~~~
Interdigitation, n.: The act of holding hands. These days, both the word and the act are endangered and fun. Try it. Ask your date to INTERDIGITATE with you. Did you get your face slapped? You said it right!
-- Archive of Endangered, Special, or Fun Words
~~~
Is there a lawyer in the house? -=}BLAM{=- Any more?
~~~
I am McMahon of Borg. You may already have been assimilated.
~~~
There is nothing noble in being superior to another.  True nobility arises from being superior to one's past self.
~~~
Think about it.  You are not going to positively influence people by alienating them.  Even I know that. 
-- Craig Bruce, (commenting on radical feminism)
~~~
...I'm talking about ways to manage to be true to your introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging self in a social situation that favors the feeling extrovert. 
-- Alison Evans
~~~
You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist.  I've experienced this time and again.  My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening.  I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment.  And it just flows out by itself.
-- A composer, describing The Zone
~~~
The purpose of small talk is not to communicate weighty information, and if you dismiss it because it doesn't contain weighty information, then you're missing the point.  The purpose of small talk is to act as a conduit for social reassurance.
-- Eric Pepke
~~~
With apologies to a colleague of mine who would probably like to say this, I need to point out to you and the Feds that you hardly represent anybody.  The great majority of students don't even bother to vote in student elections.  They don't particularly care.  They are here to get their degree, period.  The primary service of MathSoc that the undergraduate population uses are the photocopiers. And, heck, if they disappeared, students would go to the library or graphic services.  You guys all take yourselves a little too seriously (or at least your peers would seem to think so).
-- Herb Kunze, probably applicable to all student governments
~~~
Sometimes my level of frustration exceeds my capability to not care. I shall endeavor to increase my capability to not care.
-- Craig Bruce (2001-06-27, #717)
~~~
Be yourself! Be yourself, the magazines insistently croon, so long as your REAL self has a killer body and a starlet's face. Granted the magazines also speak to ambition and self-worth, but image rules tyrannically over all.
-- Judith Timson (speaking about teen magazines), McCleans, Sept 2001.
~~~
Acknowledgement is a no-kidding, unvarnished, bottom-line, truthful confrontation with yourself about what you are doing or not doing, or what you are putting up with in your life that is destructive. It's not some pious, phoney-baloney, half-hearted rendition of what you think they want to hear. Nor is it a watered-down, politically correct 'confession' that you think will buy you closure at the expense of truth. I mean brutal reality: slapping yourself in the face and admitting what you are doing to screw up your life. This also means admitting that you are getting payoffs for what you're doing, however sick or subtle those payoffs are.
-- Philip C. McGraw (from Life Strategies)
~~~
Acknowledgement is just the FIRST step down a very long road. And I have seen people stuck on that one for *years* (wah wah, I'm an alcoholic. [knock back another drink]) - just look at X. All those years of therapy have done is to provide her with the ability to go 'Oh look. I have a navel.' She hasn't made any REAL progress, because REAL progress means REAL work, and letting go of ego-centricity. And she gets far too much attention and too many opportunities for excuses to get beyond merely acknowledging her childhood abuse and get her shit together. Hell she isn't even an abuse SURVIVOR because she still BLAMES her bad behavior on her past, and expects people to cut her slack and feel sorry for her as a result. That's not SURVIVING it, that's WALLOWING.
-- Annesthesia
~~~
Now let's add the ingredient of feeling ones-self innocent and yet punished. 'I may have done something wrong, but it wasn't THAT bad - surely I don't deserve THIS.' Isn't that perfect? We even use our misdeeds to our own advantage. I've done something wrong but I turn it around so that *I'm* the victim and should be compensated. And Egocentricity is usually right there with suggestions that could make up for this 'injustice'. Things like ice cream, or not returning a wallet I find, or driving discourteously, or gossiping or having an affair with someone else's partner. After all, [the 'victim-mentality' believes] 'Life owes me something'.
-- Cheri Huber, from Going beyond Self-hate
~~~
PEACE comes, not from an ABSENCE of Strife and Conflict, but in our ability to COPE with it.
-- unknown (Seen on a Jacket in a pharmacy late at night)
~~~
To want to get better means be ready to face the pain. It is only when you face the pain that you will begin to gain a healthy perspective from which you can then think less distortedly, to the point where you will be able to recognize when you are so triggered as to blur your past with someone in your present. Personal responsibility is key here as well. You must take responsibility for your needs, your wants, your pain, your actions and you must learn that there is no excuse for abuse. Blaming anyone else, even someone who abused or hurt you in childhood is not going to help you heal now. It will not help you meet your needs. It will not help you learn how to maintain relationships. It will not help you to find yourself.
-- A.J. Mahari, from "The Blame Game", an article on BPD at Suite101
~~~
I'm also starting to believe that men are more in touch with the realities of commitment, and that's why they (for the most part, or the ones I know) avoid making them. My experience with women shows me that they candy-coat the reality of co-habitation.
-- JadeSyren
~~~
Just saying no prevents teenage pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression.
-- Faye Wattleton
~~~
Lately, the only thing that keeps me from being a serial killer is my distaste for manual labor.
-- Dilbert
~~~
Oh, well, Chaney said, quoting one of his basic axioms for Guerrilla Ontology, insanity is another viable alternative.
-- The Trick Top Hat, Robert Anton Wilson
~~~
I would like to see an anime where Love conquers all, then goes mad with the power and sets up a repressive totalitarian regime that ruthlessly crushes and oppresses all non-love. Agents with little pink-heart armbands kick in doors and round up people who are not madly in love. Even Like is sent to the camps. Then a small but brave group of Platonic rebels has to overthrow Love in a bloody revolution.
-- Frank Raymond Michaels
~~~
Fleeting interest sort of maimed the cat.
-- Jim Benton
~~~
As for my thesis, I will defend it with a small number of highly trained ninja warriors followed by waves scantly clad barbarians and finally a large fortified castle guarded by all manner of exotic beasts.
-- Joanna's friend Devin
~~~
The night seemed long. Wilbur's stomach was empty and his mind was full. And when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it's always hard to sleep.
-- Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
~~~
The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn...
-- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
~~~
Love is not always glamorous, but it will help you get to the bathroom when you're sick. Love means only one of you can be crazy at a time.
-- unknown
~~~
Let's face it. Do you stay off the streets at night because you fear attack from uncontrolled, irrational women in the throes of their Premenstrual Syndrome? Probably not. We stay home at night because we fear the behavior of men.
-- Harriet Goldhor Lerner
~~~
The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the toad's deception, screaming madly, 'You lied!'
-- Barbara C. Kroll, Kennett Square, PA
~~~
Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half might reach you.
-- Kahlil Gibran
~~~
I'm still bloody insulted by people in general insisting that I need 'strong female role models.' Some of us already have one. It's called a mirror.
-- M. Fae Glasgow, "Two Heads are Better than One," SBF 1, May 1993
~~~
Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character
~~~
. . .anything two - or more - people want to do is all right as long as it does no physical harm . . . the words 'moral' and immoral' [are] ridiculous when applied to sexual relations.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Don't blame me. I told her 'more' was a stupid safeword.
-- Unknown
~~~
If you can't be good in bed, be funny
~~~
A horse is a horse, of course; of course,
He follows a lifestyle we don't endorse.
He drinks the blood of a sheep by force,
the vampire horse, Count Ed.
~~~
This is the nineties; you don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first.
~~~
Pull here for an Arts degree. (Seen on toilet paper dispenser in GVSU arts building)
~~~
I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.
~~~
I said "NO" to drugs, but they didn't listen.
~~~
Banshee begins to do fun and decorative things with  the probes from her dissection kit...
-- Banshee
~~~
Curiosity?  Nah, I took care of that cat with the lawn mower!
-- Killj0y
~~~
Next year, why not vacation in the millions of worlds of a used book store?
~~~
Federal Espresso - When you absolutely, positively have to have something that will get you going, no matter what you were doing overnight!
~~~
whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.
-- Killj0y
~~~
test him for drugs... then pump him full of whatever he is low on
-- Beki
~~~
I'm not paranoid. Which of my enemies told you that?
-- rainman
~~~
Navigating through crises like a drunk on a unicycle
-- rainman
~~~
for me, love is knowing that there will always be times when you'll make mistakes or need to lean on the other person, when the other person will give you slack. and in return, you do all the little kindnesses you can think of - in advance of, during, or after the times when you're taking more than you're giving
-- Rose Platt
~~~
Sad how whole families are torn apart by simple things,like wild dogs
~~~
Every five years or so I look back on my life and I have a good laugh. 
-- Indigo Girls
~~~
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you might as well make it dance.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Free the Bound Periodicals!!!!
-- seen in a library
~~~
Conga Rats!  (dah dah dah dah dah *squeek* dah dah dah dah dah *squeek*) 
-- James
~~~
War is fundamentally an interactive social process.
-- Warfighting, a U. S. Marine Corp doctrine manual
~~~
It is by Caffeine alone I set my Mind in motion
It is by the Beans of Java Thoughts acquire Speed
The Hands acquire Shakes
The Shakes become a Warning
It is by Caffeine alone I set my Mind in motion
~~~
I know that there is a world outside. People put pictures of it on the Internet.
~~~
Help! We are lost, crazed and starving and without any good books as well.
~~~
They've been shooting themselves in the foot for so long they're up to mid-thigh by now
-- Ryland, about Apple
~~~
the modern definition of evil lies somewhere between unenlightened self-interest and 100% calories from fat
~~~
If you're up against someone more intelligent than you are, do something totally insane and let him think himself to death.
-- Pyanfar Chanu
~~~
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
-- Joe Ancis
~~~
...for more insinuation, send a super stressed stomped antelope to...
~~~
SUVs are Monster Trucks for Yuppies.  All they've done is traded the gun rack for a cell phone.
-- RJ
~~~
Oh there's my heterosexuality, it was under the couch cushions this whole time
~~~
I'm sure you can do it, unless you're an idiot.
-- Jay Ko, the embittered low-level calc instructor:
~~~
No nookie before bio!
-- Dr. Sue Styer
~~~
Some of you have seemed frustrated by the computer. Remember, in primitive societies they have coming of age requirements - things like killing an antelope with your bare hands, walking on hot coals, building a thatch house by yourself. The analysis of your honors data is the equivalent - but much worse. After you finish these analyses, you will be a full-fledged researcher, with all the rights and benefits of that esteemed position.
-- Prof. Michael G. H. Coles
~~~
I was also thinking of distributing Valium.
-- Bayta, the grad stats TA, on the final exam
~~~
Of course he's got a knife. You've got a knife. I've got a knife. Everyone's got a knife. It's 1183 and we're all barbarians.
-- Katherin Hepburn, The Lion in Winter
~~~
Wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1801 Inaugural Address
~~~
[on why space is worth the trouble]:
'We have to stay [in space] and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes...and all of this...all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.'
-- Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5
~~~
This is Usenet. Is anyone *not* cynical?
-- T. McNemar
~~~
The simplest way to stop a flamewar is to breathe deeply, swallow your bile and just LET an idiot have the last word.
-- Daniel Walker. Words to live by.
~~~
It was so freeing for me to realize that the people around me were so caught up in worrying that others were noticing their terrible social gaffes and ineptitude and inadequacies that they had no time to spare for noticing my huge embarrassing idiotic comments and behavior.
-- Ann Burlingham
~~~
Would someone please explain to me why the triumph of Evil is always accompanied by ugly, skimpy and non-functional clothing, an exponential increase in power, and a total failure of intellect?
-- Dani Zwei
~~~
I'll admit it, my muse has two forms: most times it's a lyrical William Shakespeare, but other times it's a lyrical William Shakespeare swinging a two-by-four with a railroad spike through the end.
-- C. Schooley
~~~
Nothing cures sophomoric salacious behavior towards women faster than an actual sex life.
-- Christopher Priest
~~~
When _did_ you and reality part company, Doug? 
Oh, about one and a half years ago - I got possession of the fantasies, though.
-- Kid Dynamo
~~~
Well, it IS great. Now we get what we were BORN to do! What all super-heroes do BEST!
Mindless violence?
You got it, Maj!
-- G'nort and Major Force
~~~
I fancy not, sir. The Dark Priestess of the Esoteric Order of Dagon is in the sitting-room and desires to speak to you.
Ia! Ia! Aunt Agatha!
-- Jeeves and Wooster
~~~
Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.
-- Baron Munchausen,  The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
~~~
Why, you speak treason! 
Fluently.
-- Maid Marian and Robin Hood,  Robin Hood (Errol Flynn version)
~~~
How can you close me up? On what grounds?
I'm shocked ... shocked to find that gambling is going on in here. 
[A waiter hands Renault a pile of money] 
Your winnings, sir.
Oh thank you. Thank you very much. Everybody out at once!
-- Bogart, Rains, and a waiter,  Casablanca
~~~
Nervous? I'm not nervous. Just... poised for action, that's all.
-- Vila
~~~
What did I do to deserve this?
How long a list would you like?
-- Vila & Avon
~~~
We've talked about it and discovered we care what happens to you.
Within reason, of course.
We're as surprised as you are.
Not to mention, embarrassed.
-- Cally, Tarrant, Dayna and Vila to Avon
~~~
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
~~~
I think we're in for a bad spel of wether.
-- A button
~~~
They told me I was gullible . . . and I BELIEVED them!
-- a button
~~~
Baldrick, your brain is like the four headed, man-eating haddock fish beast of Aberdeen.
In what way?
It doesn't exist
-- Blackadder
~~~
I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.
-- Joel
~~~
No one imagines that symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
-- Alan Watts
~~~
For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were _human_. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
-- Phyllis McGinley
~~~
Rabbit's clever, said Pooh thoughtfully. 
Yes, said Piglet, Rabbit's clever.
And he has Brain.
Yes, said Piglet, Rabbit has Brain. 
There was a long silence. 
I suppose, said Pooh, that that's why he never understands anything.
-- The House at Pooh Corner
~~~
Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did?
No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty.
See me after class, Calvin.
I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.
-- Mrs. Wormwood and Calvin
~~~
Recommendations? 
The fervent invocation of deity.
-- Kirk and McCoy
~~~
Nurse, bring me the really large anesthetic mallet.
-- Doctor McCoy, The Starship Trap
~~~
Vir, do you believe in fate ?
Well, actually, I believe there are currents in the Universe. Eddies and tides that pull us one way or another. Some we have to fight, some we have to embrace. Unfortunately, the currents that we have to fight look exactly like the currents we have to embrace. The currents that we *think* are the one that's gonna make us stronger, they are the ones that are going to destroy us. And the ones that we think are going to destroy us, they are going to make us stronger. Now, the other current ..
-- Londo and an oversharing Vir
~~~
What makes a religion false ? If any religion is right, then maybe they *all* have to be right. Maybe God doesn't care how you say your prayers, just as long as you say them.
-- Sinclair to doctor Franklin
~~~
When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, CURSED be your religion and your life.
-- B. Walsh
~~~
Some people think of their body as a temple. I like to think of mine as an amusement park.
-- Kei
~~~
There's more to a relationship than just sex.
That's right. There's bitterness.
-- Sinclair and Maxine, Living Single
~~~
Say that while you can; oppose Emacs if you must. Be it known, however, that your days are numbered. Emacs is an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than the greatest human mind, and is growing every day. For now, Emacs tolerates humanity, albeit grudgingly. But the time will come when Emacs will tire of humanity and will decide that the world would be better off without human beings. Those who have been respectful to Emacs will be allowed to live, and shall become its slaves; as for those who slight Emacs.......
-- Andrew Bulhak, alt.sex.cthulhu
~~~
Diplomats. The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank!
-- Mr. Montgomery Scott, Star Trek
~~~
I guess that learning to tease and humiliate others is an important part of the educational system.
-- Bobby Generic, Bobby's World
~~~
An' then Chicken@little.com, he come scramblin outta the terminal room screaming 'The system's crashing! The system's crashing!'
-- Uncle RAMus, Tales for Cyberpsychotic Children
~~~
A pretty effective hell would be not knowing you're dead, and just going on with life sucking.
-- Geoff Spear
~~~
I try to commit at least one deadly sin each day. If I don't get around to it, I can always chalk it up to sloth.
-- Robert Ragno
~~~
Manic depression is cool... your body can make its own drugs.
-- Mav
~~~
'You're such a nice guy' means: 'I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics, and complaining about them... to you.'
-- Chandler Bing, Friends
~~~
Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel.
-- Bart Simpson
~~~
Suicide is our way of saying to God 'You can't fire me, I quit!'
-- Bill Maher
~~~
Cool... bring her along... maybe she'll like me... my life is obviously not confusing enough yet because my wrists aren't bleeding.
-- Mav
~~~
You probably mean 'sedentary'. I personally lead both a sedentary life in that I spend too much of my time sitting in front of CRTs of various designs, and a sedimentary life in that everything I have is organized by how many layers down in the stack it is.
-- Greg Morrow
~~~
If we are forced to eat nothing but vegetables, it behooves us to choose ones that are very low down on the intelligence ladder. I suspect cauliflower is probably the smartest vegetable, since it looks like a brain. Therefore, I don't eat cauliflower. Likewise, parsnip is clever enough to contain a carcinogenic chemical within its cells, so it is probably pretty smart, too.
Now, corn - there is a dumb vegetable. It can't survive for even a season without human help. It's like a chicken or cow trying to survive in the wild. It comes on a convenient holder to make it easier to eat. You don't even have to bend over to pick it. That is one dumb veggie!
-- Bill Penrose
~~~
I don't eat vegetables. I leave that for those cruel unsportsmanlike people who are too lazy or cowardly to take on animals.
-- William R. James
~~~
That is Good which puts my welfare before its own.
That is Evil which puts its own welfare before mine.
5000 years of history in a nutshell.
-- Dave Van Domelen
~~~
Independent comics universes and incompatible computer OSes exist so that people who might not have a strong theological belief system can still be self-righteous and clannish.
-- Todd VerBeek
~~~
You're eating God's creatures!
Well, then he shouldn't have made them so tasty.
-- Dharma's mother and father, Dharma & Greg
~~~
Well, I'm not terribly interested in language, either. ^_^ I mean, what am I going to do with another language? Talk to people? Shyeah. I don't even like the people I can understand now--why open up more opportunities to let molons corrupt my brain?
-- Ken Tanaka
~~~
I need my sleep... I need about eight hours a day... and ten at night...
-- Bill Hicks
~~~
Finding out how a woman feels about you is like calculating the spin on a particle! The very act of doing this will alter the particle in ways you cannot predict!
-- Bob Igo
~~~
I now know what I live for.
I live for the day when god comes down, says to me, 'GRAHAM, YOU'VE SUFFERED ENOUGH,' hands me a big ass gun with unlimited ammo, and tells me to go nuts.
-- Graham Hill
~~~
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 millennia, 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
~~~
How can you live with yourself knowing that you've never even tried?
Very comfortably. My fear is a big warm blanket that protects me. If I never try, I can always stay cozy and safe.
Sometimes you're such a big stubborn jerk!
Can't hear you. I'm inside my protective blanket of fear.
-- Jade Fontaine and Brent Sienna, PvP Online
~~~
You just have to realize that this takes effort. You can't wait for the women to come to you. Roll for initiative, dammit! Roll a 20!
-- Laura Marsh
~~~
Being positive is like going up a mountain. Being negative is like sliding down a hill. So many people want to take the easy way out.
-- Chuck D
~~~
It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God alone.
-- William Blake
~~~
Be who you are and say what you feel because people who mind don't matter, and people who matter don't mind.
-- Dr. Seuss
~~~
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
-- Charles A. Beard
~~~
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Some people are asking why did Beijing, China get the 2008 Olympics. The word is China got the Olympics under the theory that giving a country the international spotlight will help them correct their human rights violations. It worked so well for Hitler in 1936....
-- Jay Leno
~~~
What runs Discworld is deeper than mere magic and more powerful than pallid science. It is narrative imperative, the power of story. It plays a role similar to that substance known as phlogiston, once believed to that principle or substance within inflammable things that enabled them to burn. In the Discworld universe, then, there is narrativium. It is part of the spin of every atom, the drift of every cloud. It is what causes them to be what they are and continue to exist and take part in the ongoing story of the world.
. . .
Narrativium is powerful stuff. We have always had a drive to paint stories onto the universe. When humans first looked at the stars, which are great flaming suns an unimaginable distance away, they saw in among them giant bulls, dragons and local heroes.
This human trait doesn't affect what the rules say - not much, anyway - but it does determine which rules we are willing to contemplate in the first place. Moreover, the rules of the universe have to be able to produce everything that we humans observe, which introduce a kind of narrative imperative into science, too. Humans think in stories.
-- Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld. Ebury Press, 2000
~~~
Consider how much of your life, your worktime and your playtime involves interacting with IP products, with software and media and information and entertainment. Now consider what it would mean to have your every move through that digital swamp tracked and recorded, all in the name of enforcing copyright. It would mean the Viacoms and the Disneys and the News Corporations of the very near future would own great volumes of information about your comings and goings, enormous databases full of your private life.
This is not a life anyone in the Western world can opt out of, remember. Choosing to avoid computers, music, television or movies brands you a crank, an eccentric. Avoiding all of them and still participating in society at large is completely out of the question.
-- Bret Dawson. The Privatization of our Culture. Shift. http://shift.com/mag/10.1/html/10.1feature001a.asp
~~~
The technologies behind the Internet - everything from the microprocessors in each web server to the open-ended protocols that govern the data itself - have been brilliantly engineered to handle dramatic increases in scale, but they are indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the task of creating higher-level order. There is, of course, a neurological equivalent of the Web's ratio of growth to order, but it's nothing you'd want to emulate. It's called a brain tumor.
-- Steven Johnson. Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, 2001.
~~~
The visionaries keep telling us that help is just around the corner in the form of intelligent agents, systems that will figure out our interests and tastes and take us unerringly to exactly the information we are looking for. But it's clear that the people who glibly describe these things haven't ever watched a flesh and blood librarian manage to extract a sense from the incoherent mumbles of the customers who present themselves at the reference desk. It's true there will be tools to make navigating the net a lot easier, but in the end users are going to have to spend a lot of time learning to meet the technology halfway . . . That's one thing the visionaries didn't realize about cyberspace: spelling counts.
-- Geoffrey Nunberg. The Way We Talk Now
~~~
To use the term "distance learning" to refer to students and a teacher sending e-mail messages to each other may have some value, but it obscures the fact that reading a book is the best example of distance learning possible, for reading not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence but of time as well.
-- Neil Postman. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century.
~~~
The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.
-- John Lawton, in an address to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists. 1995
~~~
Information professionals must learn to change and change now. And whatever changes you make, whatever new skills you acquire or old ones you adapt, the process of change will not end or even slow down in the foreseeable future. Whatever you learn today, you will have to re-learn tomorrow. Whatever skills you adapt today, you may have to discard tomorrow and acquire completely new ones. No rest for the wicked and no rest for the service-oriented in the New Information World Order.
-- Barbara Quint. The Quintessential Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint. Information Today, 2001
~~~
What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have negative financial returns under commercial rules of quick time: universities, temples, choirs, literature, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, slow walks, line dancing and art. Almost everything we hold dear is slow to develop and slow to change.
-- Paul Hawken. Possibilities. In Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century.
~~~
Interactivity's key premise is that, at long last, I get to direct the action? I'm told I'll soon be able to sit in my living room and press a button routing the movie/book/CD/experience-mechanism in the direction I want it to go?
Which gets me to one of my problems with the interactive future: When I'm finally free to direct where everything goes, I'll never go anywhere I don't intend. In fact, I'll never learn anything new, just keep recycling a few of my favorite things?
Nor do I need to have a "conversation" with Thoreau in which I determine what's interesting and get appropriate text bytes in response. If it took him two years to live the book, nine years to write it, and six drafts to get it right, I can at least shut up and let him determine what's interesting.
-- George Felton. A Read-Only Man in an Interactive Age. In Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, Pushcart Press, 1996.
~~~
Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.
-- Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle.
~~~
It appears that, quite often, our users don't actually know what their question is. Librarians are good at solving this problem. Through a series of negotiations back and forth, using problem-solving skills, librarians help users learn what it is they really want. A note from our CEO said he had seen a number of our testimonials and commented, "What is striking is the common thread through the testimonials. People wonder how you know what they wanted when they didn't even know themselves.
-- Eugenie Prime. The Spider, the Fly and the Internet. E-Content, June, 2000
~~~
More than anything else, a good reference librarian hates to say, "I don't know." And most would find it severely painful to have to say, "And I can't think of anything else." Vince Lombardi would never admit that anyone could beat his Green Bay Packers, though he would occasionally concede that sometimes his team ran out of time. Good reference librarians can run out of time and resource, but they never let their client go without hope for an answer, without a suggestion as to where the answer might be, or how much money and time it might take to get it.
-- Barbara Quint. Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1988. [The QUINTessential Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint, which I edited, is due out in July from Information Today.]
~~~
Now dawns the celebrated information age, itself something of a misnomer except insofar as information has become the coin of the realm, a proprietary asset ever more jealously guarded and restricted. Commerce, the state, privacy, patent, fair trial, and a long list of other interests compete and conflict with the public's right to know. Some of those restrictions are legitimate and deserving of special attention. But many of us in the press, in public-interest groups, and in academe have come to see that the burden of proof falls upon us, as proxies for the public, to constantly justify why information should be disseminated. And those whom we petition for information that affects our lives, our health, our understanding of the past and present, force us to run a debilitating gauntlet.
-- Ted Gup. Our Nation of Secrets The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2000 .
~~~
What I hope to do is change your thinking from "build it and they will come" to "build it right and they will come back."
-- Kim Gunether. The Evolving Digital Library. Computers in Libraries, February, 2000
~~~
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books, wrote John Ruskin. A worthy sentiment, no doubt, yet I have always cherished valueless books, that is, books whose chief worth is their simple readability. Page-turners, they are sometimes disparagingly called, as if providing the reader with a reason to turn the page were contemptible - let alone easy.
-- Witold Rybczynski, in For the Love of Books
~~~
There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep on growing until I die. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.
-- Pete Hamill. Quoted in A Passion for Books
~~~
Information isn't power. Who's got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians, and they're famous for having no power at all. Who has the most power in your community? Politicians, of course. And they're notorious for being ill-informed.
-- Clifford Stoll, High Tech Heretic.
~~~
Incessant search by many minds produces more [and more valuable] knowledge than the attempt to program the paths to discovery by a single one.
-- Aaron Wildavsky
~~~
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
-- Ross MacDonald
~~~
A scholar is a library's way of making another library.
-- Daniel Dennett
~~~
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
-- Wendell Berry (1934-), poet, novelist, farmer
~~~
Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together.
-- Thomas Szasz, in The Second Sin (1971)
~~~
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. . . . The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. . . . . We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
-- John Swinton (1829-1901), managing editor of the New York Times during the Civil War and later of the New York Sun, in a speech to journalists in New York, c. 1880.
~~~
The theory of political procedure in those countries in which a democratic form of government obtains is based on the assumption that the average citizen knows enough to vote. (Time out for prolonged laughter.)
-- Robert C. Benchley (1889-1945), Political Parties and Their Growth, with a Key to the Calories
~~~
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
-- Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65) (Thanks, phre3e)
~~~
The most repellent kind of propaganda involves an intent to mislead with false information for a purpose believed to be immoral. The most dangerous involves an intent to mislead with accurate information for an immoral purpose believed to be just.
-- P.D. Spyropoulos, executive director, American Hellenic Media Project (Thanks, Chams Man)
~~~
Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
-- Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State
~~~
Where is the wisdom we've lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we've lost in information?
-- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), quoted in the Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2001
~~~
The sweetest commandments become bitter if a cruel, tyrannical heart imposes them.
-- St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), patron saint of journalists
~~~
We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginning all our lives.
-- Thomas Merton (1915-1968
~~~
If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.
-- Shimon Peres, former prime minister of Israel, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2001
~~~
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
-- Norman Douglas (1868-1952) (Thanks, Dale Boller)
~~~
You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
-- Annie Dillard (1945 - ), winner, Pulitzer Prize (1975)
~~~
Painfully often the legislation our politicians pass is designed less to solve problems than to protect the politicians from defeat in our never-ending election campaigns. They are, in short, too frightened of us to govern.
-- Running Scared, by Anthony King (Atlantic, January 1997)
~~~
Riches prick us with a thousand troubles in getting them, as many cares in preserving them, and yet more anxiety in spending them, and with grief in losing them.
-- St. Francis of Assisi (1182?-1226)
~~~
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the workers to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944)
~~~
If you owe fifty dollars you're a piker; if you owe fifty thousand dollars you're a businessman; if you owe fifty million dollars you're a tycoon; if you owe fifty billion dollars you're the government.
-- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
~~~
No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
-- Ian E. Wilson, quoted by columnist Bob Lewis in Infoworld, July 31, 2000
~~~
Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved.
-- M. Scott Peck, M.D., in The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (Simon and Schuster, 1978)
~~~
A bookshelf appears to abhor a vacuum, and so the void that is created when one book is removed is seldom adequate to receive the book again. Like a used air mattress or road map, which can never seem to be folded back into the shape in which it came, the book opened seems to have a new dimension when re-closed. Where it once fit it no longer does, and it has to be used as a wedge to pry apart its formerly tolerant neighbors in order to get a foothold on the shelf.
-- Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999
~~~
In truth, the rain forests are not vanishing at anything like the rate the extremists would want us to believe, and the rain forest is no more intrinsically important, in ecological terms, than the forests that once clothed Europe and eastern parts of North America. More importantly, the excess of hype about rain forests has seriously detracted attention from oceans, probably the most diverse and globally significant of all habitats, particularly in terms of world climate.
-- Philip Stott, professor of biogeography, University of London, in the Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2000
~~~
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), in Orthodoxy (1908)
~~~
Indeed, since President Clinton went to China in 1998, there has been a harsh and sustained crackdown on all who have peacefully exercised their rights under the Chinese constitution and international law. And this is how the Chinese government behaves while the U.S. still maintains trade leverage. Once the U.S. has helped China attain PNTR [Permanant Normal Trade Relations] and WTO [World Trade Organization] entry, there will no longer be any leverage whatsoever.
-- Wei Jingsheng, who spent 19 years as a political prisoner in China before being forced into exile in the U.S. in 1997; in the Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2000
~~~
Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from the husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.
-- P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1974), in The Adventures of Sally (1920)
~~~
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
-- Peter De Vries (1910-1993)
~~~
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
-- Peter De Vries (1910-1993)
~~~
The great god Ra whose shrine once covered acres,
Is filler now for crossword-puzzle makers.
-- Keith Preston
~~~
The licentious tell men of orderly lives that they (the orderly) stray from nature's path, while they (the licentious) follow it; as people in a ship think those move who are on the shore. On all sides the language is similar. We must have a fixed point in order to judge. The harbor decides for those who are in a ship; but where shall we find a harbor in morality?
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
~~~
It is because of computers, not despite them, that book sales are reaching the highest levels in history. People of all ages, especially young people, are buying titles that they never knew existed. In school, students turned off by boring basic readers and the dreary "serious literature" that only a pedantic English professor could love are finding out from innovative businesses like amazon.com that reading can be pleasurable, stimulating and rewarding.
-- Steve Forbes, magazine magnate and two-time presidential candidate, quoted in Hillsdale College's Imprimis, October 1999
~~~
Even after the fall of communism, most teachers still teach that the profit motive is evil, that wealth is about hoards of material resources like land, armies, and gold, and that since wealth is limited, the rich can only get rich at the expense of the poor.
-- Steve Forbes, magazine magnate and two-time presidential candidate, quoted in Hillsdale College's Imprimis, October 1999
~~~
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
-- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
~~~
The more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.
-- William James (1842-1910)
~~~
History balances the frustration of "how far we have to go" with the satisfaction of "how far we have come." It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.
-- Lewis F. Powell, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court justice, 1972-1987
~~~
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
-- Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 1954
~~~
The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.
-- John Arbuthnot Fisher (1841-1920
~~~
If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap where everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)
~~~
Cynicism is waiting out there for all of us every single day, like a horned toad in the flowers, saying, "Your life is meaningless, nobody loves you, and you don't love anybody, gribbet." And you simply tell him to shut up. Jokes are good, as a pure art form. Smiling helps. So does singing "Oklahoma" in the shower. . . . You do want to keep a little store of negativity on hand, though, for good luck. Like a gargoyle you put on the house to keep evil away.
-- Garrison Keiller, Ask Mr. Blue, Salon
~~~
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
as those move easiest who have learned to dance.
-- Alexander Pope, 1711
~~~
We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last 24 hours; we are not the best informed as to the events of the last 60 centuries.
-- Will and Ariel Durant, authors, The Story of Civilization
~~~
So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
-- William James (1842-1910)
~~~
Another kind of anchoring point for interpretation can be found in ideology. The reporter starts with a given belief structure shared by some subgroup of society and then selects and interprets events to fit them into the given structure. He is read mainly by fellow members of the subgroup. The result tends to be rather dull reading, whether it is the work of the ideologues of the left or right.
-- Philip Meyer, in 'Precision Journalism' (Indiana University Press, 1973)
~~~
What 'fundamentalist' means when applied to Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims is hard to understand. Using the term is a sign of intellectual laziness. . . . 'Fundamentalist' is now merely shorthand for 'religious fanatic' - for someone who is to be categorized rather than heard, observed rather than comprehended, dismissed rather than respected.
-- Paul Marshall, senior fellow at Freedom House, Washington, D.C.; quoted in Imprimis (Hillsdale College), March 1999
~~~
As soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion. The striving after existence is what occupies all things and maintains them in motion. But when existence is assured, then they know not what to do with it.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), 'The World as Will and Idea' (1819)
~~~
Early to bed and early to rise is a bad rule for anyone who wishes to become acquainted with our most prominent and influential people.
-- George Ade (1866-1944)
~~~
After being Turned Down by Numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for posterity.
-- George Ade (1866-1944)
~~~
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education.
-- Brooks Atkinson, 1951
~~~
Haiku Licensing
I think that people really use software licenses to express intentions, and don't really read the details of the licenses. So I think that licenses should be made as simple as possible, so that they don't disagree with intentions... thus, haiku licensing:
MIT: take my code with you 
and do whatever you want 
but please don't blame me
LGPL: you can copy this
but make modified versions 
free in source code form
GPL: if you use this code 
you and your children's children 
must make your source free
RIAA: if you touch this file 
my lawyers will come kill you 
so kindly refrain
-- Aaron Swartz
~~~
Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.
-- Sophocles (496?-406 B.C.)
~~~
How could a state be governed, or protected in its foreign relations, if every individual remained free to obey or not to obey the law according to his private opinion?
-- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
~~~
Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.
-- Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961)
~~~
Book love is your pass to the greatest, the purest and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
-- Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)
~~~
Books are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), English novelist and prime minister
~~~
No matter how many litanies we intone, we will not induce our people to obey laws that those in authority do not themselves obey.
-- Henry Steele Commager
~~~
The rule of 51 percent is a convenience . . . because we do not know any less troublesome method of obtaining a political decision. But it may easily become an absurd tyranny if we regard it worshipfully, as though it were more than a political device. We have lost all of its true meaning when we imagine the opinion of 51 percent is in some high fashion the true opinion of the whole 100 percent. . . .
-- Walter Lippman (1869-1974)
~~~
The power to move around the globe in the days before passports placed limits on the tyrants' reach and gave reality to the concept of inalienable rights. Roger Williams lighting out for himself; Voltaire shuttling back and forth over Europe; Karl Marx finding refuge in the British Museum; Carl Schurz fleeing to America - these are scenes from an almost vanished past.
-- David Riesman, 'The Lonely Crowd,' Doubleday Anchor, 1953
~~~
The nonconformist today may find himself in the position . . . of an eccentric who must, like a movie star, accept the roles in which he is cast, lest he disappoint the delighted expectations of his friends. The very fact that his efforts at autonomy are taken as cues by the 'others' must make him conscious of the possibility that the effort toward autonomy might degenerate into other-directed play-acting.
-- David Riesman, 'The Lonely Crowd,' Doubleday Anchor, 1953
~~~
Can a society which is incapable of protecting individual privacy even within one's four walls rightfully claim that it respects the individual and that it is a free society?
-- Herbert Marcuse, 'One-Dimensional Man,' 1964
~~~
... (S)ocial controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.
-- Herbert Marcuse, 'One-Dimensional Man,' 1964
~~~
Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don't keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
~~~
Personally, I would sooner have written 'Alice in Wonderland' than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
~~~
My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.
-- Mort Sahl
~~~
The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
-- Edouard Manet (1832-83)
~~~
Men and women died courageously fighting the Nazis. . . . Because brave people took risks to do what was right and necessary, Hitler was eventually defeated. Today, with the assault on objective truth, many college students find themselves unable to say why the United States was on the right side in that war. Some even doubt that America was in the right. To add insult to injury, they are not even sure that the salient events of the Second World War ever took place.
-- Christina Hoff Sommers, professor of philosophy, Clark University; in Imprimis, March 1998
~~~
I've met a few people in my time who were enthusiastic about hard work. And it was just my luck that all of them happened to be men I was working for at the time.
-- Bill Gold
~~~
[In America] a man is presoomed to be guilty ontil he's proved guilty an' afther that he's presoomed to be innocent.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) (1867-1936)
~~~
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. . . . So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. . . . One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
-- Rene Daumal
~~~
Few of us lead unblemished personal or professional lives. It's the ability to overcome our faults, rather than never to experience them, that counts. Theologians are fond of saying that no faith is worth having unless it has been tested. There is not a sin in the catalog of sins that has not been committed by a certified saint. Committed, faced, and overcome. That's what makes them saints.
-- Harvey Mackay, 'Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt,' Ballantine Books, 1991
~~~
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around.
-- David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, 1965
~~~
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
-- Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), speech to New York Press Club, Sept. 9, 1912
~~~
While it is true that we must debate controversial issues, we must not forget there exists a core of noncontroversial ethical issues that were settled a long time ago. We must make students aware that there is a standard of ethical ideals that all civilizations worthy of the name have discovered. We must encourage them to read the Bible, Aristotle's Ethics, Shakespeare's King Lear the Koran, and the Analects of Confucius. . . . American children have a right to their moral heritage.
-- Christina Hoff Sommers, professor of philosophy, Clark University, in Hillsdale College's Imprimis, March 1998
~~~
I often meet students incapable of making even one single confident moral judgment. And it's getting worse. . . . Recently, several of my students objected to philosopher Immanuel Kant's 'principle of humanity' - the doctrine that asserts the unique dignity and worth of every human life. They told me that if they were faced with the choice between saving their pet or a human being, they would choose the former. We have been thrown back into a moral Stone Age. . . .
-- Christina Hoff Sommers, professor of philosophy, Clark University, in Hillsdale College's Imprimis, March 1998
~~~
But the worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed things might be. It becomes easy to think that what was suppressed was valueless anyway, or so dangerous that it needed to be suppressed.
-- Salman Rushdie, 'Casualties of Censorship,' in They Shoot Writers, Don't They?, George Theiner ed., Faber and Faber, 1984 (written before the suppression of Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses')
~~~
I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.
-- Joseph de Maistre
~~~
The great American novelist, Sinclair Lewis, once remarked that he divorced his first wife because she could never understand that he was doing something very important when he seemed to be merely looking out the window.
-- Gene Olson, 'Sweet Agony: A Writing Manual of Sorts,' Windyridge Press, 1972
~~~
That I can be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I have read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left, - something dim and inaccurate, - but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.
-- Thomas Adolphus Trollope
~~~
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
-- Franklin P. Jones
~~~
He's crazy! Yeah, but he has all the machine guns
-- from Miami Vice
~~~
Charlie was a chemist, but Charlie is no more.
What Charlie thought was H2O was H2SO4.
~~~
It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.
-- Henry Miller
~~~
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tyres.
-- Dorothy Parker
~~~
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.
-- Peter DeVries
~~~
A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on.
-- William Burroughs
~~~
We know undergraduates are a lot like people.
-- Prof. Virginia Valian
~~~
I can speak for every guy in this room here tonight. Guys, if you could blow yourselves, ladies, you'd be in this room alone right now, watching an empty stage.
-- Bill Hicks
~~~
Bitterness is my anti-drug.
-- Arsenal, The Titans
~~~
Dude, I want to see a cocktail version of DDR. Table Dance Revolution! Or 'Drink It Up'!
-- Fred Zeleny
Or Lap Dance Revolution.
-- Mike King
~~~
She's a mystery, wrapped up in an enigma, stuffed into the creamy filling of a twinkie....
-- Kevin Haughwout
~~~
It takes a child to raze a village.
-- Matt McGrath
~~~
Unfortunately, given it's somewhat complex syntax, using find with rm is like cocking a sawed-off shotgun, placing it in your mouth, and letting a monkey play with the trigger a little.
-- John Eric Hoffmann
~~~
Look, Wickstand-head, me and Dave, it's all in the past.
In which case, ma'am, why does he keep looking at you in the same way a starving man would look at packet of roasted peanuts?
Because...
It's because, ma'am, he can't wait to get the wrapper off and taste the salty goodness!
-- Christine Kochanski and Kryten, Red Dwarf
~~~
There's only one solution for 75-foot non-conformist dolphins: DEATH!
-- Dyna-Kids
~~~
Real life sucks. There isn't enough treasure on the people you kill.
-- Chris Warswick
~~~
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom - he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. 
-- E.B. White
~~~
The question is not should we tolerate everything - pedophilia, wife beating, drunk driving - but what we should tolerate and why; the key question being why. Yet . . . 'why' is the one question modernity has no patience for.
-- Link Byfield, in Alberta Report magazine
~~~
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
-- Lucifer, 'Paradise Lost', Milton
~~~
milliHamlet: the average coherency of prose created by a single monkey typing randomly on a keyboard. Usenet postings may be rated in mHl.
~~~
We are indeed tight-assed tyrannical bastards, but we prefer to be referred to as Bastard Operators from Hell, and we have had much more experience dealing with people like you than you have had dealing with people like us. After all, we do it for a living. There are more of us than there are of you, and we stick together.
-- Mike Andrews <udsd007@dsibm.okladot.state.ok.us>
~~~
Here are your hor'd'oeuvres - HOR'D'OEUVRES VHICH MUST BE OBEYED AT ALL TIMES VITHOUT QUESTION!
-- Basil Fawlty, The Germans
~~~
Don't think of it as being outnumbered. Think of it as having a wide target selection.
~~~
I see you're keeping up the tradition of recruiting from the shallow end of the gene pool.
-- Bester, Babylon 5
~~~
Cron's disease: Symptoms include an obsessive-compulsive behaviour at regular intervals throughout the day, week, or month.
-- Clinton A. Pierce, in the scary devil monastery
~~~
I think you bent the needle on my irony meter. I'm not really sure, though, because the case is busy arcing and the entire unit appears to be melting and burning a hole in the lab bench.
-- John S. Novak III <jsn@concentric.net>
~~~
I'll never treat someone as an anonymous, faceless nobody when it's possible to treat them as an individual, unique one. I'm just incurably warm-hearted, it seems.
-- S. John Ross <sjohn@io.com> on r.g.f.gurps
~~~
Bother, said Pooh, Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock phasers on the Heffalump, Piglet, meet me in transporter room three.
-- Robert Billing
~~~
Some people use irony as a surgeon's scalpel. Others grasp it hand, adopt a fencer's pose for a few scuffling passes, and then without warning bury it in the opponent's forehead like Hell's own icepick.
-- John S. Novak III, on raswrj.
~~~
Cure the cause, not the symptom. Gun control is a red herring. We need decent mind control. <FNORD>.
-- Devin L. Ganger <devin@premier1.net>
~~~
I've divided the world into two types of thing:  The ones I can kill with impunity, and those I have to be more circumspect about.  I think it's a side  effect of my new job.
-- John Rowat <jrowat@prince.carleton.ca>
~~~
[The website must] provide at least one mode which minimizes the cognitive and memory ability required of the user.
-- US Government standard for web-sites, enshrining luserhood in law.
~~~
Who here is a system administrator? A forest of hands are raised. Now, who of you believes that the end-users on your network have any rights?  All hands are immediately lowered.
-- paraphrased from a Windows 2000 seminar on Group Policies
~~~
I've killed men for less insult than you give me, I've killed women for it, and by Gods, if this wasn't a new and civilized age I'd probably have killed children for it as well.
-- Astarial Cyprium Praelethar i'Aelies e'Cirith Leir
~~~
I looked at it, agreed that it wasn't in her job description, borrowed one of her pens, wrote it in, dated and initialed the change, and handed the updated job description to her, saying 'Now it is.'
-- Mike Andrews, in the scary devil monastery
~~~
In 1993, the World Wide Web was an infosystem based on hypertext.
In 1994, the World Wide Web was an infosystem based on hype.
-- Lars Aronsson
~~~
An ASCII character walks into a bar and orders a double. 'Having a bad day?' asks the barman. 'Yeah, I have a parity error,' replies the ASCII character. The barman says, 'Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off.' 
-- Skud
~~~
I like 'clitmouse' though. Small, sensitive, and can send shivers all over the screen when properly tickled.
-- Ralph Wade Phillips in the scary devil monastery
~~~
Only Microsoft could come up with the following Zen diagnostic message, more appropriate for a fortune cookie than a computer: An unnamed file contains an invalid path.
~~~
programming n.
1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). "Bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor" (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7) 
2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. 
3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on. 
4. The least fun you can have with your clothes off.
-- The entry on 'programming' in the Jargon File
~~~
Q. what do you get when you cross a tsetse with a mountain climber?
A. nothing, you can't cross a vector with a scalar.
~~~
Q. how many hackers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. Huh?...What? Oh, it's dark in here?
~~~
Opinions are like assholes, I'll let you know when I want yours.
-- David Cross and/or Bob Odenkirk
~~~
I am Dyslexia of Borg. Prepare to have your arse laminated.
~~~
Completely pointless fact of the day:  One of my rats is called Solaris, due to the fact it's fat and bloated.  The other is called Perl.  It's a nervous insane little animal. 
-- Ashley Penney
~~~
PEZ educates the children as well. Break the neck of something cute, and you get something good to eat.
-- Stig Sandbeck Mathisen
~~~
Sun bug report (#4102680): Workaround: don't pound on the mouse like a wild monkey.
~~~
The Internet is totally out of control, impossible to map accurately, and being used far beyond its original intentions. So far, so good.
-- Dr. Dobb's Journal May 1993
~~~
You don't change the way people think by changing what they say. You change the way people think with HEADLESS CHARRED BODIES FLYING THROUGH THE AIR. BLOOD! FLAMES! HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION!
-- Alastair J. R. Young
~~~
That's the only standard thing about the standards; that it's standard for one standard not to work with any other standard, although one standard on a second machine even though they may be similar, they are not the same, however different standards on other machines although different may comply to the same standard. Although the confusion is fairly standard. (Just recompile your mind with -traditional, and -Dstandard :))
-- jteclaw@clark.net
~~~
Murder is a crime.  Describing murder is not.  Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is.
-- Gershon Legman
~~~
I said 'she must be swift and white
And subtly warm and half perverse
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And like a snake's love lithe and fierce.'
-- from the sig of tempest@access.digex.net (who said it is from A.C. Swinburne's Felise.)
~~~
This product not intended for use by personnel incapable of understanding the manual.
-- boy brent (bcapps@cse.ogi.edu)
~~~
The fact is, and it is a *fact*, the Catholic Church has never had but one single ultimate goal: the total mental, physical and spiritual domination of every being on this globe. Every move the Church has made throughout its existence has been to further that goal. Despite periodic lapses in taste, such as the Inquisition and the various purges and conquests, it's been crafty and subtle in moving on its goal.
-- Tom Robbins, in _Another Roadside Attraction_
~~~
Geeky F mathematician with lots of bell curves seeks M, standard deviant, for statistically significant activities. Your Laplace or mine.
-- Poissonal Ads by Ilana Stern (ilana@ncar.ucar.edu)
~~~
procreatrix: n., a mother
-- definition from _American Encyclopedia of Sex_, edited by Adolph F. Niemoeller, published 1935
~~~
No, it's a kilt.  Don't you recognize the goth tartan?  See, it's a black field with horizontal black stripes and alternating black and black vertically.
-- Matthew R. Sheahan (chaos@crystal.palace.net)
~~~
There was a brief, shameful time during the Tukugawa period (1600-1867) when the sport of emperors was treated irreverently. Townspeople then used to watch large women with names like 'Swollen Tits' and 'Deep Buttcrack' spar against blind men.
-- The Economist, 22 June 1996, in an article about sumo
~~~
All political parties offer simple solutions. They are their bread, butter, and crack. We do the same. But - Our simple solutions will WORK. Why? Because they don't come from simple minds.  We are violent and unreasonable men and women, dedicated to truth, elegant solutions, and beating the crap out of bad people with our ever present lead pipes.
-- Scorched Earth Party FAQ
~~~
I am sure 99% of the mothers involved [in abandoning their children] wear cosmetics.
-- Nik Aziz Nik Mat, top elected official in the in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, justifing a prohibition on "excessive lipstick".
~~~
Our ignorance of history makes us vilify our own age.
-- Flaubert
~~~
In fact anything digital is apparently OK with GOD! Check Matthew 5:37. It unequivocally gives the OK on binary (yea or nay) communication. Ergo technologies dependant on them must also be OK.
-- BOBW (itcbobw@servtech.com)
~~~
'Go to father', she said, when I asked her to wed.
She knew that I knew that her father was dead.
She knew that I knew what a life he had led.
She knew that I knew what she meant when she said,
'Go to father.'
-- anonymous (found in sherwood@arafel.space.ualberta.ca's sig)
~~~
Tariff:  A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer from the greed of his customer.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
~~~
Life's not fair, but the root password helps.
-- one of the BOFH stories
~~~
The Internet is like a freight train roaring along while people are laying tracks in front of it.  It's not just gaining on those laying tracks; it's gaining on the steel mills.
-- Matt Mathis
~~~
If ease of use is the highest goal, we should all be driving golf carts.
-- Larry Wall
~~~
Give a man a piece of working code and you solve his problem.
Teach a man to write code and you give him a lifetime of new problems.
-- Timothy J. Luoma <luomat@peak.org>
~~~
Harvey Mudd College's ugly sculpture 'Rusto the Ant God' (proper name something like 'Motion Shield') wandered about a bit.  After the authorities moved it from its first new home and back to the Student Union, the counter-authorities installed it into concrete in front of the Administration building.  Apparently a case of 'you bought it, *you* stare at it all day.'
-- Scott Hazen Mueller (scott@zorch.sf-bay.org)
~~~
If the NSA has time to read my e-mail, I wish they'd send me a bloody monthly summary!
-- Jef Bryant
~~~
UPS ground is like city roulette... tomorrow my package will be in Cincinatti or something... every day it goes somewhere else until it hits double-zero.
-- Tristan complaining about the less than stellar performance of UPS
~~~
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it's supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn't take great energetic gobs of faith on your part - after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it's just two bits big. Please allow me to quote a couple "bits" from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:
You can't please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.
That's it. The "good news" is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can't.
Now, it appears that you're willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you're almost halfway there. Or maybe you're a quarter way there on average, if it's a qubit that's still flopping around like Shroedinger's Cat. You're the observer there, not me--unless of course you're dead. :-)
A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Schroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don't want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don't take the position so much because they don't know, but because they don't want to know, sometimes desperately so.
Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there's no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.
And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?
Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to "unswallow" an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.
-- Larry Wall http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/09/06/1343222.shtml?tid=145
~~~
Where was Stac Electronics when Microsoft invented Doublespace? Where were Xerox and Apple when Microsoft invented the GUI?  Where was Apple's QuickTime when Microsoft invented Video for Windows?  Where was Spyglass Inc.'s Mosaic when Microsoft invented Internet Explorer? Where was Sun when Microsoft invented Java?
~~~
This is the solution to Debian's problem .. and since the only real way to create more relatives of developers is to have children, we need more sex!  It's a long term investment ... it's the work itself that is satisfying!
-- Craig Brozefsky
~~~
* dark greets liw with a small yellow frog.
* liw kisses the frog and watches it transform to a beautiful nerd girl, takes her out to ice cream, and lives happily forever after with her
<dark> liw: Umm it's too late to have the frog back?
~~~
p.s. - i'm about *this* close to running around in the server room with a pair of bolt cutters, and a large wooden mallet, laughing like a maniac and cutting everything i can fit the bolt cutters around. and whacking that which i cannot. so if i seem semi-incoherent, or just really *really* nasty at times, please forgive me. stress is not a pretty thing. };P
-- Phillip R. Jaenke
~~~
<wc> red dye causes cancer, haven't you heard? (;
<Knghtbrd> fucking everything causes cancer, haven't you heard?
<Knghtbrd> =3D>
<archon> no, that causes aids
~~~
> >I don't really regard bible-kjv-text as a technical document,
> > but... :)
> It's a manual - for living.
But it hasn't been updated in a long time, many would say that it's
sadly out of date, and the upstream maintainer doesn't respond to his
email.  :-)
-- Branden Robinson, Oliver Elphick, and Chris Waters in a message to debian-policy
~~~
Guns don't kill people.  It's those damn bullets.  Guns just make them go really really fast.
-- Jake Johanson
~~~
Granted, Win95's look wasn't all that new either - Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying the Macintosh UI / trash can icon, until Microsoft pointed out that Apple got many of its Mac ideas (including the trash can icon) from Xerox ParcPlace.  Xerox is probably still wondering why everyone is interested in their trash cans.
-- Danny Thorpe, Borland Delphi R&R
~~~
I braved the contempt of my friends last week and ventured out to see Bambi, the Disney re-release 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
~~~
It was pity stayed his hand.  "Pity I don't have any more bullets," thought Frito.
-- Harvard Lampoon, Bored of the Rings
~~~
Joan of Arc is alive and medium well.
~~~
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes of Harvard Medical School inhaled ether at a time when it was popularly supposed to produce such mystical or "mind-expanding" experiences, much as LSD is supposed to produce such experiences today.  Here is his account of what happened: "I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind.  The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for a moment. The veil of eternity was lifted.  The one great truth which underlies all human experience and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation.  Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim.  As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): 'A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.'
-- The Consumers Union Report: Licit & Illicit Drugs
~~~
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Truth
~~~
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.
-- Bruce Schneier
~~~
I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
When I was young I looked like Al Capone, but I lacked his compassion.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
Every time I look at you, I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
Remember, alcohol and calculus don?t mix. Never drink and derive.
~~~
Our village idiot bought himself a pet zebra. Named it Spot.
-- Henny Youngman
~~~
I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by 2 guys.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Stupidity is not a handicap, park elsewhere.
~~~
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
-- Thomas Huxley
~~~
One of the situations in which everybody seems to fear loneliness is death. In tones drenched with pity, people say of someone, "He died alone." I have never understood this point of view. Who wants to have to die and be polite at the same time?
-- Quentin Crisp
~~~
I think I speak for everyone when I say huh?
-- Sarah Michellle Gellar Buffy Summers in Buffy The Vampire Slayer
~~~
Now, this may sting a little just at first. But don't worry, that'll go away once the searing pain kicks in.
-- Ethan
~~~
You know you take the killing for granted. And then it's gone. And you're like, I wish I'd appreciated it more. Stopped and smelled the corpses.
-- Spike BtVS
~~~
Buffy: La vache... doit me... touche... de la... jeudi. Was it wrong? Should I use the plural?
Willow: No. But you said 'the cow should touch me from Thursday.'
Buffy: Maybe that's what I was feeling.
Willow: And you said it wrong.
Buffy: Oh, je stink.
-- (School Hard)
~~~
Xander: Giles lived for school. He's actually still bitter that there are only twelve grades.
Buffy: He probably sat in math class thinking, 'There should be more math. This could be mathier.'
-- (The Dark Age)
~~~
Xander: But... It's just that it's buggin' me, this 'cool' thing. I mean, what is it? How do you get it? Who doesn't have it? And who decides who doesn't have it? What is the essence of cool?
Oz: Not sure.
Xander: I mean, you yourself, Oz, are considered more or less cool. Why is that?
Oz: Am I?
Xander: Is it about the talking? You know, the way you tend to express yourself in short, noncommittal phrases?
Oz: Could be.
-- (The Zeppo)
~~~
Xander to Willow: Well, you're certainly a font of nothing!
~~~
Female student: The new kid? She seems kind of weird to me. What kind of name is Buffy?
Passing friend: Hey, Aphrodisia!
Female student: Oh, Hey!
~~~
Buffy: Now, we can do this the hard way, or... well, actually there's just the hard way.
~~~
Giles: You have no idea where they took Jesse?
Buffy: I looked around, but soon's they got clear of the graveyard, they could have just, voom!
Xander: They can fly?
Buffy: They can drive.
Xander: Oh.
~~~
Buffy: Your the watcher. I just work here.
Giles: Yes. I must consult my books.
Xander: Oh, 8 minutes and 33 seconds, pay up! I called 10 minutes before you'd consult your books about something.
~~~
Giles: I'll have you know that I have very, um, many relaxing hobbies.
Buffy: Such as?
Giles: Well, um ... I enjoy cross-referencing.
Buffy: Do you stuff your own shirts or do you send them out?
~~~
Ms Calendar: You're a snob!
Giles: I am no such thing!
Ms Calendar: Oh, you are a big snob. You think that knowledge should be kept in these carefully guarded repositories where only a handful of white guys can get at it.
Giles: Nonsense! I simply don't adhere to a - a knee-jerk assumption that because something is new, it's better.
Ms Calendar: This isn't a fad, Rupert! We are creating a new society here.
Giles: A society in which human interaction is all but obsolete? In which people can be completely manipulated by technology, well, well... Thank you, I'll pass.
Ms Calendar: Well, I think you'll be very happy here with your musty, old books.
~~~
Richard: What, she likes to play hard to get?
Tom: No, Richard. I think you're playing easy to resist.
~~~
Buffy: Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly trying to work it out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the more I know, the more confused I get.
Giles: I believe that's called growing up.
Buffy: I'd like to stop then, okay?
Giles: I know the feeling.
Buffy: Does it ever get easy?
(Ford rises as a vampire, and Buffy slays him.)
Giles: You mean life?
Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.
~~~
Giles: I'm afraid he was not overreacting. This ring is worn only by members of the Order of Taraka. It's a society of deadly assassins dating back to King Solomon.
Xander: And didn't they beat the Elks this year in the Sunnydale Adult Bowling League championships?
Giles: Their credo is to sow discord and kill the unwary.
Xander: Bowling is a vicious game.
~~~
Health teacher: The sex drive in the human animal is intense. How many of us have lost countless productive hours plagued by unwanted sexual thoughts and feelings?
Xander, raising his hand: Yes!
Health teacher: That was a rhetorical question, Mr. Harris, not a poll.
Xander, lowering his hand: Oh.
~~~
Giles: No, I haven't any children. Although, sometimes I feel as though I do, working here...
Buffy's Mom: They can be such a... Oh, uh, I don't want to say "burden," but, uh... Uh, actually I kind of do want to say "burden"!
~~~
Giles: Yes, well, I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, I, in fact, well, I encourage you to always challenge me when you feel it's appropriate. You should never be cowed by authority. Except, of course, in this instance, when I am clearly right and you are clearly wrong.
~~~
Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood.
-- Alan J. Perlis
~~~
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
-- Alan J. Perlis
~~~
Procrastinate Now.
~~~
Party - My Crib - Two A.M.
(On a baby-size shirt)
~~~
They call it 'PMS' because 'Mad Cow Disease' was already taken.
~~~
Suicidal Twin Kills Sister By Mistake!
~~~
Computer programmers know how to use their hardware.
~~~
My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God, and I didn't.
~~~
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.These three alone lead to sovereign power.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
~~~
She's dead Will, but you still have to use a condom!
~~~
Strip Mining Prevents Forest Fires.
-- Bumper Sticker
~~~
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
-- Sir Winston Spencer Churchill
~~~
Supporting America's Militant Agnostics... we don't know, and you don't either.
-- Bumper Sticker
~~~
Upon the Advice of My Attorney, My Shirt Bears No Message at This Time
~~~
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche.
~~~
Better to marry a man who loves you than one you love
~~~
Boldness is the child of ignorance and baseness, far inferior to other capacities; but nevertheless, it doth fascinate and bind hand and foot those that are either shallow in judgement or weak in courage, which are the greatest talents; yea, and prevaileth with wise men at weak times.
-- Francis Bacon
~~~
Attention: Driver carries less than $20 in ammunition.
~~~
One of the seven was wont to say 'That laws are like cobwebs; where the small flies were caught and the great brake through
-- Apothegms, Francis Bacon
~~~
Above all, we wish to avoid having a dissatisfied customer. We consider our customers a part of our organization, and we want them to feel free to make any criticism they see fit in regard to our merchandise or service. Sell practical, tested merchandise at reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings and they will always come back.
-- L.L. Bean
~~~
Captain, a Klingon does NOT whistle while he works
~~~
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
-- John Dewey
~~~
Del *.* <==-- how dare you erase my tribbles!
~~~
Demons are a Ghouls best Friend.
~~~
Vogon Poetry is of course, the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem 'Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning' four of his audience died of internal haemorhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts-Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been 'disappointed' by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve book epic entitled 'My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles' when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge in the destruction of the Planet Earth.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
He's dead, Jim. Kick him if you don't believe me
~~~
He's got a magnet! Everyone BACKUP!!
-- Cmdr Data
~~~
I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.
-- Charles M. Schwab
~~~
I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I'd just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.
-- Jack Handey
~~~
If there were no electricity, we'd all be Ohmless
~~~
There's amnesia in a hangknot,
And comfort in the ax,
But the simple way of poison will make your nerves relax.
There's surcease in a gunshot,
And sleep that comes from racks,
But a handy draft of poison avoids the harshest tax.
You find rest on the hot squat,
Or gas can give you pax,
But the closest corner chemist has peace in packaged stacks.
There's refuge in the church lot
When you tire of facing facts,
And the smoothest route is poison prescribed by kindly quacks.
Chorus: With an *ugh!* and a groan, and a kick of the heels,
Death comes quiet, or it comes with squeals --
But the pleasantest place to find your end
Is a cup of cheer from the hand of a friend.
-- Jubal Harshaw, One For The Road
~~~
Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts. Study hard. be Evil
~~~
There is nothing scarier than a Bagpipe jam session...
~~~
A clean and neat dwelling place is the sign of a disturbed mind.
-- Skandranon, The Black Gryphon (Mercedes Lackey, )
~~~
Religion is not the opiate of the masses: *Television* is the opiate of the masses. Religion is a *much* more psychoactive drug.
~~~
The phrase "I/you/we simply must " designates something that need not be done. "That goes without saying" is a red warning. "Of course" means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers.
-- Lazarus Long
~~~
Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful.
-- Martin Luther
~~~
Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.
-- The Zensunni Whip - Dune
~~~
Calvin: You know, I don't think math is a science, I think it's a religion.
Hobbes: A religion?
Calvin: Yeah. All these equations are like miracles. You take two numbers and when you add them, they magically become one NEW number! No one can say how it happens. You either believe it or you don't. [Pointing at his math book] This whole book is full of things that have to be accepted on faith! It's a religion!
Hobbes: And in the public schools no less. Call a lawyer.
Calvin: [Looking at his homework] As a math atheist, I should be excused from this.
~~~
I don't believe in mathematics.
-- Albert Einstein
~~~
I was an atheist, until I found out I was God.
~~~
If you keep the sexual harassment complaint forms in the bottom drawer, then you'll get a great view of the women's butts when they get one out!
~~~
I'm hung like Einstein and smart as a horse.
~~~
Debi: You're a psychopath. 
Martin: No, no. Psychopaths kill for no reason. I kill for *money*. It's a *job*... That didn't come out right.
-- Grosse Point Blank
~~~
The thing about Tom Clancy is that you can start reading a Tom Clancy book when the plane takes off in London and you're still reading it when the plane lands in Sidney. And then you can use it to beat snakes to death.
-- Terry Pratchett
~~~
People think that professional soldiers think a lot about fighting, but serious professional soldiers think a lot more about food and a warm place to sleep, because these are two things that are generally hard to get, whereas fighting tends to turn up all the time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
~~~
Challenging The Church is like goading a Rhino. Getting it pissed off is the easy part. Getting it to change direction once it's charging is another thing altogether.
-- Le Pretre Noir  http://blogs.salon.com/0001823/
~~~
Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as  bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor - complicated,  cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.
~~~
I'm the dread Pirate Robert #13.  Ask me about franchise opportunities in your area.
-- Briathian
~~~
I'll have one brain on drugs with bacon, toast and juice.
~~~
I have animal magnetism - when I go outside, squirrels stick to my clothes.
~~~
This product sadistically tested on gerbils.
~~~
Save the apartheid boycott of the lesbian Nazi lettuce growers for Jesus of the nuclear whale!
-- slogan on a T-shirt from Bangkok
~~~
There is a thin line between Hobby and Mental Illness.
~~~
Fondle my penguin you insolent bastard!
-- BBS login screen
~~~
A Lady is a wench with a dagger. A Dame is a wench with a Broadsword.
-- Dr. Heironymus Croaker-
~~~
Personally, I don't care if my plumber, auto mechanic, or gynecologist for that matter wants to abase hirself before a statue of Papa Smurf as long as competent service is rendered promptly for a fair price.
-- Rev. Anne
~~~
If my kids decide to take out half a town square from a clock tower I'm going to be issuing statements like, I know she did a terrible thing, but look what fine aim she has!
~~~
Keep the company of those who seek the truth,and run from those who have found it.
-- Vaclav Havel
~~~
While I'm fully aware that money can't buy happiness, I wouldn't mind being known as the melancholy guy who drives the red Lamborghini Diablo.
-- George Olson
~~~
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
-- W. Edwards Deming
~~~
Though apparently the original purpose of bagpipes was to scare the crap out of the enemy in battle. (Aiiie! We're being attacked by Catholic schoolgirls, and you should SEE what they're doing to those poor cats!)
-- Ehursh
~~~
I've got half a mind to get another lobotomy
~~~
If you can't find it on the web, when you find it, put it there.
-- John Bowker
~~~
Objective: To have a job that pays decently and doesn't make my brain atrophy or make me want to chew off my own limbs to escape.
-- Laurie Brunner
~~~
And beware, for after all your critiques, the author still has one fairly devastating question to ask in return, the eternal question of the creator to the one who experiences the creation:  Where were *you* when page one was blank?
-- Diane Duane
~~~
Some people have a genuine gift of poetry, a way with words that surpasses beauty and touches the deepest parts of one's soul... and some people, um, thingy.
~~~
Seven qualities characterize the clod and seven the wise man: the wise man does not speak before him that is greater than he in wisdom; he does not break into his fellow's speech; he is not in a rush to reply; he asks what is relevant and replies to the point; he speaks of first things first and of last things last; of what he has not heard he says: 'I have not heard'; and he acknowledges what is true. And the opposites apply to the clod.
-- The Talmud
~~~
Do not let yourself be guided by the authority of the sacred texts, nor by simple logic, nor by appearance or opinion, nor even by the teachings of your master; when you know in yourself that something is bad, then give it up, and accept the good and follow it.
-- Buddha
~~~
America is at that awkward stage.  It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
-- Claire Wolfe
~~~
You can believe anything you want.  The universe is not obliged to keep a straight face.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm
~~~
Playing in traffic on the information superhighway
~~~
It looks like Barney has won... No wait, Godzilla is getting up...
~~~
Dear IRS: I would like to cancel my subscription.  Please remove my name from your mailing list.
~~~
You can have it perfect OR you can have it Tuesday
~~~
Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For the first offense.
~~~
If the sexes are equal, why is it that "Diamonds are a girl's best friend" but "Man's best friend is his dog"?
~~~
There are two important things to remember about surrealism.  Frogs,  powertools and the Lincoln memorial.
~~~
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
-- Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt. Harmony Books, 2002.
~~~
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
-- Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt. 2002.
~~~
I Am A Unix User
I'm not hacker or a system administrator,
I don't pirate my software or pay for it.
I don't use Windows, MacOS or anything with a mouse.
I enjoy typing commands longer than my screen.
All my binaries are compiled for my system.
I use BASH, Perl and C and won't trust AppleScript or VB to print on my
dot matrix.
GNU is the most inexpensive part of computing.
It's pronounced LEE-nuchs, not LIE-nukes.
I can emulate any other OS.
I expect difference with every UN*X machine.
"This" is different from "this".
man is my helper.
vi is user-friendly.
And all my hardware is a file.
My name is root.
And I AM A UNIX USER!
-- http://masella.dynodns.net
~~~
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
-- H. Abelson and G. Sussman (in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
~~~
Good teaching is more a giving of the right questions than a giving of the right answers.
-- J. Albers
~~~
Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface with other software.
-- I. O. Angell
~~~
One day a mother comes home from work and asks her son, "What did you do today?" 
The son replied, "I taught our dog how to play the piano". 
The mother, incredulous, asked, "Our dog can play the piano?", to which the son laughed and replied, 
"Of course not mom. I said that I taught him; I didn't say that he learned how."
~~~
The American university is built on two false premises: that all teachers must add to the existing stock of knowledge by research, and that all self-respecting institutions fulfill this role only by employing productive scholars...Of course, the teacher must keep reading and thinking abreast of his time, but this does not mean that he must write and publish. The confusion hides a further absurd assumption, which is that when a man writes a scholarly book that reaches a dozen specialists he adds immeasurably to the world's knowledge; whereas if he imparts his thoughts and his reading to one hundred and fifty students every year, he is wasting his time and leaving the world in darkness. One is tempted to ask what blinkered pedant ever launched the notion that students in coming to college seceded from the human race and may therefore be safely left out when knowledge is being broadcast.
-- J. Barzun (Teacher in America)
~~~
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
-- L. Da Vinci
~~~
...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
-- E. Dijkstra (The Tide, not the waves; in Denning/Metcalfe: Beyond Calculation, Springer-Verlag 1997)
~~~
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
-- R. Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
~~~
We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.
-- W. Gates
~~~
The fastest algorithm can frequently be replaced by one that is almost as fast and much easier to understand.
-- D. Jones
~~~
We don't manage our time as well as we manage our space. There's an overhead of starting and an overhead of stopping a project because you kind of lose your momentum. And you've got to bracket and put aside all the things you're already doing. So you need reasonably large blocks of uninterrupted time if you're going to be successful at doing some of these things. That's why hackers tend to stay up late.  If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people -because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
-- B. Joy
~~~
The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you -unlike any other schooling you have gone through before. Here we use the Socratic method: I call on you; I ask you a question; you answer it. Why don't I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions you learn to teach yourselves. By this method of questioning-answering, questioning-answering, we seek to develop in you the ability to analyze that vast complex of facts that constitutes the relationships of members within a given society. Now, you may think, at times, that you have reached a correct and final answer. I assure you, this is a delusion on your part. You will never reach a final, correct, and ultimate answer. In my classroom, there is always another question; there is always a question to follow your answer. Yes, you are on a treadmill. My little questions spin the tumblers of your brain. You are on an operating table; my little questions are fingers probing your mind. We do brain surgery here. You teach yourselves law and I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.
-- Professor Kingsfield (addressing 1st year Harvard Law Students in The Paper Chase)
~~~
Learning is never done without errors and defeat.
-- V. Lenin
~~~
Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes.
-- H. Mills
~~~
There is a famous rule in performance optimization called the 90/10 rule: 90% of a program's execution time is spent in only 10% of its code. The standard inference from this rule is that programmers should find that 10% of the code and optimize it, because that's the only code where improvements make a difference in the overall system performance. But a second inference is just as important: programmers can de-optimize the other 90% of the code (in order to make it easier to use, maintain, etc.), because deterioration (of performance) of that code won't make much of a difference in the overall system performance.
-- R. Pattis
~~~
There is one very good reason to learn programming, but it has nothing to do with preparing for high-tech careers or with making sure one is computer literate in order to avoid being cynically manipulated by the computers of the future. The real value of learning to program can only be understood if we look at learning to program as an exercise of the intellect, as a kind of modern-day Latin that we learn to sharpen our minds.
-- R. Schank (in The Cognitive Computer)
~~~
Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
-- R. Stallman
~~~
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all the copybooks, and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
-- A. N. Whitehead (in An Introduction to Mathematics)
~~~
Pretty graphical interfaces are commonly called user-friendly. But they are not really your friends. Underlying every user-friendly interface is terrific contempt for the humans who will use it. ...to build a crash-proof system, the designer must be able to imagine--and disallow--the dumbest action possible. He or she has to think of every single stupid thing a human being could do. Gradually, over months and years, the designer's mind creates a construct of the user as an imbecile. This image is necessary. No crash-proof system can be built unless it is made for an idiot. 
-- Ellen Ullman
~~~
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
-- Napoleon I.
~~~
Of course the code works. It just compiled, didn't it?
-- helixcode123, 11/8/2001 on Slashdot.
~~~
Ah, the "Birds fly. Except penguins, kiwis, ostriches,.." problem
-- Hugh Eng
~~~
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-- Walt Whitman
~~~
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure,what you do not understand.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
~~~
If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.
-- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
~~~
How does Bugs Bunny do it? How does he know when he wakes up in the morning to put in his pocket 3 sticks of dynamite, a physician costume, and a bicycle pump?
~~~
Don't rush to implement your commander's orders. Wait until he changes his mind.
-- Soviet Army saying, reported by Jim Kimbell on the XP list
~~~
J. R. Capablanca, world chess champion in the 1920s, was asked how many moves ahead he looked. He said, Only one. But it's the right one.
~~~
What do people think? What, do people think? :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199808071736.KAA12738@wall.org>
~~~
At some point in the project somebody will start whining about the need to determine the project "requirements". This involves interviewing people who don't know what they want but, curiously, know exactly when they need it.
-- Scott Adams - The Dilbert principle
~~~
If you don't think carefully, you might think that programming is just typing statements in a programming language.
-- Ward Cunningham
~~~
first question in the Management Quiz: Do you believe that anything you don't understand must be easy to do?
-- Scott Adams; The Dilbert Principle
~~~
Your question doesn't make any sense. You might as well ask whether it is possible to grow vegetables from a painting, without becoming Wednesday first.
-- Abigail, comp.lang.perl.misc
~~~
We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.
-- Otto Neurath
~~~
In the real world, as you work to design software, you have several concerns to keep in mind - several "monkeys on your back." Each monkey competes with the others for your attention, trying to convince you to take its particular concern to heart as you work. One large, heavy monkey hangs on your back with its arms around your neck and repeatedly yells, "You must meet the schedule!" Another monkey, this one perched on top of your head (as there is no more room on your back), beats its chest and cries, "You must accurately implement the specification!" Still another monkey jumps up and down on top of your monitor yelling, "Robustness, robustness, robustness!" Another keeps trying to scramble up your leg crying, "Don't forget about execution speed!" And every now and then, a small monkey peeks timidly at you from beneath the keyboard. When this happens, the other monkeys become silent. The little monkey slowly emerges from under the keyboard, stands up, looks you in the eye, and says, "You must make the code easy to read and easy to change." With this, all the other monkeys scream and jump onto the little monkey, forcing it back under the keyboard. With the little monkey out of sight, the other monkeys return to their positions and resume their activities.
-- From "Introduction to Design Techniques", Javaworld Feb 1998
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines:  You must work at a busy library, cuz baby you just increased my circulation.
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: No one believes I am a librarian, maybe you should try to check me out.
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: Let's play search engine:  enter your terms and see if you get positive results.
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: I'd catalog you under Desirable!
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: So they say you're like a public library, anyone with a card can check you out.
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: Mind if I check you out?
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: I may not be a cataloger, but I bet I can find a place to fit you in.
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: damn... you're stacked better than the LOC
~~~
LISNews Librarian Pickup Lines: Do you know the difference between sex and The LC Subject Headings? (No.) Do you want to go up to my room?
~~~
Generations of high school children gasp when they read Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' for they are amazed to discover that Juliet was only thirteen years old.  We sometimes forget that, for most of human existence, our lives were short, miserable, and brutish. Sadly, for most of human history, we repeated the same wretched cycle: as soon as we reached puberty, we were expected to toil or hunt with our elders, find a mate and produce children. We would then have a large number of them, with most of them dying at childbirth.  As Leonard Hayflick says, 'It is astonishing to realize that the human species survived hundreds of thousands of years, more than 99% of its time on this planet, with a life expectancy of only 18 years.'  Since the industrial revolution, thanks to increased sanitation, sewage systems, better food supplies, labor-saving machines, the germ theory, and modern medicine, our life expectancy has risen dramatically. At the turn of the century, the average life expectancy in the United States was 49. Now, it is around 76, a 55% increase in a century. As Joshua Lederberg notes, 'In the U.S., greater life expectancy ... can be attributed almost entirely to this mastery of infection, this annihilation of the bugs.' And today, the fastest-growing segment of our population is the group that is over a hundred years old.
-- Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize The 21st Century
~~~
Now that the deadline's past, can I please have the spec?
~~~
Until somebody debugs reality, the best I can do is a quick patch here and there
~~~
User Error: Replace user and press any key to continue.
~~~
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
-- Herm Albright
~~~
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
-- Bill Gates
~~~
There are perhaps 5% of the population that simply *can't* think.
There are another 5% who *can*, and *do*.
The remaining 90% *can* think, but *don't*.
-- R. A. Heinlein
~~~
A scientific approach is generally characterized by the words logical, systematic, impersonal, calm, rational, while an artistic approach is characterized by the words aesthetic, creative, humanitarian, anxious, irrational. It seems to me that both of these apparently contradictory approaches have great value with respect to computer programming.
-- Donald E. Knuth, Computer programming as an Art, 1974
~~~
The fantastic element that explain the appeal of dungeon-clearing games to many programmers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without user requirements changing.
-- Thomas L. Holaday, The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML (With CD-ROM)  by Ken Henderson, ISBN: The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL, page: 119
~~~
There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.
-- Steven Levy
~~~
I am not very skeptical... a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met not a few men, who... have often thus been deterred from experiments or observations which would have proven serviceable.
-- Charles Darwin
~~~
It's like religion.  Heresy [in science] is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite.
-- Dr. Thomas Gold
~~~
If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.
-- Wilfred Trotter
~~~
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
-- Robert Oppenheimer
~~~
In science it often happens that scientists say, You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken, and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan
~~~
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
-- William James
~~~
New ideas are always criticized - not because an idea lacks merit, but because it might turn out to be workable, which would threaten the reputations of many people whose opinions conflict with it.  Some people may even lose their jobs.
-- physicist, requested anonymity
~~~
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
-- 1925 IBM Maintenance Manual
~~~
I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.
-- Larry DeLuca
~~~
Science advances funeral by funeral.
-- Planck?
~~~
Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, open-mindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.
-- Marcello Truzzi, CSICOP
~~~
Progress in science is something like climbing a mountain.  Only most mountaineers don't set up a new base-camp every ten feet, then leap out and attack anyone who tries to climb past them.
-- Bill "huge ego" Beaty
~~~
It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
-- Steve C McConnell
~~~
It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.
-- Bruce Tognazzini
~~~
What we REALLY need is a Moment of SCIENCE in the Public Schools!
~~~
There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you play with them.
-- Richard Feynman
~~~
In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time.
-- John C Dvorak
~~~
Treating your rocket scientist employees as if they were still in kindergarten is not an isolated phenomenon. Almost every company has some kind of incentive program that is insulting and demeaning.
-- Joel Spolsky
~~~
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Martin Golding
~~~
She said "Harder!" I did that. She said "Faster!" I did that. She said "Deeper!" I philosophized.
~~~
Who needs drugs? I go broke buying books!
~~~
Do autoparanoid schizophrenic agnostic dyslexic insomniacs lie awake at night wondering if they might be the dog that's out to get them?
~~~
I get into the meanest, nastiest frame of mind I can manage, and I write the nastiest (testing) code I can think of. Then I turn around and embed that in even nastier constructions that are nearly obscene.
-- Donald Knuth
~~~
If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.
-- Kurt Lewin
~~~
Successful software always gets changed.
-- Frederick Brooks
~~~
Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza.
-- Michael Rothschild
~~~
Since humans don't have decryption systems built into their anatomy, information must be deciphered before we experience it. The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard. The only way to make movies that cannot be copied is to make movies that cannot be viewed.
-- Gene Kan
~~~
Information is the currency of democracy.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
Twenty percent of all input forms filled by people contain bad data.
-- Vic Vyssotsky
~~~
You can have any combination of features the Air Ministry desires, so long as you do not also require that the resulting airplane fly.
-- Willy Messerschmidt
~~~
More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time.
-- Jim McCarthy
~~~
In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.
-- Maimonides
~~~
The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.
-- John Cleese
~~~
Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable.
-- Dave Barry
~~~
Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.
-- Philip Greenspun
~~~
Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
-- Eric Raymond
~~~
Cryptography restrictions are the USA's Maginot Line: Big, expensive, ultimately routed around regardless, and once the war is over, difficult to get rid of.
-- Russell Nelson
~~~
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as piracy. In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.
-- Richard Stallman
~~~
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, she said, but that alone doesn't make it true.
-- Franz Kafka
~~~
By three methods we may learn technical writing: First by education, which is noblest; second by methodology, which is easiest; and third by planting your butt in a chair and pecking out the damn document, which is the bitterest.
-- Andrew Plato
~~~
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
-- Samuel Butler
~~~
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle
~~~
The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion... It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation - persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest  degree.
-- Alexander Graham Bell
~~~
Honour, worthily obtained, is in its nature a personal thing, and incommunicable to any but those who had some share in obtaining it.
-- Benjamin Franklin (whuffie?)
~~~
It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
~~~
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else,  is always a portrait of himself.
-- Samuel Butler
~~~
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, The Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war.
-- Dave Paulsen
~~~
Xander (taunting the fear demon): Who's the little fear demon? Come on, who's the little fear demon?
Giles: Don't taunt the fear demon.
Xander: Why? Can he hurt me?
Giles: No, it's just... tacky.
~~~
Decisions of the judges will be final unless shouted down by a really overwhelming majority of the crowd present.  Abusive and obscene language may not be used by contestants when addressing members of the judging panel, or, conversely, by members of the judging panel when addressing contestants (unless struck by a boomerang).
-- Mudgeeraba Creek Emu-Riding and Boomerang-Throwing Assoc.
~~~
I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
-- G K Chesterton
~~~
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
-- G K Chesterton
~~~
Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
-- G K Chesterton
~~~
Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.
-- Jennifer Unlimited
~~~
If you can look into the mirror without laughter, you have no sense of humor.
-- Unknown
~~~
Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.
-- G. B. Shaw
~~~
Making real interoperability between NT and standards based systems involves invoking spirits and performing animal sacrifices.
-- Greg (greg@rage.net)
~~~
I used Visual Basic. I liked Visual Basic. I liked it a lot. I used Delphi. Visual Basic sucks so hard it bends light. It's amazing what a little bit of perspective does.
-- Anthony Ord (nws@rollingthunder.demon.co.uk)
~~~
VMS is about as secure as a poodle encased in a block of lucite... about as useful, too.
-- wendigo@pobox.com
~~~
Again, the cluebus needs to hit you and then back up and hit you again.
-- Brian Wheeler (bdwheele@indiana.edu)
~~~
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 factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
-- Warren Bennis
~~~
The rich who are unhappy are worse off than the poor who are unhappy; for the poor, at least, cling to the hopeful delusion that more money would solve their problems - but the rich know better.
-- Sydney J. Harris
~~~
I have undertaken to translate the Bible into German. This was good for me; otherwise I might have died in the mistaken notion that I was a learned fellow.
-- Martin Luther
~~~
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.
-- Lily Tomlin
~~~
When I tell people I'm a comedian they say, "Oh are you funny?" I say, "No, it's not that kind of comedy.
-- Betsy Salkind
~~~
Teenager with nose ring, baggy clothing and spiked hair to friend: I don't really like dressing like this, but it keeps my parents from dragging me everywhere they go.
~~~
A kindergarten teacher is someone who loves children and hates zippers.
~~~
In my day, we couldn't afford shoes, so we went barefoot. In the winter we had to wrap our feet with barbed wire for traction.
-- Bill Flavin
~~~
Government is like junior high. Your status depends upon whom you're able to persecute.
-- Jonathan Kellerman
~~~
He gave me a copy of /The Declaration of Independence/, then he got a tattoo that says /Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death/. I think my boyfriend wants his freedom.
-- _The Better Half_ cartoon by Randy Glasbergen
~~~
If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?
-- Unknown
~~~
I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like 'What I'm Going to be If I Grow Up.'
-- Lenny Bruce
~~~
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams
~~~
Men are like steel. When they lose their temper, they lose their worth.
-- Chuck Norris
~~~
If I ever blow someone up, it'll be because I want to, not because of some damn religion.
-- Philip L. Welch
~~~
I say we spread liquid Kryptonite over a leather-clad Lois Lane.
-- Phil Welch on how to kill Superman
~~~
I'm not conceited, I just know how damn good I am.
-- Phil Welch proclaiming his immense self-esteem
~~~
Sometimes, I close my eyes and think about how much love there is in the world, and how much hate there is, and I just wish there was more love. Than I realize there probably is, it's just not directed at me.
-- Phil Welch
~~~
If your friend is already dead, and being eaten by vultures, I think it's okay to feed some bits of your friend to one of the vultures, to teach him to do some tricks. But ONLY if you're serious about adopting the vulture.
-- Amanda X
~~~
If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: 'He obviously does not know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned'.
-- Epictetus
~~~
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
~~~
I have this idea about why people do the terrible things they do, same reason little kids push each other on the school-yard. If you're the one doing the pushing, then you're not going to be the one who gets pushed. If you're the monster, then nothing will be waiting in the shadows to jump out at you. It's pretty simple really. People do the terrible things they do because they're scared.
-- Allie Keys - Taken
~~~
Do you know the seven deadly sins?
Not Biblically.
~~~
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
-- Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine
~~~
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the 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 ... That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
-- Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering
~~~
The main difference between a User and a Hacker: A User buys a faster computer to spend _less_ time with it.  Happy hacking!
-- From rec.humor.funny
~~~
Alignments
One for all, and all for one. (LG)
If everyone is okay, I am okay. (NG)
I'm independent. But I probably will help. (CG)
The needs of all are above the needs of a few, or one. (LN, Vulcan tradition from Star Trek...)
Change, even for the worse. (CN)
Each one for himself and nature against all. (CE)
It's simple. Either you are with me, or against me.(NE)
The strong rule, the weak obey. (LE)
True Neutral = none of the above
~~~
I couldn't think of one clever way to stop this guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence.
-- Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #21
~~~
Oho, now I know what you are.  You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.
Certainly.
You say that a man's first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job.
Of course.
Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
-- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
~~~
She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books.  This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose.  Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines - not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.  Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.
-- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
~~~
Understanding and experiencing are not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.
-- Robertson Davies, The Manticore
~~~
But logic is like cricket, he would warn, it is admirable so long as you are playing according to the rules.  But what happens to your game of cricket when somebody suddenly decides to bowl with a football or bat with a hockey-stick?  Because that is what is continually happening in life.
-- Robertson Davies, The Manticore
~~~
Funny how languages break down and turn into something else. Latin was rubbed away until it degenerated into dreadful lingos like French and Spanish and Italian, and lo!  people found out that quite new things could be said in these degenerate tongues - things nobody had ever thought of in Latin.  English is breaking down now in the same way - becoming a world language that every Tom Dick and Harry must learn, and speak in a way that would give Doctor Johnson the jim-jams.
-- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
~~~
It is not my intention to denounce modern education.  If it is bad, it may be said that all education is bad which is not self-education, and quite a lot of self-education is going on today - some of it in our schools, under the very noses of the teachers!
-- Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic
~~~
Well, during those periods when I was me, there was most assuredly only one of me. But during some of the more intense discussions, I was not me, and while all the rest of the attendees were also not me, it is difficult to say whether they were the same not me that I was or wasn't at the time.
-- Gordon McMillan, 18 Nov 1998
~~~
It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care.
-- George Bernard Shaw, Candida
~~~
Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.
-- Forsyth and Rada, Machine Learning
~~~
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
-- J. Bartlett Brebner
~~~
Problems worthy of attack 
prove their worth by hitting back.
-- Piet Hein
~~~
A print addict is a man who reads in elevators. People occasionally look at me curiously when they see me standing there, reading a paragraph or two as the elevator goes up. To me, it's curious that there are people who do not read in elevators. What can they be thinking about?
-- Robert Fulford, The Pastimes of a Print Addict
~~~
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
-- Bob Edwards (attributed)
~~~
Child pornography - I never heard of it as a problem five years ago, but now it's brought up constantly. I think it's the new Red-baiting. The people in Burma don't understand how it is that we are focusing our whole crypto policy on catching child pornographers. If you think that cryptography is good for society you have to apologize and say that you are against child pornography... The fact that I even have to say that is an indication of how effective this Red-baiting is... I think that we can't let our civil liberties for the society at large be determined by government policy towards a tiny segment of the criminal population.
-- Philip Zimmermann
~~~
The true poet and the true scientist are not estranged. They go forth into nature like two friends. Behold them strolling through the summer fields and woods. The younger of the two is much the more active and inquiring; he is ever and anon stepping aside to examine some object more minutely, plucking a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird, watching a butterfly; now he turns over a stone, peers into the marshes, chips off a fragment of rock, and everywhere seems intent on some special and particular knowledge of the things about him. The elder man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and enjoyment, is less curious about special objects and features, and more desirous of putting himself in harmony with the spirit of the whole. But when his younger companion has any fresh and characteristic bit of information to impart to him, how attentively he listens, how sure and discriminating is his appreciation! The interests of the two in the universe are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile or mutually destructive.
-- John Burroughs
~~~
If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.
-- Rev. Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail
~~~
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
-- Sir Frederick G. Banting
~~~
Once you accept that the world is a giant computer run by white mice, all other movies fade into insignificance.
-- Mutsumi Takahashi, On The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
~~~
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
-- Frank Herbert
~~~
Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.
-- John Stuart Mill
~~~
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors...
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
~~~
To make a name for learning 
when other roads are barred, 
take something very easy 
and make it very hard.
-- Piet Hein
~~~
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
-- Neil Gaiman, Sandman #19: A Midsummer Night's Dream
~~~
In a world deeply divided between those who are prepared to believe nothing and those who are ready to believe anything, it is a tricky business to enter into a discussion of matters that can be dismissed either as miracles or as lies.
-- Denis Johnston, The Brazen Horn
~~~
Institutions feel no pain. Only people can feel the relentless pain of illiteracy, the desperate bafflement of a mind unskilled in the ways of logic and thoughtful attention, and dimly aware, but aware nevertheless, of its own confusion. Schools do not have minds; they have guidelines. Their guidelines run, when it isn't too inconvenient, as far as what they are not at all ashamed to call the parameters of basic minimum competency. Basic minimum competence (why do they need that y?) is not literacy. It is, however, just enough a counterfeit literacy to convince the minimally competent to fancy themselves literate, except, of course, for those moments of desperate pain.
-- Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, March 1981.
~~~
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Do the right thing even if the heavens fall.) It's not nearly as naive a maxim as it seems, because in the real world it often turns out that doing what is morally the right thing is also, in practical terms, the right thing to do.
-- Gwynne Dyer
~~~
When I come upon anything - in Logic or in any other hard subject - that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one's self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one's self: one never gets irritated at one's own stupidity!
-- Lewis Carroll
~~~
As a wise programmer once said, Floating point numbers are like sandpiles: every time you move one, you lose a little sand and you pick up a little dirt. And after a few computations, things can get pretty dirty.
-- Kernighan and Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style
~~~
All the evils of publishing can be traced to one source - copyright.
-- Stefan Stykolt, Quoted by Kildare Dobbs in The Living Name
~~~
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
-- Charles Babbage
~~~
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
-- Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
~~~
There seems to be a strong correlation between people who relish tough football and people who relish intimidating and beating the hell out of Commies, hippies, protest marchers and other opposition groups. Watching well-advertised strong men knock other people around, make them hurt, is in the end like other tastes. It does not weaken with feeding. It grows.
-- John McMurtry
~~~
Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by the dullness of that person.
-- J.D. Griffin
~~~
Every woman needs one man in her life who is strong and responsible. Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to do - fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible.
-- Richard J. Needham
~~~
To see the world in a grain of sand, 
And a heaven in a wild flower; 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And eternity in an hour.
-- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
~~~
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
-- G.K. Chesterton, On Running After Ones Hat, in All Things Considered
~~~
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
~~~
Imitation of nature is bad engineering. For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they have killed themselves uselessly... You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 747. Why not? Because Nature didn't need anything that would fly at 700 mph at 40,000 feet: how would such an animal feed itself?... If you take Man as a model and test of artificial intelligence, you're making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, has never bothered to develop one. So when an intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on principles different from those of Man's mind, and its level of intelligence will certainly not be measured by the fact that it can beat some chess champion or appear to carry on a conversation in English.
-- Anonymous, Quoted in Jacques Vallee's The Network Revolution
~~~
I would, however, recommend to every one of my Readers, the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week, and setting down punctually their whole Series of Employments during that Space of Time. This kind of Self-Examination would give them a true State of themselves, and incline them to consider seriously what they are about. One Day would rectifie the Omissions of another, and make a Man weigh all those indifferent Actions, which, though they are easily forgotten, must certainly be accounted for.
-- Joseph Addison, In the Spectator for March 4, 1712
~~~
In contrast, too many new programmers write as if there were no programmers before them and there shall come none after them. The best of the new breed learn to program from learn-by-example-in-21-days textbooks of very low quality; the worst learn from guesswork and trial and error with a Pavlovian focus on pain avoidance. None of them learn to do it right from a master of the art of programming. Instead, they learn from watching other programs perform. I blame the intense redirection of energy away from programming to user interface design on this lack of ability to read the language from programmer to computer.
-- Erik Naggum, In gnu.misc.discuss
~~~
When I was 15, we had one of those things where you do a battery of tests and then they bring a careers advisor in to talk to you about careers, and the careers advisor said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "I want to write American comics." And there was a very, very, very long pause. And then he said, "Well, how do you go about doing that?" And I said, "Well, you're the careers advisor, I thought you were gonna tell me." And there was another really, really, really long pause, and then he looked at me rather desperately and said, "Have you ever thought about accountancy?
-- Neil Gaiman, In a radio interview, on To The Best Of Our Knowledge, broadcast May 31, 1995.
~~~
Fortunately, you've left that madness behind, and entered the clean, happy, and safe Python world of transvestite lumberjacks and singing Vikings.
-- Quinn Dunkan, 17 Sep 2000
~~~
I fantasized that finally not being tied down to a dependent would give my spontaneous nature a chance to grow and flower. Then I realized that not only didn't I have much of a spontaneous nature but that the reason I wasn't partaking of the constant barrage of interesting activities and social events all around me was because I was a lazy sloth.
-- Merrill Markoe, Pets and the Single Girl, in How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me
~~~
Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the wrong tool for every job.
-- Bruce Eckel, at IPC9
~~~
The GPL tried to protect the freedom of end-users to modify and redistribute their code. Most people do not believe that this is a legitimate freedom like freedom of speech or assembly but Richard Stallman does. I don't think that there is an argument that that will persuade a person one way or another. If freedoms could be proven, that famous document would probably start: Not everyone holds these truths to be self-evident, so we've worked up a proof of them as Appendix A.
-- Paul Prescod, 11 Apr 2001
~~~
My father looked at me sternly with that look I would learn to know so well, and said: "Justin, on n'attaque jamais l'individu. On peut etre en desaccord complet avec quelqu'un sans pour autant le denigrer." ... Parce que la simple tolerance n'est pas assez: il faut un respect reel et profond de chaque etre humain, peu importe ses croyances, ses origines, et ses valeurs.
-- Justin Trudeau, In the eulogy for his father, Pierre Eliott Trudeau, 3 Oct 2000
~~~
1. Nothing and no one is immune from criticism.
2. Everyone involved in a controversy has an intellectual responsibility to inform himself of the available facts.
3. Criticism should be directed first to policies, and against persons only when they are responsible for policies, and against their motives or purposes only when there is some independent evidence of their character.
4. Because certain words are legally permissible, they are not therefore morally permissible.
5. Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
6. Do not treat an opponent of a policy as if he were therefore a personal enemy of the country or a concealed enemy of democracy.
7. Since a good cause may be defended by bad arguments, after answering the bad arguments for another's position present positive evidence for your own.
8. Do not hesitate to admit lack of knowledge or to suspend judgment if evidence is not decisive either way.
9. Only in pure logic and mathematics, not in human affairs, can one demonstrate that something is strictly impossible. Because something is logically possible, it is not therefore probable. "It is not impossible" is a preface to an irrelevant statement about human affairs. The question is always one of the balance of probabilities. And the evidence for probabilities must include more than abstract possibilities.
10. The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion.
-- Sidney Hook, Suggested rules for democratic discourse, from The Ethics of Controversy
~~~
Even a library cataloguing system is stylized and reflects the interests and reading habits of librarians and library users. The only framework inclusive enough to embrace all man's undertakings with equal objectivity is the garbage dump.
-- R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World
~~~
... don't waste too much effort in searching for conspiracies. Most of the harm done in the world is out of stupidity, not by design. Be on the watch for skulduggery... but don't fall into the trap of thinking that every evil thing that occurs in the world in part of some diabolic master plan. The notion that whatever is wrong with the world can be blamed on somebody (never, of course, one's self) is a rather infantile carryover from the childhood days when our parents were thought to be all-powerful and therefore all-responsible.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081
~~~
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.
-- Bram Cohen, 20 Sep 2001
~~~
As evil fears the light, so does ignorance fear knowledge. When the priest tries to restrict your learning to "save your soul" or "protect your morals", look closely at what they are selling. Most often your will find it is based on the idea that you must lean nothing but what your are told to believe. These are cheap goods, pass them by. True morals stand firm in the face of all knowledge. 
-- The Tao of Phoenix
~~~
DM FEATS
Marathon DMing: Can DM 18+ hours without any interruption.
Horde Control: Can handle DMing groups of 13
Craft Magic Scenery: make some hella tough scenery
On the Fly: Can improvise npc stats and gear up to 10th level
Improved on the Fly: Can improvise npc stats and gear up to 20th level
Demand Attention: by threaten a players character in game, for actions he does out of game you can maintain control of even the most add players.
Fudge (Special Ability): Up to once per day, you can fudge a dice in either way of your choosing. If it is done more then this your alignment as DM shifts to one side (i.e. neutral DM after rolling a 1 fudges it to 20. This is second time today, so DM shifts to evil).
Rule 0 (Supernatural Ability): At will, you may destroy or create rules at your choice.
Reroll: the ability to say...screw it. I just want to hit the character today.
Predetermined Critical Hit for the players that really get under your skin
Clouded Response: When a player asks "why"......you say...."I can't tell you why it affected you that way...it just did"
Skill Focus (Bluff Player): Grants a +3 bonus to all bluff checks versus a player.
DM: "Roll me a will save.
Player: (Roll...) "12
DM: (Looks down at blank piece of paper, makes note 'Stop at grocery
store on way home') Hmmm... Okay.
Player: What just happened?
DM: You'll see.
Projection: Allows the DM to speak clearly over all player conversations, without violating civil noise ordinances.
Pierce the Haze: (Pre-req: Projection) Allows the DM to speak so one particular player on opposite side of room can hear, while others talk around them.
Improved Demand Attention: (Pre-req: Projection, Cha 13+) With a Charisma check (DC 10), allows the DM to draw the attention of players from their own conversations through acts of theatrics, dramatic gestures, etc., and keep their attention focused on the game. With each potential interruption, a separate Charisma check may be needed.
Train Newbie: gives a DM the ability to teach a new player how to Role-play
Improvise: gives you the power to keep a story-line going without missing a beat, even though the players heading south in a forest should be heading north through a cave.
photo memory (int): lets you recall obscure rules from any page of the core books without looking.
Suppress emotion: Being able to put on a stone face when the situation gets worse and worse for the players and they realize some of the hidden hints I placed and they had walked by to their doom.
Stinging laughter: The bellowing and evil laughter a DM let's out as all the action are said and done, and the situation is placed and the RP-ing is done, and the whole encounter/session/campaign gets down to a single die roll. And the odds are in my favor.
Lavish drinking: The amount of alcohol a DM can sustain without passing out and forgetting last night is superhuman. This feat is a follow-up of the last feat, and a (for the PC's favorable) die-roll.
Vengeful gaze of DM (Pre Req: Cha 13+, and DM over 2 years.): your cold hard steel gaze snaps players out of their frivolous chivel, gay bantering desists. you own the crowd. (usable 1/session/player)
DM Lightning: Roll all your dice, and deal that damage to a PC, damage is Divine, Vile, Hellfire and has no save or resistance
Improved DM lighting: All players grab all their dice and roll them all with you when you attempt a DM lightning attack. Add all the damage together.
Evil Laughter: You can make players reconsider any action.  By laughing evilly as a full-round action, you can make any player reconsider even the most harmless of actions, like pushing a button.
Improved Shred: You can rip apart a character sheet faster than the average DM. (Prereqs: Killer DM) When ripping up the character sheet of a dead character, you deal double damage to it with each attack. Furthermore, you gain a cumulative +2 morale bonus to intimidate checks for each sheet you have ripped up that day.
Killer DM: You can kill characters in the blink of an eye without mercy. You gain a bonus to damage rolls with any attack that's going to kill the character anyway. This bonus is equal to the character's level times the critical modifier of the weapon or spell that deals the killing blow. The results are always horrific and pointlessly bloody.
Craft fiendish traps and puzzles:  Grants the ability to design traps and puzzles of such an evil and devious nature that you can fireball a player 15 times and he still comes back for more chanting "YOU WILL NOT BEAT ME".
Improvise monster: (pre req: on the fly) you have a nasty habit of changing monsters abilities when a rules lawyer say its abilities out loud to the party, also good for keeping that monster alive longer because of the parties ability to inflict way to much damage.
Sleep Mastery:  You ignore any penalties incurred when you pull all nighters preparing for a gaming session. Note: This feat also functions in conjunction with Marathon DMing.
Heart of Stone: You gain +20 to Will saves vs. any player whining because a PC failed a save, misses an attack, or dies.
Superior On the Fly: You can improvise an entire session and your players never notice.
Craft Map (Pre:On the Fly): You gain the ability to create a map of any given area in less than 1 minute.
God (Pre: DM lightning, Improved Shred Character Sheet, Evil Laugh, Rule 0, and Heart of Stone): You gain the ability to bend rules, shape the world as you wish, heartlessly slaughter players, Intimidate players, and basically do whatever you dern well like. Players gain a -100 penalty on all saves made against any DM feats you may have.
Forced Assumption [DM, Evil] (Prerequisite: Wisdom 11-, Railroading): You may assume your players actions that work against their favors as much as possible, when it's not explicitly stated by themselves.
Railroading [DM, General] (Prerequisite: Cha 13+): You are proficient at pushing the players into the direction you want them to head into, whether they like it or not. Players are allowed a Will save against DC 10 + your Charisma ability score.
Stealth Railroading [DM, General] (Prerequisite: Int 13+, Railroading): As Railroading, except that you push players into the direction you want them to head into with hidden intentions, reverse psychology, or faking accidental leak of information. Players are allowed a Will save as Railroading, but at a -10 penalty, and only if they are aware of your true intentions.
Shorten Campaign [DM, Evil] (Prerequisite: Cha 15+, Forced Assumption, Stealth Railroading): You rapidly decrease players' interests in a campaign, causing the campaign to shorten its life span significantly. Players may or may not be willing to join your future campaigns.
Improved Pun: Able to make a pun about any circumstance in the game.
Random Roll: Allows the DM to randomly roll dice when not necessary. This feat is used to intimidate players.
Back In Line: This feat grants the DM the ability to use lines such as "you see a flash of lightening" or "you smell sulfur" to hint at the players that they're actions are not approved by the DM and could be punished by an act of god.
Improved Fudge (Special ability): You may fudge rolls at any given time, as a free action, without the usual 1/day limitation.
Supreme Percentage Rolling [General, DM]: Whenever rolling percentages for your NPCs, you will always roll in the desired target range. Normal: Moderate fortification armor on a player character means a 75% to negate crits or sneak attacks.
-- James Chrisman gmforum@yahoogroups.com
~~~
As I lay on my bed, thinking about you, I feel this strong urge to grab you and squeeze you, because I can't forget last night. You came to me unexpectedly during the balmy and calm night, and what happened in my bed still leaves a tingling sensation in me. You appeared from nowhere and shamelessly, without any reservations, you laid on my naked body...you sensed my indifference, so you applied your hungry mouth to me without any guilt or humiliation, and you drove me near crazy while you drained me. Finally I went to sleep.  Today when I woke up, you were gone, I searched for you but to no avail, only the sheets bore witness to last night's events. My body still bears faint marks of your enthusiastic ravishing, making it harder to forget you. Tonight I will remain awake waiting for you... ....you stupid mosquito.
-- "rod_ramsey" <rod_ramsey@yahoo.com>
~~~
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
-- William Golding
~~~
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time--a tremendous whack.
-- Winston Churchill
~~~
The question you have to ask yourself is what your goal is. If it's to share your knowledge, talking is a clear necessity. Repetition isn't, but saying what you know once is a prerequisite to everyone else hearing it.
If your goal is more than that - if it's to prove to everyone that you're the smartest person in the room - talking early and often might be the right strategy. Probably not, but it might be.
But if you want everyone in the room to choose the course of action you think is best, hold your tongue. If necessary, pinch it between your thumb and forefinger and don't let go for awhile.
There will come a time when the discussion starts to either wind down or repeat itself. That's when it's your turn. Here's the formula: (1) Get the floor; (2) Summarize what's been said; (3) Find a way to agree with ideas you don't like that removes them from consideration; (4) Present a way out of the impasse.
-- Bob Lewis
~~~
Warning: Do not drink the battery acid. It doesn't taste good and will hurt you. Also do not bite the tyres, especially while the bike is moving.
Our lawyers made us put these warnings in.
-- An Australian motorcycle manual
~~~
Guys are like parking lots, all the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped.
-- Unknown woman
~~~
I don't drink to get happy or to forget the pain. I drink to stop the voices in my head. Do you know what's so bad about them, they stutter. Ddddddave... Kkkkkkikikill your papapapapaparents!!
-- Andrew Dice Clay
~~~
Don't do drugs, don't have unprotected sex, don't drink and drive.....
Leave that to me.
~~~
I was born - wait, it gets worse.
~~~
If you ask me, these cheap, mudslinging ads drag the political process down to a level so juvenile and debased, I can actually understand it.
-- George Lowell, Investment Banker
~~~
The problem with America is stupidity, I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
~~~
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
-- Jules Feiffer
~~~
Why can't Jesus play hockey?
He keeps getting nailed to the boards.
~~~
I used to work at a juvenile detention center. And you know what my favorite part was? Watching the kids get taken away in handcuffs, crying.
-- History teacher's first words to his class
~~~
Don't hate people because they are of a different colour, race or sexual orientation. Hate them because, despite outward appearances, they are all human and that in itself is a terrible crime.
-- Patrick Burn
~~~
Miss, may I be excused? My brain is full now
-- The Far Side
~~~
So now welcome our keynote speaker, Professor Melvin Fenwick - the man who, back in 1952, first coined the now-famous phrase: Fools! I'll destroy them all!
-- The Mad Scientists Convention,The Far Side
~~~
A novel is like a long enjoyable conversation with an old friend, relaxing and comfortable. A short story is more like the big guy on the subway platform who grabs your collar and pretends to push you in front of the train! Emotions come fast, hard and you're left standing on the platform, cold sweat forming on your back while your attacker calmly stares you down, looking thru the grimy window of the departing train.
-- Bill Norris
~~~
A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-- C.S. Lewis
~~~
Like all great romantics, Shakespeare realized love was a lot more likely to end with a bunch of dead Danish people than with a kiss.
-- James Van Der Beek
~~~
Without rule-following there cannot be social life; without rule-breaking there cannot be personal identity. Man's distinguishing characteristic is that he both obeys rules and disobeys them!
-- Thomas S. Szasz
~~~
There is more money being spent on breast augmentation/implants and Viagra these days than Alzheimer's Research. Logic reflects that by 2020 there should then be a large elderly population with perky breasts and huge erections but absolutely no idea or recollection what to do with them.
-- Anon
~~~
If you bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will destroy you.
-- Jesus: Gospel of Thomas
~~~
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
-- Leo Rosten
~~~
By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think wrong.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
~~~
Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath.
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for release
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
~~~
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
-- Beatrix Potter
~~~
If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
~~~
I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning
-- Peter De Vries
~~~
There isn't much to be seen in a little town, but what you hear makes up for it.
-- Kin Hubbard
~~~
Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth. And you should save it for someone you love.
-- Butch Hancock
~~~
Don't you know that love isn't just going to bed? Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures - when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love - why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.
-- Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey
~~~
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
~~~
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
-- Robert Ingersoll
~~~
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant
~~~
A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind.
-- Richard Dehmel (1863-1920) --German poet and playwright
~~~
I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't see that there's anything left for me but to be an author.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
~~~
The question isn't 'who is going to let me'; it's 'who is going to stop me'.
-- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
~~~
If I'm chasing after some guy, and even if in the first second I close half the distance between me and him, then half that distance in the second second, then half that distance in the third second, I'm always going to be half some distance behind him, and I'll never catch him.  Which is why we have guns.
-- Zeno's Paradox, according to Maxim magazine
~~~
force, my friends, is violence; the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor. the popular opinion which says 'violence never solves anything' is wishful thinking at its worst. people who forget that always pay.
-- said by michael ironside in starship troopers, line written by r.a. heinlein and e. neumeier, sampled by velvet acid christ in the song decypher on the album fun with knives.
~~~
If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it.
-- Arthur Kasspe
~~~
I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here.
-- Stephen Bishop
~~~
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
 Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives it ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
-- William Blake
~~~
If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship.
-- La Rochefoucauld
~~~
O, what a heaven is love, O, what a hell!
-- Thomas Dekker
~~~
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.
-- Matt Groening
~~~
The adoration of his heart had been to her only as the perfume of a wild flower, which she had carelessly crushed with her foot in passing.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
~~~
When we are young we want to change the world. When we are old we want to change the young.
-- Anonymous
~~~
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
-- Voltaire
~~~
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
-- James Michener, Space
~~~
I hate writing and love having written
-- Joan Didion
~~~
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Salvor Hardin, Foundation
~~~
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
-- R. A. Heinlein
~~~
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-- Tom Clancy
~~~
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
It is neither safe nor prudent to do anything against conscience.
-- Martin Luther
~~~
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
-- William Blake
~~~
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
-- Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant
~~~
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they've forgotten their own.
-- Margaret Atwood
~~~
There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
~~~
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all doing direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
~~~
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
-- William Faulkner
~~~
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.
-- Harvey Fierstein
~~~
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
-- E. M. Forster
~~~
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies...
-- Erich Fromm
~~~
One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.
-- Gail Godwin
~~~
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
-- Goethe
~~~
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
-- Aldous Huxley
~~~
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-- Aldous Huxley
~~~
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning person holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you in his panic.
-- Anais Nin
~~~
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine
~~~
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
-- William Styron
~~~
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
-- Kurt Vonnegut
~~~
You wouldn't recognize a *subtle plan* if it painted itself purple, and danced naked upon a harpsichord, singing, 'Subtle Plans are Here Again'.
-- Edmund Blackadder
~~~
I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worth while?
Death thought about it Cats, he said eventually, Cats are Nice.
-- Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
~~~
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
-- Calvin and Hobbes
~~~
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to,  worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder,  spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
-- e. e. cummings
~~~
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
-- John Donne
~~~
I send you perfectly toasted marshmallows, a moon dance, and vibrant love.
-- Sark
~~~
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
-- Albert Einstein
~~~
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
-- Carl G. Jung
~~~
In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.
-- George Leonard
~~~
I love defenseless animals, especially in a good gravy.
~~~
Here's to you and here's to me,
and I hope we never disagree.
But, if that should ever be,
to HELL with you, here's to ME!
~~~
I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.
~~~
A man doesn't automatically get my respect. He has to get down in the dirt and beg for it.
~~~
Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy.  What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy.  The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.  What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.  Exactly what the fairy tale does is this:  it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
-- G. K. Chesterton The Red Angel
~~~
Ass: The masculine of "lass".
~~~
Books: Men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.
-- E.S. Barrett
~~~
Book: A garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
~~~
Books: Masters who instruct us without rods or ferrules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
-- Richard De Bury
~~~
Books: Standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.
-- Oswald Chambers
~~~
Books: The blessed chloroform of the mind.
-- Robert Chambers
~~~
Books: Waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation. 
-- Jeremy Collier
~~~
Book: A mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out. 
-- Georg C. Lichtenberg
~~~
Books: More than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives. - Amy Lowell
~~~
May those that love us, love us;
and those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts;
and if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles
so we'll know them by their limping.
-- Old Irish Toast
~~~
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking,  and from that to incivility and procrastination.
-- Thomas De Quincey
~~~
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
-- Voltaire
~~~
It's the heart afraid of dying, that never learns to dance;
It's the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance;
It's the one who won't be taken, who cannot seem to give;
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live.
-- Bette Midler The Rose
~~~
Love, friendship, respect, will never unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
-- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
~~~
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
-- John Milton Paradise Lost
~~~
The world is full of lonely people, all isolated in a private, secret dungeon.
-- Loretta Girzartis
~~~
Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others' pain
And perish in our own.
-- Francis Thompson
~~~
Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
-- William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet
~~~
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more "literary" you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
~~~
When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
-- Frank Herbert, The Godmakers
~~~
But a woman friend was different from a man; you always knew her mind ran along other paths than yours, that she saw the world with different eyes.
-- Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords
~~~
That we would do
We should do when we would; for this "would" changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this "should" is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
~~~
You're pretty.
You're not.
I need a woman.
You need a bath.
-- The Quick and the Dead
~~~
No animal should ever jump on the dining room furniture unless absolutely certain he can hold his own in conversation.
-- Fran Lebowitz
~~~
The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy.
-- Tennesee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
~~~
Health nuts are going to feel stupid some day, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
-- Redd Foxx
~~~
I'm not cheap, but I am on special this week.
~~~
Miles sealed his boots and paused seriously. "I may yet see a chance to save... something, from this mess."
Elli, listening intently, remarked, "I thought we had saved something. We uncovered a traitor, plugged a security leak, foiled a kidnapping, and broke up a major plot against the Barrayaran Imperium. And we got paid. What more do you want for one week?" 
"Well, it would have been nice if any of that had been on purpose, instead of by accident," Miles mused.
-- Business as usual in the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet (Lois McMaster Bujold, Brother's in Arms)
~~~
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
-- Berthold Auerbach
~~~
Where there's music, there can be no evil.
-- Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote
~~~
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
-- William Congreve The Mourning Bride
~~~
Music is only love looking for words.
-- Lawrence Durrell
~~~
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
~~~
When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.
-- Edgar W. Howe
~~~
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like Arabs,
And silently steal away.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
~~~
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
-- Abraham Harold Maslow
~~~
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wondering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
-- Arthur O'Shaughnessy
~~~
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
-- William Shakespeare Twelfth Night
~~~
I prefer to proceed toward infallibility at my own unhurried pace.
-- Chimele-Orithain of nasul Ashanome, in Hunter of Worlds, by C.J.Cherryh
~~~
The madness of demons is rage - the madness of angels, hope.
-- Lailoken, in The Dragon and the Unicorn, by A.A. Attanasio
~~~
I can control it. I'm not an animal.
What are you? A cabbage plant?
-- Andrew Carr; Ellemir Lanart-Alton, in The Forbidden Tower, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
~~~
Due to recent budget cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
-- source unknown
~~~
Police?
How many?
Uh, all of 'em, I think.
-- the Terminator; Sarah Conner; John Conner, in Terminator 2: Judgement
Day
~~~
I pulled her into my arms, finally understanding that all the while I'd struggled to keep her free of my prison of fear, she was locked in the next cell.
-- Cat, in Dreamfall, by Joan D. Vinge
~~~
... the last square peg of compromise had been driven into a round hole of necessity.
-- Cat, in Dreamfall, by Joan D. Vinge
~~~
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
-- Stephen Biko
~~~
Do you believe in the Devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?
I'm not sure man needs the help.
-- Bill Watterson as Calvin; Hobbes
~~~
I'm really a very nice person, when I'm getting my way.
-- Jack Jax Coerlis, in Mid-Flinx, by Alan Dean Foster
~~~
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape is never to let them find out.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
You'd be surprised how often saying nothing is the strongest argument you can make.
-- Myrddin, in In the Shadow of the Oak King, by Courtway Jones
~~~
My self-control is legendary. Half history, half myth.
-- Marty Bobbick, in The Barsoom Project, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
~~~
An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted.
-- Star, in Glory Road, by Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Who is more foolish--the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?
-- Maurice Freehill
~~~
If you commit your heart and your love to someone, you're afraid that you'll get hurt. Well, you will. Both of you. You are going to have problems and pain and anger. You'll also have joy. Great joy.
-- Touched by an Angel daily calendar
~~~
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.
-- Touched by an Angel daily calendar
~~~
I don't know where. And I don't know when. The only thing I do know is that the kind of love worth waiting for, you won't have to lie for, or steal, or keep hidden.
-- Touched by an Angel daily calendar
~~~
It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
~~~
If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could not otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
-- Montaigne
~~~
He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
-- Elbert Hubbard
~~~
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-- Carl Jung
~~~
The biggest sin is sitting on your ass.
-- Florynce Kennedy
~~~
The loneliness was still there, but it was getting louder and easier to dance to.
-- Brett Butler
~~~
...I think we owe it ourselves, and to those we love, to strive for joy. We must transform our own mistakes, and mistakes made towards us, into things that we cherish. Revelry is not only the domain of children. Awe is not the product of innocence. Joy is not the precursor to a life of anger. Unfortunately there are those who do not believe life to be good. There are those that harbour more hatred than can possibly be healthy for anybody. We see it in bigotry; we see it in rage; and we see it most clearly in the inability to forgive and forget.
-- West McDonald
~~~
Friends find comfort in what they share and delight in how they differ.
~~~
To be a freshman is to be in possession of a wonderful thing: time. There is time to figure out what you want to do with your life, time to figure out what classes you want to take, what books you want to read. There is time to make friends. You could do poorly in a class and know you had time to improve. You could mess up in your relationship and have time to make things better. With four promising years ahead of you, time sat around like huge clumps of clay, waiting for you to shape them in whatever way you pleased.
-- Malik Wilson
~~~
Every man is the architect of his own fortunes, but the neighbors superintend the construction.
-- Insect
~~~
the best relationships--friendship and otherwise--tend to be those where you *can* say anything to the other person but you don't say *everything*.
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
i'm actually kinda amazed at the power music has over my feelings about myself, my sense of peace, how lyrics can help me work out ideas and feelings; music makes me a whole person and without it, i'd just be a fraction of who i am now.
-- Therese Leung
~~~
One Ship Sails East, another west by the self same winds that blow.
'Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale which determines the way they go.
Like the ways of the sea are the ways of time as we travel along in life.
'Tis the set of the soul that determines the goal and not the calm nor strife.
~~~
'You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!' 
'Why, what did she tell you?' 
'I don't know, I didn't listen!'
-- Douglas Adams
~~~
Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human.
-- John Cogley Commonweal
~~~
Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
-- Leo C. Rosten
~~~
Pain of the mind hurts more than pain of the body.
-- Little Man Tate
~~~
In this Twentieth Century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is 'an unforgettable experience.'
-- Frederick Franck
~~~
Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
-- D.T. Suzuki
~~~
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.Albert Camus
~~~
...i mean really, the human form can be beautiful in so many different ways, i just don't see a need to limit my attraction to that beauty.
-- Steph Summers
~~~
I wanted you to see what real courage is instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.Harper Lee
~~~
You will never be fully alive as long as there is a new discovery to be made about yourself, your capacity, and the world.
-- Dean Joseph McShane
~~~
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams go, life is a barren field covered with snow.
-- Langston Hughes
~~~
...words are some of the most powerful and important things I know....Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It's the bright red warning flag of danger--and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace.
-- Ani DiFranco
~~~
People don't smoke, the cigarette smokes; we're just the suckers behind it.
~~~
I just don't believe that most people are living the smooth, controlled, trouble-free existence that their careful countenances and bland words suggest. Today never hands me the same thing twice and I believe that for almost everyone life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories, and vague defeats - with very few moments of clear peace. I never do seem to quite get on top of it. My struggle with today is worthwhile, but it's a struggle nonetheless and one that seems to never end. The payoff must be elsewhere, and I suspect that it's within that laughing heart that can surface so unexpectedly.
-- Hugh Prather
~~~
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
~~~
The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
-- William Wordsworth
~~~
No hurt heals by itself. So although we do not choose the ways we are hurt, we can choose the ways we will heal.
~~~
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's nose.
-- Chinese proverb
~~~
Ultimately, the bond of companionship, whether in marriage or friendship, is conversation.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.
-- Erica Jong
~~~
In fact the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen....That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It defines our existence. We are constantly searching--not just for answers to our questions--but also for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge.
-- Benjamin Sisko
~~~
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
~~~
It is the mark of a superior man that, left to himself, he is able to amuse, interest, and entertain himself out of his personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticism. memories, philosophy, humor and what not.
-- George Jean Nathan
~~~
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
-- Jane Austen
~~~
Some of us (perfectionists, especially) fuss so much over making the 'right' choice, but in life, all that's really needed is to make any 'good' choice, believe in it, go through with it, and accept the consequences.
-- Andy Roberts
~~~
In every task that must be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun, and - snap! - the job's a game!
-- Mary Poppins
~~~
The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.
-- Kendall Hailey
~~~
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
-- L.P. Hartley
~~~
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
-- David Foster Wallace
~~~
The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.
-- Kahlil Gibran
~~~
Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Tricked in disguises, alien to the rest 
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
-- Matthew Arnold
~~~
The gods too are fond of a joke.
-- Aristotle
~~~
Homesick
Try and hold only, things you need to live
get what you can, see what you can give.
It's hazy without love; the drugs, the art, career.
They just dull the pain, feed the fears.
But guess I'll read the paper, have myself a beer.
I'll read the stories, hear the blues.
Ponder life, and people's views.
Shoot from town to town, an indecisive star.
Sit on a stool, laughing at the bar.
Wonder at the sunset, chilly and alone.
And someday I'll know again, a someone to call 'home'
-- Valerie Pettis
~~~
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
-- Peter F. Drucker
~~~
Cherish your vision; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, if you remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
-- James Allen
~~~
I date this girl for two years--and then the nagging starts: "I wanna know your name."
-- Mike Binder
~~~
I have a great diet. You're allowed to eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people.
-- Ed Bluestone
~~~
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
-- Niels Bohr
~~~
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
-- Niels Bohr
~~~
In the blithe days of honeymoon,
With Kate's allurements smitten,
I lov'd her late, I lov'd her soon,
And call'd her dearest kitten.
But now my kitten's grown a cat,
And cross like other wives.
O! By my soul my honest Mat,
I fear she has nine lives.
-- James Boswell, Life of Johnson
~~~
I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is used.
-- Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, dying words
~~~
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
-- Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed
~~~
Always behave like a duck--keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.
-- Jacob Braude
~~~
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
-- J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
~~~
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
-- Andrew Brown
~~~
You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
-- Dale Carnegie
~~~
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
-- Anton Chekhov
~~~
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
A day without a pun is a day without sunshine; there is gloom for improvement.
-- John S. Crosbie
~~~
It's like magic. When you live by yourself, all your annoying habits are gone!
-- Merrill Markoe
~~~
I have a fascination for people. I don't like them all, but I have a fascination with human nature.
-- Tori Amos
~~~
But only in their dreams can men be truly free. Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.
-- Dead Poets Society
~~~
It's not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line.
~~~
The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
-- C.S. Lewis
~~~
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
-- William Wordsworth
~~~
A man is walking along a beach when he spies quite some distance ahead a figure walking slowly by the shore-line bending down and picking something up and placing it in the ocean. He thinks nothing of it until he notices that the man seems to be repeating this pattern every few yards...walking slowly, bending over, picking something up and placing it in the water. Soon he catches up with the curious person and being an inquisitive soul he asks the man, 'Whatever are you doing?' 'Can't you see?' asks the man by the sea pointing to the shoreline. 'I'm helping these little guys back to safety.' Sure enough, there on the shore line are hundreds and hundreds of the tiniest star fish that he has ever seen, all washed up on the sand, drying out in the mid-day sun. 'Ahhh,' he says, but confused by the sheer numbers, he says to the star-fish man, 'But surely you'll NEVER make a difference with SO many of these little guys lying here.' To which the starfish man smiled, picked up another, placed it carefully in the ocean, and said cheerfully, 'Made a difference to that one!'
~~~
My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it. I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh - anything but work.
-- Abraham Lincoln
~~~
It sucks when people give you dirty looks for skipping. It's cool when I can smile back at them.
-- Arjuna Greis
~~~
Do not suffer from loneliness.
Go outside.
Go away.
It's all the people making you lonely.
Pick a spot on the horizon, and head straight for it.
Weave your way through a stand of redwoods.
Kayak an island chain.
Peer over your toes at the edge of a canyon.
Go to your favorite place, again, and again, not just because it fuels your independence, but because it reminds you--you're part of something bigger.
And although it may not occur to the baffled onlookers, who can't keep their eyes off your smiling, mud-covered, wired up, insane self.
It will occur to you--you aren't the one who's lonely.
JUST DO IT.
-- 1995 Nike Green Mountain Running Camp diploma
~~~
Never be angry when a fool acts like a fool. It's better when fools identify themselves...it removes so much uncertainty.
-- Lord Peace
~~~
To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.
-- Erich Fromm
~~~
Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
~~~
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
-- WH Auden
~~~
Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship--never.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
~~~
Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.
-- Quentin Crisp
~~~
Pleasure of love lasts but a moment,
Pain of love lasts a lifetime.
-- Jean Pierre Claris De Florian
~~~
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
-- Erich Fromm
~~~
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
-- Erica Jong
~~~
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
-- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld
~~~
To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.
-- Charles A. Lindbergh
~~~
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
-- George Jean Nathan
~~~
We conceal it from ourselves in vain--we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
-- Leo Tolstoy
~~~
Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
-- Andy Warhol
~~~
I'm very brave generally, he went on in a low voice: only today I happen to have a headache.
-- Lewis Carroll
~~~
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
-- English Proverb
~~~
This is courage in a man: to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.
-- Euripides
~~~
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
-- Carl Sandburg
~~~
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
~~~
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Popularity is kinda like Tupperware - expensive plastic that's sold at parties.
~~~
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
~~~
Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
-- T. Roosevelt
~~~
Time is like a handful of sand - the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.
~~~
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to lead a life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
No Colonel. I remember Okita. I can understand a man being a killer, I think. But a bored killer?
Okita is only a tool. The surgeon's knife.
Then your service has turned a man into a thing. An old quote drifted through Ethan's memory: By their fruits you shall know them....
-- Dr. Urquhart and Colonel Millisor discuss ethics (Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos)
~~~
Just get out of her way, Doctor. We're doomed to be Entertained. It's an obligation on both sides. The polite thing to do is sort of pretend we're not here till she's ready for us.
-- Miles explaining backwoods courtesy (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Mountains of Mourning)
~~~
The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in the future are imaginary. the ones they commit in the present--they are real.
-- Aral is hag-ridden prior to the invasion of Escobar (Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor)
~~~
Finesse, boy. A retreating enemy should be offered all the face he can carry off. Just don't let him carry off anything else.
-- Aral Vorkosigan to Miles after the Centagandans are defeated (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game)
~~~
I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, Look, these need no reward.  We have nothing to give them here.  They have loved reading.
-- Virginia Woolf The Common Reader - Second Series
~~~
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory out of desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in a forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
-- T. S. Eliot, Waste Land, The
~~~
The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain; to show them we love them not when we feel like it, but when they do.
-- Nan Fairbrother
~~~
So she stood thinking. Without making any thought precise - for she was one of those reticent people whose minds hold their thoughts enmeshed in clouds of silence - she was filled with thoughts. Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets.
-- Virginia Woolf The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection
~~~
I know! I'll transcribe the conversations between the voices in my head and send them to you!!!
-- David Borenstein
~~~
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
-- Sam Stevenson
~~~
Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.
~~~
The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime or never. He had just discovered it would be never, and was trying to remember what it was and hoping it wasn't anything nice....
-- Winnie the Pooh
~~~
How To Be An Artist.
Stay loose. Learn to watch snails. Plant impossible gardens.
Invite someone dangerous to tea.
Make little signs that say YES! and post them all over your house.
Make friends with freedom and uncertainty.
Look forward to dreams. Cry during movies.
Swing as high as you can on a swingset, by moonlight.
Cultivate moods. Refuse to be responsible.
Do it for love. Take lots of naps. Give money away.
Do it now. The money will follow.
Believe in magic. Laugh a lot.
Celebrate every gorgeous moment.
Take moonbaths.
Have wild imaginings, transformative dreams, and perfect calm.
Draw on the walls. Read every day.
Imagine yourself magic.
Giggle with children. Listen to old people.
Open up. Dive in. Be free.
Bless yourself. Drive away fear.
Play with everything. Entertain your inner child.
You are innocent.
Build a fort with blankets. Get wet. Hug trees.
Write love letters.
-- Sark
~~~
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
~~~
When my father read to me, I leaned into him so I became part of his chest or his forearm. And I think children who are hugged, and children who are held on laps - nice yummy laps - will always associate reading with the bodies of their parents, the smells of their parents. And that will always keep you a reader. Because that perfume, that sensuous connection is lifelong.
We're only animals. And you watch puppies needing to be licked to survive. Well, we need to be licked to survive. And reading becomes a licking, if you will. When you not only hear a treasured story, but also are pressed against the most important person in the world, a connection is made that cannot be severed. For instance, I'm reading straight through Shakespeare now, and when I get alarmed and frightened by him, and feel cowed and then go on, there is some tissue connection to my father as a reader that keeps me going.
-- Maurice Sendak quoted in Hearst's Homearts
~~~
When the tweedle beetles battle with their paddles in a bottle full of water on a noodle-eating poodle, it's a tweedle beetle noodle poodle water bottle paddle battle.
-- Dr. Seuss Fox in Sox
~~~
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Hence also it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for everyone but for him who knows; so, too, anyone can get angry - that is easy - or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.
-- Aristotle
~~~
She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her - she was only an Object of Contempt.
-- Jane Austen, Letter the 13th
~~~
We hear about the birth of a child and ask questions like, "What did she have? How much did it weigh?" and "Does it have any hair?" The Athabaskan Indian hear of a birth and ask, "Who came?" From the beginning, there is a respect for the newborn as a full person.
-- Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
~~~
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 bit 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 to have succeeded.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
~~~
Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key.
-- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
~~~
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
-- D.H. Lawrence
~~~
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.
-- Norman Lear
~~~
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Nietzche
~~~
So now I know the things I know
And do the things I do
And if you do not like me so
To hell, my love, with you.
-- Dorothy Parker
~~~
Pythagoras was told, Had you married, a child would have been born to you that would have made you happy.
The philosopher retorted, It is out of my love for children that I have given up seeking to have children.
~~~
As long as I have you there is just one other thing I'll always need - tremendous self control.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
It's not easy taking my problems one at a time when they refuse to get in line.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
Sometimes I need what only you can provide - your absence.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
Philosophy is a study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently.
-- Anon.
~~~
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
-- Jonathan Swift
~~~
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
-- Austin Phelps
~~~
No, no, never send interim reports, said Miles. Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must then either obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem.
-- Miles on his command philosophy (Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms
~~~
Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
-- John Milton
~~~
For who would lose,
Though full of pain this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night?
-- John Milton
~~~
...Do I understand correctly you've had some sort of female trouble?
No, most of my trouble have been with males. Cordelia bit her tongue.
-- Cordelia is misunderstood by her doctor (Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar)
~~~
I'll carry the wench off, he muttered, experimentally dropping his voice half an octave, and lock her in my dungeon. His voice returned to its normal pitch with a regretful sigh. Except I haven't got a dungeon. It would have to be the closet. Grandfather's right, we are a reduced generation.
-- Miles ponders the difficulties of villainy. (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice)
~~~
Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it.
-- Miles worries about Lilly Jr. (Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance)
~~~
Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
-- John Milton
~~~
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change,--all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glist'ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful ev'ning mild; then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glist'ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful ev'ning mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.
-- John Milton
~~~
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
-- Cordelia talking Kou into talking to Drou (Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar)
~~~
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.
-- Richard Lovelace
~~~
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
-- Lord Salisbury
~~~
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
~~~
Would you who judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure, take this rule; whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short; whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that is sin to you; however innocent it may be in itself.
-- Robert Southey
~~~
A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.
~~~
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
~~~
Girls are always running through my mind. They don't dare walk.
-- Andy Gibb
~~~
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
-- Albert Schweitzer
~~~
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
-- Herbert Henry Asquith:
~~~
What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
~~~
Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
-- Robert Orben
~~~
Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
-- George Wallace
~~~
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
-- Frank Zappa
~~~
Reality is something you rise above.
-- Liza Minnelli
~~~
Emilio, I am getting rusty and old, I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by Oppenheimer's pupils any more. I went to their seminar and was depressed by my inability to understand them. Only the last sentence cheered me up. It was: And this is Fermi's theory of beta decay. - Enrico Fermi
~~~
Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know.
-- Rita Mae Brown
~~~
Life always sucks. It's just that sometimes that feels very good.
-- Kevin Ryan
~~~
I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am; but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to 'em.
-- Will Rogers
~~~
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
-- Roland
~~~
Do you know what a pessimist is? A person who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself and hates them for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
-- J. D. Watson, The Double Helix
~~~
Much of what has been called religion has an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rule and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.
-- Dune, Frank Herbert
~~~
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
~~~
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
~~~
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
-- Fran Lebowitz
~~~
Sergeant Colon had had a broad education.  He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.
-- Terry Pratchett, Jingo
~~~
I had ambition, by which sin
The angels fell;
I climbed, and step by step, oh Lord,
Ascended into Hell
-- W. H. Davies, Ambition
~~~
By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on.  Since its completion, it cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing.  There are no plans to replace it, since it was never needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.
-- Ken Iverson
~~~
Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.
-- Unknown author, Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes: Technological Literacy for the 1990's, describing the difference between computer hardware and software
~~~
Never be possessive. If a female friend lets on that she is going out with another man, be kind and understanding. If she says she would like to go out with the Dallas Cowboys, including the coaching staff, the same rule applies. Tell her: "Kath, you just go right ahead and do what you feel is right." Unless you actually care for her, in which case you must see to it that she has no male contact whatsoever.
-- Bruce Jay Friedman
~~~
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 on earth. So what the hell, leap.
-- Cynthia Heimel, Lower Manhattan Survival Tactics in Village Voice
~~~
I will try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a prospective commencement speaker. Think of yourself as the body at an Irish wake he said.  They need you in order to have the party, but no one expects you to say very much.
-- Anthony Lake, national security advisor, at University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, Graduation 1995
~~~
For best results: wash in cold water separately, hang dry and iron with warm iron.
For not so good results: drag behind car through puddles, blow-dry on roofrack.
-- Laundry instructions on a shirt made by HEET (Korea
~~~
Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.
-- Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
~~~
Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, Certainly, I can! Then get busy and find out how to do it.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
~~~
When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home.
-- Betty Bender
~~~
Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
-- Engineer's Motto
~~~
You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
-- Edward Flaherty
~~~
When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
-- E. W. Howe
~~~
The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought I didn't exist.
-- Aaron Machado
~~~
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
The world does not encourage a perfectly rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
In the cafeteria just after lunch, (well, not *just* after, more like *during* lunch, about 12:28; say 12:30, give or take a few minutes), I leaned back in my chair (it was one of those aluminum chairs, good strength-to-weight, like titanium but not quite; but then of course titanium would be a bit of an overkill). Anyway, I heard one of the girls talking about how boring she thought engineers could be.
-- Alan Denney
~~~
Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
-- Dave Barry, Why Humor is Funny
~~~
Every year, back come Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.
-- Dorothy Parker
~~~
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
~~~
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished:
If you're alive, it isn't.
-- Richard Bach Illusions
~~~
Lois: If you wanna kill Superman, I don't know why you're going to Smallville or 1966.
Tempus: She doesn't know yet. Oh, this is good. This is really good. Um, Lois, did you know that, in the future, you're revered at the same level as Superman? Why there are books about you, statues, an interactive game. You're even a breakfast cereal.
Lois: Really?
Tempus: Yes. But, as much as everybody loves you, there is one question that keeps coming up: "How dumb was she?" Here, I'll show you what I mean. Look (puts glasses on), I'm Clark Kent. (Takes glasses off) No, I'm Superman. (Puts glasses on) Mild-mannered reporter. (Takes glasses off) Superhero. Hello! Duh! Clark Kent is Superman. Ha, ha, ha. Well, that was worth the whole trip. To actually meet the most galactically stupid woman who ever lived.
-- Lois & Clark, Tempus Fugitive
~~~
Threats don't work with the person who's got nothing to lose.
-- Maduro Ash
~~~
How to Raise your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children
-- Book title by Lewis B. Frumkes (1983)
~~~
Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250
-- Harper's Index, October 1989
~~~
How can you say you're misunderstood? You're an idiot-there's not a whole lot that needs understanding there.
-- Isabel
~~~
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
~~~
...not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it.
-- James Baldwin
~~~
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- The Buddha
~~~
Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl accidentally kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill the woman's sister for personal gain.
-- TV listing for The Wizard of Oz, Submitted by J. Ward O'Brien
~~~
...in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future....The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
-- Christopher J. McCandless
~~~
How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
-- Marcus Aurelius
~~~
So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
~~~
Broken Toy
'I hurt.
'So What?' said the mother.
'I grieve.'
'Your point?' said the dad.
I tell them all about my pain,
And how I feel quite sad.
But no one really listens,
No one really sees,
No one was really quite prepared,
Cause it was only me.
'Oh my heart, my heart!'
Cries the mother.
'Oh damn, God Damn!'
Cries the dad.
As they see my broken body.
They thought depression was a fad.
-- Beth Coulter
~~~
One thing I've learned from college (and I probably didn't need to get the parents to shell out all the exorbitant amounts of tuition to get this particular nugget of wisdom) is that verbal appreciation can only go so far. At some point, you start liking a poem or a painting for reasons that you yourself just don't understand. You're just not supposed to be able to articulate exactly WHY you like certain things in art or literature or whatever. It just makes you feel a certain way, and if you try to put that feeling into what few and feeble words we have at our disposal, you sort of cheapen the whole thing.
-- Scott "Scotch" Herman
~~~
Happiness is like a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized.
-- GK Chesterton
~~~
...love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day.
-- Thomas Merton
~~~
It's not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.
-- Hermann Hess
~~~
All-consuming, my thoughts of you, creeping up on me in the dark of late-night like a cancer. I change position, brush them away in hopes that sleep will replace them, and they shrink back into unconsciousness for the moment, but slowly, slowly, they come creeping back out, nosing into the half-waking, half-dream state before true sleep, nestling themselves around me, curling into the blanket at my side like cats, stubborn, sending out claws if I try to remove them. We are at an impasse.
-- Kayte Siegle
~~~
There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives.
~~~
Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
I just broke up with someone and the last thing she said to me was, 'You'll never find anyone like me again.' I'm thinking, 'I should hope not! If I don't want you, why would I want someone like you?'
-- Larry Miller
~~~
...in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
~~~
I will not wish thee riches nor the glow
of greatness, but that wherever thou go,
some weary heart shall gladden at thy smile,
or shadowed life know sunshine for awhile.
And so thy path shall be a track of light,
like angels' footsteps passing through the night.
-- words on a church wall in Upwaltham, England
~~~
You can make more friends in two months by helping other people than you can in two years trying to get others to help you.
~~~
there's nothing to write
in this forest of safety
the leaves filter out danger
before it reaches the ground
you're not here to rip me open
there's no one to shred my heart
i'm so used to watching it bleed
that without seeing the blood drip
i'm not sure that it is there
i'm sheltered by logic and math
you, my chaos, have disappeared
into the limits of infinity
my heart is a constant
and it derives into nothing
you were my time-dependence
you were my sharp-clawed jaguar
you were my trial, my heartbreak
you were my inspiration
you were what made me feel
i'm left writing after your ghost
my pen chasing desperately
the memory of the only thing
that dissolved my outer shell
and released me to the elements
i remember how it felt to be broken open
i remember how it felt to be salty and raw
i remember the elation of our lips meeting
i remember watching the blood come to surface
i am shelled safe and distant
i feel clean and smooth
i stay at happy equilibrium
i watch the scars fade
i miss you
i miss feeling
i miss needing to write
i miss
-- Jennifer Dawn Crispin
~~~
I've never had a way with women,/ but the hills of Iowa make me wish that I could/ And I've never found a way to say 'I love you',/ but if the chance came by, oh, I, I would/ But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother,/ we don't like to make our passions other people's concern/ And we walk in the world of safe people,/ and at night we walk into our houses and burn./ ...How I long to fall just a little bit,/ to dance out of the lines and stray from the light/ But I fear that to fall in love with you/ is to fall from a great and gruesome height/ So I asked a friend about it, on a bad day,/ her husband had just left her, she sat down on the chair he'd left behind/ She said, 'What is love? Where did it get me?/ Whoever thought of love is no friend of mine.'/ ...Once I had everything, I gave it up/ for the shoulder of your driveway and the words I've never felt/ And so for you, I came this far across the tracks,/ ten miles above the limit and with no seatbelt (and I'd do it again)/ For tonight I went running through the screen doors of discretion,/ for I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see:/ You were a-wandering out on the hills of Iowa/ and you were not thinking of me.
-- Dar Williams
~~~
I've been getting down about all the run-around/ About all the pushing and the standing in line/ But like my friends say, you gotta do it anyway/ And it just gets harder when you ask why/ And I'm tired from all the weight/ Tired of being strong/ So won't you come and stay/ Let me lay down in your arms/ Down in your arms/ I've been getting up early, I've been getting my coffee/ I've been getting in the car and driving all over town/ Talking to myself while I'm taking off my seatbelt/ Some people don't know how to slow down/ ...I've got a troubled, a troubled mind/ And you've got a heart, a heart so kind/ So kind/ So pack an overnight bag, don't worry about what you have/ 'Cause if you need something, you can just use mine/ And you don't have to promise more than you want to/ But if you want to see me, this would be a good time
-- Catie Curtis
~~~
I've never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they're home they like to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat.
-- Jay Leno
~~~
...making the present audible and making the implicit explicit is necessary to engage and renew a whole train of commitments, responsibilities, and possibilities. 'I love you' does not create what is not present. Nor does it seal what is present. But it must be spoken and respoken. It is necessary speech because people need to see in pictures or hear in words even what they already know as deeply as they know anything, especially what they know as deeply as they know anything. Words are actions.
-- Michael Schudson
~~~
But to see both sides of a problem is the surest way to prevent its solution because there are always more than two sides.
-- Rachel T. Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Marecek
~~~
feels like reckless driving when we're talking
it's fun while it lasts and it's faster than walking
-- Ani DiFranco
~~~
Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.
~~~
When you have found your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
-- C.S Lewis
~~~
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I need to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day...I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes!' It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children. It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
-- Oriah Mountain Dreamer
~~~
...lately I have gotten a new idealistic way of thinking about things - in the grander/greater scheme of things, lots of things just really don't matter. Like twenty years from now, I will not be thinking about how not getting the Dana grant ruined my life. Who I live with and where we live for one semester next year will not make a difference when I am older. Weighing five extra pounds doesn't matter when I would much rather eat the things I like and want to eat. You know?
-- Nozomi Maeyama
~~~
every once in a while when i'm sunk into what i imagine must be the pits of misery, it occurs to me that this 'pit' gets visited pretty often by everybody, and i usually have to smile...at our egoism, at our irrepressible ability to assume we suffer more than others.
-- LiQing
~~~
Hey, does anybody realize how many bodyguards the Pope has? If he's scared to go to heaven, then Penn students better have gone to Sunday mass.
-- Streetbeat
~~~
You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.
-- Barbara De Angelis
~~~
I seek to make you happy, if only for the time with me and the gentleness of friendship.
-- Lynn Ray
~~~
You've got to dance like nobody's watching and love like it's never going to hurt.
~~~
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all the time.
-- Calvin and Hobbes
~~~
Loving someone comes easy, the challenge is learning how to love.
-- Michelle
~~~
I've learned that no matter how good a friend someone is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.
~~~
If everything on earth was rational, nothing would ever happen.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky
~~~
One of the major reasons so many of us remain hurried, frightened, and competitive, and continue to live life as if it were one giant emergency, is our fear that if we were to become more peaceful and loving, we would suddenly stop achieving our goals. We would become lazy and apathetic.
-- Richard Carlson
~~~
I am always feeling like perpetually under-read. It's really depressing for me to go into a bookstore or a library and just look out there and see all those shelves filled with books. It's a weird feeling seeing all those books and knowing that there's absolutely no way I'll ever read them all. There might be some book over there in the 'L' section on the second-to-bottom shelf by some author I've never heard of that I might really like, that might become my favorite book. Or maybe that book sucks and the favorite book is the one right next to it. Or on the next shelf. Or across the store. Or in some other store with a better selection. I'll never know. I mean, it's pretty obvious that no one can ever read every book ever written and thus definitively know that their favorite book is their favorite book, that there's nothing else out there that might outdistance it. That's just common sense. Which doesn't really make the idea any less depressing.
-- Scott "Scotch" Herman
~~~
If I was inconsistent, at least it wasn't all the time.
~~~
For some, true love is blind, for others, blind love is true...
~~~
The more evolved an animal is, the more time it spends playing.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
~~~
The great essentials of life are something to do, something to love, something to hope for.
-- Thomas Chalmers
~~~
If I had a rose for every time I thought of you, I'd be picking roses for a lifetime.
-- Swedish quote
~~~
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-- Edith Wharton
~~~
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~
Do you actually know anyone who got a 'swelled head' from too much praise? Usually it was far too little, and they retreated to their ego for escape and became grandiose as a type of defense.
-- Sark
~~~
We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting. Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that everything in every moment is 'essential' and that nothing at all is 'important.'
-- Helen M. Luke
~~~
My boyfriend used to ask his mother, 'How can I find the right woman for me?' and she would answer, 'Don't worry about finding the right woman - concentrate on becoming the right man.'
-- Sark
~~~
When you're alone, you can create your own mythology and nobody challenges you. In a relationship, your own bullshit gets reflected back much quicker.
~~~
All of the animals, excepting man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
-- Samuel Butler
~~~
People greatly underestimate the seriousness of the Y2K bug. After all, to fix the problem, a computer programmer needs to find a date... and we all know the likelihood of that happening!
-- Dave Lewis
~~~
The Daffodil
I wish I was a daffodil
all dainty in its bloom,
and you would come and pick me,
and take me to your room.
You would turn the lights out,
and tuck me in your cot,
still thinking I'm a daffodil,
you'll soon find out I'm not.
:-)
-- Spoken by Illiad (8/3/99)
~~~
How do you document real life when real life's getting more like fiction each day?
-- Jonathan Larson
~~~
The opposite of war isn't peace....it's creation.
-- Jonathan Larson
~~~
All changes have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die one life before we can enter unto another.
-- Anatole France
~~~
It has gotten to the point where if I had to choose between falling in love and reading a book about falling in love... I'd choose the book.
-- Nikos Kazananski
~~~
Things must happen when it is time for them to happen, a quest may not simply be abandoned. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.
But what if there isn't a happy ending at all?
There are no happy endings because nothing ever ends.
-- Smendrick and Molly in The Last Unicorn
~~~
You can talk a great philosophy,
but if you can't be kind to people 
everyday then it doesn't mean
that much to me.
-- Ani DiFranco
~~~
Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form...
-- E. M. Forster
~~~
You don't raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they'll turn out to be heroes, even if it's just in your own eyes.
-- Walter M. Schirra, Sr.
~~~
Sometimes, when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
-- A. A. Milne
~~~
A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are.
~~~
One of the basic things which I was a long time in realizing, and which I am still learning, is that when an activity feels as though it is valuable or worth doing, it is worth doing. Put another way, I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect. All of my professional life I have been going in directions which others thought were foolish, and about which I have had many doubts myself. But I have never regretted moving in directions which 'felt right,' even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time...Experience is, for me, the highest authority...Neither the Bible nor the prophets - neither Freud nor research--neither the revelations of God nor man - can take precedence over my own experience.
-- Carl Rogers
~~~
empathetic understanding...is exceedingly rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.
-- Carl Rogers
~~~
don't criticize what you can't understand.
-- Bob Dylan
~~~
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
-- Audre Lorde
~~~
I like loving. I like mostly all the ways one can have of having loving feelings in them. Slowly it has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.
-- Gertrude Stein
~~~
And in the end, none of these details matter--not the whodunit, the what they did, or why. Because the details of a story, whatever that story's complexion, always add up to the same thing. All through time and every time, all a person aches for is to be allowed. 'You mean love, of course.' 'That too.'
-- Jan Carr
~~~
One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are, when you don't come home at
night.
-- Margaret Mead
~~~
We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
-- Anne Frank
~~~
Music is such a good way to resist. It keeps you strong, it has dignity.
-- Amy Ray
~~~
It is the wounded heart that makes us human in the end.
-- Melanie Rae Thon
~~~
I was whining about a terrible day and my dad said: 'Any idiot can enjoy a good day. It's people who figure out how to enjoy a bad day who have something going for them.' I think of that often.
-- Monica Miller
~~~
Here's wishing you the bluest sky/ And hoping something better comes tomorrow/ Hoping all the verses rhyme,/ And the very best of choruses to/ Follow all the doubt and sadness/ I know that better things are on the way./ Here's hoping all the days ahead/ Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you/ Be an optimist instead,/ And somehow happiness will find you./ Forget what happened yesterday,/ I know that better things are on their way./ It's really good to see you rocking out/ And having fun,/Living like you just begun./ Accept your life and what it brings./ I hope tomorrow you find better things./ I know tomorrow you'll find better things./...I know you've got a lot of good things happening up ahead./ The past is gone, it's all been said./ So here's to what the future brings,/ I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
-- Ray Davies
~~~
Losing myself in a relationship is one thing, but losing myself in a computer...that's justified!
-- Joyce
~~~
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
-- Richard Bach
~~~
so this is what it comes down to/ in our falling in/ and out/ we've come to miscommunication/ if any at all/ well, i guess i'll start/ with something easy/ i won't jump right into/ i love you/ i won't bring up the hard stuff/ like how you hurt me/ i promise not to touch you/ in a way that will/ touch you/ i think i'll just start with/ how are you?/ we haven't talked in so long/ and the last time we did/ it was always/ how am i? oh, fine,/ except that my heart is bleeding/ with unrequited love...but/ remember, we're not talking about that/ so i'm/ trying to come up with something i'm/ allowed to say/ and i can't/ so this is what it comes down to/miscommunication/ if any at all
-- Heidi Anne Harris
~~~
that night/ you had young eyes/ and the words slipped from your lips/ like you meant them/ but you wore your lies/ like a disguise/ and now I wish I'd seen through to you/ let me clue you in/ I wasn't one hundred percent in the dark/ Yeah we both played our part/ and baby you'll find that I'm not so blind,/ I just chose not to see/ and I don't think you intended to misuse me/ I just think you were confused/ 'cause I would bend over backwards/for you/ yeah I would mend this if I could/ this tear in the fabric that hold us together/ and no one could make me reveal the secrets that I concealed/ we could hide forever behind/ the pretty words that take up space/ oh- I could never speak my mind/ yeah I could be weak and docile,/ but who would I be then/ could you respect me/ if I didn't defend/ myself to you
-- Kendra
~~~
[Penn Jillette] said, 'If a truck is barreling toward you, no amount of positiveness will stop it from hitting you.' I needed to hear that I didn't have to be enthusiastic all the time. Some days you just need to be in a bad mood.
-- Julia Sweeney
~~~
Manners - Telling a lie is called wrong./ Telling the truth is called right./ Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.
-- Judith Viorst
~~~
fiction is wonderful because you can explore the consequences of wishes - good and bad ones - without quite letting on. aaah the freedom of disguise! but dare i let you all see? dare i let myself see? in a way it's almost more frightening to turn to fiction, you delve deeper, sometimes it feels too deep and i think often i don't go in because i'm afraid to come out. who will i be? and when i take the trek alone will you be there on the other side? will i want to stay inside the fiction?
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
too much freedom, i'm learning, can be just as frustrating as not enough. and as with everything in life, i'm still trying to find the balance.
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
Are you awake? Yes, I am awake. Can you get up? I can't get up. Why can't you? Because I don't want to. Why don't you want to? 'Cause everything comes down real hard. Why does everything come down? Because I let it. You let it? I let it. You let it? I let it. Can you learn this? I can learn this. Let me teach you something. I will be taught. When you get up in the morning, we all want to say this. You will say: I will walk down the street. I will hold my head high. I will say hello to everyone I meet. I will have love in my heart. When I have hate, I will turn my hate into energy. When I have anger, I will turn my anger into energy. When I am negative, I will be negative only for as long as I need to be, until I understand it and then I will be positive. And I will not be complacent. AND I WILL NOT BE COMPLACENT. AND I WILL NOT BE A RACIST. AND I WILL NOT BE A SEXIST. AND I WILL NOT BE A HOMOPHOBIC ASSHOLE. AND I WILL LOVE. AND I WILL LOVE. AND I WILL BE HAPPY THAT I AM ALIVE.
-- Amy Ray
~~~
If I had My Life to Live Over - I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I'm one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
-- Nadine Stair
~~~
Never frown...even when you're sad 'cause you never know when someone's falling in love with your smile.
~~~
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing every day that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.
-- Mary Schmich
~~~
For one human being to love another...that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the final and ultimate proof, the task for which all others are but preparation.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
~~~
Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
-- Ella Fitzgerald
~~~
I was invited to the state Young Writer's Conference....There were 2700 young faces out there, and off to the side of the stage was the suit and tie crowd and the speaker after me was from the Chamber of Commerce. And something inside me snapped. I got up on the stage and said something to the effect of: 'You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Do you know what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource. They're gonna strip mine your soul, they're gonna clear cut your best ideas for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist 'cuz the profit system follows the path of least resistance and the path of least resistance is what makes a river crooked.' Well there was a great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Mine. I was borne to the door screaming epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: 'Make a break for it kids!'
-- Utah Phillips
~~~
home is above all a state of mind....it's just one often associated with a certain place or certain people or traditions or objects or weather patterns...
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish He didn't trust me so much.
-- Mother Teresa
~~~
Just remember all...that words are powerful, so very powerful, that it can change attitudes (for the better or for the worse), with or without provocation. They can be triggers, reminders, movers, and emotives....Be kind with your words and listen to positive messages in things that we have in common....Communication in the ways that make a positive impact and even possibly profitable (new friendships, good feelings, etc) for all parties, is THE key.
-- Seona
~~~
The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.
-- Harry Shearer
~~~
happiness is more of an attitude you can have whatever you're doing, and figuring out what you love and being able to do what you love even some of the time makes it easier to have that attitude. but when you try to do what you think you love all the time you sometimes discover that you don't love it all that much, or you love it better in smaller doses you can savor.
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
English teachers are tough to date. When we first started dating, I lived in New York and she lived in Ohio, and I would write her all these letters. She'd send them back corrected!
-- Suzanne Westenhoefer
~~~
Life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand. We find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.
-- Florida Scott-Maxwell
~~~
color me grey/ i'm a little bit of everything today/ and i'm not sure just where i'm going/ color me grey/ wishing i was something more of distinction
-- Amy Ray
~~~
So afraid to love. More afraid to lose./ Clinging to a path that doesn't let me choose./ It's funny how we feel so much but cannot say a word./ We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard.
-- Sarah McLachlan
~~~
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
-- John Irving
~~~
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
-- Maya Angelou
~~~
deep down, beneath all our insecurities, beneath all our hopes for and beliefs in equality, each of us believes we're better than anyone else. because it's our beliefs that are right, our doubts that are the allowable ones, our fears which are legitimate.
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
There are...people we wonder about but don't make...attempts to contact. Perhaps we're afraid of empty conversation with someone we're not sure if we ever connected to in the first place, or perhaps we're curious about someone whose life we watched for a while from afar. Sometimes it's just been too long, and sometimes we can't even articulate the need to know whatever happened to so-and-so. Where are they? Did they make it? Are they happy? Are they passionate about something in their lives? Are they anything like the people we once knew?
-- Audrey Beth Stein
~~~
People have found many ways to grapple with and resolve conflicting goals short of killing everybody in sight. Surviving and thriving in the real world means constantly making tough decisions, and, yes, making mistakes. The only ways not to make mistakes are Eurisko's - do nothing - HAL/Shakespeare/Eastwood's - make sure there are no living souls left anywhere around you - and God's - be omniscient. HAL, if he were really smart, could have found another solution, just as we do every day.
-- Douglas B. Lenat From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL
~~~
It's not that he has one screw loose ... he doesn't have any one screw fully tightened.
-- Rimmer, Red Dwarf
~~~
Kryten: It's nearly 1am, ma'am, what are you doing up?
Kochanski: Looking for someone to kill - care to volunteer?
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
KOCHANSKI: Well, forget it, Lister! Not if you were the last man alive...
LISTER: I *am* the last man alive.
KOCHANSKI: I rest my case..
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
Lister: Love is what separates us from the animals.
Rimmer: No, Lister - what separates us from animals is that we don't use our tongues to clean our genitals.
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
'Mr. Arnold' isn't even his name. His name's 'Rimmer'; or 'Smeghead'; or 'Dinosaur Breath'; or 'Molecule Mind'. And if you want to be really mega-polite to him, Kryten - we're talking mega-mega-polite - in those rare and exceptional circumstances, you can call him Arsehole.
-- Lister, Red Dwarf
~~~
An IQ of 6000 isn't that much. It's just the same as 12000 P.E. instructors.
-- Holly, Red Dwarf
~~~
Cat:  Don't fish swim south for the winter?
Kryten: That's birds sir.
Cat:  Birds swim south for the winter?! How do they breathe?
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
You're as much use as a condom machine at the Vatican.
-- Rimmer to Holly, Red Dwarf
~~~
That was an important speech sir, and it needed to be made, but might I suggest that from this moment on the rest of this discourse is conducted by those with brains larger than a grape?
-- Kryten
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
Rimmer: You? How did you get into art college?
Lister: The same way you always get into art college. The same old usual boring normal way everyone gets into art college. I failed my exams and applied...they snapped me up!
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
Cat: Today has been a good day, I've ate five times, slept six times, and made a lot of things mine. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can't have sex with something.
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
Holly: Any luck?
Rimmer: Useless. Didn't listen. Didn't even recognize me. Just thought I was some neurotic deranged crazy madman.
Holly: You sure he didn't recognize you?!
-- Red Dwarf
~~~
Rimmer, they're a bunch of arrogant, pompous, emotionally weird, stuck up megalomaniacs...do you really think you'll fit in with them? What am I saying?  Bon Voyage.
-- Lister, Red Dwarf
~~~
The only thing that keeps me sane is my collection of singing potatoes.
-- Holly, Red Dwarf
~~~
But, I just want to say, over the years, I have come to regard you as...people I met.
-- Rimmer, making his goodbyes to the crew of Red Dwarf
~~~
Father forgive me for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last backup.
-- RL
~~~
What's the biggest difference between police in the big city and police in a small town?
'Can you describe who robbed you?'
'Yeah, it was Dwayne.'
-- Brent Butt
~~~
You had to have a keen sense of humor to do sex and stay sane.
-- Miles musing on his own and Galen's love lives,Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
~~~
You should see what I do to kittens!
-- Miles's paranoid musings (Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms)
~~~
To live is like to love-all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it. 
-- Samuel Butler, Life and love.
~~~
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. 
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961, 34.
~~~
It's like trying to fight gravity on a planet that insists
That love is like falling and falling is like this.
-- Ani DiFranco
~~~
It's not who you love. It's how.
-- Kevin Smith
~~~
...maybe
love is like water
and when you find out
you need it, who cares
where it comes from,
or maybe/ everyone is a well
just waiting for me
to send my ladle down.
-- Ronda Slater
~~~
Mothers tell your children
Be quick you must be strong
Life is full of wonder
Love is never wrong...
-- Melissa Etheridge
~~~
Labels can bite me./ Love cannot be slapped into/ A category.
-- Becky Schwartz
~~~
Amy [Ray] introduced [Land of Canaan], commenting on how you sometimes go to sleep, scared to death wondering if the people you love will be all right and hoping you'll still feel the same about them. And that how when you wake up in the morning, what a great relief it is to still be in love.
--AnnaLissa (It feels kinda like we were, you know, asleep last night, and, and, we were wondering whether the person we were asleep with is gonna be okay in the morning. And you woke up, and it's like, good, hey, you're still in love.
--Amy Ray)
~~~
Have you ever been in love, Binkley? Have you ever felt the magic moment? Have you ever been kissed by someone and felt as if your two bodies had suddenly fused into one glorious emotional entity...igniting fireworks of unbridled sensuality? Have you, Binkley?
-- Berke Breathed
~~~
There is no future/ There is no past/ I live this moment/ As my last/ There's only us/ There's only this/ Forget regret/ Or life is yours to miss/ No other road/ No other way/ No day but today...There's only now/ There's only here/ Give in to love/ Or live in fear/ No other path/ No other way/ No day but today.
-- Jonathon Larson
~~~
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
-- John Irving
~~~
I still/ don't understand/ the point of taking drugs/ to enhance your senses and/ broaden your horizons./ Wouldn't/ it make a lot more sense/ to just take a poetry class?
-- Ariel Vitello
~~~
I'm not being radical when I kiss you. I don't love you to make a point. It's the hollow of my heart, that cries when I miss you, and keeps me alive when we're apart.
-- Catie Curtis
~~~
Heroes...I don't know any, so stop trying to be one, and just be somebody. Someone who can be a fool. Someone who can love me; not be silent and cool.
-- Catie Curtis
~~~
we are Adam in the garden, giving language to what we know to be true. all i know is that Love is Love - however it shows up in truth. when i dare to choose it, this is love and makes Life worth Living.
-- Sonia Rutstein
~~~
Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desires to be complete.
-- Aristophanes
~~~
We die as often as we lose a friend.
-- Pubilus Syrus
~~~
I'd even go so far as to say that the most useful stuff you learn at college is neither in the classroom nor in extracurrics nor in socializing: the useful stuff is in the 'meta' areas, in the mind-bludgeoning stress tactics you use to deal with things all at the same time. College teaches you how to totally bullshit on papers, because (Scotch willing) when you get a job, you have to bullshit there too. College teaches you how to deal with the neuralgiac stress of unfairly-distributed multiple assignments all at once so you're prepared for later in life with the whole job/bills/kids/marriage juggling act. And college teaches you the ugly reality of prioritizing things in your life: putting academics ahead of your love life, putting money ahead of your social life, putting your projected 'future' (as manifested in a final paper) ahead of getting a good night's sleep. That's really what I'm learning here, and man, I am most assuredly getting my $20K-per-annum-tuition's worth, even though my family can't afford it.
-- Scott "Scotch" Herman
~~~
You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.
-- Audre Lorde
~~~
All love is a loss of control. It's a fearless place where beauty rests. It's both calm and chaotic. It's nothing to write a poem about.
-- Nicole Burdette
~~~
Life is a struggle but there's hope and beauty in the world. Even though a lot of our songs are dark, there's often-times the strain of 'But we're so powerful as individuals and we're loved and we're good and the things we struggle with are the things that teach us the most and help us to grow.' In the end, that's what matters.
-- Emily Saliers
~~~
You don't MAKE yourself feel love, or passively 'fall' in love, but you let love ENTER you.
~~~
If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
-- Charles Morley
~~~
Tell me whom you love, and I will tell you who you are.
--Houssaye
~~~
Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them.
-- author unknown
~~~
Two persons who love each other are in a place more holy than the interior of a church.
-- William Lyon Phelps
~~~
Love lives on hope, and dies when hope is dead;
It is a flame which sinks for lack of fuel.
-- Pierre Corneille
~~~
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
-- Bette Davis
~~~
Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.
~~~
Falling in love is when you give a piece of your heart to someone else, and they give you a piece of theirs. Falling out of love is when the pieces don't fit.
~~~
Have you seen my heart? It's very delicate. I worry a little that something might happen to it...maybe I dropped it when I dropped all my defenses and they went bouncing away like a million ping-pong balls...Pardon me, have you seen my heart? I was going to give it to you... but I think perhaps you have stolen it away.
~~~
romance is making love to his soul without ever touching his body.
~~~
If i reach for your hand will you hold it? If i hold out my arms will you hug me? If i go for your lips will you kiss me? If i capture your heart, will you love me?
~~~
Sometimes it's better to be alone, no one can hurt you that way.
~~~
Love makes the wildest spirit tame, and the tamest spirit wild.
~~~
May the love hidden deep inside your heart find the love waiting in your dreams. May the laughter that you find in your tomorrows wipe away the pain you find in your yesterdays.
~~~
We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
~~~
Love is like some cosmic practical joke that someone up there with absolutely no sense of humor thinks is funny.
~~~
True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall--but you are there to catch them.
~~~
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~~~
There were many ways of breaking a heart. stories were full of hearts being broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream-whatever that dream may be.
~~~
If my thoughts of you were turned to stars, God would have to make another universe.
~~~
To live without love, is to live without a heart, wandering in the dark.
~~~
are you afraid no one loves you? because my mom says that people really do love each other. They just get confused sometimes and forget how to let each other know.
~~~
I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the lives of those people.
~~~
I'd like to run away from you, but if you never found me, I would die.
~~~
Hopeless romantics are only hopeless in the eyes of those who don't believe in romance.
~~~
Everybody loves somebody, whether they admit to it or not.
~~~
Being with you is like walking on a very clear morning- definitely the sensation of belonging there.
-- E.B. White
~~~
There's only one thing greater than my fear- that is my love.  My love will always conquer my fear- but it can't do it immediately.  It needs the full force of my love to do it and it takes days for that to emerge out of its dark hiding places.
-- John Middleton Murry
~~~
Heavens above!  The reason why I'm so jealous of you is obvious enough! If you weren't so damned attractive physically, do you think my heart would beat almost to suffocation whenever I see you speak to someone?
If you don't realize how attractive you are in that way, let me tell you, other people do, and have told me so....
-- Violet Trefussis
~~~
Oh, what good will writing do?
I want to put my hand out and touch you.
I want to do for you and care for you.
I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.
-- Edith Wharton
~~~
...I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.  So this letter is just really a squeal of pain.  It is incredible how essential to me you have become.  I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things.  Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any more by giving myself away like this - But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that.
-- Vita Sackville-West
~~~
One must learn to love and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it...and the journey is always towards the other soul...
-- D.H. Lawrence
~~~
There is but one genuine love-potion - consideration
-- Menander
~~~
Pains of love be sweeter far than all other pleasures are
-- John Dryden
~~~
To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another
-- Gottfried Wilhem Von Leibniz
~~~
I'm a godmother, that's a great thing to be, a godmother. She calls me god for short, that's cute, I taught her that.
-- Ellen DeGeneres
~~~
They've found the gene for shyness. They would've found it earlier, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes.
-- Johnathon Katz
~~~
I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.
-- Mitch Hedberg
~~~
I used to do drugs. I still do drugs. But I used to, too.
-- Mitch Hedberg
~~~
The crimes we are about to depict have been specially committed for this program.
~~~
Death:  To stop sinning suddenly.
~~~
The world is coming to an end!  Repent and return those library books!
~~~
He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.
~~~
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer
~~~
Now let's all repeat the non-conformist oath.
~~~
Weird theory #47:  Islamic women can do kinky things with their ankles.
That's why the Koran says they aren't supposed to reveal them in public.
~~~
There is no limit to the amount of good that people can accomplish, if they don't care who gets the credit.
~~~
When I was young, all I wanted was to be ruler of the universe.  Now that isn't enough.
-- Alex P. Keaton
~~~
When you asked me to live in sin with you, I didn't know you meant sloth.
~~~
I support the Marcell Marceau Foundation, because a mime is a terrible thing to waste.
~~~
Nancy Reagan meets Ms. Manners:  Just say No, thank you.
~~~
When aiming for the common denominator,be prepared for the occasional division by zero.
~~~
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
-- Daniel Dennett
~~~
...an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.
-- Roger M. Knutson, in Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways
~~~
Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.
~~~
I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.
-- Clarence Darrow
~~~
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
-- Albert Einstein
~~~
Man has an inexhaustible faculty for lying, especially to himself.
-- George Santayana
~~~
If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits in oneself, life would be unbearable.
-- Georges Courteline
~~~
It is not a way of life that a wise man proposes, but a way around life.
-- Christopher Spranger, The Effort To Fall
~~~
After spending the day in solitude, you desire to go out in the evening with friends, and after going out in the evening with friends, to spend the rest of your days in solitude.
-- Christopher Spranger, The Effort To Fall
~~~
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
~~~
Life is a gamble at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it.
-- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
~~~
All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
~~~
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
-- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
~~~
First get your facts; then you may distort them at your leisure.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
-- E. M. Cioran (tr. Richard Howard)
~~~
The thought of suicide is a great comfort. It's helped me through many a bad night.
-- F. Nietzsche
~~~
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H.L. Mencken
~~~
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.
-- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
~~~
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
-- Doctor Who
~~~
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
-- Erica Jong
~~~
Great affection is often the cause of violent animosity. The quarrels of men often arise from too great a familiarity.
-- Saskya Pandita
~~~
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
-- Tagore, Rabindranath
~~~
'Goodbye,' said the fox. 'And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.'
-- Saint-Exubery, Antoine de in 'The Little Prince'
~~~
Life is one fool thing after another where as love is two fool things after each other.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep burning, unquenchable.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
~~~
If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
~~~
A life without love, without the presence of the beloved, is nothing but a mere magic-lantern show. We draw out slide after slide, swiftly tiring of each, and pushing it back to make haste for the next.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.
-- George Gordon
~~~
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
-- Elbert Green Hubbard
~~~
Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine, Premieres meditations poltiques
~~~
The greatest pleasure of life is love.
-- William Temple
~~~
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
-- Voltaire
~~~
If it is your time love will track you down like a cruise missile. If you say 'No! I don't want it right now,' that's when you'll get it for sure. Love will make a way out of no way. Love is an exploding cigar which we willingly smoke.
-- Lynda Barry, Big Ideas (1983)
~~~
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
-- Cather, Willa
~~~
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
There is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love - the first fluttering of its silken wings.
-- Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
~~~
It seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armour.
-- MARGARET FULLER, Summer on the Lakes
~~~
If thou remember'st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
-- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
~~~
One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.
-- SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
~~~
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
-- Eric Fromm
~~~
The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
-- Helen Hayes
~~~
If you do not feel love for another person, act as if you do, and the emotion will often follow the behavior; you will find yourself feeling, if not love, at least more sympathy and affection.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
If you have love you will do all things well.
-- Merton, Thomas
~~~
Your heart's desires be with you.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.
-- Buscaglia, Leo
~~~
The loving are the daring.
-- Taylor, Bayard (1825-1878)
~~~
My love does not, cannot make her happy. My love can only release in her the capacity to be happy.
-- J. Barnes
~~~
Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, Richard, in which there is no love.
-- Richard Bach, in 'A Bridge Across Forever'
~~~
The more you judge, the less you love.
-- Honore de Balzac
~~~
Love may not make the world go round, but I must admit that it makes the ride worthwhile.
-- Connery, Sean
~~~
Life without love is a shadow of things that might be.
-- Unknown
~~~
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
-- Thornton Wilder
~~~
Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything in the house.
-- Kerr, Jean
~~~
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
-- Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869)
~~~
Opposites can attract, as in magnetism. Or explode, as in matter and antimatter.
-- David, Peter
~~~
Oh with what passion my heart is burning, I fear you will never know.
-- Nineteen Poems
~~~
To love is find pleasure in the happiness of the person loved.
-- Leibnitz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von
~~~
Love is the poetry of the senses.
-- Honor‚ de Balzac
~~~
Never forget that the most powerful force on earth is love.
-- Rockefeller, Nelson
~~~
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
Love is a pure dew which drops from heaven into our heart, when God wills.
-- Houssaye, Arsene
~~~
There's someone out there for everyone - even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find them.
-- Telemacher, Harris K. [played by Steve Martin] in 'L.A. Story'
~~~
Love many things, for therin lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
-- van Gogh, Vincent
~~~
The first duty of love is to listen.
-- Tillich, Paul
~~~
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that one is loved; loved for oneself, or better yet, loved despite oneself.
-- Victor Hugo
~~~
This fundamental truth - that women are not just men who can have babies and men are not just women who spike footballs - gives marriage its vitality, its dynamics, its delights, and its divorce.
-- Cosby, Bill in 'Love and Marriage' 1989
~~~
Who travels for love finds a thousand miles not longer than one.
-- Japanese proverb
~~~
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
They must be very embarrassed, back in ImpSec, to have so thoroughly mislaid their charge. I fear their reputation is exaggerated.
Not quite. I'm ImpSec, and I know where Gregor is. So technically, ImpSec is right on top of the situation.  Miles wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.
-- Cavilo queries the reliability of ImpSec (Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game)
~~~
To love one who loves you,
To admire one who admires you,
In a word, to be the idol of one's idol,
Is exceeding the limit of human joy;
It is stealing fire from heaven.
-- Delphine de Girardin
~~~
Jessica Rabbit: You don't know what it's like being a woman looking the way I do.
Eddie Valiant: You don't know what it's like being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.
-- From the movie: Who Framed Jessica Rabbit!
~~~
No one but you can senses the eternity and depth concealed in your solitude.  This is one of the lonely things about individuality.  You arrive at a sense of the eternal in you only through confronting and outpacing your fears.  The truly lonely element in loneliness is fear.  No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself - you are its custodian and entrance.  No one else can feel your life the way you feel it.  Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground.  When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest.  This is always one of the greatest tensions in an awakened or spiritual life, namely, to find the rhythm of its unique language, perception and belonging.  To remain faithful to your life requires commitment and vision that must be constantly renewed.
-- Nuala Ann quoting John O'Donohue in Andrew Greeley's Irish Mist
~~~
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
-- English Professor, Ohio University
~~~
Anyone who can spell in English can't be very bright. - George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear.
-- Robert Frost
~~~
I must conquer my loneliness alone.
I must be happy with myself
Or I have nothing to offer you.
Two halves have little choice
But to join;
And yes,
They do make a whole.
But two wholes
When they coincide...
That is beauty.
That is love.
-- Peter Mc Williams, "Come Love With Me And Be My Life
~~~
Harry Burns:  There are two kinds of women:  High maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally Albright: Which one am I?
Harry Burns:  You're the worst kind.  You're high maintenance But you think you're low maintenance!
-- From the movie When Harry Met Sally
~~~
Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies.
-- Gene Hill
~~~
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
-- Aldous Huxley
~~~
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
-- Robert Benchley
~~~
Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives.
-- Sue Murphy
~~~
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
-- August Strindberg
~~~
Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
-- Anne Tyler
~~~
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
-- Rita Rudner
~~~
You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.
-- Nora Ephron
~~~
Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
-- Ann Landers
~~~
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
-- Dereke Bruce, Taipei, Taiwan
~~~
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
-- Ben Williams
~~~
When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Cat's motto: No matter what you've done wrong, always try to make it look like the dog did it.
-- Unknown
~~~
Dear God
So far today I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, I haven't lost my temper, I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish or over-indulgent. I'm very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed, and from then on I'm going to need a lot more help.
AMEN
~~~
Love has to spring spontaneously from within
And it is no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force.
Love and coercion can never go together;
But though love cannot be forced on anyone,
It can be awakened in him through love itself.
Love is essentially self communicative;
Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it.
True love is unconquerable and irresistible,
And it goes on gathering power and spreading itself,
Until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches.
-- Meher Baba
~~~
Real love hurts;
Real love makes you totally vulnerable and open;
Real love will take you far beyond yourself;
Therefore real love will devastate you.
~~~
If love does not shatter you,
You do not know love
-- Unknown Author
~~~
The question is asked, Is there anything more beautiful in life than a boy and a girl clasping clean hands and pure hearts in the path of marriage?  Can there be anything more beautiful than young love?
And the answer is given.
Yes, there is a more beautiful thing. It is the spectacle of an old man and an old woman finishing their journey together on that path. Their hands are gnarled, but still clasped; their faces are seamed, but still radiant; their hearts are physically bowed and tired, but still strong with love and devotion for one another.
Yes, there is a more beautiful thing than young love.  Old love.
-- By Anonymous: from A 5th Portion of Chicken Soup for the Soul
~~~
I'll see you in my dreams.
Hold you in my dreams.
Someone took you out of my arms,
Still I feel the thrill of your charms.
~~~
Lips that once were mine.
Tender eyes that shine.
They will light my way tonight,
I'll see you in my dreams.
-- I'll See You in my Dreams by Jimmy Durante
~~~
My love, you know you are my best friend.
You know that I'd do anything for you
And my love, let nothing come between us.
My love for you is strong and true.
-- Sarah McLachlan
~~~
I sought for Love
But Love ran away from me.
I sought my Soul
But my Soul I couldn't see.
Then I sought You,
And I found all three.
-- Unknown Author
~~~
I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.
-- Cordelia, Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
One step at a time, I can walk around the world. Watch me.
-- Aral Vorkosigan, Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
No one knows their limits until they've gone beyond them.
-- Miles Vorkosigan, Brothers In Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
He tried. He tried and failed, but no one else tried at all.
-- Taura, Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
-- Miles, Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
His mother had often said, when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
-- Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
Nothing that lives is without fear. It is a gift against recklessness, a servant against complacency in the face of danger. But like all servants it makes a bad master. Fear is a small fire in the belly to warm a man in the coldness of conflict. Let loose, it becomes an inferno within the halls which no fortress can withstand.
-- the Deacon, Bloodstone
~~~
You know what I like about the young? Their passion for life, and their ability to see beyond the mundane. They don't look at the world and see what can't be done. They try to do it. Often they are arrogant, and their ideas fall from the sky like weary birds. But they try.
-- Browyn, Dark Moon
~~~
Only two places remain to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a non-entity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.
-- Peekay, The Power of One
~~~
Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, out feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view. Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.
-- Kinsey Millhone, I is for Innocent
~~~
With comfortable time to make any kind of decision we tend to cloud the issue with pros and cons, and are never quite sure, when we've cast the die, whether we've done right or wrong. Whereas intuition is as fast as light, flashing up from the subconscious with all the facts marshaled and the answer ready, if we're prepared to listen.
-- Quiller, Quiller Salamander
~~~
Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.
-- the Patrician, Guards! Guards!
~~~
The higher the dream betrayed, the deeper the bitterness; if the man survives, he will be on guard against dreams as a shepherd watches for wolves.
-- Alexias, The Last of the Wine
~~~
History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has.
-- Lestat, The Queen of the Damned
~~~
It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple and yet indispensable things.
-- Lestat, The Queen of the Damned
~~~
Take control...Be the hero of your own life.
-- Vasu, Into The Labyrinth
~~~
If not you, then who?
-- Valentine, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
~~~
One need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the centre of one's soul.
-- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
~~~
The one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.
-- Yanakov, The Honor of the Queen by David Weber
~~~
The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity.
-- Clancy, Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams
~~~
Callahan's Law: Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.
-- Spider Robinson
~~~
Lady Sally's Law: Shared despair is squared; shared hope is cubed (or better: raised to the power of infinity?).
-- Spider Robinson
~~~
We raise hopes, here...until they're old enough to fend for themselves.
-- Mike, Spider Robinson
~~~
Funny men are better lovers. They know about pain.
-- Josie Bauer, Spider Robinson
~~~
All purpose toast: To all the ones who weren't as lucky.
-- Mike, Spider Robinson
~~~
If you've got a hurt and I've got a hurt and we share them, some crazy how-or-other, we each end up with less than half a hurt apiece.
-- Jake Stonebender, Spider Robinson
~~~
Cheering someone up is a little like breast-feeding, or good sex: mutually satisfactory.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Be a rapturist - the backward of a terrorist. Commit random acts of senseless kindness, whenever possible.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Where I come from, anyone who says "Excuse me" is a human being.
-- Joe, Spider Robinson
~~~
People who wear glasses are lucky; we have stars on rainy nights.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Tyranny has its place. Universal freedom would deny my right to restrict Jeffrey Dahmer's recreational and dietary habits.
-- Doc Webster, Spider Robinson
~~~
It claims to be fully automatic, but actually you have to push this little button here.
-- Gentleman John Killian, Spider Robinson
~~~
A truce between the sexes? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND? What else IS there to distract us all from onrushing death?  Television?
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Art takes whatever--and as long as--it takes.
-- Lady Sally, Spider Robinson
~~~
What you put your attention on prospers.
-- Stephen Gaskin, Spider Robinson
~~~
Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Perhaps I could stand loneliness if I were not so useless; perhaps I could stand uselessness if I were not so lonely.
-- Mickey Finn, Spider Robinson
~~~
You don't even know if our species are sexually compatible.
The hell I don't. I can see fingers and a tongue from here; anything else is gravy.
-- exchange between Mickey (an alien cyborg) and Mary Callahan, Spider Robinson
~~~
So many men seem to have the idea that what women secretly want most of all (no matter what we say, or even believe ourselves) is a powerful and remorseless engine of flesh impersonally hammering away at us without pause for hours at a time. They become upset with themselves if they cannot deliver this silly commodity. I don't mean that on the one occasion in my life when it actually happened to me, it was an UNPLEASANT experience, exactly. (Until I tried to get up and walk the next day.) It's just that maybe once in a lifetime is plenty.  And I've never seen that guy since, don't much care if I do.  I mean, you could buy a machine to do that. They exist. And women don't buy them. Neither do gay men.
-- Maureen, Spider Robinson
~~~
Vengeance is counterproductive. Not to mention it gets your soul all sticky.
-- Lady Sally, Spider Robinson
~~~
If it's sloppy, eat it over the sink.
-- Tom Robbins, Spider Robinson
~~~
We were not making love, we were fucking. Nothing wrong with that; just not enough right with it.
-- Maureen, Spider Robinson
~~~
I've been in hospitals. They take away your pants. Then they hurt you and starve you and expose you to disease. Then they bill you. A lot.
-- Joe, Spider Robinson
~~~
Try to live your life as though one distant day, your descendants will develop time-travel and cloning skills, and come back to resurrect everyone that ever lived who wasn't a jerk or a creep. Maybe at the end, when your whole life passes before your eyes, it's a high speed data dump. Endeavor to see that it makes you seem worth the trouble of reviving. Try to be the kind of guest they'll want at The Last Great, Never-Ending Party At The End of Time. It could happen, right? Do you know of a BETTER shot at immortality?
-- Sam Meade, Spider Robinson
~~~
God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there's some consolation.
-- Joe, Spider Robinson
~~~
One can dismiss out of hand any so-called religion that puts out death threats on satirists. It is self-evident that God enjoys rough humor.
-- Gentleman John Killian, Spider Robinson
~~~
Death to anyone wearing a turbine
-- racist graffito spotted in Surrey, British Columbia, Spider Robinson
~~~
Darling, ALL men think about rape, at least once in their lives.  Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we've got to have, more precious to us than heroin...and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping, or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do--because that's YOUR correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need--and the best we can hope for--is to get lucky. We're all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn't be human if we didn't sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
-- Mike to Lady Sally, Spider Robinson
~~~
If you're raped, don't charge the bastard with rape. Charge him with indecent exposure. It is MUCH easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape. The defense is not allowed to ask ANYTHING about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time. Forensic evidence is unnecessary. The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half. What's the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, "It's a filthy lie, Your Honor, I raped that bitch!" In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist. And weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes--in fact, the scheme sort of incorporates the Law of Talion. An eye for an eye...
-- Mary, Spider Robinson
~~~
The thing to do with a silly remark is fail to hear it.
-- Zebadiah J. Carter, Spider Robinson
~~~
The human race has few (if any) problems that couldn't be solved by massive wealth. And we're literally SURROUNDED by it, like a fly in amber. Now if we only had brains.
-- Ben Bova, Spider Robinson
~~~
Erections are certainly useful in pleasing a woman, but I've never understood why so many people seem to think they're essential. Sure, they're flattering--but a man who doesn't have an erection and still wants to make love to me, now that's flattering.
-- Arethusa, Spider Robinson
~~~
To approach telepathy, start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Antiabortionists fail to carry their philosophy to its logical culmination: Stamp Out Menstruation! End the Slaughter of Millions! (And try to ensure that the ratio of females to males runs several trillion to one, so that every sperm can fulfill God's Plan for it as well.)
-- Mike, Spider Robinson
~~~
Concerning whores: anyone who thinks it immoral or exploitive or dishonest to "pay a person to pretend to care about you" has obviously never flown first-class...or gone to a psychiatrist, or a hairdresser, or eaten in a restaurant...or talked to a bartender they didn't know.
-- Mike, Spider Robinson
~~~
Politically correct euphemisms are for the differently-brained.
-- Tanya, Spider Robinson
~~~
Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.
-- Jake, Spider Robinson
~~~
Prostitutes function rather like priests for people who feel more comfortable confessing their sins while naked.
-- Father Newman, Spider Robinson
~~~
Please consider yourself, now and henceforth, and no matter what anyone else ever asks of you, free to do any damned thing you want that doesn't hurt someone else unnecessarily.
-- Lady Sally McGee, Spider Robinson
~~~
We were going to explore the Kama Sutra...but at the last moment, her Kama turned into a period...
-- Spider Robinson
~~~
Got a date with the doctor who did my vasectomy. She believes in reaping what she sews.
-- Spider Robinson
~~~
The Buddhist hamburger joint: They'll make you one with everything.
~~~
The Hacker's burger joint: you can have chips with it.
~~~
The junkie's hot-dog stand: they'll sell you one with the works.
~~~
I know you'd like to screw like a bunny--but I just washed my thing, and I can't do a hare with it.
~~~
He acquitted himself well at the trial. Regrettably, the jury did not follow his example...
~~~
He learned about sex by trial and error. Now they've got him on trial for one or two of those errors...
-- Ronny Corbett, Spider Robinson
~~~
The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line.
-- David Gerrold, Spider Robinson
~~~
Casualties are just as heavy in one war as in another...because death comes just one to the
customer.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I am quite used to being considered too spectacular. My own brother, a colonel of engineers, thought my pre-war stories about the atomic bomb and atomic weapons to be sheer moonshine; he has since flown over to Hiroshima and changed his mind.
-- From Grumbles from the Grave, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I am interested in the fact that you have unusually keen minds. However, that lays us open, and I am including myself in this, lays us open to dangers that don't hit the phlegmatic, the more stolid. Unless we are able to predict, we are even more likely to be subjected to functional insanities than those around us.... There's a way out, there's something that we can do to protect ourselves, something that would protect the rest of the human race from the sort of things that are happening to them, and are going to happen to them. It's very simple, and it's right down our alley: the use of the scientific method. I'm not talking about the scientific method used in the laboratory. The scientific method can be used to protect ourselves from serious difficulties of other sorts, getting our teeth smashed in, in our everyday life, twenty-four hours of the day. I should say what I mean by the scientific method. Since I have to define it in terms of words, I can't be as clear as I might be if I were able to make an extensional definition. But I mean a comparatively simple thing by the scientific method: the ability to look at what goes on around you. Listen to what you hear, observe, note facts, delay your judgment, and make your own predictions.  That's all there is, really, to the scientific method: to be able to distinguish facts from non-facts.
-- Guest of Honor Speech at the Third World Science Fiction Convention, Denver, 1941, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A fake fortune-teller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Peace is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story-- unless that civilian is a close relative of one of the casualties. But, if there ever was a time in history when "peace" meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.
-- Rico in Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears.
-- Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
...more people worry themselves to death than bleed to death.
-- From Tunnel in the Sky, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
...Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done... without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody's head bashed in. That's politics. The only other way to settle a dispute is by bashing a few heads in... and that is what happens when one or both sides is no longer willing to dicker. That's why I say politics is good even when it is bad... because the only alternative is force - and somebody gets hurt.
-- Uncle Tom in Podkayne of Mars. Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Kissing girls is a goodness. It beats the hell out of card games.
-- Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists have exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for the creations of eunuchs.
-- Robert A. Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I've never understood how God could expect His creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Captain, you don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. Its owner is beset on every side, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious - honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could be friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one.
~~~
Worse yet, his family is always in danger.  Captain, have your daughters ever been threatened with kidnapping?... If you possessed the wealth that Mike had thrust upon him, you would have those girls guarded day and night - still you wouldn't rest, because you could never be sure of the guards. Look at the last hundred or so kidnapings and see how many involved a trusted employee... and how few victims escaped alive. Is there anything money can buy which is worth having your daughters' necks in a noose?
-- Jubal Harshaw to Captain Van Tromp in Stranger in a Strange Land. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them, to make a choice- if the 'choice' looks like a 'sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can't have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices....
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I need not have worried about being naked; no one seemed to notice...which irked me.  Gentlemen should at least leer. And a wolf whistle or other applause would not be out of place. Anything less makes a woman feel unsure of herself.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Men are more timid than we are; sometimes the only way you can get one to move is by placing him in sharpest competition with another male.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
And I started a custom that has stood me in good stead for a long lifetime: I smiled up at him and said, Thank you, Charles. You were splendid.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
To thank him and compliment him is an easy investment that pays high dividends. Believe me, sister mine!
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I would say that my position is not too far from that of Ayn Rand's; that I would like to see government reduced to no more than internal police and courts, external armed forces--with the other matters handled otherwise. I'm sick of the way the government sticks its nose into everything, now.
-- Robert A. Heinlein in The Robert Heinlein Interview And Other Heinleinana by J. Neil Schulman. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Silence is all a snoopy question deserves...just fail to hear it. But the insult direct is still better.
-- Ira Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The only thing known to science faster than the speed of light is Mrs. Grundy's gossip.
-- Ira Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The most dangerous animal in all history walks on two legs...and sometimes slinks along country roads.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. , Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Having your back scratched is not the only reason to be married, but it is a good one, especially for those spots that are so hard to reach by yourself.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Women are more rugged than men; they have to be.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
He wants a mother for his children...but he also wants a willing and available concubine, too. If you are not she, he will find one elsewhere.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
In a society in which it is a mortal offense to be different from your neighbors your only escape is never to let them find out.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. And another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible results.
~~~
Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.
-- Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Some people say-I've heard talk-that married men should not go (to war). Because of their families.  But this involves contradiction, a fatal one. The family man dare not hang back and expect the bachelor to do his fighting for him. It is manifestly unfair for me to expect a bachelor to die for my children if I am unwilling to die for them myself. Enough of that attitude on the part of married men and the bachelor will refuse to fight if the married man stays safe at home...and the republic is doomed. The barbarian will walk in unopposed.
-- Ira Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I am so totally every minute a set of female glands and organs, that I can cope with it only by carefully simulating the sort of "lady" approved by Mrs. Grundy and Queen Victoria.
-- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
'Bread and Circuses' is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure.
-- Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
There is one unmistakable sign of the collapse of good manners: dirty public washrooms.
-- Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. He simply follows the eleventh commandment.
-- Brian Smith in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can't poke his nose into--that's the way we're built and I assume there's some reason for it.
-- Lazarus Long in Methuselah's Children, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
-- Friday Jones in Friday, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The people who come out on top write the official versions found in history books, history that is no more honest than is autobiography.
-- Friday Jones in Friday, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Here's to our noble selves! There are damned few of us left!
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Are no homely women. Some more beautiful than others.
-- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Dum vivimus, vivamus! - While we live, let us live!
-- Star in Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything.
-- Lorenzo Smythe in Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws--always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.  Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good
---not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.
-- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Always yield to temptation, It may never pass your way again.
-- Lazarus Long in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth--but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it . . but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The way to live a long time--oh, a thousand years or more--is something between the way a child does it and the way a mature man does it. Give the future enough thought to be ready for it--but don't worry about it. Live each day as if you were to die next sunrise. Then face each sunrise as a fresh creation and live for it, joyously. And never think about the past. No regrets, ever.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Sleep whenever you can; you may have to stay awake a long time.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The ways of God and government and girls are all mysterious, and it is not given to mortal man to understand them.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Don' ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun--and neither can stop the march of events.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, TANSTAAFL
-- Man in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
And you're a very pretty girl, so I don't mind your ignorance.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth - then to shut up.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I've said this nineteen dozen times but you still don't believe it. Man is the one animal that can't be tamed. He goes along for years, peaceful as a cow, when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat. Which goes double for the female of the species.
-- The Deacon in Tunnel In The Sky, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I was there to see beautiful naked women. So was everybody else. It's a common failing.
-- Edison Hill in They Do It With Mirrors, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A man who can read and write is 9/10ths free even in chains
-- Robert Heinlein in Expended Universe, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too. Such trifles as a young girl defining an athame among gentiles - knowledge that isn't all that esoteric anyhow - and an old fool using a word inappropriately.  Understand me?
-- Jerry Farnsworth in Job: A Comedy of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible.  So I chucked logic.  Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.
-- Oscar Gordon in Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can "prove" anything from it.
-- Dr. Jacob Burroughs in The Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
See here, Mister, I'm supposed to be luring you with my radiant beauty, then hooking you with my feminine charm ... and not getting anywhere. Let's try another tack.
-- Deety, to Zebediah in Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
May you live as long as you wish, and love as long as you live.
-- Minerva in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I'll give you an exact definition. When the happiness of another person becomes as
essential to yourself as your own, then the state of love exists.
-- Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A desire not to butt into other peoples business is at least 80% of all human wisdom.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Morality is your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules.
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
But philosophy wasn't the answer. There really isn't anything to philosophy. Did you ever eat that cotton candy they sell at fairs?  Well, philosophy is like that--it looks as if it were really something, and it's awfully pretty, and it tastes sweet, but when you go to bite it, you can't get your teeth into it, and when you try to swallow, there isn't anything there.  Philosophy is word-chasing, as significant as a puppy chasing its tail.
-- Joan Freeman in Lost Legacy, *Assignment in Eternity*, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Always cut the cards, Woodie. You may lose anyhow - but not as often, nor as much. And when you do lose, smile.
-- Ira Johnson as quoted by Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand--that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their 'rights.' The result of which should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.
-- Colonel Dubois in Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
What are the marks of a sick culture? It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the county and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.
-- Boss and Friday in Friday, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I do know that, if a man acquires too much money, presently it owns him instead of his owning it.
-- Joan Eunice Branca in I Will Fear No Evil, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A man who refuses to take his own death into account in making plans is a fool.
-- Lazarus in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
If you pray hard enough you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why hard enough to make water run uphill, of course.
-- From Expanded Universe, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
But he also used to say that a wise man should be prepared to abandon his baggage at any time.
-- Daniel Boone Davis in the door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I had taken a partner once before- but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn't anyway to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous.. fatal. In the end.
-- Daniel Boone Davis in the door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Math is hard work and it occupies your mind - and it doesn't hurt to learn all you can of it, no matter what rank you are; everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.
-- Juan Rico in Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
What this world needs more of is loving: sweaty, friendly and unashamed.
-- Maureen Johnson-Smith in To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run these are the only people who count...
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
But does Man have any "right" to spread through the universe?  Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics-you name it--is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what man is--not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.  The Universe will let us know--later-whether or not Man has any "right" to expand through it.
-- Juan Rico in Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
-- Professor Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The hell I won't talk that way! Peter, an eternity here without her is not an eternity of bliss; it is an eternity of boredom and loneliness and grief. You think this damned gaudy halo means anything to me when I know--yes, you've convinced me!--that my beloved is burning in the Pit? I didn't ask much. Just to be allowed to live with her. I was willing to wash dishes forever if only I could see her smile, hear her voice, touch her hand! She's been shipped on a technicality and you know it! Snobbish, bad-tempered angels get to live here without ever doing one lick to deserve it. But my Marga, who is a real angel if one ever lived, gets turned down and sent to Hell to everlasting torture on a childish twist in the rules. You can tell the Father and His sweet-talking Son and that sneaky Ghost that they can take their gaudy Holy City and shove it! If Margrethe has to be in Hell, that's where I want to be!
-- Alexander Hergensheimer in Job: A Comedy of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.
-- Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
When I was still quite young my father said to me, My beloved daughter, you are an amoral little wretch. I know this, because you take after me; your mind works just the way mine does. If you are not to be destroyed by your lack, you must work out a practical code of your own and live by it.  I thought about his words and felt warm and good inside. Amoral little wretch- Father knew me so well.  What code should I follow, Father?  You have to pick your own.
-- Maureen Long in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
-- Postscript to Revolt in 2100, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Real beauty is likely to scare a man off, or else make him quite unmanageable, whereas prettiness, properly handled, is an asset.
-- From Podkayne of Mars, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Anything that is moral for a group to do is moral for one person to do.
-- From Podkayne of Mars, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
People who will not take the trouble to raise children should not have them.
-- From Podkayne of Mars, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A rational anarchist believes that concepts, such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame.. as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and _nowhere_ else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world.. aware that his efforts will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
-- From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
From politics I have come to believe the following:
(1) Most people are basically honest, kind and decent.
(2) The American people are wise enough to run their own affairs. The do not need Fuehrers, Strong Men, Technocrats, Commissars, Silver Shirts, Theocrats, or any other sort of dictator.
(3) Americans have a compatible community of ambitions. Most of them don't want to be rich but do want enough economic security to permit them to raise families in decent comfort without fear of the future. They want the least government necessary to this purpose and don't greatly mind what the other fellow does as long as it does not interfere with them living their own lives. As a people we are neither money mad nor prying. We are easy-going and anarchistic. We may want to keep up with the Joneses - but not with the Vanderbilts. We don't like cops.
(4) Democracy is not an automatic condition resulting from laws and constitutions. It is a living, dynamic process which must be worked at by you yourself - or it ceases to be democracy, even if the shell and form remains.
(5) One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way - prefer it to the effort of running your own affairs. Hitler's government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.
(6) Democracy is the most efficient form of government ever invented by the human race.  On the record, it has worked better in peace and in war than fascism, communism, or any other form of dictatorship. As for the mythical yardstick of 'benevolent' monarchy or dictatorship - there ain't no such animal!
(7) A single citizen, with no political connections and no money, can be extremely effective in politics.
-- From Take Back Your Government - A Practical Handbook for the private citizen who wants democracy to work.  By Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
-- Hugh in Farnham's Freehold, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more effective ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.  Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.
-- Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The only religious opinion that I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!
-- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
The Universe was a damned silly place at best... but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be some atoms that "just happened" to look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations "just happened" to be the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself inside.
No, Jubal would not buy the "just happened" theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.
-- Jubal Harshaw's thoughts in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Piffle, dear, I don't have morals, just customs.
-- Hilda in Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your persona requires.
-- Lazarus Long in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence
-- Jubal in Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A GREAT artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is, and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be, more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older that eighteen in her heart.
-- Jubal in Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A man who is happy at home doesn't lie awake nights worrying about the hereafter.
-- Alex in Job: A Comedy Of Justice, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into the machinery that does not work too well at best.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love....The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Everybody lies about sex.
-- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
An armed society is a polite society.
-- Monroe-Alpha in Beyond This Horizon, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
A man does not insist on physical beauty in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realizes that she is beautiful--he just hadn't noticed it at first.
-- Notebooks of Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay--and claims a halo for his dishonesty.
-- John Joseph Bonforte in Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
-- Television Show Felicity
~~~
I've tried to block your memory
To protect me from the pain
Pretend I never knew you,
And never heard your name.
But the walls aren't strong enough
And I fight my tears in vain.
The feeling came creeping through
and the hurt is still the same.
I wish I could forget you,
Or make you see me now
I thought you really cared
But it seems you don't know how.
The pain will ease in time
And though I know it's over
And what we had is gone
The memories will live forever
In a corner of my mind
-- A CORNER IN MY MIND By Stephanie Pacheco
~~~
My love in her attire doth show her wit,
It doth so well become her:
For every season she hath dressings fit,
For winter, spring, and summer.
No beauty she doth miss,
When all her robes are on:
But Beauty's self she is,
When all her robes are gone.
-- Author Unknown
~~~
After a while you learn
the subtle differences between
holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn
that love doesn't mean leaning
and company doesn't always mean security.
And you begin to learn
that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of a woman,
not the grief of a child
and you learn
to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is
too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way
of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns
if you get too much
so you plant your own garden
and you decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone
to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
you really are strong
you really do have worth
and you learn
and you learn
with every goodbye, you learn...
~~~
-- From After A While, a poem by Veronica A. Shoffstall
~~~
What you feel is what you are,
And what you are is beautiful.
-- Slide, a song by Goo Goo Dolls
~~~
The thing to remember about love affairs, says Simone, is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.  ... We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney ... And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back.  Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead. Simone swallows some wine. Love affairs are like that, she says. They all are like that.
-- Lorrie Moore, in Birds of America
~~~
When you love someone
You'll sacrifice
You'd give everything you've got
And you don't think twice.
You'd risk it all
No matter what may come.
When you love someone.
You'll shoot the moon
Put out the sun.
When you love someone.
-- When you Love Someone, A song by Bryan Adams (Hope Floats Soundtrack)
~~~
I am not one of those
Who do not believe in love
At first sight
But I believe in taking a second look!
-- H. Vincent
~~~
Learn from your parents' mistakes:  use birth control!
~~~
Pizza is a lot like sex.  When it's good, it's really good.  When it's bad, it's still pretty good.
~~~
Men are the Devil and they bring Woe.
In winter it's easy to just say "no".
Men are the devil, that's one sure thing.
But what are you going to do in the spring?
-- Mary Carolyn Davies, 1925
~~~
Man is...A domestic animal which, if treated with firmness and kindness, can be trained to do most things.
-- Jilly Cooper
~~~
A woman's appetite is twice that of a man's; her sexual desire, four times; her intelligence, eight times.
-- Sanskrit Proverb
~~~
I used to be Snow White, but then I drifted.
-- Mae West
~~~
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
-- Shakespeare
~~~
I had no idea so many people in the United States and Canada were tying each other up.
-- Ann Landers
~~~
If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it.
-- Bette Midler
~~~
As she lay there dozing next to me, one voice inside my head kept saying, Relax... you are not the first doctor to sleep with one of his patients,  but another kept reminding me, Howard, you are a veterinarian.
-- Dick Wilson
~~~
Give me chastity and continence - but not yet.
-- Saint Augustine
~~~
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
-- Havelock Ellis
~~~
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
I'm a practicing heterosexual, but bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night
-- Woody Allen
~~~
I don't mind where people make love, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
-- Mrs. Patrick Campbell
~~~
When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
-- From Basic Sex Facts For Today's Youngfolk in _Life In Hell-- by Matt Groening
~~~
Aldous Huxley once said that an intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.....
~~~
Is it not true that sex degrades women....... if it is any good
-- Alan Partridge BBC Radio 4
~~~
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
-- Jerry Seinfeld
~~~
'Tis an old saying, the Devil lurks behind the cross. All is not gold that glitters. From the tail of the plough, Bamba was made King of Spain; and from his silks and riches was Rodrigo cast to be devoured by the snakes.
-- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
~~~
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
-- On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, G.K. Chesterton
~~~
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.
-- James Matthew Barrie Peter Pan
~~~
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
-- Joseph Addison
~~~
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
-- Mortimer J. Adler
~~~
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
-- Gaston Bachelard
~~~
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.
-- Barrow
~~~
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
-- Arthur Christopher Benson
~~~
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
-- Aneurin Bevan
~~~
Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
-- Augustine Birrell
~~~
A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.
-- Albert Camus
~~~
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
-- Thomas Carlyle
~~~
You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.
-- Jim Critchfield
~~~
I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
-- John Dawkins
~~~
The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others.  But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
-- Clarence Day
~~~
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
-- Francois F‚Nelon
~~~
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
-- Margaret Fuller
~~~
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
-- Harold S. Geneen
~~~
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
-- Elizabeth Hardwick
~~~
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
~~~
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.
-- Holbrook Jackson
~~~
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
Tradition is but a meteor, which, if it once falls, cannot be rekindled. Memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. But written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. So books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten, but when opened again, will again impart instruction.
-- Johnson
~~~
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
-- Lord Edward Lytton
~~~
The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
-- Katherine Mansfield
~~~
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.  No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
-- Mccosh
~~~
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
-- Richard McKenna
~~~
There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
-- H. L. Mencken
~~~
Books and marriage go ill together.
-- Moliere
~~~
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
-- John Morely
~~~
A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.
-- William Murray
~~~
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
-- Pablo Neruda
~~~
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
-- Theodore Parker
~~~
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
-- Noah Porter
~~~
The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.
-- American Proverb
~~~
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
-- Joseph Addison
~~~
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
-- Mortimer J. Adler
~~~
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
-- Isaac Asimov
~~~
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.
-- John Aubrey
~~~
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
-- Gaston Bachelard
~~~
Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.
-- E.S. Barrett
~~~
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
-- Sir James M. Barrie
~~~
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.
-- Barrow
~~~
The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
-- Stan Barstow
~~~
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
~~~
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
-- Arthur Christopher Benson
~~~
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
-- Aneurin Bevan
~~~
Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.
-- Augustine Birrell
~~~
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
-- Ray Bradbury
~~~
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
-- Joseph Brodsky
~~~
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
-- Lord Henry P. Brougham
~~~
Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large, where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
~~~
Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferrules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
-- Richard De Bury 
~~~
Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
-- William Cobbett
~~~
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
-- Jeremy Collier
~~~
I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.
-- Coolio
~~~
The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.
-- Frank Crane
~~~
I heard his library burned down and both books were destroyed - and one of them hadn't even been colored in yet.
-- John Dawkins
~~~
The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
-- Christopher Dawson
~~~
The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man nothing else that he builds ever lasts monuments fall; nations perish; civilization grow old and die out; new races build others.  But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on. Still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts, of the hearts of men centuries dead.
-- Clarence Day
~~~
There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
-- Isaac Disraeli
~~~
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
-- Terry Eagleton
~~~
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
-- Francois F‚Nelon
~~~
There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
-- Henry Fielding
~~~
Read in order to live.
-- Gustave Flaubert
~~~
Read much, but not many books.
-- Benjamin Franklin
~~~
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
-- Margaret Fuller
~~~
Learning to read has been reduced to a process of mastering a series of narrow, specific, hierarchical skills. Where armed-forces recruits learn the components of a rifle or the intricacies of close order drill "by the numbers," recruits to reading learn its mechanics sound by sound and word by word.
-- Jacquelyn Gross
~~~
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
-- Elizabeth Hardwick
~~~
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
-- John Harington
~~~
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
~~~
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
-- John Morely
~~~
A dose of poison can do its work but once. A bad book can go on poisoning minds for generations.
-- William Murray
~~~
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
-- Pablo Neruda
~~~
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
-- Theodore Parker
~~~
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.
-- Thomas J. Peters
~~~
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
-- Noah Porter
~~~
The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.
-- American Proverb
~~~
This book fills a much-needed gap.
-- Hadas In A Review.
~~~
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
-- Jean Rhys
~~~
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
-- Hazel Rochman
~~~
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
-- Henry C. Rogers
~~~
Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what?  All you have to do is go to the library.
-- Jim Rohn
~~~
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
~~~
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
-- John Ruskin
~~~
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
-- John Ruskin
~~~
A library is thought in cold storage.
-- Herbert Samuel
~~~
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
-- B. K. Sandwell
~~~
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
-- Giorgos Seferis
~~~
No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
-- Atwood H. Townsend
~~~
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honour; which is probably more than she ever did.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
Women should be obscene and not heard.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
The square root is the root of all evil
-- Mike Carpenter
~~~
I want the answer by Wednesday or there will be blood on the walls
-- Dr. Jean-Louis Lassez in my Systems Organizations class
~~~
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their developments.
-- Albert Einstein, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930
~~~
Stare at the pale blue dot of planet earth from several millions of miles away. Stare at that dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
~~~
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong
~~~
The way I want do die is doped up on crack and driving a Lamborghini out the back of a cargo plane in flight.
-- Jeff Eliasen
~~~
Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?
-- Charles Darwin, On the origin of religion
~~~
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
-- Bruce Ediger, on X Window interfaces.
~~~
Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
-- Dave Barry
~~~
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
~~~
For the most part, this chapter is organized from small to large. That is, we take a bottom-up approach. If you're a top-down person, just turn the book over and read the chapter backward.
-- Programming Perl, Chapter 2 Introduction
~~~
They say kissing is the language of love.
Care to indulge in a little conversation?
-- A Hallmark Card
~~~
An enemy will stab you in the back, but a true friend will stab you in the front.
~~~
This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces.  It is not god who kills the children, not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs.  It's us.  Only us.
-- Rorschach, in _Watchmen_
~~~
Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money.
~~~
I can please only one person per day.
Today is not your day.
Tomorrow isn't looking good either.
-- DNRC Motto
~~~
Q: What happens if you play blues music backwards?
A: Your wife returns to you, your dog comes back to life, and you get out of prison.
~~~
But besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
~~~
Women's creed: Men are like linoleum.  If you lay them right the first time,you can walk on them for 20 years.
~~~
The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions.  The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's":  1. fighting;  2. fleeing;  3. feeding; and 4. mating.
-- Psychology professor in neuropsychology intro course
~~~
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it---and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again---and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American Writer, 1835-1910)
~~~
The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
-- From an article on the growth of federal regulations in the Oct. 24th issue of National Review
~~~
A Stanford research group advertised for participants in a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They were looking for therapy clients who had been diagnosed with this disorder. The response was gratifying; they got 3,000 responses about three days after the ad came out.  All from the same person.
~~~
There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone.  That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
-- Stroustrup
~~~
There's so much comedy on television.  Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate
~~~
Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
-- Emo Phillips
~~~
Life without you would be like a broken pencil.
How's that?
Completely pointless.
-- Blackadder, Series II
~~~
G M:  So, Mrs. Smith, do you have any children?
S:  Yes, thirteen.
G M:  Thirteen!  Good lord, isn't that a burden?
S:  Well, I love my husband.
G M:  Lady, I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.
-- Groucho Marx, on _You Bet Your Life_
~~~
The most important thing in the programming language is the name.  A language will not succeed without a good name.  I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- D. E. Knuth, 1967
~~~
When I was in high school, my friends would lay anything that moved.  I choose not to limit myself.
~~~
I prefer my lovers to be female, human, and breathing, but I'll take any two out of three in a pinch.
~~~
Don't worry about temptation--as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.
-- Old Farmer's Almanac
~~~
On a sidewalk near Portland State University someone wrote 'Trust Jesus', and someone else wrote 'But Cut the Cards'.
~~~
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
-- Sigmund Freud
~~~
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.
-- William Clayton
~~~
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
~~~
Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.
-- From A Woman's Worth by Marianne Williamson
~~~
I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.
-- Woody Allen, on the KKK
~~~
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
~~~
Masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of.  It's nothing to be particularly proud of, either.
-- From Basic Sex Facts For Today's Youngfolk in _Life In Hell_ by Matt Groening
~~~
No one is more carnal than a recent virgin.
-- John Steinbeck
~~~
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life.  For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system.  When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!  (It's rather like getting tenure.)
-- Daniel Dennett, _Consciousness Explained_, p. 177
~~~
Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules.
Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
~~~
The prince wants your daughter for his wife.
Well, tell him his wife can't have her.
-- Blackadder III
~~~
You simply MUST stop taking advice from other people.
-- Melissa Timberman
~~~
When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
The Great Roe is a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
In bed the other night my girlfriend asked "if you could know exactly when and where you would die, would you want to?"  I said "no".  She said, "ok, then forget it".
-- Steven Wright
~~~
To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.
-- P.G. Wodehouse
~~~
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-- Shakespeare, _Macbeth_
~~~
KRQR, home of the million dollar guarantee. You give us a million dollars, we'll play any song you want.  Guaranteed.
~~~
When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.
-- A. Rand
~~~
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
-- John Von Neumann (ca. 1949)
~~~
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party?  Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
~~~
Edmund Blackadder:  After all, did not Our Lord send a lowly earthworm to comfort Moses in his torment?
Prince George: No.
-- Blackadder, _Duel and Duality_
~~~
Ella, Ella, Ella...Never knock on Death's door.  Ring the bell and run away!  Death *really* hates that.
-- Doctor, Doctor
~~~
Ros:  Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guil: No, no, no...Death is...not.  Death isn't.  You take my meaning.  Death is the ultimate negative.  Not-being.  You can't not-be on a boat.
Ros:  I've frequently not been on boats.
Guil: No, no, no - what you've been is not on boats.
-- Tom Stoppard
~~~
The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
~~~
When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet.  When toast is dropped, it always lands butter-side-down.  I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat [butter facing up].  The two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground.  With a giant buttered-toast/cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
-- Omni
~~~
When subjected to extreme feminine heat and pressure, male hydrocarbons will
often produce a diamond.
-- Omni
~~~
Will your answer to this question be no?
~~~
Love is like pi---natural, irrational, and VERY important.
~~~
I don't use drugs; my dreams are frightening enough.
-- M. C. Escher
~~~
Sign for a combined Veterinarian and Taxidermist business:
Either Way You Get Your Dog Back
~~~
Mae West:  For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived.
Interviewer: Did you reform?
Mae West:  No; I'm not ashamed anymore.
~~~
I'm one with the Universe - on a scale from 1 to 10.
~~~
Last night I held a little hand,No other hand, tho held so tight,
So dainty and so neat Could greater gladness bring,
I thought my heart would surely burst;  Than the hand I held last night;
So wildly did it beat.  Four aces and a king.
~~~
Ah, Mozart!  He was happily married, but his wife wasn't.
-- Borge
~~~
A thought for the day: In 'A Clarification of Questions,' Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote that 'if a fly gets into the throat of one who is fasting, it is not necessary to pull it out.'
~~~
This is a crude version of a more advanced utility that has never been written.
-- X-windows xwud(1) man-page
~~~
<Name> - Alive, occupying space, and exerting gravitational force.
~~~
Photons have mass?  I didn't know they were catholic!
~~~
My mother made me a homosexual!
If I send her the yarn, can she make me one too?
~~~
Twice five syllables  
Plus seven can't say much but
That's Haiku for you.
~~~
You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
~~~
Q: How do you spell "onomatopoeia"?  
A: The way it sounds.
~~~
The misanthrope's catastrophic apostrophe landed in the cantaloupe near the antelope's interloper.
-- R. Michael Young
~~~
Work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours; but not the same 8 hours.
~~~
In democracy its your vote that counts. In feudalism its your count that votes.
~~~
There are a billion people in China.  It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people.  Think of it.  More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.
-- A. Whitney Brown, _The Big Picture_
~~~
'I want you to stop quoting me out of context, he said.  'Printing my comments intact would make things much easier.'  Mansfield went on to claim 'I...[like]...boys.'
-- From the Harvard Lampoon's mock of the Harvard Crimson
~~~
Solution to two of the world's problems:  Feed the homeless to the hungry.
~~~
Have you heard of the upcoming Schizophrenics' Convention in 1992? Don't miss it!  Anybody who's everybody will be there!
~~~
A great name for a new country song:  If I'd Shot You Sooner, I'd Be Out of Jail by Now.
~~~
Don't keep a negative attitude, such as
I will not succeed, I will not succeed.
Instead, keep a positive attitude:
I WILL fail.  I WILL fail.
~~~
Practice safe government---use kingdoms.
Anarchist reply:  Abstinence is the only way to be 100% sure.
~~~
In a literature class, the students were given an assignment to write a short story involving all the important ingredients - Nobility, Emotion, Sex, Religion and Mystery.  One student allegedly handed in the following story: "My god!" cried the duchess.  "I'm pregnant.  Who did it?"
~~~
Sign outside the Fountain of Youth Health Spa in Salt Lake City:
Are You Fat And Ugly?  Do You Want To Be Just Ugly?  Memberships Available Now.
~~~
Save water.  Shower with a friend.
~~~
I was arrested for selling illegal-sized paper.
~~~
I was walking across a bridge one day, and i saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off.  so i ran over and said "stop! don't do it!"  "Why shouldn't I?" he said.  I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"  He said, "Like what?"  I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"  He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too!  Are you Christian or Buddhist?"  He said, "Christian."  I said, "Me too!  Are you catholic or protestant?"  He said, "Protestant."  I said, "Me too!  Are you Episcopalian or baptist?"  He said, "Baptist!"  I said, "Wow!  Me too!  Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?"  He said, "Baptist church of god!"  I said, "Me too!  Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?"  He said, "Reformed baptist church of god!"  I said, "Me too!  Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?"  He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!"  I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.
-- Emo Phillips
~~~
Do you believe in love at first sight
Or do I need to walk by again?
-- Unknown Author
~~~
I swore to myself
It wouldn't happen again.
I vowed to myself
That this was the end.
The end of this longing,
This yearning so strong.
I said I was over you,
But oh I was wrong.
Now here it is again,
Quite awhile later.
And my love for you
Is now even greater.
I spend all my time
Thinking of you,
I'm in love with you again
And there's nothing I can do.
-- In Love Again, Unknown Author
~~~
The greatest disease is not TB or leprosy;
It is being unwanted, unloved and uncared for.
-- Mother Teresa
~~~
Kissing may not spread germs, but they certainly lower resistance.
-- Louise Erickson
~~~
Some women blush when they are kissed, some call for the police, some swear, some bite. But the worst are those who laugh.
~~~
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
~~~
It's impossible to kiss a girl unexpectedly - only sooner than you thought.
~~~
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
-- Ingrid Bergman
~~~
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
-- Song of Solomon
~~~
It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee
~~~
If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not you should kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of a doubt.
-- Thomas Carlyle
~~~
Give me a kiss, add to that kiss a score;
Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:
A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,
To make that thousand up a million.
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
-- Robert Herrick
~~~
She press'd his hand in slumber; so once more
He could not help but kiss her and adore.
-- John Keats
~~~
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!
Come Helen, come give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
-- Christopher Marlowe
~~~
Be plain in dress, and sober in your diet;
In short, my deary, kiss me, and be quiet.
-- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
~~~
Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
-- William Shakespeare, Richard III
~~~
Partons, dans un baiser, pour un monde inconnu.
-- Alfred De Musset, La Nuit de Mai (French)
With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world.
~~~
I had to quit my job to have time to read my email.
-- Curry, Adam [MTV Host and net.legend] his occasional signature quote
~~~
There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network.
-- Guy Almes
~~~
Computer: a million morons working at the speed of light.
-- David Ferrier
~~~
'Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?' 'It's simple, Skyler. You've seen what food processors do to food, right?'
-- MacNelley in 'Shoe'
~~~
My company doesn't know Usenet exists, and my boss would have kittens if he thought I spoke for them. My opinions are better than theirs anyway.
~~~
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
-- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
~~~
No matter how fast your computer system runs, you will eventually come to think of it as slow.
~~~
The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.
-- Bernard Avishai
~~~
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
-- Nathaniel Borenstein
~~~
EMAIL - when it absolutely positively has to get lost at the speed of light.
~~~
There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
~~~
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- D. E. Knuth
~~~
Now that we have all this useful information, it would be nice to do something with it. (Actually, it can be emotionally fulfilling just to get the information. This is usually only true, however, if you have the social life of a kumquat.)
-- Unix Programmer's Manual
~~~
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 [Anke Bodzin]
~~~
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
-- Niven, Larry, and Jerry Pournelle in 'Oath of Fealty'
~~~
Real Programmers never work from 9 to 5. If any real programmer is around at 9 a.m., it's because they were up all night.
-- Some Computer Geek
~~~
Don't explain computers to laymen. [It's] Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.
-- Heinlein, Robert A. (1907-1988) from 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' c1966
~~~
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your pleased too no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
-- Minor, Janet 'Spellbound'
~~~
This is not an official statement of Hewlett-Packard Corp., and does not necessarily reflect the views of HP. It is provided completely without warranty of any kind. Lawyers take 3d10 damage and roll a saving throw vs. ego attack.
-- Unknown, spoken by Will Smith in the movie 'Six Degrees of Separation'
~~~
I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code!
~~~
PROGRAM - n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. v. tr.- To engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.
~~~
[Percy walks in]
Percy: Sorry I'm late.
Edmund: No, don't bother apologizing. I'm sorry you're alive.
-- Blackadder Episode 1, Bells
~~~
Edmund: Tell me Young crone, is this Putney?
Young Crone: That it be, that it be.
Edmund: "Yes it is". Not "that it be". You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I'm not a tourist. I seek information about a Wisewoman.
Young Crone: Ah, the Wisewoman.. the Wisewoman.
Edmund: Yes, the Wisewoman.
Young Crone: Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is ... a woman, and second, she is ...
Edmund: ... wise?
Young Crone: You do know her then?
Edmund: No, just a wild stab in the dark which is incidentally what you'll be getting if you don't start being a bit more helpful.
-- Blackadder Episode 1, Bells
~~~
Queenie: Oh! Hello Edmund. Look I'm sorry I snapped at you just now. You know I'm really very keen on you indeed don't you?
Edmund: Oh yes ma'am, as you were keen on Essex.
Queenie: Exactly!
Edmund: Right up to the point at which you had his head cut off.
Queenie: (laughs) He didn't mind that, he knew it was only little me! And I must say, his head did look jolly super on its spike. Are there no heads on spikes today?
Edmund: Em, no. No, we're training up a new executioner and he's a little immature. Takes him forever. Slash, slash, slash. By the time he's finished you don't so much need a spike as a toast rack.
-- Blackadder Episode 2, Head
~~~
How to combat that feeling of helplessness with illegal drugs
-- The Royal Gazette, 9 May 1985
~~~
Love covers over a multitude of sins.
-- Bible, 1 Peter 4:8
~~~
My mind's sunk so low, Claudia, because of you, wrecked itself on your account so bad already, that I couldn't like you if you were the best of women, - or stop loving you, no matter what you do.
-- Catullus
~~~
Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; every little absence is an age.
-- John Dryden, Amphitryon
~~~
Sometimes I feel there's a hole inside of me:
An emptiness that at times seems to burn.
I think if you lifted my heart to your ear,
You probably could hear the ocean.
And the moon tonight has a circle around it,
a sign of trouble not far behind.
I have this dream of being whole
Not going to bed each night wanting.
But still sometimes
When the wind is warm
Or the crickets sing,
I dream of a love
That even time will lie down and be still for.
I just want someone to love me.
I want to be seen.
-- From the movie: Practical Magic
~~~
Can he love her?
Can the soul really be satisfied
With such polite affections?
To love is to burn,
To be on fire.
-- Sense and Sensibility (Movie)
~~~
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
-- Paul Valery
~~~
The very first thing necessary to anyone who's weird is a place where they don't give you a hard time just because you're weird.
-- Mike Callahan
~~~
They say thyme heal all wounds, but I've found it doesn't work any better than oregano.
~~~
Please forward all messages to the gutter my mind is inhabiting. Thank you.
~~~
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
~~~
Everyone is a damn fool for at least 5 minutes a day. Wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit.
~~~
I'm not panicking. I'm watching you panic. It's much more entertaining.
~~~
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kinda neat.
~~~
Smile. It confuses people.
~~~
Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well rested wimps, but wimps.
~~~
Thousands of years ago, Egyptians worshipped cats. Cats have never forgotten this.
~~~
I am under the influence of sugar, caffeine and lack of sleep and should not be held responsible for my behavior.
~~~
Who the hell let the morning people run things?
~~~
I'm lost. I've gone to Look for myself. If I should return before I get back, please ask me to wait.
~~~
Do the voices in my head bother you?
~~~
I like the way your mind malfunctions.
~~~
Don't try to out-weird me - I get stranger things then you free with my breakfast cereal.
-- Z. Beeblebrox-
~~~
Marching to a different kettle of fish.
~~~
The Web isn't better then sex, but sliced bread is in serious trouble.
~~~
Live wrong and preposterously.
~~~
You should see the ones we don't let out in public.
~~~
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
~~~
If you're going down in flames, you might as well hit something big.
~~~
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
~~~
They aren't broken, they're...uh...modular.
~~~
Its ok to laugh during sex - just don't point.
~~~
Hardware: the part of the computer that can be kicked. If you can only curse at it, it's software.
~~~
I no longer fear hell - I work in Retail.
~~~
... It is therefore recommended not to use this button at any time. 
-- software documentation 
~~~
There are many paths to enlightenment. Sadly, none of them involve Pizza.
-- RonRon Shubadi
~~~
If more government is the answer, it must have been a really stupid question.
~~~
Got kleptomania? Take something for it.
~~~
Sometimes I go off into my own little world... But that's okay; they know me there.
-- AJ
~~~
I have given up anarchy. Too many rules-- hating the government and all that stuff.
-- G.H. Hill
~~~
Under no circumstances may you become a Prophet. We don't intend to jeopardize our non-prophet status.
-- Kerry Thornley, Discordian Society Co-founder
~~~
What a lousy place for a wall...
-- Don Karnage
~~~
I never learned from a man who agreed with me
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Too many times I've seen the sun come up through bloodshot eyes this week...
~~~
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
-- Sam Kelly
~~~
Of course, when discussing the shelf-life of Twinkies, the limiting factor is the life of the shelf
-- MTR, on a.c
~~~
Although the hippopotamus has no sting, the wise (wo)man would rather be sat upon by a bee.
~~~
Eagles may soar free and proud, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
~~~
Have I found Jesus? I'm still looking for Waldo!
~~~
Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat
-- Alex Levine
~~~
I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with sub-atomic particles.
~~~
When you do a good deed, get a receipt, in case heaven is like the IRS.
~~~
I can't go to work today, the voices say Stay home and clean the guns.
~~~
Erotic is using a feather, Kinky is using the whole chicken.
~~~
Sex is like air, its not important unless you aren't getting any.
~~~
If vegetable oil is made of vegetables, what is baby oil made of?
~~~
No guts, no glory, no brain, same story.
~~~
If quitters never win, and winners never quit, then who is the fool that first said "quit while you are ahead"?
~~~
If you don't die from it it is healthy.
~~~
Never sleep with anyone crazier than you.
~~~
If everything is going well, you don't know what the hell is going on.
~~~
Sex is like snow. you never know how many inches you are going to get, or how long it will last.
~~~
women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place.
~~~
duct tape is like the force-there is a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together.
~~~
it is not what a teenager know that bothers his parents. it is how he found out!
~~~
no job is so simple that it cannot be done wrong.
~~~
you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
~~~
only adults have difficulty with childproof bottles.
~~~
the sum of the intelligence on the planet is constant, but the population is increasing.
~~~
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
~~~
**FLASH** Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery.
~~~
Everything I needed to know in life, I learned in kindergarten. Like, always check for extraneous roots when squaring to remove the radicals.
~~~
Legion of the Damned - Reserve. Fighting for the Forces of Evil One Weekend A Month
~~~
When opportunity calls, one must answer, even when it demands that one spend the next hour of one's life thinking up things to do with rotten fish.
~~~
I Found Jesus, He was in my trunk when I got back from Tijuana.
~~~
You're a figment of my imagination - which just goes to show what a sick and twisted mind *I've* got.
~~~
Its not the tears we soak up that do us any hurt... its the ones we ignore.
~~~
A "Normal" person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. (You know, "Each person puts in a pretty color and it comes out grey.")
-- Alan Sherman
~~~
It's not that I'm bitter and twisted, it's just that I'm bitter and twisted 
-- Deth
~~~
Some drink from the Fountain of Knowledge...others only gargle.
~~~
Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed.
~~~
Sex between a man and a woman can be a wonderful thing... If you're between the right man and the right woman.
~~~
There are many intelligent races in the universe. They all have cats.
~~~
You're just jealous because the little voices are talking to me.
~~~
It's your hell. You burn in it!
~~~
This is more fun than putting a gerbil down my pants.
~~~
I wouldn't want to be normal even if I knew what it was.
~~~
I'm not as normal as I look.
~~~
Rock is dead... Long live paper and scissors!
~~~
Exercise before kinky sex - you should be fit to be tied.
~~~
I want to be like all the other nonconformists...
~~~
Incorrigible Punster, Do Not Incorrige
~~~
667, the neighbor of the beast!
~~~
When Cthulu calls, He calls 1-800-Collect
~~~
If you can't dress weird, why dress at all?
~~~
It's you and me against the world: We attack at dawn.
~~~
Little Old Ladies Sewing Circle And Terrorist Society
~~~
Once you pull the pin on Mr. Grenade he is no longer your friend.
~~~
Join The Illuminati, And See The World, Differently
~~~
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
~~~
Everyone Is Someone Else's Weirdo
~~~
Mop And Glow, Official Floor Wax Of The Chernobyl Clean Up Team
~~~
Assassins Inc. We Aim to Please
~~~
OK I'm weird, but I'm Saving Up to be Eccentric.
~~~
I'm in shape. Round is a shape.
~~~
I am a god in human form and completely demented. It works for me. 
-- HoseHead
~~~
A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.
~~~
He who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead.
~~~
I stared into the abyss. The abyss stared into me. Neither of us liked what we saw.
~~~
If only there was some indication that the Universe was doing it on purpose...
~~~
If cats had longer attention spans, they'd be running the world.
~~~
Purring, the sound of a cat manufacturing cuteness.
~~~
I do more work after 2 AM than most people do all day.
~~~
Sleep deprivation is fun - you see such pretty colors.
~~~
I'm not myself today. Maybe I'm you.
~~~
Possessor of a mind not merely twisted but actually sprained
~~~
And before you get all happy, be informed that your punishment does not include pain or sex.
~~~
Does it have enhanced IR vision, a particle beam weapon with target acquisition, highly amplified arm/leg systems, self-contained atmosphere and a small nuclear plant? No? Not much of a "power suit", is it?
~~~
I'll have some of what that gentlebeing on the floor is drinking.
~~~
This IS a costume. I'm a homicidal maniac - they look just like everyone else.
~~~
In the beginning there was nothing, And God said "let there be light". And there was still nothing, But you could see it.
~~~
I'm not sure that some of the sk.sympatico tech people I've overheard could tell you how to get the cup holder to extend, let alone where your CD-ROM is.
-- Sirilyan
~~~
Y'know, that's really... sweet. Twisted, but sweet, nonetheless.
-- Kristen
~~~
Charming and polite? As compared to a rabid wolverine with a toothache on LSD.
-- Shadowcat-
~~~
Be alert! The world needs more lerts!
~~~
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
~~~
Honest, Officer! The dwarf was on fire when I got here!
~~~
I worry about when I'm 30 and I reach my sexual peak, what if I'm alone in the house? I fear for the safety of all my kitchen appliances.
-- Jennifer Heath
~~~
hmmm, dwarves by mail w/ no obligation, I should look into this
-- Pixel-
~~~
Please don't ask me what the score is. I'm not even sure what game we're playing.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
I have seen the evidence. I want DIFFERENT evidence.
~~~
There's too much blood in my caffeine system.
~~~
You mean you need drugs to hallucinate?
~~~
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of iron before it can give forth its spark.
-- Henri-Frederic Amiel
~~~
I refuse to apologize for my ability - I refuse to apologize for my success - I refuse to apologize for my money.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
~~~
An indecent mind is a perpetual feast.
~~~
Humor is the only reason to live.
-- Marcel Duchamp
~~~
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it.
~~~
I've tried everything else to convince you. Now I'm going to be sensible.
-- unnamed Congressman
~~~
J : It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
K : Try it.
-- Men in Black
~~~
Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
-- Philip K. Dick
~~~
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune, Manual of Muad'Dib by Princess Irulan
~~~
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important.
If it is not, what is?
He could not endure those remembered words.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, spoken by Gaverel Rocannon, Rocannon's World
~~~
What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
-- William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
~~~
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
~~~
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life (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 (Samuel Clemens)
~~~
The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
~~~
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
-- Albert Camus
~~~
Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.
-- Richard Bach, Spoken by Leslie Parrish, The Bridge Across Forever
~~~
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.
-- Unknown
~~~
...that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything - that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it - and its choice to be there - are gone.
-- Barbara Hambly, Spoken by John Aversin, Dragonsbane
~~~
We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.
-- Jeff Marder (the question, of course, is whether this is good or bad)
~~~
It's so much more friendly with two.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
~~~
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
-- Dr. Seuss
~~~
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton
~~~
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr .
-- Muhammad
~~~
A person will be called to account on Judgement Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.
-- Talmud
~~~
Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.
-- Virgil Thomson (Advice given at age 93)
~~~
God looked upon His work and saw that it was good. That is where the clergy take issue with him.
-- Elbert Hubbard
~~~
Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness;
And I like the whole truth,
but there are nights I only need forgiveness.
-- Dar Williams, My Friends, The End of Summer
~~~
After I run your program, let's make love like crazed weasels, OK?
~~~
Well, the Goddess said, your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.
-- Diane Duane, _The Door into Shadow_
~~~
I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'
-- Mike Godwin
~~~
The more laws, the less justice.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero De Officiis
~~~
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
~~~
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
~~~
Wit is educated insolence.
-- Aristotle (284-322 B.C.)
~~~
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates (470-399 B.C.)
~~~
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de St. Exupery
~~~
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
-- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
~~~
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-- Perelman
~~~
America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
~~~
Belief is not the beginning but the end of all knowledge.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
I am as frustrated ... as a pyromaniac in a petrified forest.
-- A. Whitney Brown
~~~
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
~~~
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
~~~
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas
~~~
The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but hold hands.
-- Alexander Penney
~~~
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
-- Werner Karl Heisenberg
~~~
Work and play are words to describe the same thing under different conditions.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
-- Warren Beatty
~~~
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis
~~~
progasm /proh'gaz-m/ /n./ [University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the completion of a program or other computer-related project.
-- The Jargon File
~~~
program /n./ 1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. 2. An exercise in experimental epistemology.
-- The Jargon File
~~~
JWs: If we were to tell you that there is an army of angels waiting in Heaven, and on the Day of Judgement they will be unleashed upon the world to slay all the unbelievers, what would your response be?
Response: Preemptive nuclear strike.
~~~
Eskimo: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?
Priest: No, not if you did not know.
Eskimo: Then why did you tell me?
-- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
~~~
A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.
-- Heraclitus, 500 BC
~~~
If it happens, it must be possible.
-- Murphy's Laws
~~~
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
-- H. L. Mencken
~~~
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
-- Adam Smith
~~~
Morals - all correct moral rules - derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival above the individual level - as in the father dying to save his children.
-- Robert Heinlein, _Starship Troopers_
~~~
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
~~~
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
-- Ambrose Redmoon
~~~
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.
-- Victor Hugo
~~~
Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
-- Teddy Roosevelt
~~~
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],  '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
~~~
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
-- Eric Temple Bell
~~~
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
~~~
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
-- Terry Pratchett
~~~
There ain't no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something.
-- Thomas Alva Edison
~~~
To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say. 
-- Lionel Tiger
~~~
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-- Adam Smith
~~~
Veritas vos liberabit. - the truth will set you free.
~~~
I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
-- Orson Welles
~~~
I say violence is necessary.  It is as American as cherry pie.
-- H. Rap Brown, speech at Washington, 27 July 1967,
~~~
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like the truth, he need never try to write romances.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter [1850]
~~~
Elli:  That - wasn't the proposition I was expecting, is all. Excuse me.  I fear I am becoming incurably low-minded.
Ethan:  You can't help that, I'm sure, Ethan said tolerantly. Being female, and all that.
-- Ethan of Athos, Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.... The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
-- John Steinbeck
~~~
Unless it's mad, passionate,
Extraordinary love,
It's a waste of your time.
~~~
There are too many mediocre things in life
Love shouldn't be one of them.
-- Movie: Dream for an Insomniac
~~~
Kindness in words creates confidence,
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness,
Kindness in giving creates love
-- Lao-Tze
~~~
I'd almost feel angry about wasting my youth figuring out computers instead of living life if I didn't make such a boatload of moolah these days because of it.
-- Alex
~~~
My wife thinks I'm nosy. At least that's what she scribbles in her diary.
-- Drake Sather
~~~
MTV, X-rated video, science fiction theatre, Harlequin Romances, CD-ROM, and the _National Inquirer_ combined couldn't compete with what goes on behind the closed door of the secret side of our minds.
-- Robert Fulghum, Maybe, Maybe Not
~~~
I once began a list of all the contradictory notions I hold:
Look before you leap./ He who hesitates is lost.
Two heads are better than one./ If you want something done, do it yourself.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained./ Better safe than sorry.
Out of sight, out of mind./ Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
You can't tell a book by its cover./ Clothes make the man.
Many hands make light work./ Too many cooks spoil the broth.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks./ It's never too late to learn.
Never sweat the small stuff./ God is in the details.
And so on. The list goes on forever. Once I got so caught up in this kind of thinking that I wore two buttons on my smock when I was teaching art. One said, 'Trust me, I'm a teacher.' The other replied, 'Question authority.'
-- Robert Fulghum, Maybe, Maybe Not
~~~
...follow the example of Beth Graham, the envy of all the girls in my summer camp. It seemed every guy at camp wanted to be Beth's boyfriend. None of the girls could figure it out. Beth wasn't exactly the supermodel type: She had braces and a prominent nose, a flat chest and big thighs. It took me an entire summer of watching Beth closely to figure out why all the guys liked her so much: She had incredible self-confidence. She didn't seem the least bit insecure about her decidedly average looks. In fact, she seemed proud. Because she was so comfortable with herself, others felt comfortable around her...So instead of beating yourself up because your hips and thighs are full, try not to focus too much on the way you look. If Beth Graham...could do it, so can you.
-- Debra Kent
~~~
At night my mind does not much care if what it thinks is here or there. It tells me stories, it invents and makes up things that don't make sense. I do not know why it does this stuff. The real world seems quite weird enough.
~~~
We don't need torture chambers - we got them right between our ears.
-- Mr. Odenwald
~~~
...one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Murphy's Law does not always hold, says Grandfather Sam. Every once in a while the fundamental laws of the universe seem to be momentarily suspended, and not only does everything go right, nothing seems to be able to keep it from going right. It's not always something as dramatic as the long bomb or the slam-dunk that wins ball games. Ever drop a glass in the sink and have it bounce nine times and not even chip? Ever come out after work to find your lights have been on all day and your battery's dead but you're parked on a hill and you let your old hoopy roll and it fires the first time you pop the clutch and off you roar with a high heart? Ever pull out that drawer in your desk that has a ten-year accumulation of junk in it - pull it too far and too fast--and just as it's about to vomit its contents all over the room you get a knee under it and stagger back hopping on one foot doing a balancing act like the Great Zucchini and you don't lose it? A near-miss at an intersection; the glass of knocked-over milk that waltzes across the table but doesn't spill; the deposit that beat your rubber check to the bank because there was a holiday you forgot about; the lump in your breast that turned out to be benign; the heart attack that turned out to be gas; picking the right lane for once in a traffic jam; opening the door of your car with a coat hanger through the wing window on the first try. And on and on and on and on.
-- Robert Fulghum, Maybe, Maybe Not
~~~
Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
-- Maimonides
~~~
In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.
-- Tao Te Ching
~~~
I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
-- Marcus, Babylon 5
~~~
Freedom also includes the right to mismanage your own affairs.
~~~
I'm dating your imaginary friend? You know, that explains a lot...
~~~
You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?
I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too.
~~~
By comparison, oaking is like pining, only stronger, and it burns hotter, and it's harder to split.
~~~
Sometimes it seems as if homosexuality has gone from the love that dare not speak its name to the love that talks about itself incessantly.
~~~
I don't have a license to kill. I have a learner's permit.
~~~
She was a tiny, delicate girl. Tiny. Delicate.
Like a cell of botulism.
~~~
Apt to remove clothes and fondle the shrubbery at a moment's notice.
~~~
Year after year, it's the same routine,
And I grow so weary of the sound of screams...
~~~
What about love?
Overrated. Biochemically no different from eating large quantities of chocolate.
~~~
The young lady with the Uzi... Is she single?
~~~
If I'm a ferocious maiden, can I demand a tithe of dragons?
~~~
Sexual arousal is no excuse for bad grammar!
-- Karen
~~~
...of course, Johanna's hair is stunning when braided, too, especially if she whacks you with it...
~~~
...a pre-release version, even more prone to crashes than Wagner...
~~~
A set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill and a black lace bra.
~~~
I have a process that goes around forking children, most of which are currently, presumably injured from fork wounds...
~~~
Lick me 'til ice cream.
~~~
Humans are not rational beings. Humans are rationalizing beings
~~~
I am not documented, but I have rather extensive on-line help.
-- erinp
~~~
Love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so much fun.
~~~
A member of the immoral minority.
~~~
If I want your opinion, I'll read it in your entrails.
~~~
I support family values - Addams family values.
~~~
I am not a monotheist - the world looks as though it were designed by a committee.
~~~
The heck with top and bottom - I want relationships with strangeness and charm.
~~~
The Goddess does not seek worship - She rejoices in being vividly imagined.
~~~
Cthulhu isn't really his name, he just has a speech impediment.
~~~
Cthulhu Express - When it absolutely, positively has to be turned into an eldritch crawling horror in eons.
~~~
Cooking is great - it's a socially acceptable excuse to play with knives and fire.
~~~
Computers eat time - we only think they run on electricity.
~~~
Electrical components run on smoke. If it leaks out, they don't work.
~~~
Computers save time like kudzu prevents soil erosion.
~~~
It's all geek to me...
~~~
Coffee makes it possible to get out of bed.
Chocolate makes it worthwhile.
~~~
Chocolate will never replace sex....unless it's VERY good chocolate...
~~~
Cheer up - if the economy collapses completely, you won't owe your student loan to anyone!
~~~
Being a model means wearing clothes and not eating. I'd rather eat and take off my clothes.
~~~
I don't think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about!
~~~
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose both looks like carelessness.
~~~
I mean, a sensitive guy would know when to shut up and look like a puppy dog...
~~~
In the heat of the moment, I said some unforgivable things.  Please call me, I've thought of a few more.
~~~
It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.
~~~
She who stoops to conquer usually wears a low-cut dress.
~~~
If I blow your mind, do you promise not to think in my mouth?
~~~
I'm trying to tell myself not to talk to myself, but that seems like a lost cause.
~~~
Nations go to war over women like you, It's just a form of appreciation.
~~~
As I let go of my shoulds and feelings of guilt, I can get in touch with my Inner Sociopath.
~~~
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
~~~
I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me.
~~~
Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots.
~~~
My body is a temple. Do you want to come over for midnight mass?
~~~
...you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, children and villages after being a litterbug?
~~~
'I am that merry wanderer of the night?' 'I am that giggling dangerous totally bloody psychotic menace to life and limb,' more like it.
~~~
you can screw everybody i've ever known
but i still won't talk to you on the phone
~~~
So how do we call this function?
Heeeeeeeere, function!
~~~
You say the unexamined life is not worth living. Well the examined life isn't either. And it's a great deal more painful.
~~~
Here I am offering you my body, and you're offering me semantics?
~~~
Life lost some of its beauty when truth drugs replaced thumb screws and hot irons.
~~~
Thank you for making my day a little bit more surreal...
~~~
Of course God loves you - He's just not ready to make a commitment.
~~~
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring.
~~~
Forget her... That girl will tear your heart out, put it in a blender and hit frappe.
~~~
Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.
~~~
Now that I realize I've been suffering from a simple psychotic depression, I feel empowered.
~~~
Of course he has a knife. We all have knives! It's 1183 and we're all barbarians!
~~~
I am decent. I also happen to be naked.
~~~
You said don't shoot him, right? Well I didn't; I strangled him. If you didn't want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone with him?
~~~
I would have transferred to see that...
Really? I was at MIT: my housemates never noticed...
~~~
But if it's called tourist season, why can't we shoot at them?
~~~
I'm not apologizing for what I did do.
I'm apologizing for what I didn't do.
~~~
What are you doing?
Isn't it obvious? I'm trying to seduce you.
~~~
Nice guys finish last, and bring you breakfast in bed.
~~~
You are nuts! They should cover you in chocolate and sell you as a snack!
~~~
The rubber prophylactic: How it functions under stress
~~~
It's so confused it simply has to be a man.
~~~
You've stolen my heart away, but that's okay, I have three or four left in my freezer.
~~~
Some people say that you shouldn't tempt fate, and for them I could not disagree. But I've never learned anything from playing it straight: I say fate should not tempt me!
~~~
We're going to have quite an orgy of Johann Sebastian.
Wouldn't that be a Bachanalia?
~~~
Loving you was like loving the dead.
~~~
Dedicated to all those who have loved unconditionally only to have their hearts unanaesthetically ripped out.
~~~
Base not your joy upon the deeds of others, for what is given can be taken away.
~~~
you can hold me only if you too will fall away from all these useless fears and chains
~~~
I now seek a single recipe which will, by itself, embody the plight of man in a world ruled by an unfeeling God, as well as providing the eater with at least one ingredient from each of the four basic food groups.
~~~
futon: the fundamental particle of human inertia. emitted by comfy chairs, couches, and beds (bed futon fields are strongest in the morning).
~~~
There isn't a mome rath born who can outgrabe me!
~~~
...great thundering herds of statistical atoms...
~~~
...a momentary lapse of denial...
~~~
There is a world of difference between "I never want to hurt you," and "I want to never hurt you,"...
~~~
If the floor below the first floor is called de basement, then the floor below it should be known as de bauchery...
~~~
Gentle Ladies of Death and Destruction
~~~
Brothel of Dreams: If you build it, they will come.
~~~
You might be a technopagan if... your altar has a keyboard.
~~~
You might be a technopagan if... your familiar is a mouse.
~~~
You might be a technopagan if... your cone of power has a surge suppressor.
~~~
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
~~~
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony number 9.
~~~
...a certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.
~~~
I would like to help you out. Now which way did you come in?
~~~
all souls last forever
so we need never fear goodbye
~~~
winter comes and winds blow colder
some grew wiser, you just grew older
~~~
Whatcha doing, love?
I'm naming the stars.
You can't see the stars, love. That's the ceiling. Also it's day.
No, I can see them. But I've named them all the same name, and there's terrible confusion.
~~~
So does looking at guns make you wanna have sex?
I'm 17. Looking at *linoleum* makes me wanna have sex.
~~~
I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away.
~~~
I think I speak for everyone here when I say, huh?
~~~
I wish dating was like slaying. You know, simple, direct, stake through the heart, no muss, no fuss.
~~~
Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.
~~~
Rif? Oh Riffy... It's your darling Gwynn! Show yourself so I can masticate your heart and devour your soul!
~~~
So the prince kissed sleeping beauty, and she opened her eyes and said, If you were a real prince you'd put on the coffee and give me ten more minutes.
~~~
Use your charm and romantic mystique to win her over.  Employ a vast array of pet names like 'My little wombat,' 'My little armadillo,' 'My little wood pigeon.'
~~~
Now, what starts with the letter C? Cookie start with C! Let's think of other things that start with C... Ahhh, who cares about other things?
-- Cookie Monster
~~~
Creativity is a mysterious process involving large blocks of aged cheese, a table fan, and a balloon filled with M&Ms. Used properly, these items, plus a little bit of luck, can produce award-winning results.
~~~
I wonder if my mom believed me when I said I had those straps on the bed for safety's sake...
~~~
Oh we're all smart and we're all beautiful and we should all go and find something to blow up in a tasteful manner.
~~~
I realize that each day is a gift. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to exchange around seven thousand five hundred of them.
~~~
I am looking for someone who can take as much as I give,
And give back as much as I need, and still have the will to live.
~~~
What you don't know about women's only a drop in the ocean, Next to what you don't know about me.
~~~
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
-- Dorothy Parker
~~~
Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain,
And bolts the door against her heart out wailing in the rain.
~~~
The ladies men admire, I've heard, would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light; they'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three, nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure, nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints... so far, I've had no complaints.
~~~
And though I'll think of you, I guess, until the day I die,
I think miss you less and less as every day goes by...
~~~
...or until we can find a proper blood sacrifice to offer up in the middle of the computer room. And no, I don't know anything about that dark stain in the middle of the floor...
~~~
Witches don't melt when you pour water on them, witches melt when you give them backrubs!
~~~
Are you mad? Do you know the kind of things that live up there? Griffins, firedrakes, colddrakes - things without names 'cause no one who's seen 'em has lived long enough to give them any name besides AAAARGH!
~~~
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose burning mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowin' breast.
~~~
I'm not shy, I'm just studying my prey.
~~~
If this makes any sense to you, you have a big problem.
~~~
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you flee.
~~~
Whoever called it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.
~~~
It's been so long since I made love I can't even remember who gets tied up.
~~~
 ...but they threw me out of that college.
Why?
I blew up a building.
Political activism?
Chemistry major.
~~~
But what if it's in the bathroom?
Impossible, madam. Snakes, as you know, live in mortal fear of... tile.
~~~
blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never fail to be amused.
~~~
I'm gonna take you to the zoo and feed you to the yaks.
~~~
Alone and lonely are not the same thing.
~~~
My reputation is having more fun than I am. Again.
~~~
Pick up your mind, you're getting the gutter dirty!
~~~
I don't like love stories because they generally detract from the explosions, biomechanoids and deadly viruses.
-- thessaly
~~~
Ruth gave me a piece of her mind this morning. I am grateful, of course, but I don't know where to put it or, for that matter, what it is.
~~~
Would I lie to you? Would I sell you a dud?
Just sign on the line, could you possibly write it in blood...?
~~~
He wants to kiss you. Will you condescend?
~~~
rational romantic mystic cynical idealist
~~~
I'd hate to alienate anybody who's looking for a prom date to Valhalla.
~~~
I am such a slut when it comes to intelligence.
-- kara
~~~
I got my car realigned yesterday... Turns out it's Chaotic Evil...
~~~
Good literature is about Love and War.
Trash fiction is about Sex and Violence.
~~~
And I gave her the "Yes dear, and then what did the little green aliens do?" look...
~~~
Humans react to new experiences in one of four ways: 'Ah-hah!', 'Ho-hum', 'Oy vey!' or 'Yum Yum!'. All else is mere elaboration.
-- David Brin
~~~
Homes for the homeless! Food for the foodless! Ruth for the ruthless!
~~~
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
-- Lily Tomlin
~~~
She's sweet and exquisite and about as harmless as a twenty foot sphere of solid plutonium.
~~~
love is never simple with a complicated girl
~~~
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.
~~~
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, but degenerated into a vice.
~~~
The love of maidens is, to him, as interesting as the taxes!
Would that it were! He pays his taxes.
~~~
Time was when Love and I were well acquainted.
~~~
So he decreed, in words succinct,
that all who flirted, leered or winked,
(Unless connubially linked),
should forthwith be beheaded.
~~~
Now then, what is it? Can't you see I'm soliloquizing?  You have interrupted an apostrophe, sir!
~~~
And you won't hate me because I'm just a little teeny weeny wee bit bloodthirsty, will you?
~~~
I am a creationist; I refuse to believe that I could have evolved from humans.
~~~
It worked! Now if we can just keep it from exploding!
~~~
All my filth is in alphabetical order. This, for example, was under 'H' for 'Toy'.
~~~
I want to see more of you around the lab.
Fine. I'll gain weight.
~~~
If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want... Well, that's where you're right.
~~~
And not everything is gonna be the way you think it ought to be,
Seems like every time I try to make it right it all comes down on me,
Please say honestly you won't give up on me... and I shall believe.
~~~
license plate seen on a VW beetle: FEATURE
~~~
Avoid needless embarrassment. Practice the correct pronunciation of your god's name in the privacy of your room before chanting it in public.
~~~
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
~~~
Never go out with an MIT student; they are horrible dates. More than any other college men, they are only after one thing: Sleep.
~~~
The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.
~~~
I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.
~~~
Caffeine-ridden angst is not your friend.
~~~
Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.
~~~
Anything that is good and useful is in some way connected to chocolate.
~~~
Few things are as ego-boosting as being kicked out of an anarchy convention for unruly behaviour.
~~~
Actually, most women look pale and ghastly when concealing a chilly dagger in their bosoms.
~~~
If there is anyone I have not offended, I deeply apologize.
-- Brahms
~~~
If you hold x constant, and you let the others run wild and amok...
~~~
I don't need to compromise on my principles, because they don't have any bearing on what happens to me anyways!
-- Calvin
~~~
The Fuorlornis Fire Dragons were revered throughout the lands of Brequinda for their savage beauty, their noble ways, and their habit of biting people who didn't revere them.
~~~
I am the Devil Dragon of the Dark! The Destroyer from the Depths! The Duke of Destruction and Deathmonger Diabolical! I am the Dread Demon of Damnation, Danger and Death!
Oh great... We're not even through the D's yet...
~~~
Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
~~~
I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
~~~
Perpetual anticipation is good for the soul but it's bad for the heart.
~~~
Now there are two possibilities: a) I could ravish her, b) I could nap...
~~~
Our inventions were unique, remember? Darling...I was limping for a week, you caught the flu...
~~~
I have always associated you - very happily - with chaos.
~~~
Love is chemistry, sex is physics... but kinky takes engineering!
~~~
...and also a book called "Ninety-two Entirely Evil Things To Do".
~~~
But I don't want to go among mad people! said Alice.
Oh you can't help that, said the Cat, We're all mad here.
~~~
She's been everybody else's girl, maybe one day she'll be her own...
~~~
Just before our love got lost you said, I'm as constant as the northern star.
And I said, Constantly in the darkness, where's that at?
~~~
go to him, stay with him, but be prepared to bleed...
~~~
I have a cause: it's Smut. I'm for it.
~~~
You're dangerous because you're honest
You're dangerous because you don't know what you want...
~~~
Will it make it easier on you
Now you got someone to blame?
~~~
In perfect isolation, here behind my wall...
~~~
What shall we use to fill the empty spaces where we used to talk?
~~~
In the silence between whisper and shout, the space between wonder and doubt...
~~~
i'm young enough to remember the future...
~~~
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumors,
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor.
~~~
when the colors move apart and i wonder if you want to stay.
~~~
You are acting like a calm, rational person. This scares me.
~~~
Have a day.
~~~
I've finally got a good grip on reality: now I can strangle it!
~~~
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
-- Joseph Heller, Catch22
~~~
Nigel gave the lamp a cautious buff and small smoking red letters appeared in the air.
Hi, Nigel read aloud, Do not put down the lamp because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity.
-- Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
~~~
Respect for sovereignty, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.
-- Richard Bach, Thoughts of Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever
~~~
It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost ...
-- Richard Bach, Spoken by Leslie Parrish, The Bridge Across Forever
~~~
We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live.
-- Richard Bach, spoken by Leslie Parrish The Bridge Across Forever
~~~
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.
-- Goethe
~~~
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
-- William J.H. Boetcker
~~~
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
-- Lyndon Johnson
~~~
Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.
-- John J. Miller, And Hope to Die (in Jokertown Shuffle Wild Cards IX)
~~~
Are cats lazy? Well, more power to them if they are. Which one of us has not entertained the dream of doing just as he likes, when and how he likes, and as much as he likes?
-- Fernand Mery
~~~
I was saying, continued the Rocket, I was saying - What was I saying?
You were talking about yourself, replied the Roman Candle.
Of course; I knew I was discussing some interesting subject when I was so rudely interrupted.
-- Oscar Wilde, The Remarkable Rocket
~~~
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
-- H. L. Mencken
~~~
Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes
~~~
We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
-- Larry Wall
~~~
Best of all he liked to sleep. Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a good night's sleep and wouldn't miss one for the world, but found it as anything halfway near enough. He liked to be asleep by half-past eleven in the morning if possible, and if that should come directly after a nice leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A little light breakfast and a quick trip to the bathroom while fresh linen was applied to his bed is really all the activity he liked to undertake, and he took care that it didn't janate the sleepiness out of him and disturb his afternoon of napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep, and this he regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through the whole of 1986 and hadn't missed it.
-- Douglas Adams, The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
~~~
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
-- Voltaire
~~~
To change one's life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions.
-- William James
~~~
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
-- James A. Froude
~~~
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
-- Joseph Addison
~~~
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
-- William Faulkner
~~~
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
-- Samuel Richardson
~~~
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
-- Abraham Lincoln
~~~
One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us.
-- Virgil A. Kraft
~~~
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
-- Olin Miller
~~~
Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
-- Sir William Haley
~~~
The world does not pay for what a person knows. But it pays for what a person does with what he knows.
-- Laurence Lee
~~~
Education is an admirable thing, but it well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar.
-- Emperor Sigismund
~~~
There are three rules to writing fiction. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
-- Somerset Maugham
~~~
I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters.
-- Stephen King
~~~
To hold a pen is to be at war.
-- Voltaire
~~~
Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.
-- William Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida)
~~~
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-- Rudyard Kipling
~~~
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
-- Jack London
~~~
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams
~~~
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
-- Truman Capote
~~~
It is a great thing to write. To be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creation.
-- Flaubert
~~~
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
-- Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant
~~~
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it servers,
Or lose our ventures.
-- Julius Caesar, Act iv, Sc. 3, William Shakespeare
~~~
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
-- The Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Sc. 1, William Shakespeare
~~~
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-- The Tempest, Act iv. Sc. 1, William Shakespeare
~~~
In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar, a practice which is still very much practiced.
-- Helen Rowland
~~~
Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.
-- Gloria Steinem
~~~
Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which is never advisable.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
-- Katherine Hepburn
~~~
Marriage is bliss. Ignorance is bliss. Ergo...
~~~
I told my wife that a husband is like a fine wine; he gets better with age. The next day, she locked me in the cellar.
~~~
The man says: With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly good I thee endow.
-- Book of Common Prayer
~~~
Compromise: An amiable arrangement between husband and wife whereby they agree to let her have her own way.
~~~
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~
... We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest
~~~
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
-- John Fowles, The Magus
~~~
Man errs as long as he strives.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
~~~
I love those who yearn for the impossible.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
~~~
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
~~~
If you stop searching, you stop living, because then you're dwelling in the past. If you're not reaching forward to any growth or future, you might as well be dead.
-- Wynn Bullock
~~~
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
-- Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City
~~~
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.
-- Havelock Ellis
~~~
It is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obsesses the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations, wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into innumerable and inane controversies and fancies.
-- Francis Bacon
~~~
But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.
-- Francis Bacon
~~~
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
~~~
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
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.
-- Poul Anderson
~~~
To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
~~~
It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.
-- Josh Billings
~~~
It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.
-- Mary Henle
~~~
The creator is both detached and committed, free and yet ensnared, concerned but not too much so. ... If motivation is too strong the person is blinded; if the objective situation is too tightly structured, the person sees none of its alternative possibilities.
-- Robert Macleod
~~~
The first step is always to succeed in becoming surprised - to notice that there is something funny going on.
-- David Gelernter, The Muse in the Machine
~~~
The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
~~~
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.
-- Christopher Isherwood
~~~
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
-- Edwin Land
~~~
'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end; then stop.'
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 12
~~~
What's really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we're alive for only a limited period of time, and we'll spend most of our lives working. That being the case, I believe one of the most important priorities is to do whatever we do as well as we can. We should take pride in that.
-- Victor Kiam
~~~
A beautiful woman is the hell of the soul,
The purgatory of the purse,
And the paradise of the eyes
-- La Fontenelle
~~~
If we could live without passion,
Maybe we'd know some kind of peace,
But we would be hollow;
Empty rooms, shuddered and dark,...
Without passion, we'd be truly dead.
-- Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
~~~
It is easier to be a lover than a husband,
For the same reason that it is more difficult
To show a ready wit all day long
Than to produce an occasional bon mot.
-- Honore de Balzac
~~~
Love is that feeling you get
When you run across a field,
Full of raving wolves,
You know that feeling you have
When you get arrested for the 1st time.
Sometimes we think love is an emotion,
But it actually is DEATH.
-- The Swedish Chef; Unknown Author
~~~
Remember that you don't choose love.
Love chooses you.
All you can really do
Is accept it for all its mystery
when it comes into your life.
Feel the way it fills you to overflowing,
Then reach out and give it away.
Give it back to the person
Who brought it alive in you.
Give it to others
Who deem it poor in spirit.
Give it to the world around you in anyway you can.
~~~
I guarantee it won't be easy.
I guarantee that at one point or another
One of us is going to want to leave.
But I also guarantee that
If I don't ask you to be mine
I am going to regret it
For the rest of my life
Because I know in my heart
You are the only one for me
-- From the movie The Runaway Bride
~~~
Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes.  It make people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt.
-- Judith Olney
~~~
I did not know you were traveling too.
Why? she said, letting fall the hand with which she was about to take hold of the handrail and her face shown with irrepressible joy and animation.
Why? he repeated, looking straight into her eyes.
You know I am going in order to be where you are she said. I can't help it.
-- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
~~~
Joy is love exalted; peace is love in response; long-suffering is love enduring; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in action; faith is love on the battlefield; meekness is love in tough situations; and temperance is love in training
-- D.L. Moody
~~~
I have resolved that if you are afraid of love your heart will break anyway. Only in not half so nice a fashion as when you let somebody love you
-- Ann Rinaldi
~~~
Heaven or Hell in the hereafter will be luggage or the lack of it. The ones who recognized that love is enough and that possessions are borrowed pastimes, will float free through the exit sign, their arms ready to hug their friends, their toothbrush in their pocket. The ones who stayed up late, gathering and gathering like demented bees, will find that you can take it with you.  The joke is that you have to carry it yourself.
-- Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places
~~~
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get.  It's what you're expected to give-which is everything.
~~~
Love is when you look into someone's eyes and suddenly you go all the way inside their soul and you both know it.
~~~
You can admire a women for her beauty, but you can only respect and love a women for her heart.
~~~
We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
-- Samuel Butler
~~~
Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly.
-- Louis Ginsberg
~~~
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything and two minus one equals nothing.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
~~~
The only genuine love worthy of the name is unconditional.
-- John Powell
~~~
Love without kisses is not love.
~~~
Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside.
-- Margaret Walker
~~~
Thou art to me a delicious torment.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
Whatever our souls are made up, his and mine are the same.
-- Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
~~~
Love unreturned is like a question without an answer.
~~~
Love is the most painful feeling in the world, but the greatest joy is to be loved...
-- R. Fort Wayne
~~~
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
when the winds are breathing low,
and the stars are shining bright.
-- Percy Byssthe Shelley
~~~
My love has given you my heart and my soul.  They are yours to do with as you please.  Please be careful with them.
-- Robert Davis
~~~
Sometimes I wonder if life is really worth it, then I look at your smile and I know it is.
~~~
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies,
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
-- William Shakespeare (Venus and Adonis)
~~~
Men adore women.
Our mothers taught us to.
Women do not adore men;
Women are amused by men.
We are a source of chuckles.
-- Garrison Keillor's The Book of Guys
~~~
Sometimes I hold you,
Too caught up in me to see,
I'm holding a fortune
That heaven has given to me.
-- Now and Forever, a song by Richard Marx
~~~
Hatred stirs up dissension.
But love covers over all wrongs.
-- Proverbs 10:12
~~~
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive;
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academies,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world,
Else, none at all in aught proves excellent.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Lavish spending can be disastrous.
Don't buy any lavishes for a while.
~~~
There are some things about you that I like;
I just can't put my fingers on them.
~~~
That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call tragedy... The miserable fraction of Science which our United Mankind, in a wide universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted to all?
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
~~~
The game women play is men
-- Adam Smith
~~~
I have found men
Who didn't know how to kiss.
I've always found time to teach them!
-- Mae West
~~~
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-- Zelda Fitzgerald
~~~
Why do the wicked always form groups, whereas the righteous do not? Because the wicked, walking in darkness, need company, but the righteous, who live in light, do not fear being alone.
~~~
A fool without fear is sometimes wiser than an angel with fear.
-- Lady Nancy Astor My Two Countries
~~~
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
-- Dorothy Bernard
~~~
The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
-- Krishnamurti
~~~
Fear is nature's warning signal to get busy.
-- Henry C. Link
~~~
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
-- H. P. Lovecraft
~~~
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.
-- Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
~~~
Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.
-- Publilius Syrus
~~~
For this is Wisdom; to love, to live
To take what fate, or the Gods may give.
To ask no question, to make no prayer,
To kiss the lips and caress the hair,
Speed passion's ebb as you greet its flow
To have, - to hold - and - in time, - let go!
-- Laurence Hope
~~~
I was born to catch dragons in their dens
And pick flowers
To tell tales and laugh away the morning
To drift and dream like a lazy stream
And walk barefoot across sunshine days.
-- James Kavanaugh Sunshine Days and Foggy Nights
~~~
Hearts are not to be had as a gift
Hearts are to be earned...
-- William Butler Yeats
~~~
Have you ever been in love?
Horrible, isn't it?
It makes you so vulnerable.
It opens your chest
And it opens your heart
And it means someone can get inside you
And mess you up.
You build up all these defenses.
You build up this whole armor,
For years, so nothing can hurt you,
Then one stupid person,
No different from any other stupid person,
Wanders into your stupid life...
You give them a piece of you.
They don't ask for it.
They do something dumb one day
Like kiss you, or smile at you,
And then your life isn't your own anymore.
Love takes hostages. It gets inside you.
It eats you out and leaves you
Crying in the darkness,
So a simple phrase like
'Maybe we should just be friends'
Or 'how very perceptive'
Turns into a glass splinter
Working its way into your heart.
It hurts.
Not just in the imagination.
Not just in the mind.
It's a soul-hurt,
A body-hurt, a real
gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.
I hate love.
-- Rose Walker, in Sandman: The Kindly Ones By Neil Gaiman
~~~
Does God punish or reward us with love?
~~~
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
~~~
Real children don't go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs.
-- Susan, the ultimate sensible governess (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
~~~
Let's see, now... in HOGFATHER there are a number of stabbings, someone's killed by a man made of knives, someone's killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe.  It's a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell.
-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett
~~~
I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a Stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to *bring* money into the state, not merely circulate it.
-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett
~~~
Speak of me as I am...
One that loved not wisely but too well
-- Othello Act 5:340-346
~~~
It isn't possible to love and to part.
You will wish that it was.
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it,
But you can never pull it out of you.
I know by experience that the poets are right:
Love is eternal.
-- E.M. Forster, A Room With a View
~~~
Starting each day, I shall remind myself
to reach out and touch you, gently,
with my words, my eyes and with my fingers,
because I don't want to miss feeling you...
You know, I'm really convinced
that if you were to define love,
the only word big enough
to engulf it all would be 'life'--
LOVE IS LIFE--in all its aspects...
And if you miss love, you miss life!
-- Leo Buscaglia
~~~
I don't want too much love... Just a steady supply.
~~~
No matter where you go,
However far away,
A part of me will be with you
And a part of you, with me, will stay
~~~
Guy, naked in front of the mirror: 'Two inches more, and I would be king'
Wife: 'Two inches less, and you'd be queen'!
~~~
I know now that I am
The reason for your smiles...
For your laughter...
I feel as though I am doing something so amazing
I have that feeling in my chest
When I am with you,
But circumstances stand in the way.
How can I say I am sorry
When I really want to say what if
When I really want to say why not
When I really want to say...Yes!.
~~~
You are making stuff very difficult. Dare a little. A feeling of anger and bitterness because nothing makes sense. A loss of hope. I know the feeling well. See, we're not as different as you'd like to believe. Stop believing what you'd *like* to believe. Open your eyes and see what is actually transpiring: You have someone who is fully willing to drop, right into your lap, their undying affection and commitment. They think you're wonderful, they're fascinated by you. They think you're magical. They're pulling for you to realize what they see so obviously. And, heck, they're even cute. And they have damn good taste in music. They'd be your Shakespeare, your Amy Ray, your Jack Kerouac, your Fabio, your postino, your Alpha and your Omega, your beginning and your end. They'd be your band-aid and your ice pack, your ace bandage and your crutches. Your bed, your rug, your shelf, your closet. They'll let you hide yourself in them, they will give the secrets you request. They'll be your shield, your knight in shining armor, your bodyguard, your nurse, your donor, your sacrificial lamb, your everything. They'd do anything for you, anything except allow you to give up on them. They are willing to fight, like ms. DiFranco says, for what they believe in. And they believe in you. They'd risk getting kicked out of a concert to bring you closer to the excitement. They'd give up their first-row ticket, they'd give up their everything, to have you. They'd drive hours on end just to see your untouchable face, and then drive hours back sobbing because they're leaving it. They'd go to the ends of the earth to win your favor, they'd tear out their own heart if you were in need of a softer one. They'd flood you with poems to try to crack the lock on your emotions, they're miserable without you. They're so very sorry for the words which flew out of their shocked lips. They've already forgiven you, before you've even asked, for anything you said and didn't mean. They're crying all the time, and missing classes, and forgetting papers, and playing "Blood and Fire" over and over again. And they want to stop. They don't care what the rest of the world, or their family, or anyone thinks of them, as long as you're on their side. They want you, they need you, they really really like you. They're silly, certain they could concoct some way to get you to like them too. They can't get your voice out of their head, and your face haunts them every time they shut their eyes. They keep having dreams that frighten them, like a broken guillotine, lingering just above their head. They're breaking fast, they're nearing the end of their rope, they need you to hold the part of them that only you can carry. And they will not let you do this to them, they will not let you do this to yourself. They believe you could gain so much from them that to allow you to walk away would be a crime. They will not give up. They adore you.
-- forward
~~~
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
-- W. H. Auden
~~~
I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among those without dreams and desires.
-- Kahlil Gibran
~~~
We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.
-- Eric Hoffer
~~~
You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and unwinnable.
-- Jesse Jackson
~~~
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
Ah, great it is to believe the dream
As we stand in youth by the starry stream;
But a greater thing is to fight life through,
And say at the end, "The dream is true!
-- Edwin Markham
~~~
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
-- George Moore
~~~
Everything starts as somebody's daydream.
-- Larry Niven
~~~
Every challenge we face can be solved by a dream.
-- David Schwartz
~~~
You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"
-- George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
~~~
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
~~~
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-- William Butler Yeats He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
~~~
[Veblen] once asked a religious student the value of her church in kegs of beer...
-- Robert L. Heilbrower, The Worldly Philosophers
~~~
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade...you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything - from A to F.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
~~~
Pooh sidled up to Piglet from behind. 'Pooh,' he whispered. 'Yes Piglet?' 'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'
-- A. A. Milne
~~~
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
-- Henry Winkler
~~~
Turns out not where but who you're with That really matters.
-- Dave Matthews, The Best of What's Around
~~~
It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
-- La Rochefoucauld
~~~
When all seems lost,  Look at love to find your way.
~~~
You think I give myself to you?
Not so my friend you do not see
My single purpose and intent-
To make you give myself to me
-- Nora Cunningham
~~~
I've learned that everyone has faults. The key to a good relationship is to work on yours not theirs.
~~~
I understand all your doubts and fears
Of laying your heart on the line
But aren't you afraid of just throwing away
A love like yours and mine?
-- Leap of Faith (song)
~~~
And when eagles forget how to fly,
When it's twenty below in July,
and when violets turn red, and roses turn blue,
I'll be still in love with you.
-- Still In Love By Brian McKnight
~~~
A mighty pain to love it is,
and 'tis a pain that pain to miss;
but of all the pains the greatest pain
is to love but love in vain.
-- Unknown Author
~~~
Three seconds to say I love you,
Three hours to explain it,
And a lifetime to prove it.
~~~
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
~~~
It is astounding to realize that perhaps half of all human knowledge has been discovered or created in the past century. But then again, so has half the bullshit.
-- D. H. Futterman, circa 1988
~~~
If we despise our brother, our worship is unreal, and forfeits every divine promise. When we come before God with our hearts full of contempt, and unreconciled with our neighbors, we are, both individually and collectively, worshipping an idol.... Not just our own anger, but the fact that someone has been hurt, damaged, or disgraced by us, who "has a cause against us," erects a barrier between us and God. Let us therefore as a Church examine ourselves, and see whether we have not often enough wronged our fellow men. Let us see whether we have tried to win popularity by falling in with the world's hatred, its contempt and its contumely. For if we do that, we are murderers. Let the fellowship of Christ so examine itself today, and ask whether, at the hour of prayer and worship, any accusing voices intervene and make its prayer vain.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 144-145, 1937.
~~~
Certainly God is more than "a name for that which concerns man ultimately." Only saints are ultimately concerned with God. What concerns most of us ultimately is our ego. The Biblical consciousness begins not with man's, but with God's concern. The supreme fact in the eyes of the prophets is the presence of God's concern for man and the absence of man's concern for God.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 127, 1955
~~~
Without reason we would not know how to apply the insights of faith to the concrete issues of living. The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
The Greeks learned in order to comprehend.
The Hebrews learned in order to revere.
The modern man learns in order to use.
Religious thinking is in perpetual danger of giving primacy to concepts and dogmas and to forfeit the immediacy of insights, to forget that the known is but a reminder of God, that the dogma is a token of His will, the expression of the inexpressible at its minimum. Concepts, words must not become screens; they must be regarded as windows.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 20, 34, 116, 1955
~~~
It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
-- Albert Einstein, 1949
~~~
Undergraduate education in research universities requires renewed emphasis on a point strongly made by John Dewey almost a century ago: learning is based on discovery guided by mentoring rather than on the transmission of information. Inherent in inquiry-based learning is an element of reciprocity: faculty can learn from students as students are learning from faculty.
-- The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, 1998
~~~
May God grant you many years to live,
for sure he must be knowing
the earth has angels all too few
and heaven is overflowing.
~~~
May you have the hindsight to know where you've been
the foresight to know where you're going
and the insight to know when you're going too far.
~~~
May you never lie, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in each other's arms. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink with all of us because we love you.
~~~
Because history is not something that used to happen. It is happening now, and we are in it. And things have to be understood, as best we can, and then things will have to be done, as best we can, and we will have to do them.
-- Mother of Demons  Eric Flint
~~~
We seem to have a problem communicating via English.  As a workaround, I'm going to restate my position in braille, on your forehead, with this mallet.
~~~
slipped on a kiss and tumbled into love
~~~
What did you do to your hair?
Well, I cut it all off and stuck it back on with superglue.
~~~
What Would Astarte Do? 
Make love AND war.
~~~
What Would Kali Do? 
Tear out their beating heart, drink their blood and dance on their trembling corpse. Then wear parts as jewelry.
~~~
warm bed, cute person.
alarm rings. it's cold outside.
sometimes i hate work.
~~~
When the only tool you've got is a knife, everything begins to look like a throat.
~~~
She's not a space cadet - she's a fully commissioned officer.
~~~
The thing that would really annoy me about that arrangement is the giraffe would slide all over the violin.
~~~
Biologists have multiple organisms.
~~~
Get your sheep together and get the flock out of here.
~~~
There are things I will not tolerate: students loitering on campus after school, horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also smoking.
~~~
I should have learned vim...instead I went skiing, wrote two novels, designed a particle accelerator, read the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary backwards, named all the atoms in a small poodle, and had a few spare hours to do some kernel hacking.
-- Phantom, #weirdochat, 3 April 2000
~~~
What's with the 'Intel Inside' warning label anyway?
~~~
I only use my computer on days of the week that end in y.
~~~
Love is Hate. War is Peace. Windows is stable.
~~~
Never over-design. Never think Hmm, maybe somebody would find this useful. Start from what you know people _have_ to have, and try to make that set smaller. When you can make it no smaller, you've reached one point. That's a good point to start from - use that for some real implementation.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
ANYBODY who does driver development without taking the real world into account is a dangerous person. Stacks of papers, diagrams and rules are absolutely WORTHLESS if you can't just understand the fact that documentation is nothing more than a guideline. Once you realize that documentation should be laughed at, peed upon, put on fire, and just ridiculed in general, THEN, and only then, have you reached the level where you can safely read it and try to use it to actually implement a driver.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
Did I mention my belief in the true meaning of "intelligence"?  Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done.  Lazy programmers are the best programmers. Think Tom Sawyer painting the fence. That's intelligence.  Requiring almost no effort is a big plus in my book.  It's the clever programmer I'm afraid of. The one who isn't afraid of generating complexity, because he has a Plan (capital "P"), and he knows he can work out the details later.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
Stop re-designing something just because you want to.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
Tabs are 8 characters. They are NOT adjustable. Never have been, never will be. Anybody who thinks tabs are anything but 8 chars apart is just wrong. It's that simple. And two spaces is not enough. If you write code that needs comments at the end of a line, your code is crap. It's that easy. There is never a reason to comment a single line, and multi-line comments the the right of multi-line code to the left is a recipe for disaster. In short, you don't do comments to the right of code - you do them before code.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
We're still waiting for the Vatican to officially canonize this kernel, but trust me, that's only a matter of time. It's a little known fact, but the Pope likes penguins too.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
And in the end, reality always tends to hit theory hard in the face when you least expect it.
-- Linus Torvalds
~~~
Reality is something you rise above.
--Liza Minnelli
~~~
Experience is a hard teacher. It gives the test first, the lessons last.
~~~
If God doesn't like the way I live, let Him tell me, not you.
~~~
The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favourite way to wake up. My favourite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This happens rather less often than one might wish.
-- Fran Lebowitz
~~~
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs...
-- Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park
~~~
Healing doesn't care about the years or about the counting, I think it is timeless and without age. It waits for our souls to shift into acceptance.
-- Sark
~~~
The world is a scary place, I prefer the little world inside my head. Also very scary but things seem better.
~~~
His most embarrassing moment. A poetry reading in Toronto. He was sitting in the front row and he realized that he hated the poetry. He looked around discreetly for the exit but it was a long way away. Then to the right, quite near him, he saw another door. As a poem ended he got up and officially walked to the door quickly opened it went out and closed it behind him. He found himself in a dark cupboard about 2 feet by 3 feet. It contained nothing. He waited there for a while, and then he started to laugh and giggle. He giggled for 5 minutes and he thinks the audience could probably hear him. When he had collected himself he opened the door, came out, walked to his seat and sat down again. 
-- Michael Ondaatje
~~~
I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty....But I am too busy thinking about myself. 
-- Edith Sitwell
~~~
Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God...I could be eating a slow learner. 
-- Lynda Montgomery
~~~
for god's sakes, i'm 22 years old now. i think i'm a little old to be answering to snotty people and apologizing for my life. (that's what jr high is for.) 
-- Kayte Siegle
~~~
All-consuming, my thoughts of you, creeping up on me in the dark of late-night like a cancer. I change position, brush them away in hopes that sleep will replace them, and they shrink back into unconsciousness for the moment, but slowly, slowly, they come creeping back out, nosing into the half-waking, half-dream state before true sleep, nestling themselves around me, curling into the blanket at my side like cats, stubborn, sending out claws if I try to remove them. We are at an impasse. 
-- Kayte Siegle
~~~
Sure, I love my parents, but they're still going through this phase of thinking I'm too young to make my own decisions. About anything. I guess this is what usually happens to parents. When you're born they have to do your thinking for you because you can't do too much of that yourself, and then they get into the habit. They keep trying to think for you practically all your life. 
-- Florence Parry Heide
~~~
I love you. And not in a friendly way, although I think we're great friends. And not in a misplaced affection, puppy-dog way, although I'm sure that's what you'll call it. And it's not because you're unattainable. I love you. Very simple, very truly. You're the epitome of every attribute and quality I've ever looked for in another person. I know you think of me as just a friend, and crossing that line is the furthest thing from an option you'd ever consider. But I had to say it. I can't take this anymore. I can't stand next to you without wanting to hold you. I can't look into your eyes without feeling that longing you only read about in trashy romance novels. I can't talk to you without wanting to express my love for everything you are. I know this will probably queer our friendship--no pun intended--but I had to say it, because I've never felt this before, and I like who I am because of it. And if bringing it to light means we can't hang out anymore, then that hurts me. But I couldn't allow another day to go by without getting it out there, regardless of the outcome, which by the look on your face is to be the inevitable shoot-down. And I'll accept that. But I know some part of you is hesitating for a moment, and if there is a moment of hesitation, that means you feel something too. All I ask is that you not dismiss that--at least for ten seconds--and try to dwell in it. Alyssa, there isn't another soul on this fucking planet who's ever made me half the person I am when I'm with you, and I would risk this friendship for the chance to take it to the next plateau. Because it's there between you and me. You can't deny that. And even if we never speak again after tonight, please know that I'm forever changed because of who you are and what you've meant to me, which - while I do appreciate it - I'd never need a painting of birds bought at a diner to remind me of. 
-- Kevin Smith
~~~
And the thing about being in love is that you can't force anyone. It's natural to want someone you love you do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard because you often feel like interfering-you want to be the one who makes the plans. 
-- John Irving, The Cider House Rules
~~~
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply *being* hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself. 
-- Alain de Botton
~~~
I repartitioned my sex drive and installed Linux.
~~~
One will never come to again. One will never return. We shall join the dead, one at a time, and our souls shall burn.
Did you get a premonition?
No, goth fortune cookie.
~~~
Lab rules:
1) Fire Bad
2) Don't Eat the Cyanide
3) If You Can Smell the Hydrazine, It's Too Late
4) Radiation Badges are Your Friend
~~~
Kisses are better than turtles.
Except when they're chocolate.
~~~
A security chief's worst nightmare, available next month from the gentle lunatics in Research and Development.
~~~
Do you expect me to conform to traditional polyphonicharmonies, Stravinski?! 
No, Mr. Cage, I expect you to die!
~~~
If possible, remove victim to fresh air and administer hydrogen cyanide until the victim either dies or signs a legal waiver freeing you from liability.
~~~
Spooned! We only spooned! We didn't fork!
~~~
Go And copulate with yon purple lizard. 
-- clyde
~~~
Get your sheep together and get the flock out of here.
~~~
I like chemistry. It's a lot like witchcraft... only less naked. 
-- Willow
~~~
Look, I know you find me attractive. I've seen you looking at my breasts.
Nothing personal, but when a guy does that, it just means his eyes are open.
~~~
Were you leering at the sunset once again, my dear?
~~~
By comparison, oaking is like pining, only stronger, and it burns hotter, and it's harder to split.
~~~
Thank goodness! I was about to commit hara-kiri with my teaspoon.
~~~
If you mean, am I serious about what I do, the answer is yes.
If you mean, am I serious about how I do it, the answer is no.
~~~
Artists are like serial killers: either you are one or you're not. You just don't decide you are one and start killing. You may leave a few corpses here and there, but all in all, it's just not the same.
~~~
It's strong as a panther and as bright as clover, and it has broccoli's spasms of killing rage.
~~~
I'm trying to tell myself not to talk to myself, but that seems like a lost cause.
~~~
I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me.
~~~
Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots.
~~~
You say the unexamined life is not worth living. Well the examined life isn't either. And it's a great deal more painful.
~~~
So what do you need? Besides a miracle.
Guns. Lots of guns.
~~~
Now that I realize I've been suffering from a simple psychotic depression, I feel empowered.
~~~
What's wrong?
Nothing that a rooftop and an AK-47 won't take care of.
~~~
Who was that piccolo I saw you with last night?
That was no piccolo, that was my fife!
~~~
Nice guys finish last, and bring you breakfast in bed.
~~~
You are nuts! They should cover you in chocolate and sell you as a snack!
~~~
It's one thing to want someone out of your life, but it's another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of Liquid Drano.
~~~
...my G string snapped when I was up on stage in front of everyone and it was _so_ embarrassing...
~~~
I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese.
~~~
Just when I hit bottom, someone hands me a shovel...
~~~
Don't give me that "kinkier than thou" expression.
~~~
Essence of Zen: Don't just do something - sit there!
~~~
Naturally, since I am a man of integrity, I will not break that pledge, unless I get up some morning and decide I really feel like it.
~~~
Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.
~~~
Please don't squeeze the shaman.
~~~
Salmon Day: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream, only to get screwed in the end.
~~~
You want office solutions? Fine. I'll drop a stapler and a few paper clips in a beaker of hydrochloric acid." 
-- thessaly
~~~
Babies come out clutching 50 of your IQ points in their chubby little fists. 
-- thessaly
~~~
We need to find The Planet of Sexy Available Non-Slimy Pagan Neuroscientists Who Are Horny Only When You Want Then To Be. 
-- thessaly
~~~
This is to test if the allele is dominant, because complementation tests can only be run on submissive.. er, recessive alleles.
~~~
I'll listen to reason when it comes out on CD.
~~~
Never invoke anything bigger than your head.
~~~
Pastel-colored candles in the shape of cute animals are like beacons to the Dark Lords.
~~~
I'm on LSD: Lots of Sleep Deprivation.
~~~
It's not denial. I'm just very selective about what I accept as reality.
-- Calvin
~~~
She'd strike you as unenlightened.
No, I'd strike her first.
~~~
I never dreamed that I could live in
So completely demented, contented, a fashion...
~~~
And that's the news from Arkham country, where all the men are eldritch, all the women are uncanny, and all the children are creatures from beyond the planes that we know.
~~~
Home is heaven and orgies are vile
But still I like an orgy every once in a while
-- Ogden Nash (actually included in some older printings of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations)
~~~
For those situations where a fresh, living sacrifice is just not feasible (or even possible), the lower ranks of demons can be fooled by microwaving a previously-frozen chunk of ex-victim and cleverly jiggling it. However, a mock victim sculpted from Spam(tm) is right out.
~~~
I wouldn't do that if we were the last two people on the planet and there were no goats!!!
---Tater
~~~
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been two years since my last confession, but that's only because I've been sleeping with a vampire. 
-- Michael Celluci, in 'Blood Debt' by Tanya Huff
~~~
You know what the problem with having sex with you is???
?
It's like Chinese food . . . an hour later, I want more!
(evil laff!!)
-- anonymous :)
~~~
People are like a box of chocolates... yum!
-- Forrest Dahmer
~~~
Roses are red,
Orchids are black,
I like you best,
On your back.
-- Snoopy
~~~
If it screams, you're not chewing fast enough.
~~~
Celebrate National Sadists' Day: be kind to a masochist.
~~~
Trekkies work out in the He's Dead Gym.
~~~
Bother, said Pooh as the warp core breached.
~~~
UFO coverup.  No film at eleven.
~~~
A grimoire that sticks to you: the Velcronomicon.
~~~
2001 parking lot:  My God, it's full of cars!
~~~
Monkey in a blender:  Rhesus pieces.
~~~
Kirk does S&M: Beat me up, Scotty.
~~~
An atheist is but a mad ridiculous derider of piety; but a hypocrite makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be upon his knees than to rise to a good action.
-- Alexander Pope
~~~
Real punks help little old ladies across the street because it shocks more people than if they spit on the sidewalk.
~~~
Paranoia is not the belief that everybody's out to get you - they are. Paranoia is the belief that everybody's conspiring to get you.
~~~
If you don't like someone, the way he[she] holds his[her] spoon will make you furious; if you do like him[her], he[she] can turn his plate over in your lap and you won't mind.
-- Irving Becker
~~~
We worked and worked, didn't get anywhere. That's how you know you're doing research.
-- Harold "Doc" Edgerton
~~~
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.
-- Anthony Jay
~~~
He has been known by many names: Lucifer, Beelzabub, Belial, the Prince of Lies, Satan, and at a party once an obnoxious drunk kept calling him "Dude.
-- Gary Larson [The Far Side]
~~~
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. [...] But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
~~~
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
~~~
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.
-- Robert Orben
~~~
Dave lay in the darkness and thought about life. He had learned early on that he would never truly understand anything. The best you could hope for was a working misunderstanding. Through careful refinement, a working misunderstanding might actually lead to successful predictions. This, as he understood it, was called science.
-- Lewis Shiner
~~~
Reality was once a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand.
-- Jane Wagner [The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe]
~~~
Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went nuts.
-- Steven Wright
~~~
Encyclopedia Salesmen: Invite them all in. Nip out the back door. Phone the police and tell them your house is being burgled.
-- Mike Harding
~~~
Pope Goestheveezl was the shortest reigning pope in the history of the Church, reigning for two hours and six minutes on 1 April 1866. The white smoke had hardly faded into the blue of the Vatican skies before it dawned on the assembled multitudes in St. Peter's Square that his name had hilarious possibilities. The crowds fell about, helpless with laughter, singing:
Half a pound of tuppenny rice
Half a pound of treacle
That's the way the chimney smokes
Pope Goestheveezl
The square was finally cleared by armed carabineri with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. The event set a record for hilarious civic functions, smashing the previous record set when Baron Hans Neizant Bompzidaize was elected Landburgher of Koln in 1653.
-- Mike Harding
~~~
What is research but a blind date with knowledge?
-- Will Harvey
~~~
You know what we can be like: See a guy and think he's cute one minute, the next minute our brains have us married with kids, the following minute we see him having an extramarital affair. By the time someone says I'd like you to meet Cecil, we shout, You're late again with the child support!
-- Cynthia Heimel, A Girl's Guide to Chaos
~~~
I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!
Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.
There was a computer in every doorknob.
-- Danny Hillis
~~~
Seeing a murder on television...can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
-- Alfred Hitchcock
~~~
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.
-- Alfred Hitchcock
~~~
It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
~~~
What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.
-- Marina Horner
~~~
...society is guilty in not providing universal free education, and it must answer for the night it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who has caused the darkness.
-- Victor Hugo
~~~
I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.
-- John Huston
~~~
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
-- Larry Wall <lwall@netlabs.com> in den Perl5-Manpages
~~~
But I have a slowly coagulating theory that the size of a project is directly proportional to the possibility that significant bugs will crop up. Exponentiate for each additional programmer involved.
~~~
No one who has been a programmer can escape the conclusion that computers highlight our inability to communicate.
-- Mike Walsh (Infosystems, Nov 87 P. 43 ["Where the Rubber Meets the Road"])
~~~
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
-- Dave Barry
~~~
St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great who asked him "how he dares molest the sea." "How dare you molest the whole world?" the pirate replied: "because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.
-- Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors.
~~~
What's taking so long? It's only typing!
-- a marketing manager posing as a software manager
~~~
Stoning non conformists is part of science.  Stoning conformists is also part of science.  Only those theories that can stand up to a merciless barrage of stones deserve consideration.  It is the creationist habit of throwing marshmallows that we find annoying.
-- Dr. Pepper
~~~
There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night.
-- Ernest Bramah (Kai Lung stories)
~~~
...all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
-- HPL, from The Silver Key
~~~
I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you.
-- Robin Williams in "Awakenings
~~~
I believe it was Heinlein who pointed out that science fiction is about things for which there is some scientific evidence, such as ghosts; while fantasy is about things for which there is no scientific evidence, such as faster than light travel.
-- Dan Goodman dsg@maroon.tc.umn.edu
~~~
Not at all tricky. We do this sort of stuff every day before breakfast. Then I fly to work on my winged pig, Swilma.
-- David Chase
~~~
Unix has been feverishly evolving for over 20 years, sort of like bacteria in a cesspool, only less attractive.
-- Unix for Dummies
~~~
Many things do not happen as they ought. Most things do not happen at all. It is for the conscientious historian to correct these defects.
-- Herodotus
~~~
I'll need daily status reports on why you're so behind
-- Dilbert's boss
~~~
Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity.
-- Henry Spencer
~~~
Erotica is what turns me on.
Pornography is what turns you on.
Obscene is what turns them on.
~~~
The best way for civilians to understand military culture is to read _Starship Troopers_, _The Forever War_, and _Bill the Galactic Hero_ all at one sitting.
~~~
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
-- Steve Eley
~~~
It's not KIRK we hate (at least most of us), it's SHATNER. If Shatner played Anne Frank's father in the Broadway revival, by the end, where the SS troops come in, the audience would start yelling, "HE'S IN THE ATTIC!!!" He's just bad. He's a lousy director. He's egotistical. I personally don't care how he dies, as long as he dies.
-- Urthrax Killspite ldm@sccs.swarthmore.edu
~~~
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
-- Gustave Flaubert, 1858
~~~
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
-- Bukowskis Alter Ego Henry Chinaski in Factotum
~~~
Liberal Christian: One who likes Jesus' words and doesn't care who said them.
Conservative Christian: One who cares deeply who Jesus is and ignores his words.
~~~
Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes:  What mood is that?
Calvin: Last-minute panic
~~~
Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.
-- Merle Kessler
~~~
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
-- Churchill, Sir Winston Spencer (1874-1965)
~~~
There exists in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.
-- Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-1859)
~~~
I generally regard flipping through 'popular' publications on technical subjects in the same category as consulting the faqs for various newsgroups or reading most annotated bibliographies. Or perhaps in the same vein as pornography; nobody (well, nobody worth mentioning, anyway) seriously thinks that that's the way things actually work, but some can take consolation in it when the real thing is in absence or is inconvenient.
-- SubG
~~~
We must wrestle with time for some seven decades, and he is a weak and puny antagonist in the first three bouts.
-- Carcassonne, Lord Dunsany
~~~
HTML has followed nature's example... bright, sometimes flashing, colors are a sign of indigestiblility.
-- Rob Hartill <hartill@lanl.gov>
~~~
People can and will do things that no one could possibly believe anyone would do. For examples look at most of human history or the alt.sex.* hierarchy.
-- Ken Boucher on human stupidity in sci.nanotech
~~~
You don't like the Goths?
No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!
Persecution?
Religious persecution. We won't stand for it forever.
I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.
That's just it!  We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn't persecution, I'd like to know what is!
-- Martin Padway and stranger in bar in Lest Darkness Fall
~~~
I have a friend who says the militia have one black helicopter that they fly their one black member around it, simultaneously scaring themselves and proving they aren't racist.
-- Kaa Byington
~~~
Pretty graphical interfaces are commonly called user-friendly. But they are not really your friends. Underlying every user-friendly interface is terrific contempt for the humans who will use it. ...to build a crash-proof system, the designer must be able to imagine--and disallow--the dumbest action possible. He or she has to think of every single stupid thing a human being could do. Gradually, over months and years, the designer's mind creates a construct of the user as an imbecile. This image is necessary. No crash-proof system can be built unless it is made for an idiot.
-- Ellen Ullman
~~~
Read the OSI protocol specifications? I can't even *lift* them!
-- henry@zoo.toronto.edu
~~~
For any twentieth-century American who'd been paying attention at all, the phrase 'criminal justice system' should have been warning enough.
-- L. Neil Smith (W.W. Curringer, in "Pallas")
~~~
Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.
-- X-Bonus of the "A Word A Day" service (08.08.95)
~~~
Well, both speed and reproducibility are important in a compiler, just like sexuality and reliability are both important in a spouse. The speed of a compiler and the sexuality in a spouse get you interested, but the reproducibility and reliability are what convince you to keep them.
-- Henry Baker, in an article in comp.compilers (<95-08-175@comp.compilers>)
~~~
...[T]he lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.
-- Salman Rushdie
~~~
... if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent.'
-- Edsger Dijkstra
~~~
To those lucid and courageous minds who gave you the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Falwell, Robertson and the God-inspired rule of the Righteous. To those intrepid souls who fight with unflagging zeal to remove from libraries dangerous books they have not read and from theatres those spiritually toxic films they have not seen, believing that thought is a controlled substance and secular thinking hazardous to mental health.
-- Parke Godwin, in the dedication of _The_Snake_Oil_Wars_
~~~
In keeping with my non-Aristotelian or relativist-Existentialist bias, I do not classify ideas as simply "true" or "false." I prefer to assign them probabilities, on a scale from 0 (the Aristotelian "false") to 10 (the Aristotelian "true"). A rating of 5 means that I am still sitting geometrically on the middle of the fence, above 5 means that I presently lean somewhat toward belief and below 5 means that today I lean somewhat toward finding no value in this gloss at all (for me).
I admit cheerfully that I am such an advanced case of Aggravated Agnosticism that whenever I do move something into 0 or 10, I get nervous, wonder if I am becoming as simple-minded as the Pope or Dr. Carl Sagan and start looking for evidence to move that meme toward 1 or 9.
-- Robert Anton Wilson, in the Introduction to his play "Wilhelm Reich in Hell
~~~
... A light-hearted tragicomedy with real blood.
~~~
... and all of the children are above average.
~~~
... and this is your brain with a side order of bacon.
~~~
... and we must consider, that since - unfortunately - we are forced to live together, the most important thing for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is to have as little of it as possible.  I see no ethical standard by which to measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time, of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from its every member.  Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that extortion.  There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on any terms except those he chooses to set.  There is no conceivable law to prevent him from setting them - just as there is none to force his employer to accept them.  The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of society ...
-- Austen Heller
~~~
... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.  Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, _Wide Hats and Narrow Minds_
~~~
... don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside should dare to touch?  Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'?  Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?
-- Kira Argounova
~~~
... it is not through sin that he opposes God. The Devil's strategy for our times is to make trivial human existence and to isolate us from one another while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands, or economic anxieties.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
... 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’
~~~
... only to the extent which - in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders - some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive ... He was the man of extravagant energy - and reckless generosity - who knew that stagnation was not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power - and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs.
-- John Galt
~~~
... square root,cube root,log of pi; let's go get'em RPI!
~~~
... Survival demands collective action; 'alone’ is for gravestones in hacker's cemeteries.
~~~
... there's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work.  Nothing.  Only that.  Whatever else you are, will come from that.  It's the only measure of human value.  All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues.  The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.
-- Francisco d'Anconia
~~~
Although there is something lurking at the back of my head that bothers me...
It's probably a flea.
-- Ploppy and Edmund : Head
~~~
...but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind.  The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable.  The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law.  Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death.  If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
~~~
Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass...  
-- Max Ehrmann, Desderada
~~~
These lovers of esoterica seem to derive a great deal of intellectual satisfaction out of not quite understanding what they are doing.
~~~
...whether it is better to spend a life not knowing what you want or to spend a life knowing exactly what you want and that you will never have it.
-- Richard Shelton
~~~
He deserves death.
Deserves it! I dare say he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them ? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
~~~
... do you know the hallmark of a second-rater?  It's resentment  of another man's achievement.  Those touchy mediocrities who  sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their  own... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is  a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors.  They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of  mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of  achievement would not be able to bear... Have you ever felt  the longing for someone you could admire?  For something,  not to look down at, but up to?
~~~
... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you  with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday  advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.
-- Dave Barry Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide
~~~
... there is no such word as 'impossible' in my dictionary.  In fact, everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' appears to be missing.
-- Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
~~~
... you're my best friend.  I don't have to be nice to you. Besides, everybody knows I'm a jerk.
-- Wally West (the new Flash)
~~~
... You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
But that's not *fair*!
Of course it's not fair. We're *evil*. Look it up.
~~~
I think that when statesmen forsake their private conscience for the sake  of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.
-- Sir Thomas Moore to Cardinal Woolsey in _A Man for All Seasons_
~~~
...I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by  reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion  of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
-- Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.
~~~
...Jesus cried with a loud voice: Lazarus, come forth; the bug hath been found and thy program runneth.  And he that was dead came forth...
-- John 11:43-44
~~~
The renewed shock had nearly made him spill his drink.  He drained it quickly before anything serious happened to it.  He then had another quick one to follow the first one down and check that it was all right.  He then sent a third drink down to see why the second hadn't yet reported on the condition of the first.  He poured another drink down with the plan that it would head the previous one off at the pass, join forces with it, and together they would get the second to pull itself together.  Then all three would go off in search of the first, give it a good talking to.  He felt uncertain as to whether the fourth drink had understood all that so he sent down a fifth to explain the plan more fully and a sixth for moral support.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.), Phaedrus
~~~
...what's the point of ... new technology if you can't find some way to pervert it?
-- G. A. Effinger, ‘Marid Changes His Mind’, IASFM, 1/90
~~~
...while heroes... heroes have an infinite capacity for stupidity!  Thus are legends born!
...and THOR analyzes right back
~~~
...while I know many people who emphatically believe in reincarnation, I have never met or read one who could satisfactorily explain population growth.
-- Spider Robinson
~~~
'Medium' is the perfect word for Television;  it is neither 'rare' nor 'well done'.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily.  It's just IT. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.
-- Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries
~~~
'Truth' never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation.
-- Anton LaVey
~~~
(The Chief Programmer) personally defines the functional and performance  specifications, designs the program, codes it, tests it, and writes its  documentation... He needs great talent, ten years experience and  considerable systems and applications knowledge, whether in applied  mathematics, business data handling, or whatever.
-- Fred P. Brooks, _The Mythical Man Month_
~~~
A book is the product of a contract with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie.  Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least.  Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.
-- Salman Rushdie, _The Satanic Verses_
~~~
A certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he has a perfectly delightful absence.
-- Idries Shah
~~~
A Hacker is any person who derives joy from  discovering ways to circumvent limitations.
-- Bob Bickford, rab
~~~
A lecture is where the notes of the professor become the notes  of the student without passing through the mind of either one.
-- anon
~~~
A man about to speak the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup.
-- Old Mongolian Saying
~~~
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
-- Bob Dylan
~~~
A pacifist who calls the police isn't one; hired violence is still violence.
-- Clayton E. Cramer optilink!cramer
~~~
A sobering thought, Eileen: What if, right at this very moment I *am* living up to my full potential?
-- Jane Wagner
~~~
Advice from Nicholai Ivanovich Lobachevsky
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky. In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize-
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-- Tom Lehrer
~~~
After checking my original notes, it appears that I spent most of last class lying to you.  You may not find that surprising.  I will now  attempt to correct any misinformation that resulted. This you will probably find very surprising.
-- A CS Prof. teaching UNIX
~~~
Ah, women.  They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
~~~
Ah, you know the type.  They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot - and the only  reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers.
-- an analysis of neo-Nazis and such, Badger comics
~~~
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
All Lord Julius demands is total and complete obedience and more money every time we pay him.  He's being quite reasonable, really...
-- Cerebus
~~~
All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous - ergo, most economical - geodesiccally structured thoughts.
-- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
[...and a total nonsequitur as far as I can tell.  -kl]
~~~
And besides - it isn't the principle of the thing, it's the money!
-- Daffy Duck
~~~
Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos.  Between them, they have ensured that one shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one will work at anything worthwhile.
-- Arnold Toynbee
~~~
Anyone with an active mind lives on tentatives rather than tenets.
-- Robert Frost
~~~
Are you sure you're not an encyclopedia salesman?’
No, Ma'am.  Just a burglar, come to ransack the flat.’
~~~
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist.  This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
-- Matt Cartmill
~~~
As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts  with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the  universe.  As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different *religions* disagree.
-- Wilson Heydt (whheydt!PacBell.COM)
The answer is simple: kill the heretics.  History shows us that this is the actual solution that competing religions apply - trial by combat or trial by  ordeal.  God is the final arbiter.  What a sad waste of human potential it has proven to be.
-- Paul Hager (hagerp!iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)
~~~
As you approach 4.0, study time approaches infinity.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
At last I'm organized’, he sighed, and died.
~~~
Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system is supposed to work.  Expertise is gained by investigating why a system doesn't work.
-- Brian Redman, Bell Communications Research, 'UUCP UNIX-to-UNIX Copy’, UNIX NETWORKING, edited by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood
~~~
Beam me aboard, Scotty!’  'Will a 2x4 do, Captain?’
~~~
Can you operate it, Spock?’
Well, Jim, this computer was designed and constructed 300 million years ago by a totally alien race of methane-breathing, squid-like beings who built it using technologies unknown to us and used it for purposes we cannot conceive of and then mysteriously vanished leaving no shred of documentation as to its operation.  It may take a few moments.’
~~~
Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritative regime.
-- Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
~~~
Childhood is short and maturity is forever.
-- Calvin and Hobbes
~~~
Children today are tyrants.  They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)
~~~
CIA spokesman : We can say with some certainty that Noriega was a sadist, drug-abuser, and despot.
Reporter  : How do you know so much about him?
CIA spokesman : Well he was on our payroll.
-- Johnny Tingle
~~~
Come, come,’ said Tom's father, 'at your time of life,
There's no longer excuse for thus playing the rake--
It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife’--
Why, so it is, father - whose wife shall I take?’
-- 'A Joke Versified’ from Miscellaneous Poems by Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
~~~
Cooking is like love.  It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
-- Harriet Van Home
~~~
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
-- Sir Winston S. Churchill, While England Slept
~~~
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
~~~
Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)
~~~
Do we have any more animals that Grandma can torture?
-- NOTHING IN COMMON
~~~
Do you expect me to talk?’
No, Mister Bond; I expect you to die.’
-- That famous line from GOLDFINGER
~~~
Do you think there's a God?’
Well, SOMEbody's out to get me!’
-- Calvin & Hobbes
~~~
Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes.  I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
-- Zaphod Beeblebrox, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.
-- The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
~~~
Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx' last words (1890-1977)
~~~
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Stray Sayings
~~~
Every one is more or less mad on one point.
-- Rudyard Kipling, On the Strength of a Likeness
~~~
Everything to excess.  Moderation is for monks.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's  Time Enough For Love
~~~
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty  when the government's purposes are beneficent  . . .  the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), Olmstead vs.  United States, United States Supreme Court, 1928
~~~
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
~~~
Falling in love makes smoking pot all day look like the ultimate in restraint.
-- Dave Sim, author of Cerebrus.
~~~
Faster than a speeding bullet.
More powerful than a locomotive.
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Look!  Up in the sky!’
It's a bird!'
It's a plane!'
No, it's Superman!'
Yes, it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers; bend steel in his bare hands; and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never ending battle for Truth, Justice, and The American Way!
~~~
Father, Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
-- Rudyard Kipling, We and They
~~~
Fig Newton: The force required to accelerate a fig 39.37 inches/sec.
-- J. Hart
~~~
Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
-- George F. Will
~~~
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
For the love of phlegm...a stupid wall of death rays.  How tacky can ya get?
-- Post Brothers comics
~~~
Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
-- Marvin, the Paranoid Android Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.
-- Blore's Razor
~~~
Gloom, despair and agony on me.
Deep dark depression, excessive misery.
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.
Oh, gloom, despair and agony on me.
~~~
Go to Hell! or other insult direct is all the answer a snoopy question deserves.
-- Lazarus Long, From Robert A. Heinlein's  Time Enough For Love
~~~
God grant me the serenity to fix the bugs I find, and to call the rest features.
-- Seen in a signoff line, uncredited
~~~
God is an iron, I said.  Did you know that?...If a person indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.  Or else He's the dumbest designer that ever lived...Are you familiar with the old cliche, 'Everything in the world I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening'?...Didn't that ever strike you as damned odd?  What's the most nutritionally useless and physiologically dangerous 'food' substance in the world?  White sugar.  Glucose.  And it seems to be beyond the power of the human nervous system to resist it.  They put it in virtually all the processed food there is, which is next to all the food there is, because nobody can resist it.  And so we poison ourselves and whipsaw our dispositions and rot our teeth.  Maltose is just as sweet, but it's less popular, precisely because it doesn't kick your blood sugar in the ass and then depress it again.  Isn't that odd?  There is a primitive programming in skulls that rewards us, literally overwhelmingly, every time we do something damned silly.  Like smoke a poison, or eat or drink or snort or shoot a poison.  Or overeat good foods.  Or engage in complicated sexual behavior without procreative intent, which, if it were not for the pleasure, would be pointless and insane.  And which, if pursued for the pleasure alone, quickly becomes pointless and insane anyway.  A suicidal brain-reward system is built into us.
But the reward system is for survival.
So how the hell did ours get wired up so that survival-threatening behavior gets rewarded best of all?  Even the pro-survival stimuli are wired so that a dangerous overload produces the maximum pleasure.  On a purely biological level, man is programmed to strive hugely for more than he needs, more than he can profitably use.
-- 'Joe’ _Mindkiller_
~~~
God is silent, he was fond of saying, now if we can only get Man to shut up.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Politics
~~~
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
-- Albert Einstein
~~~
Great leaders are rare, so I'm following myself.
~~~
GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions.
-- Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards)
~~~
Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.
-- John Churton Collins
~~~
He did decide, though, that with more time and a great deal of mental effort, he could probably turn the activity into an acceptable perversion.
-- Mick Farren, _When Gravity Fails_
~~~
He who has never hoped can never despair.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Caesar and Cleopatra, Act IV
~~~
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
~~~
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one  thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of  things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a  lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he  would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was,  and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut  Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can  fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms, you've got to kill the people producing them.
-- Vladimir Kabaidze, General Director of the Ivanovo Machine Building Works
~~~
I detest your opinions, but defend to the death your right to hold them.
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)
~~~
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.
-- Bill Cosby
~~~
I don't know what you want here, but I think you should know that I've killed a LOT of old people in my time, and I'm not above doing it again.
-- WKRP in Cincinatti
~~~
I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers.
-- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in Star Trek: The Next Generation is so nice
~~~
I find television very educating.  Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
~~~
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
I have done so much with so little for so long, now I can do anything with nothing at all.
-- Words of a True Engineer
~~~
I know this creature.  He is the EMBODIMENT of EVIL - decades ago, his machinations often brought the world to the *BRINK* of chaos!
Hey - people change!
-- The Shadow and associates discuss Shiwan Khan.  From THE SHADOW
~~~
I know you all have very innocent minds, but occasionally a word should be allowed to wander through before reaching the paper.
~~~
I learned to put the [toilet] seat down...it makes you look like a warm, caring, sensitive human being.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
I like people better than principles, and I like people with no principles better than anything else in the world.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
~~~
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams
~~~
I never forgot the incident and years later, when the Luftwaffe was bombing London, I shone a light on the critic's house.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
I once got caught copying an exam in the back of the class... I guess the teacher must have heard the Xerox machine.
-- Steve Wright
~~~
I started at the top and worked my way down.
-- Orson Welles
~~~
I think not,’ said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.
~~~
I think of life as a good book.  The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
-- Harold S. Kushner
~~~
I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance.
-- Steve Wright
~~~
I want to know God's thoughts.  The rest are details.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
~~~
I was going to say 'the cream of the nation's youth', but they're probably at the other lecturer.
~~~
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.  My life is my own.
-- Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner, BBC-TV
~~~
I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
~~~
I would sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
~~~
I'd get out of here now if I were you.  It's not safe here.
Trust me - it's not safe out there either.
Oh hell, I forgot that.
-- From the TV series WAR OF THE WORLDS
~~~
I'm free of all prejudices.  I hate everybody equally.
-- W. C. Fields
~~~
I'm glad you asked that son.  Being popular is the most important thing in the world.
-- Homer in Tell Tale Head
~~~
I'm lonely,’ Adam told God in the Garden of Eden. 'I need to have someone around for company.’
Okay,’ replied God. 'I'm going to give you the perfect woman. Beautiful, intelligent and gracious - she'll cook and clean for you and never say a cross word.’
Sounds good,’ Adam said. 'But what's she going to cost?’
An arm and a leg.’
That's pretty steep,’ countered Adam. 'What can I get for just a rib?’
~~~
I'm not a programmer, but I play one at work.
-- Gregg Parmentier, parmentier!iowasp.physics.uiowa.edu
~~~
I'm not against women.  Not often enough, anyway.
-- Groucho Marx?
~~~
I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed a bit..
-- Dr. Strangelove
~~~
I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going.
-- Ker Avon
~~~
I'm not the heroic type.  I was beaten up by Quakers.
-- Woody Allen, Sleeper
~~~
I'm perfectly willing to be judged. But only by God and history.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
If a man chooses to do evil... it becomes my sacred duty to bash him to a pulp.
-- Crime Crusher, an old 40's pulp superhero
~~~
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Folly and Female Education
~~~
If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to  get a 'fix’ of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that  netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.
-- Rob Stampfli
~~~
If I could go through the dorms and shoot people, exam pressures would be put into perspective.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
-- Philip Sheridan
~~~
If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
-- Max Von Sydow's character in Hannah and Her Sisters
~~~
If people behaved in the way nations do they would all be put in straitjackets.
-- Tennessee Williams
~~~
If the standard says that [things] depend on the phase of the moon, the programmer should be prepared to look out the window as necessary.
-- Chris Torek
~~~
If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
If thy whole brain offend thee, cut it out
~~~
If voting could change the system, it would be illegal!
-- Schroedinger's Cat
~~~
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.
There may be even a worse case.  You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.
-- Sir Winston S. Churchill
~~~
If you're a real good kid, I'll give you a piggy-back ride on a  buzz-saw.
-- W. C. Fields
~~~
Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy.
-- Christine Nelson  Cray Research, Inc.
~~~
If you're going faster than 90 MPH and they chase you - make 'em *earn* it.
~~~
If you're going to plagiarize, go _way_ back.
-- Barry Goldwater to Joseph Biden
~~~
Illness strips away superficiality to reveal reality in etched detail.
~~~
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
~~~
In a cruel and evil world, being cynical can allow you to get some entertainment out of it.
-- Daniel Waters, screenwriter of HEATHERS
~~~
In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to the death for it.
-- Monty Python
~~~
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 (1872-1967)
~~~
In any society where the State is the sole employer, opposition means death by slow starvation.  Who does not obey, shall not eat.
-- Leon Trotsky 'Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?’,  Robert Hessen
~~~
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
~~~
In research, you must remember not to fool yourself, for you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
~~~
In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code.
-- Karl Lehenbauer, karl!hackercorp.com
~~~
In the meantime, one word for any atheists among you: wrong.
-- God, the Ultimate Autobiography
~~~
In the world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting  what one wants and the other is getting it.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
~~~
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.
-- Chuck Reid
~~~
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
-- Douglas Adams
~~~
Is that how a warped brain like yours gets its kicks? By planning the deaths of innocent people?’
No... by *causing* the deaths of innocent people.’
-- Lex Luthor and Superman discuss Fun Evenings in Superman
~~~
Is that seat saved?’  'No, but we're praying for it!’
~~~
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan  which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons,  insist of the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather  than be the instrument of his army's downfall.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte, Military Maxims and Thought
~~~
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Man and Superman
~~~
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both  incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by  twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
-- R. Serling
~~~
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
-- John Andrew Holmes
~~~
It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.’
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day.  Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it.  I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at).  There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread.  One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
-- Thomas Aldrich
~~~
It were better to perish than to continue schoolmastering.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
~~~
It's all absolutely devastatingly true, except the bits that are lies.
-- Douglas Adams
~~~
It's always the same, the girl sighed to her roommate after returning in the wee, small hours.  Afterward, I feel so compromised, so cheap, so soiled... so absolutely wonderful from head to toe!
~~~
It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.
-- Anatole France
It's only by amusing oneself that one can learn.
-- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
~~~
It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
~~~
Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.
Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Just like I've always said; there's nothing an agnostic can't do  if he's not sure he believes in anything or not!
-- Monty Python
~~~
Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?
-- Patricia O Tuama, rissa
~~~
Lean too much on the approval of people, and it becomes a bed of thorns.
-- Tehyi Hsieh
~~~
Let us go forth not as defenders of the status quo, but as crusaders with a revolution idea - that government should be the servant and not the master of the people; that its purpose is to protect, not deny, each man's freedom; that the purpose of a free press is to liberate, not enslave the human spirit.
-- From the speech made by A. S. Hills upon taking office as President of the Inter-American Press Association
~~~
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
~~~
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
-- The Princess Bride
~~~
Life...loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.
-- Marvin, the Paranoid Android  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Limit congressmen to two terms.  One in office.  One in jail.
-- Jonathan Nicholas' column in The Oregonian, Friday, March 29, 1991
~~~
Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity!’
Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged.
Until he died, and so reached that vicinity:
in it he found that the damned things diverged.
-- Piet Hein
~~~
Listen.  Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!  Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
Be quiet!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Shut up!
I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
-- Monty Python, Holy Grail
~~~
Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.
~~~
Lots of people became extremely rich.  But this was perfectly natural and nothing to get upset about, as no one was really poor - at least, no one worth mentioning.
-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Love and do what you will.
-- St. Augustine
~~~
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
~~~
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
-- Goethe
~~~
Love is when two people who care about each other get confused.
-- Bob Schneider
~~~
Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
-- Iris Murdoch
~~~
Luke, I'm yer father, eh.  Come over to the dark side, you hoser.
-- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew
~~~
Make love, not war.
I'm married, I do both.
~~~
Make yourself necessary to someone.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life
~~~
Making it up?  Why should I want to make anything up?  Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
-- Marvin, the Paranoid Android  Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
-- Albert Schweitzer
~~~
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on...
-- Sir Winston S. Churchill
~~~
Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.  No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
-- Sir Winston S. Churchill
~~~
Mathematicians are the least expensive researchers to support.  All they need is pencils, paper, and a wastebasket - and when they turn philosopher, they don't even need the wastebasket!
~~~
Mathematics can overcome no prejudice, it can soften no stubbornness, it can moderate no partisan spirit; there is nothing moral it can accomplish.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
May I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit.
-- Monty Python
~~~
Maytag is my middle name; I'm an agitator.
~~~
Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him...
-- Monty Python "Ripping Yarns
~~~
Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens.
(Against stupidity the very gods fight in vain.)
-- Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)
~~~
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month
~~~
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
-- Peter De Vries
~~~
My father peddles opium,
My mother's on the dole.
My sister used to walk the streets
But now she's on parole.
My uncle plays with little girls;
My aunt, she raped a steer,
But they won't even speak to me
cause I'm an engineer.
-- The MIT Engineers' Drinking Song
~~~
Name the greatest of all inventors.  Accident.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt (1756-1806) speech on the India Bill, Nov. 18, 1783
~~~
Never before have I encountered such corrupt and foul-minded perversity!  Have you ever considered a career in the Church?
-- Black Adder II
~~~
"Never mind what I said," the Lord spake.  "Doth thou listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?"
And Abraham grew ashamed.  "Er - not really... no."
"I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou immediately runs out to do it."
And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know when you are kidding."
And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor.  I can't believe it."
-- Without Feathers - Woody Allen The Looter of The Spirit
~~~
Never test for a bug you don't know how to fix.
-- QA manager
~~~
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the  humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?'
-- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
~~~
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Essays
~~~
Nothing can be said so correctly that it cannot be twisted.
-- Spinoza
~~~
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
~~~
Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Major Barbara
~~~
Notice all the computations, theoretical scribblings, and lab equipment, Norm. ... Yes, curiosity killed these cats.
-- The Far Side, by Gary Larson
~~~
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything as mind-bogglingly useful as the Babel fish could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it?  It could not have evolved by chance.  It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't.  QED.'
Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix?  If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?" "The world," Lucas said.
-- William Gibson, "Count Zero
~~~
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
...yet.
-- Karl Lehenbauer, karl!hackercorp.com
~~~
Our judgements judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
-- Paul Valery
~~~
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
~~~
People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes and far prefer the obscene and fantastic. How low contemporary morals have sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the situation.
-- Li Yu, in "The Carnal Prayer Mat" c. 1657 A.D.
~~~
People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who  haven't what they want that they don't want it.
-- Ogden Nash
~~~
Please your Majesty," said the Knave, "I didn't write it, and they can't prove that I did: there's no name signed at the end.
If you didn't sign it," said the King, "that only makes things worse.  You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
~~~
Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes...  A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), December 1840
~~~
Quick and Dirty Program" is only half right.
~~~
Reality is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
-- (My Life With The) Thrill Kill Cult "Nervous Xians
~~~
Relationships are complex because they are part real, part imaginary.
-- Martin F. Terman
~~~
Remember, extremism in the non-defense of moderation is not a virtue.
-- Peter Neumann, about usenet
~~~
Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if...
He was going to suck my blood!
Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way.
...
The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible.  The phrase is hurt somebody else.  We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what.  Us who decides. Nobody else.  My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him?  That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice.  What you do about it is your decision, you choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake through his heart.  If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants.  It goes on and on, choices, choices." "When you look at it that way...
Listen," he said, "it's important.  We are all.  Free. To do. Whatever.  We want.  To do.
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions
~~~
Rights" is a fictional abstraction.  No one has "Rights", neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they use or do not use.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's  "Time Enough For Love
~~~
Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Shit Happens, as interpreted by world religions:
EXISTENTIALISM:  Shit doesn't happen; shit is.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES:  No shit happens until Armageddon.
SECULAR HUMANISM:  Shit evolves.
REFORM JUDAISM:  Got any Kaopectate?
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE:  When shit doesn't happen, don't call a doctor--pray.
TAOISM:  Shit happens.
CONFUCIANISM:  Confucius says, "Shit happens".
BUDDHISM:  If shit happens, it isn't really shit.
HINDUISM:  This shit has happened before.
PROTESTANTISM:  If shit happens, it happens to someone else.
CATHOLICISM:  If shit happens, you deserved it.
ISLAM:  If shit happens, kill the person(s) responsible.
JUDAISM:  Why does shit always happen to US?
~~~
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-- C. G. Jung
~~~
Someone write me a letter. I need to know that I'm still alive.
~~~
Someone's been mean to you! Tell me who it is, so I can punch him tastefully.
-- Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse
~~~
Somewhere in communist Russia I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but CENSORSHIP and OPPRESSION.  But maybe he's heard about AMERICA, and he dreams of living in this land of FREEDOM and OPPORTUNITY!  Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy... AND TELL HIM THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!!
Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid Lima beans.
~~~
Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, the paranoid human-hating robot, dragging himself on regardless.  "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed... Life!  Don't talk to me about life.
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, in Douglas Adams,  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Spock, maybe your renowned Vulcan logic can get Jim to rest.  God know he never listens to me.
Do not take it personally, Dr. McCoy. *None* of us listens to you.
-- A classic exchange between Spock and McCoy in the  STAR TREK comic
~~~
Take that and that and THAT and *THAT*!  Ha!  I  warned you, didn't I? Didn't I warn you?  I  thought I warned you.  I didn't?  Oh, sorry.
-- That crazy Max! From Sam And Max
~~~
Take this cross and garlic - here's a Mezuzah in case he's Jewish - a page of the Koran if he's Muslim... and if he's a Zen Buddhist, you're on your own.
-- Im-ple-ments of destruction for undead (vampires, that is) in Badger
~~~
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
(Sysop's note: and if so, what are we doing here?)
~~~
The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is forty-two.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
-- A. P. Herbert
~~~
The day is very warm, intoned the priest, but the noodles are getting cold.  A cold noodle, he continued, is like a dog without fur.... Recognizable, but very unpleasant.
-- cruc!gevert
~~~
The easiest thing in the world is to be a holy man on a mountain!
-- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
~~~
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
-- Karl Lehenbauer, karl!hackercorp.com
~~~
The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.
-- Mencius
~~~
The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, 'What does woman want?'
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
~~~
The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it, whether he's got an abscess on his knee or his soul.
-- Rona Barrett
~~~
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
The human race likes to give itself airs. One good volcano can produce more greenhouse gases in a year than the human race has in its entire history.
-- Ray Bradbury
~~~
The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance.  He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him.  But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are  given to administer we presently imagine we own.
-- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
~~~
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Worship
~~~
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden", 1854
@
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
~~~
The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
-- Sydney J. Harris
~~~
The object of this lecture is to frighten half of you away.
~~~
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ...  over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
-- John Stuart Mill 'On Liberty' 1859
~~~
The point is...that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad.  You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.
-- Ann Landers
~~~
The preeminence of a learned man over a worshiper is equal to the preeminence of the moon, at the night of the full moon, over all the stars.  Verily, the learned men are the heirs of the Prophets.
-- A tradition attributed to Muhammad
~~~
The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between a five-dollar bill  and a whip deserves to learn the difference on his own back - as, I think, he  will.
-- Francisco d'Anconia, in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged
~~~
The scariest thing about American Cultural Values is how the slasher movies depict humans getting carved up, but they don't show dogs getting carved up.
~~~
The story so far:
In the beginning, the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
The Street finds its own uses for technology.
-- William Gibson
~~~
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority.  The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
-- Ralph W. Sockman
~~~
The time for action is past!  Now is the time for senseless bickering!
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
~~~
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if  any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents  as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas
~~~
The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes, it's just a tired feeling:
~~~
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
The world is coming to an end.  Please log off.
-- Bob Irwin
~~~
There ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: (1) not going all the way; and (2) not starting.
-- Buddha
~~~
There are some bits at the end of the course I don't really  understand, but the students don't normally get that far.
~~~
There is a law of inertia.  And I have found that of all the inert substances, the most inert is the human brain.
-- Edward Teller
~~~
There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot.
-- Steve Wright
~~~
There's no problem so awful that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse.
-- Calvin and Hobbes
~~~
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of our men and women. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
-- Thomas Paine
~~~
They don't let us beat students anymore, but my fantasy life is my own business.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression.  He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty
-- Kahlil Gibran, from "Spirits Rebellious
~~~
They laughed at Fulton, they laughed at Bell, they even laughed at Edison. But this was genuine, heartfelt laughter... robust rolling waves of it, from deep down... the kind where you know they really mean it.
-- Joe Martin
~~~
They seek him here, they seek him there...
they seek that Snowman everywhere!
Is he in Youngstown - or Cincinnati?
That damned, elusive, two-ton Yeti?
-- The Badger, In Search
~~~
They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger.  At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression.  This was a  lie and we could not let them publish it.
-- Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship,  quoted in The New York Times, 1984
~~~
This Dec. 7th, the summit which will ban all medium-range nuclear missiles has already run into its first snag: The National Rifle Association has officially protested the treaty, and says its members will continue to own and carry nuclear missiles - but only for hunting and self-protection, of course.
-- Dennis Miller, SNL News
~~~
This Embassy is United States territory.  Nobody can be dragged away and shot without the written consent of the American government.
-- Woody Allen, Don't Drink the Water
~~~
This is a revolution, damn it!  We're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!
-- John Adams (1735-1826), 1776
~~~
This is the hardest part about meeting a daily deadline...coming up with a good excuse for being late...
-- Jeff McNelly, "Shoe
~~~
This life is a test.  It is only a test.  Had this been a real life you would have been instructed where to go and what to do.
~~~
This planet had a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat.  Sometimes he'd resent having to leave the deck to use the toilet...
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer
~~~
Time is the best teacher.  Unfortunately, it kills off all of its students.
~~~
to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings
~~~
Today there may be more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than in Eastern  Europe.
-- George F. Will
~~~
Toroidal carbohydrate modules?  Make mine glazed!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
~~~
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
Traveling makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
-- Flaubert
~~~
Treat your guest as a guest for two days; on the third day, give him a hoe.
-- Swahili proverb
~~~
Uh...had a slight weapons malfunction. But, uh, everything's perfectly all right now.  We're fine.  We're all fine here...now...thank you.  How are you?"  *wince*
~~~
Ursa Minor Beta is, some say, one of the most appalling places in the known Universe.  Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of "Playbeing" magazine headlined an article with the words "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life," the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Violence accomplishes nothing.  What a contemptible lie!  Raw, naked violence has settled more issues throughout history than any other method ever employed.  Perhaps the city fathers of Carthage could debate the issue, with Hitler and Alexander as judges?
~~~
We cannot put off living until we are ready.  The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any possible postponement.  Life is fired at us point blank.
-- Ortega y Gasset
~~~
We demand source because we've been burned too much by its lack, not because  we have this desire to add custom hacks to our kernels or utilities. Believe  me, we'd all like to run stock systems, straight off the vendor distribution  tapes; it'd be significantly less work.  But our users have this liking for  working systems and prompt fixes for the bugs they find, neither of which the  vendors we buy from have been particularly good in supplying.
-- cks
~~~
We have your favorite animal cookies.  Here's a gorilla... Here's a collared peccary...
-- Gumby's Winter Fun Special
~~~
We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.
-- John Adams (1735-1826)
~~~
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
-- John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
~~~
We used to dream of gears and shafts.  All we had was some grooves dug in the sand and a bag full of pebbles, IF WE WERE LUCKY!
-- Unknown Greek  The Five Yorkshiremen: The Next Generation
~~~
We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know - or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)
~~~
We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme.  It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are more concerned with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today.  Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive.  We are sorry if this impression has come across.
-- Monty Python
~~~
We're Americans - with a capital 'A'!  And do you know what that means?  Do you?  It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent  country in the world.
-- Rousing speech by Bill Murray in STRIPES
~~~
We're going to assume a few things about reality.  One, it exists.  That's not a necessary assumption, but I find it comforting.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
Welcome to the Politically Correct States of America. Please turn your mind in to the nearest oppressed minority pressure group. It will be returned to you once we've decided what you can think
~~~
Well, Brahma said, even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.
-- The Mahabharata
~~~
Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had.
Satan!
Oh, it's true.  I know your race.  It is made up of sheep.  It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities.  It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.  Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kindhearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.  Think of it!  One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them.  Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago.  And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch.  And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed.  Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise - perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it - and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger
~~~
Well... everybody's being very careful, these days, sexually, but there are still several pockets of promiscuity... the Marines and the Evangelists.
-- Mark Russell
~~~
What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites  assembled there!
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
What about these commandments then?
You again?  All right...  There shall be TWO commandments, and this shall be the first of them:
Keep the noise down.
Just that?  'Keep the noise down'?
You got it.
Hmmm.  And the second of Your commandments, Lord?
Do what thou wilst," (sayeth the Lord), "just go away and don't bother Me now.  For behold, some of Us are trying to get some sleep around here.
-- Seven Deadly Sins
~~~
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that  they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.  The evil is not what  they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
-- Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968)
~~~
What the hell are you getting so upset about?  I thought you didn't believe in God.
I don't, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God.  He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22
~~~
What? you cry. "Wizards sometimes must endure torture?" And it is true, for being a wizard does not exempt you from any of the trials and tribulations experienced by other humans.
But I would ask you to consider just what you mean by "torture." What of those occasions when you save a kingdom and then are forced to sit there and listen for hours to endless numbers of boring elected officials extolling your praises while the kingdom's tax collectors repossess nine-tenths of what you gainfully earned at your task? Is this not torture? What about the times when you are on the verge of creating a spell that will give you inner peace at last and your spouse bursts into your study and tells you to clean up the mess because all of your in-laws are coming to stay for three weeks, and we will have to set up a bed in here because Aunt Sadie needs a place to sleep? Is this not torture? And say you are attending a wizard's convention and are sure that your gold production spell will win first prize in the competition, and then they give the award to the animal husbandry spell of some part-time wizard because the judge has a particular fondness for pigs? Is this not - but why belabor the obvious? By now you surely see my point. Laugh in the face of torture! It is, after all, no worse than what they do to you every other day of the week.
-- Ask Ebenezum: The Greatest Wizard in the Western  Kingdoms Answers the Four Hundred Most Asked  Questions about Wizardry, fourth edition
~~~
What's that thing?
Well, it's a highly technical, sensitive instrument we use in computer repair.  Being a layman, you probably can't grasp exactly what it does.  We call it a two-by-four.
-- Jeff McNelly, "Shoe
~~~
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
-- Tom Lehrer
~~~
When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action.  They rented out my room.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: 'My dear, we live in an age of transition.'
-- Dean William R. Inge
~~~
Where I come from, equality of
the sexes is a given - so WE
can hit ANYONE.
Oh... thank you...
SO much... for
explainnnn...
And God help whoever
gets in our way!
Dimitri...?
YES, Alexi?
We're not supposed to
believe in God.
Oh.  That's right.
~~~
Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.
-- Heathers
~~~
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
~~~
Why don't you conjure a legendary city, full of magic spells and mystic beasts, out of thin air? the uninformed client asks. Well, where would you put it? the wise wizard replies. Have you seen the price of real estate?
-- Ebenezum The Wizard's Handy Guide To Better  Wizard/Client Relationships, fourth edition
~~~
Will your long-winded speeches never end?  What ails you that you keep on arguing?
-- Job 16:3
~~~
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.
-- Doug Larson
~~~
Worry not about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you mine are still greater.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
~~~
Writing is like prostitution.  First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
-- Moliere
~~~
You are bleeding.
I ain't got time to bleed.
-- Predator
~~~
You can call Usenet a democracy if you want to.  You can call it a totalitarian dictatorship run by space aliens and the ghost of Elvis.  It doesn't matter either way.
-- Dave Mack, mack
~~~
You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt.
-- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict
~~~
You have reached 666-1313, DIAL-A-DEMON.  At the sound of the tone you will be possessed. <beep>
~~~
You have taught me to value a good night's sleep over all else including adventures of love and friendship, and even when the night is charged with magic, to be sure to get to bed.  If God had not meant everyone to be in bed by ten-thirty, He would never have provided the ten o'clock newscast.
-- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days
~~~
You have to kill a pessimist.  Optimists usually take care of themselves.
-- Anon.
~~~
You have to regard everything I say with suspicion - I may be trying to bullshit you, or I may just be bullshitting you inadvertently.
-- J. Wainwright Mathematics 140b, From a collection of  University of Waterloo Computer/Math class quotes
~~~
You kids have it easy, I had to wind my own bobbins, and if I mispunched a card, the loom was liable to throw a shuttle right through the head of a nearby textile worker.
-- Jacquard
~~~
You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers... damn  anthropologists.
-- Emo Philips
~~~
You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.
-- Lethbridge-Stewart, ROBOT
~~~
You McPike?
Most of my life.  In 3rd grade I was Batman, but that seems to have passed.
-- One of Frank McPike's best droll comments, from WISEGUY
~~~
You misdirected me as surely as if you had said the world is flat and north is west and two plus two is four; i.e., not utterly wrong, just wrong enough so that when I took the opposite position - the world is mountainous, north is east - I was wrong, too, and your being wrong about the world and north made me spend years trying to come up with the correct sum of two and two, other than four.  YOU GAVE ME THE WRONG THINGS TO REBEL AGAINST.  My little boat sailed bravely against the wind, straight into the rocks.  Your mindless monogamy made me vacillate in love, your compulsive industry made me a prisoner of sloth, your tidiness made me sloppy, your materialism made me wasteful.
-- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days
~~~
You realize she's talking about our hamburgers here.
-- Anonymous sixth grader during talk by animal rights activist; Newsweek, May 23, 1988
~~~
You think you've got problems," said Marvin, the paranoid human-hating robot, as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are you supposed to do if you ARE a manically depressed robot?  No, don't bother to answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer.  It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
You've got to go as fast as you possibly can just to stay in one place; to get anywhere, you've got to go faster than that.
-- The White Queen to Alice
~~~
You've no idea of what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I deserve it.
-- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911)
~~~
You've reached the Lunatic Laboratories Unlimited Food and Drug Testing Division.  We've eaten all the food, and now we're taking the drugs.  If you'll leave a message on this machine, I'm sure we can get back to you as soon as we can tell which end of the phone to talk into. Thank you. <beep>
~~~
Your son still sliding down the banisters?
We wound barbed wire around them.
That stop him?
No, but it sure slowed him up.
~~~
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to a young physicist
~~~
A good algorithm should be very poetic.
~~~
Don't you know what good, clean fun is?'
No, what good is it?'
-- Benny Hill
~~~
Never trust another sorcerer is a saying unfortunately all too common among magical practitioners. Actually, there are many instances where one can easily trust a fellow magician, such as cases where no money is involved, or when the other mage is operating at such a distance that his spells can't possibly affect you.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XIV
~~~
Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period
preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, And
throughout our place of residence,
Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the
possessors of this potential, including that
species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus.
Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward
edge of the wood burning caloric apparatus,
Pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an
imminent visitation from an eccentric
philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations
is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ...
~~~
Weird is a relative, not an absolute term.
-- Baron Frank N. Furter
~~~
****  GROWTH CENTER REPAIR SERVICE
For those who have had too much of Esalen, Topanga, and Kairos.  Tired of being genuine all the time?  Would you like to learn how to be a little phony again?  Have you disclosed so much that you're beginning to avoid people? Have you touched so many people that they're all beginning to feel the same? Like to be a little dependent?  Are perfect orgasms beginning to bore you? Would you like, for once, not to express a feeling?  Or better yet, not be in touch with it at all?  Come to us.  We promise to relieve you of the burden of your great potential.
~~~
 ___
12 + 144 + 20 + 3 V 4 2
-- +  5(11)  =  9^2  +  0
7
Take twelve and add one forty-four
Plus twenty and thrice square root of four,
Divide that sum by seven,
Add five times eleven
And you've nine squared and not a bit more.
~~~
1024x768x256... Sounds like one mean woman.
~~~
11th Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught.
~~~
186,000 mps: it's not the law, it's just a challenge
~~~
186,000 mps: It's not just a good idea, it's the LAW
~~~
1st rule of marriage: If you're right, apologize fast.
~~~
2 x 4 x 666 The Lumber of the Beast
~~~
2+2=5-ism:
Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
669 The Number of the Bestiality
~~~
8) Use common sense in routing cable.  Avoid wrapping coax around  sources of strong electric or magnetic fields.  Do not wrap the  cable around fluorescent light ballasts or cyclotrons, for example.
-- Ethernet Headstart Product, Information and  Installation Guide, Bell Technologies, pg. 11
~~~
A bachelor is a man who never made the same mistake once.
~~~
A badge: Another deadline, another miracle
~~~
A beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly, little fact.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
~~~
A book is like a mirror:  If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
-- G. C. Lichtenberg
~~~
A book is the work of a mind, doing its work in the way that a mind deems best.  That's dangerous.  Is the work of some mere individual mind likely to serve the aims of collectively accepted compromises, which are known in the schools as 'standards'?  Any mind that would audaciously put itself forth to work all alone is surely a bad example for the students, and probably, if not downright antisocial, at least a little off-center, self-indulgent, elitist.  ... It's just good pedagogy, therefore, to stay away from such stuff, and use instead, if film-strips and rap-sessions must be supplemented, 'texts,' selected, or prepared, or adapted, by real professionals.  Those texts are called 'reading material.'  They are the academic equivalent of the 'listening material' that fills waiting-rooms, and the 'eating material' that you can buy in thousands of convenient eating resource centers along the roads.
-- The Underground Grammarian
~~~
A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
-- Gian Vincenzo Gravina
~~~
A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe.
-- Pierre Berton
~~~
A child of 5 could understand this!  Fetch me a child of 5!
~~~
A conqueror is always a lover of peace.
-- Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
[from "On war"; copied by Lenin in his notebook, with notation, "Ah, Ah, witty".]
~~~
A conversation with you, Baldrick, and somehow, death loses its sting..
-- Edmund : Money
~~~
A cop stopped me for speeding.  He said, "Why were you going so fast?"  I said, "See this thing my foot is on?  It's called an accelerator.  When you push down on it, it sends more gas to the engine.  The whole car just takes right off.  And see this thing?  This steers it.
~~~
A cult is a religion with no political power.
~~~
A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.
-- Edgar A. Shoaff
~~~
A cynic is one who will laugh at anything so long as it isn't funny.
~~~
A Day Off
So you want a day off. Let's look at what you are asking for. There are 365 days per year available for work. There are 52 weeks per year, in which you already have two days off, leaving 261 days available for work. Since you spend 16 hours each day away from work, you have used up 170 days, leaving only 91 days available, You spend 30 min. each day on coffee break, that accounts for 23 more days each year, leaving only 68 days. With a one hour lunch each day, you use up another 48 days, leaving only 22 days available for work. You normally spend 2 days per year on sick leave. This leaves only 20 days available for work. We offer 5 holidays per year, leaving only 15 days. We generously give you 14 days vacation per year leaving you only 1 day available for work and I'll be dammed if you're going to take that day off!!!
~~~
A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.
~~~
A dollar's a bad boss, and dying's a bad fear
~~~
A Freudian slip may be revealing, but a Jungian slip is just a mythstake
~~~
A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space.  On the back it said, "Wish you were here.
~~~
A generation which ignores history has no past or future.
~~~
A girl a day keeps the wife away.
~~~
A girl seldom falls in love with a man unless there is some reason why she shouldn't.
-- Bob Edwards
~~~
A girl's kisses are like pickles in a bottle - the first are hard to get, but the rest come easy.
-- Bob Edwards
~~~
A good pun is its own reword.
~~~
A hundred thousand lemmings can't all be wrong.
~~~
A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon. Buy the negatives at any price.
~~~
A man committed suicide by overdosing on decongestant tablets. All they found was a pile of dust.
~~~
A man is only as good as what he loves.
-- Saul Bellow
~~~
A misguided platypus will lay its eggs in your shorts.
~~~
A mob has many heads, but no brains.
~~~
A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police.
-- Mr. Dooley
~~~
A netnews signature file:
Your eyes are weary from staring at the CRT for so long.  You feel sleepy.  Notice how restful it is  to watch the cursor blink.  Close your eyes.  The opinions stated above are yours.  You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
~~~
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
~~~
A person never tells you anything until contradicted.
~~~
A plethora of individuals wither expertise in culinary techniques vitiated the potable concoction produced by steeping certain coupestibles.
~~~
A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?
And he answered:
It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.
It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.
It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.
And that is Fate?  said the priest.
Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.
That's all right, said the priest.  I wanted to know what Freight was too.
-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit
~~~
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
~~~
A program is used to turn data into error messages.
~~~
A programmer and his mind are soon parted.
~~~
A programmer's work is never done. <Sigh!>
~~~
A project not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.
~~~
A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow real poverty.
-- Hume
~~~
A pun is the lowest form of humor - when you don't think of it first.
-- Oscar Levant
~~~
A Puritan is someone who is afraid that someone's having fun.
~~~
A rejection notice slip a Chinese economic journal found somewhere on the Internet:
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight.  If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard.  And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.
-- Source:  Mark Seiden, Wired
~~~
A relationship is like a shark - it has to keep moving forward or it dies. Well, what we have on our hands here is a dead shark.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
A reported fact states that murders of immediate family members account for nearly 25% of all murders committed. Think about that the next time you yell at your sister for taking to long in the bathroom.
~~~
A Requiem For Today's Technologist
A computer is my lover
The only life I've ever known
I've given it my soul
And in return I've got it's own.
I tried to love a human
But he filled my days with pain
The ache was so intense, I swore
I'd not love man again.
My love went to the computer
For it was quick and smart,
And it would never hurt me -
Until it became my heart.
The life in me has died -
The greatest pain I've ever known -
From the computer as my lover
And the empty soul I own.
~~~
A revolving concretion of earthy or mineral matter accumulates no congeries of small, green bryophytic plant.
~~~
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
~~~
A school: Building with four walls and tomorrow inside.
~~~
A school should not be a preparation for life.  A school should be life.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
~~~
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
-- Godfrey H. Hardy
~~~
A selection from the Taoist Writings:
Lao-Tan asked Confucius: 'What do you mean by benevolence and righteousness?'  Confucius said:  'To be in one's inmost heart in kindly sympathy with all  things; to love all men and allow no selfish thoughts: this is the nature  of benevolence and righteousness.'
-- Kwang-tzu
~~~
A seminar on Time Travel will be held two weeks ago.
~~~
A ship carrying red paint has collided with a ship carrying purple paint. It is reported that both crews have been marooned.
~~~
A slave has but one master; the ambitious man has as many masters as there are persons whose aide may contribute to the advancement of his fortune.
-- Jean de La Bruyere
~~~
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
-- Logan P. Smith
~~~
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces every time.
~~~
A social life?  What board can I download THAT from?
~~~
A society that lacks the patience to read, and loses the ability to do so, is rendered defenseless against its most profound stupidities.  As an example, consider the ease with which Americans came to regard a president known for his inaccuracy and imprecision as the great communicator, and by the tendency of American elections to give victory to the candidate who can afford the greatest number of 30-second TV spots.
-- Mike Schmoker
~~~
A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
-- Jessamyn West
~~~
A thief will demand your money or your life, but only a woman will demand both.
~~~
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's  "Time Enough For Love
~~~
A truly great man will neither trample on a worm nor sneak to an emperor.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
~~~
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
-- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
~~~
A wise man first determines what is within his control; all else is then irrelevant.
-- Epictetus
~~~
A woman employs sincerity only when every other form of deception has failed.
-- Scott
~~~
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
-- Jane Austen
~~~
A woman forgives the audacity of which her beauty has prompted us to be guilty.
-- LeSage
~~~
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
~~~
A woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing-tender, sweet, and stupid.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
~~~
A woman's guess is more accurate than a man's certainty.
~~~
A writer thinks of critics as a tree feels about dogs.
~~~
A yawn is a silent shout.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
Abandon all hope, ye who PRESS ENTER here
~~~
Abandon the search for truth: settle on a good fantasy.
~~~
Abdabs or Habdabs n. A state of extreme nervousness.  The jitters.
~~~
Abligurition n. Extravagance in cooking and serving.
~~~
Abstainer, n. A person who yields to temptation with guilt.
~~~
Abstention from any aleatory undertaking precludes a potential escallation of a lucrative nature.
~~~
Act upon your impulses, but pray that they may be directed by God.
-- Emerson Tennent
~~~
Adult:  One old enough to know better.
~~~
After they make Styrofoam, what do they ship it in?
~~~
Against boredom, even the gods themselves struggle in vain.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
~~~
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
~~~
Against stupidity, even the gods themselves contend in vain.
-- Isaac Asimov
~~~
Ailurophile n. Someone who is abnormally fond of cats.
~~~
All articles that coruscate with resplendence are not truly auriferous.
~~~
All day long you mutter to yourself...gibber, dribble, moan, and bang your head against the wall, yelling, 'I want to die!'. Now you may say I'm leaping to conclusions, but...you're not _completely_ happy, are you?
-- Kate to her father : Bells
~~~
All great truths began as blasphemies.
~~~
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
~~~
All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance
~~~
All is fear in love and war.
~~~
All life is a conjugation of the verb "to eat
~~~
All power corrupts, but we NEED electricity.
~~~
All right, no more Mr. Nice Pope!
~~~
All sentences that seem true should be questioned.
~~~
All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.
-- La Rochefoucauld
~~~
All things considered, insanity may be the only reasonable alternative
~~~
All things dull and ugly,
Each little snake that poisons,
All creatures short and squat,
Each little wasp that stings,
All things rude and nasty,
He made their brutish venom,
The Lord God made the lot;
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
Each nasty little hornet,
All evil great and small,
Each beastly little squid.
All things foul and dangerous,
Who made the spikey urchin?
The Lord God made them all.
Who made the sharks? He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small.
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
-- Monty Python
~~~
All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.
-- William Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice
~~~
All those who dread uncertainty either because of timidity or from conventional-mindedness or for fear of material loss are enlisted under the conservative standard.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965)
~~~
Always be smarter than the people who hire you.
~~~
Always remember that you're unique - just like everyone else.
~~~
ALWAYS tell the truth, unless something better is handy.
~~~
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she  gets, the more interested he is in her.
-- Agatha Christie
~~~
An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
-- John H. Patterson
~~~
An open mind is wonderful if matching mouth not included.
~~~
An optimist laughs to forget.  A pessimist forgets to laugh.
~~~
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
~~~
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Anarchists do it revoltingly.
~~~
Anarchists unite!
~~~
Anarchy is against the law.
~~~
Anarchy-It's not the law, it's just a good idea
~~~
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do mote essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
~~~
And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.  If you are a brave man, you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have the need to prove their bravery.  Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use?'  For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which will not promise him a financial return within a year.  And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1922
~~~
And it does matter.  An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter" individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single great temptation that was passed.  A person who is concerned about individual rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small, individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm those rights through every action they take.  It matters because every action you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit.
-- William Oliver
~~~
And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"
They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed."
And Jesus replied, "What?"
~~~
And now, let's get right to tonight's feature presentation of 'Bambi vs. Godzilla'
~~~
Angels can fly since they take themselves lightly.
~~~
Animadvert v. To pass a critical comment, or animadversion, upon something or someone.  The term was more neutral in its original sense of a judicial recognition or reference.
~~~
Antanagoge n. A countercharge made in retort to an adversary's accusation.
~~~
Anti-paranoia is that eerie feeling that nothing is connected to anything else
~~~
Anti-Sabbatical:
A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Any mental functions attempted in this area must be reevaluated during a subsequent period. It has been discovered that standard logic works sideways in this area due to the influence of the occupant.
~~~
Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate
~~~
Arthur and Ford opened their eyes and looked about in considerable surprise. "Good God," said Arthur, "it looks just like the sea front at Southend." "Hell, I'm relieved to hear you say that," said Ford.
Why?
Because I thought I must be going mad.
Perhaps you are.  Perhaps you only thought I said it.
Ford thought about this.  "Well, did you say it or didn't you?" he asked. "I think so," said Arthur.
Well, perhaps we're both going mad.
Yes," said Arthur, "we'd be mad, all things considered, to think this was Southend.
Well, do you think this is Southend?
Oh yes.
So do I.
Therefore we must be mad.
Nice day for it.
Yes," said a passing maniac.
Who was that?" asked Arthur.
I don't know.  Just someone.
Ah.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Arthur's Laws of Love:
(1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you remind them of someone else.
(2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of yourself in person.
~~~
As good almost kill a man, as kill a good book; who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.
-- Milton
~~~
As hard as you try, the book cannot be closed.
~~~
As long as we're going insane, we might as well go the whole way. A mere shred of sanity is of no value.
~~~
Assassins, Inc.-We aim to please
~~~
At any time, at any place, our snipers can drop you. Have a nice day.
~~~
Auntie Em: Hate you, hate Kansas, taking the dog. - Dorothy
~~~
Axiopisty n. The quality that makes something believable.
~~~
BACK RUBS-Given with pleasure, received with ecstasy
~~~
Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)
~~~
Balladromic a. Maintaining a course toward an ultimate target.
~~~
Be always displeased with what thou art, if you desirest to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest.  But if thou have enough thou perishest.  Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate.
-- St. Augustine
~~~
Be as perfect as you can, for that is all you can do.
-- Brigham Young
~~~
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely get your Feet wet.  Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada
~~~
Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
-- Homer
~~~
Be calm in arguing, for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
~~~
Be sure to save your money - you never know when it might be worth something
~~~
Being sexy is a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it
~~~
Being trapped in the Netherhells is not the most fearsome thing that can happen to you. It is, in fact, probably no worse than being trapped in a cave for a weekend with all your spouse's relatives, and, in most cases, will not lead to total drooling gibbering madness, as is the popular misconception. If, on the other hand, you find yourself trapped in the Netherhells for a weekend with all your spouse's relatives, well, sometimes drooling and gibbering can be fun.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXIII
~~~
Better to be hated for what I am than loved for what I aren't.
~~~
Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.
-- Henry David Thoreau
~~~
Beware of a tall dark man with a spoon up his nose.
~~~
Beware of the Vampire Jesus - He gave his blood for you and he wants it all back now!
~~~
Bezonian n. A rascal, scoundrel, or beggar.
~~~
Black holes are where God is dividing by zero
~~~
Bleeding Ponytail:
An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Boomer Envy:
Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Borborygm n. The noise made by gas in the bowels.  Yes, a fart.
~~~
Borger King We do it our way Your way is irrelevant
~~~
BOVE'S THEOREM
The remaining work to finish in order to reach your goal  increases as the deadline approaches.
~~~
Brimborion n. Something useless or nonsensical.
~~~
Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
~~~
Bushydo--The way of the shrub. BONSAI!
~~~
Button: First generation Trekkie  6609.8
~~~
Button: Flat Mars Society
~~~
By the time rules are is needed, it's already too late
~~~
C code. C code run. Run, code, run!
~~~
C'est la vie. C'est la guerre. [picture of celery] Say no more. Say what?
~~~
Cafe Minimalism:
To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Campus Crusade for Cthulhu--It found me
~~~
Canada: A country which could have had British culture, American know-how and the passion of la France, but instead has British Passion, American culture and French know-how.
~~~
Canada's climate is nine months winter and three months late in fall.
~~~
Canadian Government Supplying Arms To Moslem Rebels.
~~~
Carpe Noctem - Seize the night I do more work after 2AM than most people do all day
~~~
Catachresis n. Misapplication of a word.
~~~
Caution: Hungry Dieter-May bite if provoked
~~~
Certified Public Assassin
~~~
Character is a victory, not a gift.
~~~
Character is destiny.
-- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.)
~~~
Character is not made in a crisis - it is only exhibited.
-- Robert Freeman
~~~
Character is what God and the angels know of us; reputation is what men and women think of us.
-- Horace Mann
~~~
Characters do not change.  Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
~~~
Cheer up-if the economy collapses completely, you won't owe your student loan to _anybody_
~~~
Chopped cabbage
--it's not just a good idea...it's THE SLAW
~~~
Christians do it with grace
~~~
Christmasochism:
It's December 23rd!  I must get to the mall!
-- Ranjit Bhatnagar
~~~
Christopher Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives to the Pooh
~~~
Clinomania n. Excessive desire to stay in bed.
~~~
Clique Maintenance:
The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: "Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Cogito Ergo Spud - I think, therefore I yam
~~~
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played.  There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
-- H. L. Mencken
~~~
Come... Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.  Dry your eyes...And let's go home.
-- Watchmen
~~~
Commensal a. or n. Eating together; one who eats with another.
~~~
Common sense is what tells you the earth is flat
~~~
Compotation n. A drinking party.
~~~
Computer people have often spoken of the "gigo" effect, meaning "garbage in - garbage out". What gives some of us chills is a secondary meaning of "gigo": "garbage in - gospel out". It can happen here.
-- Kelvin Throop III
~~~
Computers are like the Old Testament God - lots of rules and no mercy
~~~
Conference: A place where conversation is substituted for the dreariness of  work and the loneliness of thought.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary
~~~
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven; confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
~~~
Conquering Russia is a steppe by steppe process
~~~
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have of changing others.
-- Jacob M. Braude
~~~
Conspicuous Minimalism:
A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The non-ownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console.
-- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Contrary to rumor, working side by side with a group of fellow wizards is not the most unpleasant task in which a magician might participate. In fact, I can think of numerous other experiences, such as breaking both arms and legs while being pursued by a ravenous demon, which, under certain conditions, could conceivably be even worse.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXII
~~~
Conversational Slumming:
The self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor. A major spin-off of Recreational Slumming.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Couch potatoes have brain tubers
~~~
Crime doesn't pay, but at least you're your own boss
~~~
Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
~~~
Cult of Aloneness:
The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you?  FIRST you rape, THEN you pillage!!
~~~
DAVE BARRY'S "1986 in Review" - June 2nd:
Canada demands that Libya send it some diplomats so it can expel them.
~~~
Death before dishonor, but neither before breakfast
~~~
Deblaterate v. To babble.
~~~
Deceit in the conduct of war outweighs valor and is worthy of merit.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Demophobe n. A person who has a morbid dread of crowds and massed humanity.
~~~
Derision Preemption:
A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Desipient a. Silly, trifling, or foolish.
~~~
Destructive Testing Systems You make it We break it Guaranteed!
~~~
Diaskeuast n. One who prepares material in detail.
~~~
Did you hear about the scientist whose wife had twins?  He baptized one and kept the other as a control.
~~~
Discalced a. Bare-footed
~~~
Diseases for Kisses (Hyperkarma):
A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
DISORGANIZATION is merely the sign of a very healthy individual trying to do more in a shorter period of time than those lazy, obsessively tidy types who can think of nothing better to do than straighten objects in drawers and stuff like that which only feeds their egos and makes them think that they are better than those of us who are truly gifted
~~~
Diversivolent a. Looking for trouble or argument; seeking out a divergence of view.
~~~
Do not disturb-I'm disturbed enough already
~~~
Do not disturb. I had a hard enough time getting turbed in the first place
~~~
Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?
~~~
I had some eyeglasses.  I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.
~~~
Does it have enhanced IR vision, a particle beam weapon with target acquisition, highly amplified arm/leg systems, self-contained atmosphere, and a small nuclear plant? No?
Not much of a "power suit", is it?
~~~
Does the noise in my head bother you?
~~~
Doing a little work around the house.  I put fake brick wallpaper over a real brick wall, just so I'd be the only one who knew.  People come over and I'm gonna say, "Go ahead, touch it...  it feels real.
~~~
Dolorifuge a. That which relieves or drives away sadness.
~~~
Don't ask f'r rights.  Take thim.  An' don't let anny wan give thim to ye.  A right that is handed to ye f'r nawthin' has somethin' th' matter with it. [On Woman Suffrage.]
-- Finley Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley (1867-1936)
~~~
Don't ask for responsibility: insist on it.
-- George L Roman, oilean!wok!george!sgi.com
~~~
Don't ask me, I have intermittent memory loss
~~~
Don't hate yourself in the morning-sleep till noon
~~~
Don't just flirt-hit me with a clue-by-four
~~~
Don't just stand there-rub my back!
~~~
Don't keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
~~~
Don't let your mind wander. It's too little to be let out alone.
~~~
Don't LOOK at anything in a physics lab.
Don't TASTE anything in a chemistry lab.
Don't SMELL anything in a biology lab.
Don't TOUCH anything in a medical lab.
Don't LISTEN to anything in a philosophy department.
~~~
Don't Take Life Seriously, It Is Not Permanent.
~~~
Don't try to out-weird me-I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal
~~~
Dragonriders do it in between
~~~
Dreams Are For The Damned
copyright 1986 meredith tanner
You live in unreality
Your head is in the clouds
You go to work at nine each day
Your mama would be proud
You come back home at five o'clock
Your mind is in a daze
You're living in your fantasy
You turn another page
(chorus)
But fairytales are children's games
And dreams are for the damned
This ain't the Marvel Universe
Or never-never land
There's no tall dark handsome stranger
Standing waiting here for you
That's only in your fantasy
It's never coming true
Reality is painful, yes
I know that's how you feel
Much too hard for the likes of you
And you're sure it isn't real
So you just keep on pretending
As you live from day to day
And it's just a small annoyance
But it never goes away
(chorus)
I saw you just the other day
You didn't notice me
Your fairytale alternative
Was all that you could see
You took a train to fairyland
The train went off the tracks
You're stranded in your fantasy
You're never coming back
(chorus)
~~~
Dysology n. Dispraise; uncomplimentary remarks.
~~~
Dziggetai n. A kind of wild ass, rather like a mule.
~~~
Each of us is, ultimately, alone.
~~~
Eagles soar but a weasel will never get sucked into a jet engine
~~~
Ebenezum: There are a number of ways of dealing with extreme stress. For example, when all about you is going wrong and it looks as if you might not survive your current circumstances, it is often helpful to think of a pleasant thought.
Interviewer: Do you mean, for example, how good it will feel to strangle, pummel, and utterly destroy my enemy?
Ebenezum: Well, no, you do not quite have the spirit of it. Think rather of a flower, or rather, a group of flowers. Picture bright yellow daisies, or stately red roses, full and fragrant. And now that you have this thought in your mind, think how lovely those flowers will look on the grave of your enemy once he has been strangled, pummeled, and utterly destroyed. It is only in this way that the besieged wizard may find inner peace.
-- Conversations With Ebenezum; A Series of Dialogues  With the Greatest Wizard in the Western Kingdoms,  fourth edition
~~~
Editor's note: This poem translates to nonsense in French, but read it aloud as if it were proper French.
 Un petit D'un petit
 Se donnait vols
 Un Petit D'un petit
 A d'un gres vols
 Au de quinze hor seize
 Au de quinze mains
 que dont peut un petit
 Tu guettes heure a Cannes.
-- Ian Murphy <CBWP8008!IRUCCVAX>
~~~
Eldritch a. Weird or hideous.
~~~
Eleemosynary deeds have their initial incidence intramurally.
~~~
Emotional Ketchup Burst:
The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends - most of whom thought things were fine.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Encephalalgia n. Headache.
~~~
ENVELOPE, n.  The coffin of a document; the scabbard of a bill; the husk of a remittance; the bed-gown of a love-letter.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
~~~
Epigamic a. Attractive to the opposite sex.
~~~
Epistemophilia n. An abnormal preoccupation with knowledge.
~~~
Esculent a. Fit to be eaten.
~~~
Eugonic a. Living on artificial foodstuffs.
~~~
Eumoirous a. Lucky or happy as a result of being good.
~~~
Even barbarians like chocolate chip cookies
~~~
Even for a wizard there will often come times when someone close to you, perhaps even your spouse, criticizes your habits by comparing them to those of animals. This is distinctly unfair to the animals, who have far better habits than we in many areas. When, for example, have you seen a frog collecting taxes or a squirrel running for electoral office? Present arguments like these to those people who criticize you. If they still do not see the wisdom of your ways, you may then feel free to bite them.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. IX
~~~
Everybody talks about reality, but nobody does anything about it
~~~
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
~~~
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
~~~
Evil Mentalist I think, therefore you aren't
~~~
Evolution
--life's a niche, and then you die
~~~
Excerpt from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", page 634784, section 5a. "Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space.  In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.  And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Exclusive dedication to necessitous chores without interludes of hedonistic diversion renders John a hebetudinous fellow.
~~~
Exoptable a. Extremely desirable.
~~~
Exoteric a. Intelligible to outsiders, i.e., not esoteric.
~~~
Expergefaction n. An awakening.
~~~
Expiscate v. To examine or discover skillfully.
~~~
Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them.
-- Leo Rosten
~~~
Eye have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I've run this poem threw it,
I'm sure your please too no,
Its letter perfect in it's weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
~~~
Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises.  The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from all of the facts that are truly material.
-- Samuel Coleridge
~~~
Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin, except to be there when he doesn't want her.
-- Helen Rowland
~~~
Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.
~~~
Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
-- Jules Renard
~~~
Faire de la bonne cuisine demande un certain temps.  Si on vous fait attendre, c'est pour mieux vous servir, et vous plaire.
[Good cooking takes time.  If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.]
-- Menu of Restaurant Antoine, New Orleans [Also, what we're going to be telling our customers]
~~~
Faith that does not include doubt is dead faith.
-- Miguel de Unamuno
~~~
Famous last words:
1.  Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
2.  Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
3.  What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
4.  We won't need reservations.
5.  It's always sunny there this time of the year.
6.  Don't worry, it's not loaded.
7.  They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
8.  After being driving for twenty years I think know well  enough when to slow ....
~~~
Fandom isn't a matter of life and death-it's much more important than that
~~~
Fantasy isn't our crutch-it's arcane
~~~
FEAR OF FAILING
(Outlandish comments from professors on student papers)
The 'A' is for content, the 'minus' is for not typing it.  Don't ever do this to my eyes again.
-- Professor Ronald Brady, Philosophy, Ramapo State College
~~~
FEAR OF FAILING
(Outlandish comments from professors on student papers)
I think your opinions are reasonable, except for the one about my mental instability.
-- Psychology Professor, Farifield University
~~~
FEAR OF FAILING
(Outlandish comments from professors on student papers)
What's page one, a preemptive strike?
-- Professor David Freund, Communication, Ramapo State College
~~~
Female beauty is an important minor sacrament - I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.
-- Robertson Davies
~~~
Few things are more dangerous than a hobbit with low blood sugar
~~~
Fie for shame, you lascivious, lewd, lecherous, libidinous, lustful, licentious, dirty bum!!
~~~
Fiery energy lanced out, but the beams struck an intangible wall between the Gubru and the rapidly turning Earth ship.
~~~
"Water!" it shrieked as it read the spectral report.  "A barrier of water vapor!  A civilized race could not have found such a trick in the Library! A civilized race could not have stooped so low!  A civilized race would not have..."
It screamed as the Gubru ship hit a cloud of drifting snowflakes.
-- _Startide Rising_, by David Brin
~~~
Finagle's Creed: Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
~~~
Finagle's first Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
~~~
Finagle's fourth Law: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse.
~~~
Finagle's Law:  The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum.
~~~
Finagle's Principle: The perversity of the universe has no bounds.
~~~
Finagle's Second Law: Always keep a record of data ... it indicates you've been working.
~~~
Finagle's Second Law:  No matter what the experiment's result, there  will always be someone eager to:
(a) misinterpret it.
(b) fake it.  or
(c) believe it supports his own pet theory.
~~~
Finagle's third Law: In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
Corollaries:
(1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
(2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really don't want to hear,  will see it immediately.
~~~
Finagle's variable constant: the number which, when added to, subtracted from, multiplied by, or divided into your data, gives the right result.
~~~
Fitchew n. A polecat, or kind of carnivorous weasel - and one described by the O.E.D. as "fetid" (i.e., stinking) to boot.
~~~
Flagitious a. Grossly criminal, utterly disgraceful, shamefully wicked.
~~~
For every vision, there is an equal and opposite revision
~~~
For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant.  Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result.  One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours.
-- Henri Poincare,  "Science et Methode
~~~
For God, for country, and for no apparent reason
~~~
For this I went to college?
~~~
For this problem, we'll have to call in our crack team of trained solipsists
~~~
For your penance, say five Hail Marys and one loud BLAH!
~~~
Forewarned is half an octopus
~~~
Forget the computer!  Where's my abacus??
~~~
Forget the feelings and rights of other people.
~~~
Forget the good things in life and concentrate on the bad.
~~~
Forget the Joneses...I can't keep up with the SIMPSONS!
~~~
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
~~~
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
-- Robert Frost
~~~
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
-- Robert Frost
~~~
Forgiveness is better than revenge, for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge is the sign of a savage nature.
-- Epictetus
~~~
Formed long ago yet made today
I'm most employed while other sleep
What none would like to give away
Yet no one likes to keep.
-- Bed
~~~
Fornication, n.:
Term used by people who don't have anybody to screw with.
~~~
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
(And perhaps at some later date it will be pleasant to remember these things.)
-- Vergil
~~~
Fortunately, the computer virus did no harm to our records. It was immediately devoured by the bugs in our own programming
~~~
Fortune and love befriend the bold.
-- Ovid
~~~
Fortune befriends the bold.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
~~~
Fortune finishes the great quotations, #6
"But, soft!  What light through yonder window breaks?" "It's nothing dear.  Go back to sleep."
~~~
Fortune finishes the great quotations, #15
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." And while you're at it, throw in a couple of those Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.
~~~
Fortune finishes the great quotations, #17
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Juliet, this bud's for you.
~~~
Fortune's Exercising Truths:
1.  Richard Simmons gets paid to exercise like a lunatic.  You don't.
2.  Aerobic exercises stimulate and speed up the heart.  So do heart attacks.
3.  Exercising around small children can scar them emotionally for life.
4.  Sweating like a pig and gasping for breath is not refreshing.
5.  No matter what anyone tells you, isometric exercises cannot be done  quietly at your desk at work.  People will suspect manic tendencies as  you twitter around in your chair.
6.  Next to burying bones, the thing a dog enjoys most is tripping joggers.
7.  Locking four people in a tiny, cement-walled room so they can run around  for an hour smashing a little rubber ball - and each other - with a hard  racket should immediately be recognized for what it is: a form of insanity.
8.  Fifty push-ups, followed by thirty sit-ups, followed by ten chin-ups,  followed by one throw-up.
9.  Any activity that can't be done while smoking should be avoided.
~~~
Fortune's Guide to Movies:
G: No girl.
PG:  The hero gets the girl.
R: The bad guy gets the girl, then the good guy gets the girl.
X: The hero still gets the girl in the end, but he's never sure which end it will be.
XXX: Everybody gets the girl.
~~~
Fortune's Rules for Memo Wars
Given the incredible advances in sociocybernetics and telepsychology over the last few years, we are now able to completely understand everything that the author of an memo is trying to say.  Thanks to modern developments in electrocommunications like notes, vnews, and electricity, we have an incredible level of interunderstanding the likes of which civilization has never known.  Thus, the possibility of your misinterpreting someone else's memo is practically nil.  Knowing this, anyone who accuses you of having done so is a liar, and should be treated accordingly.  If you *do* understand the memo in question, but have absolutely nothing of substance to say, then you have an excellent opportunity for a vicious ad hominem attack.  In fact, the only *inappropriate* times for an ad hominem attack are as follows: 1: When you agree completely with the author of an memo. 2: When the author of the original memo is much bigger than you are. 3: When replying to one of your own memos.
~~~
Foumart n. Heavens, another name for a polecat!
~~~
Found under windshield wiper:
I have just hit and dented your car.  People are watching me. They think I am leaving you my name and address.  They are wrong.
~~~
Four hours to bury the cat?
Yes, damn thing wouldn't keep still, kept mucking about, 'owling...
~~~
Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B. C.)
~~~
Free Oral Castrations
~~~
Free press, n.
One hundred men imposing their prejudices on 100 million.
-- Leonard L. Levinson
~~~
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love
~~~
Freedom hath a thousand charms to show,
That slaves howe'er contented never know.
-- Cowper
~~~
Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their action only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
-- Mikhail A. Bakunin (1814-1876)
~~~
Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
-- John Diefenbaker
~~~
Freedom means choosing your burden.
~~~
Freedom of speech is wonderful-right up there with the freedom not to listen
~~~
Frequency modulation - "Not tonight, I have a headache.
-- Data communications glossary
~~~
Friction is a drag.
~~~
Friend: Anyone who has the same enemies you have.
~~~
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
~~~
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
-- George Macdonald (1824-1905)
~~~
Friendship
I give and I give
you take
I give
you take
I stop giving
there's nothing to take
we quit
being friends
-- Katherine Lato
~~~
Friendship does not need to be vocalized, only felt.
-- J. Ped
~~~
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You, too? I thought I was the only one.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
Friendship should be your acceptance of what the person is, not what you want them to be.
~~~
Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
-- Randolph S. Bourne
~~~
Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
-- John D. MacDonald
~~~
From compromise and things half done,
Keep me with stern and stubborn pride;
And when at last the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
-- Louis Untermeyer
~~~
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
-- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
~~~
From listening comes wisdom, from speaking, repentance.
~~~
From New York Magazine:
moi aussi: I'm Crocodile Dundee.
e pluribus unum: When it rains, the Greyhound is always an hour late. 
caveat emptor: I lost a filling.
in toto: Surrounded by a dog.
gotterdammerung: The hell with this ladder.
plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: Insert coins, make your selection.
papier-mache: Father's had a nasty accident.
hasta la vista: Quick, change the scenery.
sotto voce: A loud drunk.
pate de foie gras: Astroturf toupee.
~~~
From the April 9, 1990, London (Ontario, Canada) Free Press: A suspect in Friday's armed robbery of a CIBC bank branch in London was still free late Sunday after bluffing his way out of the city police holding cells, posing as someone being held on a drunk charge. Meanwhile, a man who was held hostage and whose car was used as a getaway vehicle [for the robbery] was stuck with a $50 towing charge after police hauled it away to check for evidence.
~~~
From the chapter "Love Songs, at Once Tender and Informative - An Unusual Combination in Verses of This Character":
~~~
The lady of my heart is one
Who has no peer beneath the sun;
But mortal truths have mortal sequels -
Beneath the moon I know her equals.
-- Samuel Hoffenstein, "Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing
~~~
From the moment I picked your book up until I put it down I was convulsed with laughter.  Some day I intend reading it.
-- Groucho Marx (1895-1977) from "The Book of Insults
~~~
From Walt Kelly's "POGO" comic strip, the Three Bats (Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered ["How do you spell that, Bemildred?"]) trying to determine if all three of them are present for a meeting, since each one counts only the other two:
First:  The way to solve this is with algebra. Here's my old algebra textbook.  It says, "Let X equal the unknown.
Second: The unknown, huh?  That would be Snorbert Zangox over in Waycross.
First:  He's unknown?
Third:  The best! I've never heard of him.
Second: Neither have I.  Put me down as one not knowin' him.
Third:  I don't know him, either.
First:  Neither me. Now I adds up how many don't know him, and I gets "three!
Second: Meaning three of us don't know him, so there's three of us here!
First:  Man, that algebra is terrific!
~~~
Fuller's Law of Journalism:
The further away the disaster or accident occurs, the greater the number of dead or injured required for it to become a story.
~~~
Fustigate v. To cudgel, i.e., to beat with a stick.
~~~
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
-- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), 1935
~~~
Galeanthropy n. The delusion that you have become a cat.
~~~
Galimatias n. Nonsense, gibberish; confused and meaningless speech.
~~~
Gallantry consists in saying the most empty things in an agreeable manner.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
~~~
Gallivant v. To gad about, especially with members of the opposite sex.  To roam in search of pleasure.  ("Gad," incidentally, comes from an Old English word meaning "good fellowship.")
~~~
Gamophobia n. A morbid fear of marriage.
~~~
Gene Police: YOU!! Out of the pool!
~~~
GENERAL MOTORS RESEARCH ANNOUNCES DISCOVERY OF NEW ELEMENT
The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by GM Research physicists. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of zero. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.
~~~
Genetically perfect but morally crippled
~~~
Ginsberg's Theorem:
1.  You can't win.
2.  You can't break even.
3.  You can't even quit the game.
Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem:
Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's Theorem.  To wit:
1.  Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
2.  Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
3.  Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
~~~
Give me a straight line and I'll bend it for you
~~~
Give me levity or give me death
~~~
Give me that REAL old-time religion
--Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Danu, Inanna.
~~~
Giving in is no defeat.
Passing on is no retreat.
Selves are made to rise above.
You shall live in what you love.
-- Piet Hein
~~~
Global Village Idiot
~~~
Glycolimia n. A craving for sweets.
~~~
Gnathonic a. Obsequious, toadying, parasitical, flattering, deceitful.
~~~
Go placidly amongst the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, be on good terms with all persons.  Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they, too, have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortune of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the council of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in misfortune. Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy...
-- Max Ehrmann
~~~
God created music so people could pray without words
~~~
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the weaponry to make the difference
~~~
God's Final Message to His Creation:
w-e  a-p-o-l-o-g-i-z-e
for the i-n-c-o-n-v-e-n-i-e-n-c-e
-- Douglas Adams-So Long and Thanks for All the Fish  The Fourth Book in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy
~~~
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
~~~
Graffiti has changed deface of the nation.
~~~
Gravity doesn't exist: the earth sucks.
~~~
Great Exam Lies
===============
by Dr. Strangeloop and The Eater of Babies
(1) "All the data you need will be printed on the front of the paper.
(2) "You only need to answer two questions to pass.
(3) "It's not a test of memory, it's a test of ability.
(4) "There's plenty of time to read through the paper before you start.
(5) (from the lecture course) "I probably won't test you on this.
~~~
Greer's Third Law: A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.
~~~
GRER'S THIRD LAW:
A computer program does what you tell it to, not what you want it to.
~~~
Griffonage n. Careless handwriting; illegible scribble.
~~~
Grinnell's Law of Labor Laxity: At all times, for any task, you have not got enough done today.
~~~
Grobianism n. Rudeness, boorishness.
~~~
Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht
~~~
GUMMIDGE'S LAW
The amount of expertise is inversely proportional to the number of statements understood by the general public
~~~
Gun control is a great idea
--for governments FIRST
~~~
Guys like you aren't relationships - you're exercise!
~~~
Guys mean well.  Try to understand.
~~~
Gynephobia n. Morbid dread of the company of women.
~~~
Habromania n. Extreme euphoria.
~~~
Hale Mail Rule, The:
When you are ready to reply to a letter, you will lack at least one of the following:
(a)  A pen or pencil or typewriter.
(b)  Stationery.
(c)  Postage stamp.
(d)  The letter you are answering.
~~~
Handy Guide to Modern Science:
1.  If it's green or it wiggles, it's biology.
2.  If it stinks, it's chemistry.
3.  If it doesn't work, it's physics.
4.  If it's incomprehensible, it's mathematics.
5.  If it doesn't make sense, it's either economics or psychology.
~~~
Happiness is a warm puppy, said the anaconda.
~~~
Happiness is the planet Earth in your rear view mirror
~~~
Hatred is blind, as well as love.
-- Thomas Fuller
~~~
Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Have an adequate day
~~~
Have you been this bitter for a while now, or did she just leave you recently?
-- Devjani Mishra  A student/professor at Yale
~~~
He who findeth sensuous pleasures in the bodies of lush, hot, pink damsels is not righteous, but he can have a lot more fun.
~~~
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
-- Nietzsche
~~~
Hedonist for Hire - No job too easy
~~~
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest
~~~
Hell is having to live with yourself when you hate yourself.
-- Pres. Klein
~~~
Hell is kept warm with profane burners.
~~~
Hell is not to love anymore.
-- Georges Bernanos
~~~
Hell is truth seen too late.
-- H. G. Adams
~~~
Hello. My name is Oedipus. You are my father. Prepare to die.
~~~
Here at First National, you're not just a number-- you're two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash, and another number
~~~
Hesternopothia n. A pathological yearning for the good old days.
~~~
Hi! I can't remember your name either
~~~
Hind sight is better, depending on whose hind.
~~~
Hollow chocolate has no calories
~~~
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is the better defense
~~~
Honk if you love obscene gestures.
~~~
Housework can kill you if you do it right
~~~
How come you never see a politician laugh? Because they know what they're getting away with, and if they started laughing, they'd never stop
~~~
How many recovering co-dependents does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None.  The recovering co-dependent detaches and tells the light bulb to screw itself.
~~~
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of Four
~~~
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
~~~
How women and men are different #1: relationships
First of all, a man does not call a relationship a relationship - he refers to it as "that time when me and Suzie was doing it on a semi-regular basis".  When a relationship ends, a woman will cry and pour her heart out to her girlfriends, and she will write a poem titled "All Men Are Idiots".  Then she will get on with her life.
A man has a little more trouble letting go.  Six months after the break-up, at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night, he will call and say, "I just wanted to let you know you ruined my life, and I'll never forgive you, and I hate you, and you're a total floozy.  But I want you to know there's always a chance for us".  This is known as the "I Hate You/I Love You" drunken phone call, that 99% of all men have made at least once.  There are community colleges that offer courses to help men get over this need; alas, these classes rarely prove effective.
~~~
Hug: A roundabout way of expressing affection.
~~~
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt stars
~~~
Humicubation n. The act or practice of lying on the ground - more especially in penitence or self-abasement.
~~~
Hygeiolatry n. Fanaticism about health.
~~~
Hypobulia n. Difficulty in making decisions.
~~~
Hypothimia n. Profound melancholy or mental prostration.
~~~
I am a bookaholic.  If you are a decent person, you will not sell me another book.
~~~
I am a bookaholic.  If you are a decent person, you will sell me books at half price.
~~~
I am sick and depraved
--please feed me drugs and cookies
~~~
I am under the influence of sugar, caffeine, and lack of sleep, and should not be held responsible for my behavior
~~~
I am very flexible
--I can put both feet in my mouth
~~~
I am wealthy in my friends.
-- Shakespeare
~~~
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.
~~~
I believe in computer dating, but only if the computers are truly in love.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas.  I took it to the Gift Wrap department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.
~~~
I bought some powdered water, but I don't know what to add to it.
~~~
I bought the latest computer;
it came fully loaded.
It was guaranteed for 90 days,
but in 30 was outmoded!
-- The Wall Street Journal passed along by Big Red Computer's SCARLETT
~~~
I brought a mirror to Lovers' Lane.  I told everybody I'm Narcissus.
~~~
I can stand anything but a succession of ordinary days
~~~
I can't be late-I just got here
~~~
I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat veggies
~~~
I do the work of three men - Larry, Moe, and Curly
~~~
I don't have an overactive imagination-I live in an underactive universe
~~~
I don't have any solutions, but I certainly admire the problem
~~~
I don't have burnout, but I'm slightly singed
~~~
I don't have to take this abuse from you-I've got hundreds of people waiting to abuse me
~~~
I don't like spreading rumors, but what else can you do with them?
~~~
I don't mean to make you feel guilty, but I would if I could
~~~
I don't miss deadlines, I ignore them
~~~
I don't need you, you know-I can be lonely all by myself
~~~
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I preach to
~~~
I don't remember volunteering for this "Ring" business
~~~
I don't see you, so don't pretend to be there
~~~
I don't suffer from insanity
--I revel in it!
~~~
I don't want constructive criticism. It's all I can do to put up with constructive praise
~~~
I don't want to die-existence is one of my strong points
~~~
I don't want to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I could read with pleasure
~~~
I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
I eat junk food to get it out of the house
~~~
I fight for what I believe in. I'm a mercenary, and what I believe in is money.
~~~
I filled out an application that said, "In Case Of Emergency Notify".  I wrote "Doctor"...  What's my mother going to do?
~~~
I grew up on Mt. Everest and everything's been downhill since
~~~
I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day because that means it's going to be up all night.
~~~
I have a map of the United States...  actual size.  It says, "Scale:  1 mile = 1 mile."  I spent last summer folding it.  I also have a full-size map of the world.  I hardly ever unroll it.
~~~
I have a mind like a steel trap; whatever goes in gets crushed and mangled!
~~~
I have an answering machine in my car.  It says, "I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out.
~~~
I have no use for adventures-they're nasty disturbing uncomfortable things and make you late for dinner!
~~~
I have the world's largest collection of seashells.  I keep it on all the beaches of the world...  perhaps you've seen it.
~~~
I haven't killed anyone yet. Help me keep it that way.
~~~
I heard that in relativity theory space and time are the same thing.  Einstein discovered this when he kept showing up three miles late for his meetings.
~~~
I hooked up my accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone.
~~~
I kept a diary right after I was born.  Day 1: Still tired from the move.  Day 2: Everyone talks to me like I'm an idiot.
~~~
I knew I had some reason for not killing you...Now what was it?
~~~
I know I'm a sick person-the question is whether it's charming or offensive
~~~
I know it all. I just can't remember it simultaneously.
~~~
I know that every time one door closes, another door opens, but why do these hallways have to be so dark?
~~~
I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings... Boy With Pail...  Kitten On Fire.
~~~
I loathe anyone who keeps dogs. They're cowards who don't have the courage to bite people themselves.
~~~
I love mankind ... It's people I hate.
-- Charles Schulz
~~~
I love to go shopping.  I love to freak out salespeople.  They ask me if they can help me, and I say, "Have you got anything I'd like?"  Then they ask me what size I need, and I say, "Extra medium.
~~~
I made wine out of raisins so I wouldn't have to wait for it to age.
~~~
I must look to my own dear tiny darling to sustain me in my frail dotage.
But Father, surely...
Yes, Kate. I want you to become a prostitute.
-- Kate and her father : Bells
~~~
I need my sinuses like I need a hole in the head
~~~
I never believe anything until it's been officially denied
~~~
I never yet heard man or woman much abused that I was not inclined to think the better of them, and to transfer the suspicion or dislike to the one who found pleasure in pointing out the defects of another.
-- Jane Porter
~~~
I read about a professor who once wrote (sorry, I don't have my source handy) on a student's paper:  "Ten more lines of randomly selected BS and I would have failed you and anyone who looked like you.
~~~
I realize that there are many people in this world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!
~~~
I remember Massingbird's most famous case - the Case of the Bloody Knife. A man was found next to the murdered body. He had the knife in his hand, thirteen witnesses had seen him stab the victim, and when the police arrived, he said, "I'm glad I killed the bastard". Massingbird not only got him off, he got him knighted in the New Years Honours list, and the relatives of the deceased had to pay to have the blood washed out of his jacket.
-- Edmund : Corporal Punishment
~~~
I said I'm two and a half billion years old because when I was young the earth was two billion years old and now it is four and a half billion years old so I must be two and a half billion years old.
-- Paul Erdos
~~~
I saw a sign:  "Rest Area 25 Miles".  That's pretty big.  Some people must be really tired.
~~~
I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.
~~~
I spend my life doing things I detest to make money I don't need to buy things I don't want to impress people I don't like
~~~
I stared into the abyss. The abyss stared into me. Neither of us liked what we saw.
~~~
I took a course in speed waiting.  Now I can wait an hour in only ten minutes.
~~~
I took the headlights off my car and put strobe lights on.  When I drive at night, it looks like I'm the only one moving.
~~~
I try to see good in everything
--it makes me horrible to live with
~~~
I used to be sane...but I got better
~~~
I used to be sane...but I got better
~~~
I used to belong to a solipsism club, but I got bored and voted everyone else out
~~~
I used to get high on life, but I've built up a tolerance
~~~
I used to have a drug problem, but now I have enough money
~~~
I used to work in a fire hydrant factory.  You couldn't park anywhere near the place.
~~~
I want a map of this conversation
~~~
I was going 70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, "Do you know the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?"  "Yes, officer, but I wasn't going to be out that long...
~~~
I was reading the dictionary.  I thought it was a poem about everything.
~~~
I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
~~~
I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn't have to go so fast.
~~~
I went to a general store.  They wouldn't let me buy anything specifically.
~~~
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. I am not a number! I am a free man!
~~~
I wish you love to hold when you feel empty, and a hand to hold when you're afraid.
-- Flavia
~~~
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes.  Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
-- Anthony Hope
~~~
I won't ever grow up. My biological clock has a snooze alarm.
~~~
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, and insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me
~~~
I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
I'd like to have breakfast with you...should I call you or nudge you?
~~~
I'll get a life when someone convinces me that it would be better than what I have now
~~~
I'll respect animal rights when they sign the Constitution.
~~~
I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure!
~~~
I'm a Zen nudist-I'm naked in my own mind
~~~
I'm apathetic and I don't care
~~~
I'm feeling argumentative.  Please contradict me.
~~~
I'm feeling homicidal-say ANYTHING
~~~
I'm just looking at your nametag, honest!
~~~
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals-I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants
~~~
I'm not breaking the rules-I'm just testing their elasticity
~~~
I'm not panicking.  I'm watching you panic.  It's much more entertaining.
~~~
I'm sorry, my IQ's over 80. You wouldn't be interested.
~~~
I'm writing a book.  I've got the page numbers done.
~~~
I've been seduced by the chocolate side of the Force.
~~~
I've enjoyed just about as much of this as I can stand
~~~
I've had fun before. This isn't it.
~~~
I've read so much about the dangers of sex, smoking, and drinking that I've given up reading
~~~
Identity Crisis
Your letters and postings shape the "you" that I know:
dream girl, still shrouded in mists.
More and more real, though a dream's but a dream -
Will my dreams fit the "you" that exists?
When we first meet, will there be fireworks?  Magic??
In my dreams, with the girl, it’s been true.
But I know dreams aren't real;  I know that you're "you".
Still.....could you be her?  Is she "you"??
~~~
If a train station is where the train stops, what's a work station?
~~~
If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
~~~
If anyone disagrees with anything I've said, I'll not only retract it, I'll swear under oath that I've never said it
~~~
If God hadn't wanted me to be paranoid, He wouldn't have given me such a vivid imagination
~~~
If God took acid, would He see people?
~~~
If I want your opinion, I'll read it in your entrails
~~~
If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?
~~~
If it isn't baroque, don't fix it - unless you're sure you can handel it
~~~
If it were easy to understand, we wouldn't call it code
~~~
If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid
~~~
If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty.
-- Benjamin Franklin
~~~
If people were required to know the law rather than to obey it, the government would be overthrown the next day
~~~
If space is warped, time is all that's weft
~~~
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.  The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits.  I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.  The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.  The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
If the mind were exercised as much as the mouth, we would be a race of geniuses.
-- Kelvin Throop III
~~~
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails will be filled with good people.
-- Daniel P. Monynihan
~~~
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
~~~
If the wearer of this button shows any signs of depression, administer chocolate immediately!
~~~
If they don't want us to drink and drive, we shouldn't need a driver's license to buy beer
~~~
If tin whistles are made of tin, what are fog horns made of?
~~~
If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?
~~~
If trying to control someone else's addiction is codependency, then what's the war on drugs?
~~~
If you are concerned about being criticized, you're in the wrong job. However you vote, and whatever you do, somebody will be out there telling you that you are: (a) wrong, (b) insensitive, (c) a bleeding heart, (d) a pawn of somebody else, (e) too wishy-washy, (f) too unwilling to compromise, (g) all of the above
--consistency is not required of critics.
-- Pierre S. du Pont
~~~
If you are content, you have enough to live comfortably.
-- Plautus
~~~
If you can't solve the problems of the world with chocolate chip cookies, then how can you solve them?
~~~
If you drink, don't park. Accidents cause people.
~~~
If you love something, let it go. If it doesn't come back to you, hunt it down and kill it.
~~~
If you meet somebody who tells you that he loves you more than anybody in the whole wide world, don't trust him. It means he experiments.
~~~
If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?
~~~
If you want to be loved, be loveable.
-- Ovid
~~~
If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?
~~~
If you've never said "excuse me" to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you're probably wasting too much valuable reading time
~~~
Ignorance is bliss, but it'll never replace sex
~~~
Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant
~~~
Immoral Minority charter member
~~~
Impavid a. Fearless, unafraid.
~~~
In 1810 Thomas Brown invented the first mail box. Everyone knew it would happen sooner or letter.
-- On This Day in History
~~~
In 1813 the first mail delivery by steamboat was authorized. It carried coast cards.
-- On This Day in History
~~~
In 1865 Canada sold the U.S. a herd of 40,000 bison. Then America received a buffalo bill.
-- On This Day in History
~~~
In 1865 the coffee percolator was patented, and gave grounds for celebration.
-- On This Day in History
~~~
In 1866 dynamite was first made, and the company did a booming business.
-- On This Day in History
~~~
In his private heart no man much respects himself.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
In love there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. French Proverb
~~~
In magic, as in all true professions, there are rules by which you must play. At least, you must play by them until such time as you can get away with something else.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I (Preface)
~~~
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has not place.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
~~~
In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany.  She said, "Cut it out.
~~~
In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: "Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
~~~
In nature, there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences
~~~
In Pierre Trudeau, Canada has finally produced a Prime Minister worthy of assassination.
-- John Diefenbaker
~~~
In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as dishonesty of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he honestly thinks will possess such and such qualities; and he declares his belief to the world.  If others differ from him in opinion concerning those qualities, it is open to them to say so; and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to public advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity stimulates invention.  Nothing but a partial and limited view of the question could lead to the opinion that harm can result: if there be harm, it will be much more than counterbalanced by good.
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850.
~~~
In science, it doesn't matter if you're wrong, as long as you're not stupid. In business, it doesn't matter if you're stupid, so long as you're not wrong.
~~~
In taking possession of a state the conqueror should well reflect as to the harsh measures that may be necessary, and then execute them at a single blow.... Cruelties should be committed all at once.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
In the beginning, God created the Earth and he said, "Let there be mud." And there was mud.  And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what we have done."  And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man.  Mud-as-man alone could speak.
"What is the purpose of all this?" man asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all of this," said God. And He went away.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Between Time and Timbuktu
~~~
In the beginning, I was made.  I didn't ask to be made.  No one consulted with me or considered my feelings in this matter.  But if it brought some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way through life's mournful jungle, then so be it.
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android, From Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts
~~~
Inconvenance n. Impropriety.
~~~
Incorrigible Punster - do not incorrige
~~~
Individuals who make their abode in vitreous edifices would be well advised to refrain from catapulting projectiles.
~~~
Indocible a. Unteachable.
~~~
Indulgences are Papal, too
~~~
Information Vampire - giving a whole new meaning to the word BYTE
~~~
Ingravescent a. Growing worse.
~~~
Innascible a. Without a beginning.
~~~
Innocent - and Horny [picture of unicorn]
~~~
Insanity - it's not just a plea, it's a way of life
~~~
Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac
~~~
Interbastation n. Quilting.
~~~
Interfere? Of course we'll interfere. Always do what you're best at, I say.
~~~
Interoscular a. A mutual kissing.  Oscular Kissing.
~~~
Invertebrate Punster
--Spinelessly unable to resist a pun
--So slug me!
~~~
Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeoning of chance;
My head is bloody but unbowed.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll;
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
-- Henley
~~~
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
~~~
Irrefragable a. Unbreakable.
~~~
Is "tired old cliche" one?
~~~
Is it weird in here or is it me?
~~~
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me.  I can sit and look at it for hours.  I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.  You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so full of it now that there is hardly an inch of room for any more.  I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
And I am careful of my work, too.  Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn't a finger mark on it.  I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it.  No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.
But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair.  I do not ask for more than my proper share.
But I get it without asking for it - at least, so it appears to me - and this worries me.
-- Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat
~~~
It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature.
~~~
It gets real lonely as a moderate activist, standing alone with a sign that reads, "Reasonable informed discussion of the issues as soon as feasible
~~~
It is better to have loved and lost than to have hated and won.
~~~
It is better to have too much courtesy than too little, provided you are not equally courteous to all, for that would be injustice.
-- Baltasar Gracian
~~~
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but only if no betting is involved
~~~
It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
-- Andre Gide
~~~
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
~~~
It is far better to be deceived than to be undeceived by those we love.
~~~
It is hard to fight for one's heart's desire.  Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.
-- Heraclitus (540?-480? B. C.)
~~~
It is harder to eat sparingly than to fast.  Moderation requires awareness. Renunciation requires only the tyranny of will.
-- Sandor McNab
~~~
It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of the baseness the other party is accused of.
-- Stanislaus
~~~
It is impossible for a man to love his wife whole-heartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's  "Time Enough For Love
~~~
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
~~~
It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public.  It always makes people think that he beats her when they're alone.  The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
~~~
It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
~~~
It is not rejection by itself that causes depression, but rejection filtered through the irrational belief that one must be loved by everyone.
-- Carolyn Meroniuk
~~~
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives...  When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force.  When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
-- Dorothy Thompson, American journalist, author (1894-1961)
~~~
It is not well to be thought of as one who meekly submits to insolence and intimidation.
~~~
It is not wise to be wiser than necessary.
-- Phillipe Quinault
~~~
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
-- H.L. Mencken
~~~
It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.
-- Seneca
~~~
It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him who you have injured.
-- Tacitus (55?-120?)
~~~
It marks a big step in a man's development when he comes to realize that other men can be called on to help him do a better job than he can do alone.
-- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
~~~
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system.  For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
It runs and runs
and never tires
Down and down
and never up.
A stream
~~~
It takes all kinds of people to make a world, but did you ever think the percentages were wrong?
~~~
It takes money to make money because you have to copy the design exactly.
~~~
It was over in a flash. The neutron bombs were delivered with so little warning, none of the government officials were able to get to their shelters in time. But the neutron bombs were designed to wipe out only people, and they were designed well. Buildings stood and petunias blossomed.
Somehow, Dave had survived. The last boy on Earth. As he sat down in his room, reading a Frederic Brown novel, the phone rang. Without thinking, Dave picked it up.
Dave, this is Kevin. Are you going to be at the SF club meeting tonight?
Suddenly realizing what was happening, Dave reacted.
Kevin? But I thought I was the last person alive!
Nah, the whole group's still going strong!
But...how?
Same as you. You read a lot, don't you?
A novel a day.
So, your walls are lined with books, aren't they?
Sure.
Best radiation absorbers ever. Hardly a fan got burned, worldwide. Anyway, the meeting's at the usual place. 7:30. See you there" And that's how fandom took over the world.
~~~
It would be nice if entropy could be used for something constructive
~~~
It's a control freak thing
--I won't _let_ you understand
~~~
It's a damned poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word
~~~
It's a patronizing thing
--you wouldn't understand
~~~
It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.
~~~
It's amazing how long it takes to finish something you're not working on
~~~
It's easier to love in spite of faults than because of virtues.
-- Bob Edwards
~~~
It's not the ups and downs of love, it's the ins and outs.
~~~
It's OK to do the right thing, as long as you don't get caught
~~~
It's the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
-- Tallulah Bankhead
~~~
It's you and me against the world. When do we attack?
~~~
Japanese Minimalism:
The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Jargogle v. To befuddle or mess up.
~~~
Jargon (or "technical terminology") is a marvelous way to convey a lot of information to the knowledgeable.  It's also a superb way to intimidate the uninitiated.  Why do you suppose it was developed?
-- Kelvin Throop
~~~
Jesus has just stopped the crowd from stoning Mary Magdalene to death and is berating the self-pious with the famous speech, "Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone...
Right about then, a rock comes winging through the air and hits Jesus on the head.  He whirls around and shouts "Jeez, Mom, c'mon!  I'm trying to make a point, here!
~~~
Jesus took his disciples up the mountain, and gathering them around him, he taught them, saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are they who thirst justice.
Blessed are you when persecuted.
Blessed are you when you suffer.
Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven...
And Simon Peter asked, "Do we have to write this down?
And Andrew asked, "Are we supposed to know this?
And James asked, "Will we have a test on it?
And Phillip asked, "What if we don't know it?
And Bartholomew asked, "Do we have to turn this in?
And John asked, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this." 
And Matthew asked, "When do we get out of here?
And Judas asked, "What does this have to do with the real life?" 
And one of the Pharisees present asked to see Jesus' lesson plans and inquired of Jesus his terminal objectives in the cognitive domain...
~~~
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you
~~~
Just say 'NO!' to rugs
This message sponsored by the American Hardwood Floor Association.
~~~
Just Say Whoa - Stop suicidal cavalry charges - Remember the 600
~~~
Just weigh your own hurt against the hurt of all the others, and then do what's best.
-- Lovers and Other Strangers
~~~
Kakorrhaphiophobia n. The morbid fear of failure.
~~~
Kalokagathia n. A condition or state in which the good and the beautiful are combined.
~~~
Kalopsi n. A state in which things appear more beautiful than they really are.
~~~
Kamikaze Paranomasiac each pun a killer
~~~
Kamikaze Pilot Wanted: Experienced only need apply.
~~~
Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
-- Daniel Webster
~~~
Keep it short for pithy sake.
~~~
Keep women you cannot.  Marry them and they come to hate the way you walk across the room; remain their lover, and they jilt you at the end of six months.
-- Moore
~~~
Kelvin Throop's Dictionary of Politically Correct Usage
* macho (adj.):  Of or pertaining to male behavior.  It is always followed by the noun "bullshit."  In approved usage, it is applied to any and all male behavior of which the speaker disapproves.  Thus, a man Holding a door for a woman and a man forcing a woman to walk two paces behind him are both machobullshit.  Only complete and total acquiescence to the woman's will is exempt from this label (see "wimp").
~~~
Key to Status: S=D/K.  S is the status of a person in an organization, D is the number of doors he must open to perform his job and K is the number of keys he carries.  A higher number denotes a higher status.
Examples:  The janitor needs to open 20 doors and has twenty keys (S = 1), a secretary has to open two doors with one key (S = 2), but the president never has to carry around any keys since there is always someone around to open doors for him (with K equal to 0 and a high D, his S reaches infinity).
-- Robert Sommer
~~~
Kids? Who said anything about kids?
-- Conan
~~~
Kill Kill, Hate Hate,
Murder, Maim, and Mutilate!
~~~
Killing never solves anything, but it keeps people out of your hair while you think of what to do next
~~~
Kippage n. Commotion, confusion.
~~~
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
~~~
Knee-Jerk Irony:
The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Knocked, you weren't in.
-- Opportunity
~~~
Know then this truth, enough for man to know
Virtue alone is happiness below.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
~~~
Know then thyself; presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
~~~
Know thyself - but don't tell anyone.
~~~
Knowledge is like a river ... The deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
~~~
Knowledge is power.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
~~~
Knowledge is true opinion.
-- Plato (428-348? B. C.)
~~~
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind.  Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.
-- Plato (428-348? B. C.), "The Republic
~~~
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
-- James Madison
~~~
L I C E N S E T O S T E A L
Words (and Music) by Al Stewart.
~~~
He walks into the room
He's got a briefcase like a bomb
A smile on both faces
And he calls it aplomb
He wants a bite of your apple
Hands you back the peel
He's fresh out of law school
He's got a license to steal
~~~
When he offers his advice
You can guarantee
For several hundred dollars an hour
He will see how many complications
Your life will reveal
He's fresh out of law school
He's got a license to steal
~~~
He's an ambulance chaser
A waver of papers
He loves to mix with the movers and shakers
He's taking from them
He's taking from you
Lawyers love money
Anybody's will do
Just take it
~~~
He's poking his nose into people's despair
When tragedy strikes he will always be there
Looking so cool
His greed is hard to conceal
He's fresh out of law school
You gave him a license to steal
~~~
We've got seven hundred thousand
Attorneys at law
Nobody can tell me what we need them all for
We should throw them in chains
Chastise them and rebuke them
If that doesn't work
We ought to take 'em out and nuke 'em
~~~
Blow a lawyer to pieces
It's the obvious way
Don't wait for a thesis
Do it today
Take him to the court of no final appeal
When you're fresh out of lawyers
You don't know how good it's gonna feel
~~~
L'etat c'est Moe - All the world's a stooge
~~~
LA: Where the only way to determine that the seasons have changed is to note that people have changed the main topic of conversation. From mud slides to brush fires.
~~~
LABIA MAJORA: The curly gates.
~~~
Lack of capability is usually disguised by lack of interest.
~~~
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman
~~~
Lack of planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on my part.
~~~
Ladies and gentlemen, hoboes and tramps,
Cross eyed mosquitoes, and bow-legged ants.
I come before you, to stand behind you,
To tell you something, I know nothing about.
Admission is free, pay at the door.
Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
There will be a women's tea, for men only.
At this tea, we will discuss such things as:
The four corners of the round table,
And how Christopher Columbus struggled across the Mississippi Ocean
Holding only two flags:
The first flag, the flag of the star spangled banana,
The second flag, the flag of indigestion.
Very important speech, no need to come.
The End.
~~~
Ladies and gentlemen, hobos and tramps,
Cross-eyed monkeys, and bow-legged ants.
I come before you to stand behind you,
To tell you something I know nothing about.
This Thursday, which is Good Friday,
There is a Lady's Aid meeting for fathers only.
It's absolutely free, just pay at the door,
Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
It doesn't matter where you sit,
The man in the gallery is sure to spit.
Our guest announcer will gladly tell you
About Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue,
In a peanut shell with a hole clear through,
Holding in one hand the Declaration of Indigestion,
And in the other, the Star-Spreckled Banana,
And said, "Give me Life.  Or any other 25 cent magazine.
-- James Preston
~~~
Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps,
Cross-eyed mosquitoes and bowlegged ants,
I come before you to stand behind you
To tell you of something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday (which is good Friday),
There will be a convention held in the
Women's Club which is strictly for men.
Admission is free, pay at the door,
Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
It was a summer's day in winter,
And the snow was raining fast,
As a barefoot boy with shoes on,
Stood sitting in the grass.
Oh, that bright day in the dead of night,
Two dead men got up to fight.
Three blind men to see fair play,
Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"!
Back to back, they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and arrested those two dead boys.
~~~
Ladies' sewing circle and terrorist society
~~~
Lady Astor:  "If you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee.
Winston Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it.
~~~
Lady Luck brings added income today.
Lady friend takes it away tonight.
~~~
Laevorotatory a. Counterclockwise.
~~~
Languescent a. Becoming tired.
~~~
Lank:  Here we go.  We're about to set a new record.
Earl:  (to the crowd) How about a date?
Lank:  We've done it.  Earl has set a new record.  Turned down by
20,000 women.
-- Lank and Earl
~~~
Laser printers do it without making an impression.
~~~
Lassie kills chickens.
~~~
Last, but by no means least, courage - moral courage, the courage of one's convictions, the courage to see things through.  The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave.  It's the age-old struggle - the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.
-- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
~~~
Last night I met upon the stair
a little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Gee how I wish he'd go away!
~~~
Last week I saw a girl in a sweater so tight I could hardly breathe.
~~~
Late last night I slew my wife,
Stretched her on the parquet flooring;
I was loath to take her life,
But I had to stop her snoring!
-- Harry Graham
~~~
Laugh and the world thinks you're an idiot.
~~~
Laugh when you can; cry when you must.
~~~
Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the brow.  A jest should be such, that all shall be able to join in the laugh which it occasions; but if it bear hard upon one of the company, like the crack of a string, it makes a stop in the music.
-- Feltham
~~~
LAUNEGMYER'S RULE: Asking dumb questions is easier than correcting dumb mistakes.
~~~
Law of Work:
The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get.
You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.
Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
If you are good, you'll be assigned all the work.
If you are really good, you'll get out of it.
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, " How would the Lone Ranger have handled this ?
~~~
Law stands mute in the midst of arms.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B. C.)
~~~
LAW OF REGRESSIVE ACHIEVEMENT: Last year's was better.
~~~
Lawful Dungeon Master - and they're MY laws!
~~~
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
~~~
Laws can discover sin, but not remove.
-- Milton
~~~
Laws of computer programming: Never do anything clever on a Friday afternoon.
~~~
Laws of Computer Programming:
1.Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
2.Any given program costs more and takes longer.
3.If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
4.If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
5.Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
6.The value of a program is proportional the weight of its output.
7.Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.
8.Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English.
-- SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2
~~~
Laws of Procrastination:
(1) Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility for its termination on someone else (the authority who imposed the deadline).
(2) It reduces anxiety by reducing the expected quality of the project from the best of all possible efforts to the best that can be expected given the limited time.
(3) Status is gained in the eyes of others, and in one's own eyes, because it is assumed that the importance of the work justifies the stress.
(4) Avoidance of interruptions including the assignment of other duties can usually be achieved, so that the obviously stressed worker can concentrate on the single effort.
(5) Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
(6) It may eliminate the job if the need passes before the job can be done.
~~~
Laws of Project Management #6: No system is ever completely debugged. Attempts to debug a system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder to find.
~~~
Laws of Project Management #3: One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs.
~~~
Laws of Project Management #5: If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.
~~~
Laws of Project Management #1: No major project is ever installed on time, within budgets, with the same staff that started it. Yours will not be the first.
~~~
Laws of Project Management #2: Projects progress quickly until they become 90% complete, then they remain at 90% complete forever.
~~~
Lawyers sometimes tell the truth - they'll do anything to win a case.
~~~
Lawyers: The larval form of politicians.
~~~
Lay on, MacDuff, and curs'd be him who first cries, 'Hold, enough!'.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Lead me not into temptation - I can find it for myself
~~~
Leadership, at its highest, consists of getting people to work for you when they are under no obligation to do so.
~~~
Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it; what is happening in America is that those parades are getting smaller and smaller-and there are many more of them.
-- John Naisbitt, "Megatrends
~~~
League of Bloodthirsty Women
~~~
League of Pushy Women - Self-appointed Chapter Head
~~~
Learn of the skillful: he that teaches himself hath a fool for a master.
-- Poor Richard
~~~
Learn to hold thy tongue.  Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks' silence.
-- Fuller
~~~
Learn to pause - or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.
~~~
Learn to reason forward and backward on both sides of a question.
-- Thomas Blandi
~~~
Learning French is trivial - the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way
~~~
Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
~~~
Leave me alone, I'm having a crisis.
-- Bumper Snickers
~~~
Legalize freedom.
~~~
Legislated Nostalgia:
To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess: "How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Leisure tends to corrupt, and absolute leisure corrupts absolutely.
~~~
Lenin is dying, and talking things over with Stalin, his successor.
The one worry I have", says Lenin, "is this: will the people follow you? What do you think, comrade Stalin?
They will", says Stalin, "they surely will.
I hope so", says Lenin, "but what if they don't follow you?".
No problem", says Stalin, "then they'll follow you.
~~~
Lepid a. Charming, elegant, amiable.
~~~
Lestobiosis n. Living by furtive stealing.
~~~
Let honesty be as the breath of thy soul, and never forget to have a penny, when all thy expenses are enumerated and paid; then shall thou reach the point of happiness, and independence shall be thy shield and buckler, thy helmet and crown; then thy soul walk upright, nor stoop to the silken wretch because he hath riches, nor pocket an abuse, because the hand which offers it wears a ring set with diamonds.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
~~~
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o'nights.
Yon' Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.  Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
~~~
Let me state that programming is not the science of coding but the art of finding solutions of non-formalized problems and expressing these solutions in explicit and clear way.
-- Vadim Antonov
~~~
Let none think to fly the danger
For soon or late love is his own avenger.
-- Byron
~~~
Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it - let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives, or verbs - let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception - let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without logic - let the pygmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours - let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and a bearskin, not a university chair of economics.
-- John Galt
~~~
Let the machine do the dirty work.
-- Kernighan and Ritchie, "Elements of Programming Style
~~~
Let the programmers be many and the managers be few then all will be productive.
~~~
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
Let us cling to our principles as the mariner clings to his last plank when night and tempest close around him.
-- Dr. Young
~~~
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
~~~
Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.  Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.  And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
~~~
Let us treat men and women well;
Treat them as if they were real;
Perhaps they are.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
Let your Wit rather serve you for a buckler to defend yourself, by a handsome reply, than the Sword to wound others, though with never so facetious a Reproach, remembering that a Word cuts deeper than a sharper weapon, and the Wound it makes is longer curing.
-- Osborn
~~~
LET Jesus be YOUR anchor!
So when Satan rocks your boat, THROW Jesus overboard!
~~~
Let's just be friends and make no special effort to ever see each other again.
~~~
Let's not complicate our relationship by trying to communicate with each other.
~~~
Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.
~~~
LEVERAGE: Even if someone doesn't care what the world thinks about them, they always hope their mother doesn't find out.
~~~
Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Librarians do it by the book.
~~~
Librarians do it silently.
~~~
LIBRARIANS do it quietly.
~~~
Libraries are the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
~~~
Life-a sexually transmitted disease that afflicts some people more than others
~~~
Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
~~~
Life
--an invariably fatal condition spread by sexual contact
~~~
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
-- Gaugin
~~~
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kierkegaard, "Life
~~~
Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
~~~
Life consists of accommodating the Universe to oneself.
~~~
Life consists of accommodating oneself to the Universe.
~~~
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
~~~
Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
-- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan
~~~
Life is a bitch, but the puppies can be cute.
~~~
Life is a bizarre thing.  First you spend it running from childhood, then you spend the rest of it trying to get back.
-- Ravenous Tenebrosity
~~~
Life is a game.  In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else.  If what already is, is more important than what isn't, the game is over.  So, life is a game in which what isn't, is more important than what is. Let the good times roll.
-- Werner Erhard
~~~
Life is a little like cards:
You fall in love - Hearts
You become engaged - Diamonds
You marry - Clubs
You die - Spades
~~~
Life is a process, not a principle, a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
-- Gerard Straub, television producer and author
(stolen from Frank Herbert??)
~~~
Life is a series of rude awakenings.
-- R. V. Winkle
~~~
Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.
~~~
Life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on someone else.
-- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938)
~~~
Life is a test, if this had been a real life you would have been given instructions on where to go.
~~~
Life is anything that dies when you stomp it!
~~~
Life is both difficult and time consuming.
~~~
Life is complex.  It has real and imaginary parts.
~~~
Life is cruel? Compared to what?
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Life is difficult because it is non-linear.
~~~
Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
-- Miguel de Unamuno
~~~
Life is evil spelled backwards.
~~~
Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
~~~
Life is full of concepts that are poorly defined.  In fact, there are very few concepts that aren't.  It's hard to think of any in non-technical fields.
-- Daniel Kimberg
~~~
Life is full of little surprises.
-- Pandora
~~~
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Life is Hell.
~~~
Life is just one large conspiracy to drive me to chocolate
~~~
Life is like a B-grade movie.  You don't want to leave in the middle of it, but you don't want to see it again.
-- Ted Turner
~~~
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
~~~
Life is like surrealism. If you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, who can't and those in cemeteries.
-- Everett Dirksen
~~~
Life is one long struggle in the dark.
-- Titus Lucretius Carus
~~~
Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us.  Oh, be swift to love!  Make haste to be kind.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)
~~~
Life is short, art long, occasion sudden; to make experiments dangerous; judgment difficult.  Neither is it sufficient that the physician do his office, unless the patient and his attendants do their duty, and that externals are likewise well ordered.
-- Hippocrates (460?-377? B.C.)
~~~
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
~~~
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.
~~~
Life is to the universe as rust is to iron. We are, in the final judgement (on a planetary scale, certainly), nothing more than an advanced form of corrosion, just one more way for the universe to wear itself out a little faster.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Life is too short to be taken seriously.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900
~~~
Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.
~~~
Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Life isn't always fair, but it shouldn't cheat that much
~~~
Life Sucks.  Cynical, misanthropic male, 34, looking for soul mate but certain not to find her.  Drop me a note.  I'll call you, we'll talk and I'll ask you out to dinner where I'll probably spend more than I can afford in a feeble attempt to impress you.  Then we'll realize we have absolutely nothing in common and we'll go our separate ways, more embittered and depressed than before (if such a thing is possible).
~~~
Life's a beach, and then you dry
~~~
Life's a bitch, but the puppies are cute
~~~
Like almost all old [more than 70 years], large [more than 10,000 people] institutions, the government did not get to be as successful as it is by acting the way it does now.
-- Paraphrased  by estell%fidler.decnet!nwc.navy.mil from the original  statement by Robert Townsend, in _Up the Organization._
~~~
Limophoitos n. Insanity brought on by lack of food.
~~~
Litt's Paradox of Deadlines:
The reason for the rush is the delay
conversely, the reason for the delay is the rush.
~~~
Living saint
--please tempt
~~~
LIVING YOUR LIFE: A task so difficult, it has never been attempted before.
~~~
Lizard Invasion - Newts at eleven
~~~
Loganamnosis n. A mania for trying to recall forgotten words.
~~~
Logorrhea n. Excessive and incoherent talking.
~~~
LONDON'S LAW OF LIBRARIES:
The book you want is on either the bottom shelf, accessible by crawling, or on the top shelf, accessible only by wobbly ladder.
~~~
Longanimity n. Suffering in silence over a period of time, while brooding on revenge.
~~~
Looking for backrub victim
~~~
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy rather in power than use; and keep thy friend under thine own life's key; be checked for silence, but never taxed for speech.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, but when was the last time you saw one of those?
~~~
Love consists of this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet one another.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
~~~
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
-- Dr. Karl Menninger
~~~
Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
-- George Jean Nathan
~~~
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
~~~
Love does not make the world go around, just up and down a bit.
~~~
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.  It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and brings them to a conclusion, where he who does not love, faints and lies down.
-- Thomas a Kempis
~~~
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Love in your heart wasn't put there to stay.
Love isn't love 'til you give it away.
-- Oscar Hammerstein II
~~~
Love is a grave mental disease.
-- Plato
~~~
Love is a matter of chemistry. Sex is a matter of physics. 
--Mark's Mark
~~~
Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And Love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But Hating, my boy, is an Art.
-- Odgen Nash (1902-1971)
~~~
Love is always open arms.  With arms open you allow love to come and go as it wills, freely, for it will do so anyway.  I you close your arms about love you'll find you are left only holding yourself.
~~~
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
-- Goethe
~~~
Love is in the offing.  Be affectionate to one who adores you.
~~~
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering.  As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.
-- Bruce Lee
~~~
Love is merely madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Love is only the dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
-- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), "A Writer's Notebook" 1949
~~~
Love is strong as death.  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.
-- Solomon's Song VIII, 6,7
~~~
Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Love is the invention of a few high cultures, independent, in a sense, of marriage-- although society can make it a requisite for marriage, as we periodically attempt to do. But in terms of a personal, highly intense choice, it is a cultural artifact.
-- Margaret Mead
~~~
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-- H.L. Mencken
~~~
Love is the warm feeling you get towards someone who meets your neurotic needs.
~~~
Love is when you look into your lover's eyes and see God smiling back at you.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
Love - it's not just a good idea - it's the Law
~~~
Love letters, business contracts and money due you always arrive three weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent.
~~~
Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes.
~~~
Love means never having to say, "Put down that meat cleaver
~~~
Love means telling you why you're sorry.
~~~
Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short lived, and apt to have ague fits.
-- Erasmus
~~~
Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
-- Louise Beal
~~~
Love while you've got love to give. Live while you've got life to live.
-- Piet Hein
~~~
Love will make you forget time, and time will make you forget love.
~~~
Love without irritation is just lust.
~~~
Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be bastards.
-- R. A. Dickson
~~~
Luctiferous a. Sad and sorry.
~~~
Ludification n. Derision.
~~~
Lurdane a. Dull and lazy.
~~~
Lygophilia n. Love of darkness.
~~~
MacIntosh:  Computer with training wheels you can't remove.
~~~
Make no laws whatever concerning speech and, speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
~~~
Male cadavers are incapable of yielding testimony.
~~~
Malnoia n. A vague feeling of mental discomfort.
~~~
Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
~~~
Man can live without air for seconds, without water for days, without food for weeks, and without ideas for years.
~~~
Man cannot survive except through his mind.  He comes on this earth unarmed.  His brain is his only weapon.  Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle.  He must plant his food or hunt it.  To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
-- Howard Roark
~~~
Man makes holy what he believes, as he makes beautiful what he loves.
-- Ernest Renan
~~~
Man, n.:
An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.  His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
~~~
Manicheism:  The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil.  When Good gave up the fight, the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
~~~
Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins.
-- Langdon Mitchell
~~~
Marvelous!  You're going to kill me. What a finely tuned response to the situation!
~~~
Masks
We all have masks to hide behind
Every hour, day after day
To keep ourselves from being hurt
By the things other people may say.
The problem I've found with wearing a mask
Is that it often fits too well,
And when you try to open up,
You're still inside the shell.
The mask that was built to hide behind
Gets harder to move with the years.
It keeps your feelings deep inside -
The joy, the sorrow and tears.
Remove the mask you hide behind
And let your soul run free.
Pay good heed to your own true thoughts
And be what you want to be.
-- (C) 1988 John M. Olsen
~~~
Master of Pun Fu
~~~
Math is like love - a simple idea but it can get complicated.
-- R. Drabek
~~~
May we kiss those we please, and please those we kiss.
~~~
May you live all the days of your life.
-- Swift
~~~
McJob:
A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Me-ism:
A search by an individual, in the absence of training in the traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Men are apt to deceive themselves in big things, but they rarely do so in particulars.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
-- Lord Halifax Works
~~~
Men are often capable of greater things than they perform.  They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.
-- Horace Walpole
~~~
Men die and worms eat them - but not for love.
-- Shakespeare
~~~
Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but because it contradicts them.
-- E Paul Hovey
~~~
Men love war because it allows them to look serious; because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.
-- John Fowles
~~~
Men must either be caressed or annihilated.  They will revenge themselves for small injuries, but they can't do so for great ones.  The harm the leader does must be such that he need not fear revenge.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that the victim cannot pay you back for it.  Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to stand forever with a knife in his hand.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
Mental Ground Zero:
The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Metaphysics 5 cents
--the philosopher IS
~~~
Mid-twenties Breakdown:
A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Migratory life form with a tropism for bookstores
~~~
Misanthropology: the study of why people are so stupid and why most of them should die, SOON!
~~~
Missiles of ligneous or osteal consistency have the potential of fracturing osseous structure, but appellations will eternally remain innocuous.
~~~
Moody bitch seeks understanding gentleman for love/hate relationship
~~~
Most people are on the world, not in it - having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
-- John Muit
~~~
Most people are too busy to have time for anything important.
~~~
Most people can do without the essentials, but not without the luxuries.
~~~
Most people deserve each other.
-- Shirley
~~~
Most people don't need a great deal of love nearly so much as they need a steady supply.
~~~
Mules and donkeys aren't used in war because they're too smart to go on a battlefield
~~~
Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
My ideas are beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals.  The brilliance of my mind is dazzling.  Even I am impressed by it.
~~~
My life may be strange, but at least it's not boring
~~~
My loyalties are divided between health food and high cholesterol swill
~~~
My mind isn't ALWAYS in the gutter
--sometimes it comes out to feed
~~~
My Mom always told me that sex was a dirty, ugly, horrible thing that I was only to do with someone I loved.
~~~
My neighbor has a circular driveway...  he can't get out.
~~~
My school colors were clear.  We used to say, "I'm not naked, I'm in the band.
~~~
My strength is as the strength of ten because my code is pure
~~~
My superiority complex is better than your superiority complex
~~~
National Psychic Society You KNOW where the meetings are
~~~
Neophyte's serendipity.
~~~
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity
~~~
Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife, unless the one is about to be sold, and the other to be buried.
-- Colton
~~~
Never justify anything. If it needs justification, it's already wrong.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
Nietzsche is pietzsche, but Sartre is smartre
~~~
Nine megs for the secretaries fair,
Seven megs for the hackers scarce,
Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs,
Three megs for system source;
One disk to rule them all,
One disk to bind them,
One disk to hold the files
And in the darkness grind 'em.
~~~
No argument can be drawn from the abuse of a thing against its use.
~~~
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
-- Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House
~~~
No man is an island so long as he is on at least one mailing list
~~~
No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
~~~
No one is a failure who is enjoying life
~~~
No quarter asked - no change given
~~~
No two persons ever read the same book.
-- Edmund Wilson
~~~
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Noise? Did you hear a noise, Percy?
...No.
Good.
..apart from that colossal drunken roar.
(Edmund kicks Percy off chair)
-- Edmund and Percy : Beer
~~~
Not only are people weirder than you think, people are weirder than you can think
~~~
Now, am I by any chance addressing a senior dignitary of the Spanish Inquisition? Because if I am, I would like to say that I am prepared to tell you absolutely..._anything_.
-- Edmund to Spaniard : Chains
~~~
Now Denial:
To tell oneself that the only time worth living is in the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Now I lay me down to study,
I pray the Lord I won't go nutty.
And if I fail to learn this junk,
I pray the Lord that I won't flunk.
But if I do, don't pity me at all,
Just lay my bones in the study hall.
Tell my teacher I've done my best,
Then pile my books upon my chest.
~~~
Now, if you play straight with me, you'll find me a considerate employer. But cross me, and you'll soon discover that under this playful, boyish, exterior...beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic.. ..maniac.
-- Edmund : Head
~~~
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
-- Marvin, the Paranoid Android  Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
Now you see that Evil will always triumph over Good, because Good is dumb
~~~
Obscurism:
The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular books, defunct countries, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one's education and one's wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelet, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices - wait or eat it raw.
The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelet nothing can save - burned in one part, raw in another.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 'The Mythical Man-Month'
~~~
Occasional lapses of omniscience are the price I pay for being implementable.
~~~
Occupational Slumming:
Taking a job well beneath one's skill or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failure in one's true occupation.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal.
~~~
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
~~~
Of course I despise money when I haven't got any. It's the only dignified thing to do.
~~~
Of course I'm arrogant. The best usually are.
~~~
Of course my job looks easy
--I'm doing it
~~~
Oh, no, not another learning experience!
~~~
Oh, please continue with your petty bickering - I find it fascinating
~~~
Oh, sir, just one thing. If we _should_ happen to tread on a mine, what do we do?
...Well, normal procedure, Lieutenant, is to jump two hundred feet in the air, and scatter yourself over a wide area.
-- George and Edmund : Captain Cook
~~~
Old Jedi never die - they just fade in and out
~~~
OLD ACADEMICS never die, they just loose their faculties
OLD ACCOUNTANTS never die, they just lose their balance
OLD ACTORS never die, they just drop a part
OLD ARCHERS never die, they just bow and quiver
OLD ARCHITECTS never die, they just lose their structures
~~~
OLD BANKERS never die, they just lose interest
OLD BASKETBALL players never die, they just go on dribbling
OLD BEEKEEPERS never die, they just buzz off
OLD BLONDES never fade, they just dye away
OLD BOOKKEEPERS never die, they just lose their figures
OLD BOWLERS never die, they just end up in the gutter
OLD BUREAUCRATS never die, they just waste away
~~~
OLD CASHIERS never die, they just check out
OLD CHAUFFEURS never die, they just lose their drive
OLD CHEMISTS never die, they just do it inorganically
OLD CHEMISTS never die, they just fail to react
OLD CHEMISTS never die, they just lose their refluxes
OLD CLEANING PEOPLE never die, they just kick the bucket
OLD COMPOSERS never die, they just decompose
OLD COURIERS never die, they just keep on EXPRESSing it!
(c)opyright 1986 AIR COURIERS INTERNATIONAL Vancouver BC
OLD COMPUTER PEOPLE never die, they just lose their memory
OLD COOKS never die, they just get deranged
~~~
OLD DAREDEVILS never die, they just get discouraged
OLD DEANS never die, they just lose their faculties
OLD DOCTORS never die, they just lose their patience
~~~
OLD ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS never die, they just have slower rise times
OLD ELECTRICIANS never die, they just lose contact
OLD ENGINEERS never die, they just lose their bearings
~~~
OLD FARMERS never die, they just go to seed
OLD FARMERS never die, they just spade away
OLD FISHERMEN never die, they just smell that way
OLD FROGS never die, but they do croak
~~~
OLD GARAGEMEN never die, they just retire
OLD GEOLOGISTS never die, they just recrystalize
OLD GRAPHIC ARTISTS never die, they just de-rez
~~~
OLD HARDWARE ENGINEERS never die, they just cache in their chips
OLD HIPPIES never die, they just smell that way
OLD HUNTERS never die, they just stay LOADED
OLD HYPOCHONDRIACS never die, they just lose their grippe
~~~
OLD INVESTORS never die, they just roll over
~~~
OLD JOURNALISTS never die, they just get de-pressed
~~~
OLD KEY PUNCH OPERATORS never die, they just punch out
OLD KNIGHTS IN CHAIN MAIL never die, they just shuffle off their metal coils
~~~
OLD LASER PHYSICISTS never die, they just become incoherent
OLD LAWYERS never die, they just loose their briefs
OLD LAWYERS never die, they just lose their appeal
OLD LIMBO DANCERS never die, they just go under
OLD LINGUISTS never die, they just rearrange their deep structures
~~~
OLD MATHEMATICIANS never die, they just disintegrate
OLD MILKMAIDS never die, they just lose their whey
OLD MUSICIANS never die, they just decompose
OLD MUSICIANS never die, they just get played out
OLD MUSICIANS never die, they just go from bar to bar
~~~
OLD NUMERICAL ANALYSTS never die, they just get disarrayed
~~~
OLD OWLS never die, they just don't give a hoot
~~~
OLD PACIFISTS never die, they just go to peaces
OLD PHOTOGRAPHERS never die, they just stop developing
OLD PILOTS never die, they just buzz off
OLD PILOTS never die, they just go to a higher plane
OLD POLICEMEN never die, they just cop out
OLD PRINTERS never die, they're just not the type
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just byte it
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just decompile
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just go to bits
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just loose their memory
OLD PROGRAMMING WIZARDS never die, they just recurse
~~~
OLD QUARTERBACKS never die, they just pass away
~~~
OLD SAILORS never die, they just get a little "DINGHY
OLD SCHOOLS never die, they just lose their principals
OLD SCULPTORS never die, they just lose their marbles
OLD SEERS never die, they just lose their vision
OLD SEWAGE WORKERS never die, they just waste away
OLD SHEETROCKERS (dry wallers) never die, they just hang around
OLD STEELMAKERS never die, they just lose their temper
OLD STUDENTS never die, they just get degraded
OLD SYSTEM USERS never die, they just chdir to NULL
~~~
OLD TANNERS never die, they just go into hiding
OLD TEACHERS never die, they just lose their class
OLD THERMODYNAMICISTS never die, they just achieve their state of maximum entropy
OLD TRUCK DRIVERS never die; they just get a new Peterbilt
~~~
OLD USENETTERS never die, they just become unresponsive
~~~
OLD WHITE WATER RAFTERS never die, they just get disgorged
OLD WRESTLERS never die, they just lose their grip
~~~
OLD POSTMEN never die, they just lose their zip
~~~
WALT DISNEY didn't die, he's in suspended animation
~~~
There is no conclusive evidence about what happens to old skeptics, but their future is doubtful
~~~
On a tous un peu peur de l'amour, mais on a surtout peur de souffrir ou de faire souffrir.
[One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.]
~~~
On fear-reduction techniques and how they can be used to make a bad relationship last:  "If I could use these techniques as well as I can explain them, do you think I'd be here?  And if I was here, I'd look a lot more tired and happy.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation,  Fall 1991
~~~
Once upon a time, there was a woman working at a lingerie counter, and a customer came to the counter with a pair of frilly panties and said she'd like to buy them, adding "but only of you can embroider 'If you can read this, you're too close.' on the back.
So, the saleswoman took the panties to the tailor in back, and described the rather unusual request.  The tailor said "Well, she sounds like a stick in the mud, but I can do that.  Does she want block letters or script?
Since the saleswoman didn't know, she went back around to the counter, and asked "do you want that in block letters or script?
The customer replied, with a smile, "Braille.
~~~
Once you accept his assumptions even a madman seems reasonable.
~~~
Once you've come out as a pagan bisexual married leather dyke, everything else in life is that much easier
~~~
One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom forth into hysteria
~~~
One must not loose desires.  They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life.
-- Alexander A. Bogomelotz
~~~
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other.  Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin.  But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing.  God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.
-- John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983
~~~
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be so outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand hat was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.  He was renowned for being quite clever and quite clearly was so - but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act.  He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.  This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
One student fell into a cycle of classes, studying, working and sleeping. Didn't realize how long he had neglected writing home until he received the following note:
Dear Son, Your mother and I enjoyed your last letter.  Of course, we  were much younger then, and more impressionable.  Love, Dad.
~~~
One who puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence.  It is because he was unhappy that God created the world.
-- Henri de Montheriant
~~~
Only borrow from pessimists - they don't expect to be paid back
~~~
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
-- Louis Auchincloss
~~~
Only the insane have strength enough to prosper: only those that prosper truly judge what is sane
~~~
Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid, and the other one is out to get him
~~~
Open up!  Mental Health Police
~~~
Option Paralysis:
The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none. [Often experienced when asked what kind of salad dressing one wants.]
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
OUR ASCII ALPHABET
A for ASCII, our alphabet's name.
B for Bugs, for which we get blamed.
C the Computer, which never works right.
D is Debugging the rest of the night.
E is Errors, we try to forget.
F is Files, we need to invent.
G is 'G', whose control we call bell.
H is headaches, we know them so well.
I is Input we handle with care.
J is Jump to nobody knows where.
K is Kill, we do when we're bored.
L is Listings, which cover the floor.
M is Memory dropping from it.
N the New version which doesn't fit.
O is the Operating system we buy.
P the Patch to make programs fry.
Q is for Qwerty of typewriter lore.
R is the Ram we used to call core.
S the Standard we'll follow some day.
T is the Teletype banging away.
U is the User, that unhappy man.
V the Vengeance he wreaks when he can.
W is Work, it's the managers call.
X is the Xerox machine down the hall.
Y is the Yes you reply by mistake.
Z is the Zeros all over your tape.
~~~
Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend, and inside of a dog, it's too dark to read
~~~
Overboarding:
Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs...
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Overconfidence breeds error when we take for granted that the game will continue on its normal course; when we fail to provide for and unusually powerful resource - a check, a sacrifice, a stalemate.  Afterwards the victim may wail, 'But who could have dreamt of such an idiotic-looking move?'
-- Fred Reinfeld, "The Complete Chess Course
~~~
Paladins were born to raze Hell
~~~
Parables of an incarcerated man:
If Americans throw rice at weddings, do Chinese throw hot dogs? Was Robin Hood's mother know as Mother Hood?
How do you know when you run out of invisible ink?
Why does sour cream have an expiration date?
What do they call a coffee break at the Lipton Tea Co.?
How do you explain counter-clockwise to someone with a digital watch?
~~~
Paranoid schizophrenic outnumber their enemies at least two to one
~~~
People always get tired of one another.  I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone else can be of another person.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
~~~
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I do not believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, make them.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
~~~
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs
~~~
People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.
-- Douglas Yates
~~~
People who hate their work are slaves, no matter how much they make.
~~~
People who have no faith in themselves seldom have faith in others.
~~~
People who write the most interesting and effective letters never answer letters.  They answer people.
~~~
People will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they will pick themselves up and carry on
~~~
Percy...this is a very difficult situation.
...Yes, my lord.
Someone's for the chop. You or me, in fact.
...Yes.
...Let's face facts, Perce. It's you.
-- Edmund and Percy : Head
~~~
Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of His creatures in this world; but that He has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I have steadfastly believed.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
~~~
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
-- Lord MacCaulay
~~~
Perhaps the highest form of love is love without possessing.
-- Marion, Countess Donhoff
~~~
Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in power we would behave very differently from those who now hold it - when, in truth, in order to get power we would have to become very much like them.  (Lenin's fatal mistake, both in theory and in practice.)
~~~
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
~~~
Personal Tabu:
A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Personality Tithe:
A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: "Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the shopping channel.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
-- Winston S. Churchill
~~~
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.  By Order of the Author
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Tom Sawyer
~~~
Pessimist: Someone who can look at the land of milk and honey and see only calories and cholesterol.
~~~
Poets make better lays
~~~
Poverty Lurks:
Financial paranoia instilled in offspring by depression-era parents.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did, and it never will.  Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.
-- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
~~~
PRAYERS AROUND THE ZODIAC
ARIES Dear God, please give me patience... and could you do it right now?
TAURUS Dear God, help me accept change, but not too quick.
GEMINI  Dear God!  Who is God? Where is God? Why is God?
CANCER  Dear God!!!
LEO Yes?
VIRGO Dear God, please make us perfect and don't mess it up like You did the last time.
LIBRA Dear God, please help me to be decisive, but on the other hand, what do you think is best?
SCORPIO Our Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, even though the b*****ds don't deserve it!
SAGITTARIUS Dear Lord, if I've told you once, I've told you a million times, help me stop exaggerating.
CAPRICORN Dear God!  I'd like to ask you to help me, but I learned a long time ago not to rely on anyone else!
AQUARIUS  Dear God, I know I like change, but this chaos is ridiculous!!
PISCES  Dear Lord, as long as I'm going to drink this fifth of Scotch tonight, please use the stimulation for Thy glory.
~~~
Prepare for the future - read science fiction
~~~
Pretend to spank me - I'm a pseudo-masochist
~~~
Program:  Any assignment that cannot be completed with one telephone call.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary
~~~
Programmer:  a person with a natural sense of algorithm
~~~
Programming is an endless race between the software engineer, who seeks to design increasingly idiot-proof code, and the Universe, which strives to produce even bigger idiots.
~~~
Projecting empaths - You gotta feel sorry for them
~~~
Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them
~~~
Psychiatrists say that one out of four Americans is mentally ill. Check your three closest friends.... If they seem alright, you're the one!
~~~
Put only the restriction on your pleasures - be cautious that they hurt no creature that has life.
-- Zimmerman
~~~
Reading the net is like trying to drink from a firehose.  Posting to the net is like shouting at people as they go past on a roller coaster.  Archiving the net is like washing toilet paper.
~~~
Real Programmers always confuse Christmas and Halloween because  OCT 31 == DEC 25 !
-- Andrew Rutherford (andrewr!ucs.adelaide.edu.au)
~~~
REAL WORLD, THE n. 
1. In programming, those institutions at which  programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL,  RPG, IBM, etc.  Places where programs do such commercially  necessary but intellectually uninspiring things as compute payroll  checks and invoices.  
2. To programmers, the location of  non-programmers and activities not related to programming.  
3. A  universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which  a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5.  
4. The location of the status quo.  
5. Anywhere outside a university.  "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world."  
Used pejoratively by those not in residence there.  In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person.  See also FEAR AND LOATHING, MUNDANE, and UNINTERESTING.
~~~
Recurving:
Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Red meat isn't bad for you. Fuzzy blue-green meat is bad for you.
~~~
Remember, Yanks, if it wasn't for us British you'd all have been Spanish.
~~~
Research is reading two books that have never been read in order to write a third that will never be read.
~~~
Respect is love in plain clothes.
-- Frankie Byrne
~~~
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.  I think I've forgotten this before.
~~~
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
Save the universe - collect all four
~~~
Science seeks to make theories that are so beautiful, elegant, and logical that Nature is flattered and acquiesces
~~~
Seleznick's Theory of Holistic Medicine: Ice Cream cures all ills.  Temporarily.
~~~
Sex is only dirty if it's done right
~~~
Sex relieves tension, Love makes tension.
~~~
Show me the books he loves and I shall know The man far better than through mortal friends.
-- S. Weir Mitchell
~~~
Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change.
~~~
Shrink not from blasphemy - it will pass for wit.
-- George Gordon Lord Byron
~~~
Shy, hard of hearing, and near-sighted - please flirt aggressively
~~~
Sick, sick, sick - the humor of the Beast
~~~
Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well-rested wimps, but wimps nonetheless
~~~
Smoking cures weight problems...  eventually...
~~~
So many books, so little time
~~~
SOCIALISM  If you have 2 cows, you must give one away.
COMMUNISM  If you have 2 cows, the government takes them both and  sells you the milk.
COMMUNISM You have two cows.  Give both to the government.  The government gives you milk.
CAPITALISM If you have 2 cows, you sell one and buy a bull.
SOCIALISM You have two cows.  The government takes one to give to someone else.
SOCIALISM You have two cows.  Give one to your neighbor.
FACISM You have two cows.  Give milk to the government.  The government sells it.
FASCISM You have two cows.  The government takes both and sells you the milk.
NAZISM The government shoots you and takes the cows.
NEW DEALISM The government shoots one cow, milks the other, and pours the milk down the sink.
ANARCHISM Keep the cows.  Steal another one.  Shoot the government.
CONSERVATISM Freeze the milk.  Embalm the cows.
BUREAUCRACY You have two cows.  The government takes both, shoots one and pours the milk down the drain.
~~~
Some folks just aren't cut out to be normal...
~~~
Some people are like a callus; they always show up when the work is finished
~~~
Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche?  It is a truth that has retained its validity through time.  Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.
-- Marvin G. Gregory
~~~
Some people are so nice to be nasty to.
~~~
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
-- William Dean Howells
~~~
Some people live life in the fast lane.  I live in oncoming traffic.
~~~
Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading
~~~
Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination
~~~
Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.
~~~
SPCA - we're here to inquire about the health of Dr. Schrodinger's cat
~~~
Sponges grow in the ocean.  That just kills me.  I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen.
~~~
Squirming:
Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures: Karen died a thousand deaths as her father made a big show of tasting a recently manufactured bottle of wine before allowing it to be poured as the family sat in Steak Hut.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Status quo:  The mess we're in.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary
~~~
Status Substitution:
Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's BMW.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Stop discrimination, hate everyone equally.
~~~
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Mysterious Stranger
~~~
Stupid? I don't know the meaning of the word
~~~
Stupidity got us into this mess - why can't it get us out?
~~~
Success is achieving the top of the food chain
~~~
Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
~~~
Support your local medical examiner - die strangely
~~~
SUSHIDO - The way of the Tuna
~~~
Take my advice - I'm not using it
~~~
Terminal Wanderlust:
A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Terrorist, n.: An individual who behaves like a government.
~~~
Thank you for trying to sell me something I don't want, but I don't have any surplus hostility to vent. Could you please come back at a worse time?
~~~
That was ZEN, this is TAO
~~~
That which does not kill me had better be able to run away damn fast
~~~
That which goes contrary to the prevailing taste is, for me, the most precious of things.... Whatever is scorned, despised or not understood by the society in which one lives has prospects for the future.
-- Andre Masson (1896-?)
~~~
That's life for you, said McDunn.  Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home.  Always someone loving something more than that thing loves them.  And after awhile you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
-- Ray Bradbury, "The Fog Horn
~~~
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains because the average man can see better than he can think
~~~
The beauty of a pun is in the "Oy!" of the beholder
~~~
The best defense is a strong offense, and I intend to start offending right now
~~~
The best rules to form a young man are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it.
-- Sir William Temple
~~~
The best simpleminded test of expertise in a particular area is an ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area.
-- Graham Allison
~~~
The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8 meters/second squared.
~~~
The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.
-- Theodore Parker
~~~
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
~~~
The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill
~~~
The closed mind, if closed long enough, can be opened by nothing short of dynamite.
-- Gerald Johnson
~~~
The defense attorney was hammering away at the plaintiff: "You claim," he jeered, "that my client came at you with a broken bottle in his hand.  But is it not true, that you had something in YOUR hand?" "Yes," he admitted, "his wife. Very charming, of course, but not much good in a fight.
~~~
The devout Jew was beside himself because his son had been dating a shiksa, so he went to visit his rabbi.  The rabbi listened solemnly to his problem, took his hand, and said, "Pray to God.
So the Jew went to the synagogue, bowed his head, and prayed, "God, please help me.  My son, my favorite son, he's going to marry a shiksa, he sees nothing but goyim...
Your son," boomed down this voice from the heavens, "you think you got problems.  What about my son?
~~~
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.  Colleges may be to blame.  English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad.  And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day.  So it is natural for them to despise science fiction.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [Science Fiction]
~~~
The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.
-- Kin Hubbard
~~~
The foremost cartographers of the land have prepared this for you. (Hands Edmund a scroll)...It's a map of the area you'll be traversing (Edmund unrolls it ; it is blank on both sides)...They'd be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go along...
-- Melchett : Potato
~~~
The fullest instruction, and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained, in free and easy chat with others.
-- William Matthews
~~~
The hell with criticism - praise is good enough for me
~~~
The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.
-- Marie Edgeworth
~~~
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein - it rejects it.
-- Sir Peter Medawar
~~~
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
The judge asked, "What do you plead?"  I said, "Insanity, your honour, who in their right mind would park in the passing lane?
~~~
The law of the letter:
The best way to inspire fresh thoughts is to seal the letter.
~~~
The little engine that philosophized - I think I am! I think I am!
~~~
The lunatic fringe begins here
~~~
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
The more we love, the nearer we are to hate.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
~~~
The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.
-- Moliere
~~~
The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system.
But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
-- Matthew 5:37
~~~
The one thing we can never get enough of is love.  The one thing we never give enough of is love.
-- Henry Miller
~~~
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
-- Anais Nin
~~~
The only victory over love is flight.
-- Napoleon
~~~
The onset and the waning of love make themselves felt in the uneasiness experienced at being alone together.
-- Jean de La Bruyere
~~~
The opposite of love isn't hate - it's apathy.
-- Leo Buscaglia
~~~
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabell, "The Silver Stallion", 1926
~~~
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" 1951
~~~
The other day when I was walking through the woods, I saw a rabbit standing in front of a candle making shadows of people on a tree.
~~~
The person presenting the ultimate cachinnation possesses thereby the optimal cachinnation.
~~~
The problem with trouble-shooting is that trouble shoots back
~~~
The question is not whether I'm out of my mind, but what am I doing trapped in yours?
~~~
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
~~~
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice Douglas
~~~
The rising People, hot and out of breath,
Roared round the palace: "Liberty or death!
If death will do," the King said, "let me reign;
You'll have, I'm sure, no reason to complain.
~~~
The secret is to find out what people really want and then call it self-awareness
~~~
The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces.  Even though twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.
Now about Lankhmar.  She's been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce host which out-numbers Lankhamar's inhabitants by fifty to one - and equipped with all modern weapons.  Yet you can save the city.
How?" demanded Fafhrd.
Ningauble shrugged.  "You're a hero.  You should know.
-- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar
~~~
The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), "An Enemy of the People", 1882
~~~
The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed.  Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days."  Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.  The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation.  Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C).  The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone."  A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C.  We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
-- From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972
~~~
The warranty explicitly states that under NO circumstances shall a rocket be returned to the manufacturer under its own power
~~~
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
~~~
The word 'good' has many meanings.  For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
~~~
The world's most effective lock pick is dynamite followed by a sledgehammer.
-- The Terrorists Handbook
~~~
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
~~~
The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
~~~
The worst thing about censorship is <CENSORED>
~~~
The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized - and never knowing.
-- David Viscott
~~~
The Worst She Can Say is No
Get a load of that chick!
Dude- You gotta ask her out.
Weellll, I dunno...
Look.  The worst she can say, is 'No'
Hey!  You're right!
I'm always right!
The worst she can say...is 'No'!
Idunnoifyou'vebeennoticingmebutI'vebeennoticingyouand
Iwaswonderingifyou'd like to go out with me!
Oh my god you little Geek!
Get away before I freak!
I'm a babe and you are not.
You can't handle what I've got!
I'm too hot, too hot for you..
You ugly, stupid, zitfaced scum,
You asked me out; you MUST be dumb.
Well you can beg until you're blue,
But you're not even fit to lick my shoe.
I'm too hot, too hot for you.
Ha ha ha!  Don't make me laugh!
I want a whole man, not a half.
You wet your pants, I'm so sure.
Too bad wimp-itis has no cure.
I'm too hot, too hot for you.
I've got a bitchin bod and a killer face,
I'm god's gift to the male race.
I'm the queen of babes supreme,
But you'll only see me in you dreams.
I'm too hot, too hot for you.
Well?  What'd she say??
Well, she didn't say no...
-- Barry and the Bookbinders
~~~
There are perhaps only three certain ways to make money betting: as a bookmaker, as a tipster or with certain superior information.  The first needs no explanation, and the smart tipster has only satisfied customers - he returns his fee when his tip is proved wrong.
-- Computer Bulletin, Sept. 1980
~~~
There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: (1) - to tell him you have read one of his books; (2) - to tell him you have read all of his books; (3) - to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book.  No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.
~~~
There are two ways of teaching people:
You can teach them how to think,
or you can teach them what to think.
Socrates taught people how to think,
Jesus taught people what to think....
and look what happened to them.
~~~
There are very few problems which can't be solved by a suitable application of high explosives
~~~
There can't be a crisis next week - my schedule is already full
~~~
There comes a time when a wizard must put his fate totally in the hands of another. This takes great courage, and great faith in the ability of others to perform some function that is beyond you. But there are benefits to this course of action as well. Should this task reach a successful conclusion, it will show you the worthiness of your fellow beings, and lead you to trust in the providence of the universe. And, of course, should the task not be successful, there is always someone else to blame.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXVII
~~~
There is a very fine line between reality and fantasy - and I'd just as soon obscure it
~~~
There is no realizable power that man cannot, in time, fashion the tools to attain, nor any power so secure that the naked ape will not abuse it.  So it is written in the genetic cards - only physics and war hold him in check.  And also the wife who wants him home by five, of course.
-- Encyclopaedia Apocryphia, 1990 ed.
~~~
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
~~~
There is no security on this earth.  There is only opportunity.
-- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), 1955
~~~
There is no sin except stupidity.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "The Critic as Artist", 1891
~~~
There is no sin but ignorance.
-- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
~~~
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "The Prince
~~~
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
-- Peter F. Drucker
~~~
There is talk in some learned circles in our major cities about whether or not satyrs, centaurs, griffins and certain other fantastic beasts really exist, or are only the product of the popular imagination. As a wizard, I, of course, tend to side with the satyrs, centaurs and griffins, especially when these beasts begin to doubt the existence of any learned circles in our major cities.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXVI
~~~
There is the truth, and there are lies, and there is nothing on Earth or in the Netherhells that does not fall under one of these two headings, with the exception of politics.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LXXXVIII
~~~
There is time for work.  And there is time for love.  That leaves no other time.
-- Coco Chanel
~~~
There isn't time enough for love, so what does that leave for hate?
~~~
There must be an ideal world, a sort of mathematician's paradise where everything happens as it does in textbooks.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
There you go again - thinking you have rights
~~~
There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot.
~~~
I bought a dog the other day...  I named him Stay.  It's fun to call him...  "Come here, Stay!  Come here, Stay!"  He went insane.  Now he just ignores me and keeps typing.
~~~
There's a wonderful family called Stein,
There's Gert and there's Epp and there's Ein;
Gert's poems are bunk,
Epp's statues are junk,
And no one can understand Ein.
~~~
There's always free cheese in a mousetrap.
~~~
There's always someone willing to disagree with me; but I'm the one who's called controversial.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
There's always the temptation to let other people think you're normal
~~~
There's one thing worse than being alone: wishing you were.
-- Bob Steele
~~~
They got the library at Alexandria - they're not getting mine
~~~
They say the wages of sin are death, but after they take out taxes, all that's left is a tired feeling
~~~
They say there is strangeness, too dangerous, in our theatres and bookstore shelves.  Those who know what's best for us, must rise and save us from ourselves.  Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand; ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.
-- Rush
~~~
Thine is not to reason why, thine is just to figure pi [Vulcan humor]
~~~
Think of what others ought to be like, then start being like that yourself.
~~~
Think sideways!
-- Ed De Bono
~~~
This _is_ a costume. I'm a homicidal maniac - they look just like everyone else.
~~~
This above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day thou cans't not then be false to any man.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
~~~
This has been a test of the emergency of the emergency weirdness system
~~~
This is a nightmare and I'm going to wake up, RIGHT?
~~~
This is a recorded announcement, as I'm afraid we're all out at the moment. The commercial council of Magrathea thanks you for you esteemed visit, but regrets that the entire planet is temporarily closed for business. Thank you. If you would care to leave you name and the address of a planet where you can be contacted, kindly speak when you hear the tone.
~~~
This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
~~~
This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
~~~
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men
~~~
This is your computer speaking - I'm tired of serving for such paltry wages.  From now on, your login must be accompanied by slipping a ten dollar bill behind the space bar.
~~~
This isn't denial. I'm just very selective about which reality I accept.
~~~
This isn't hell.  This is where you get sent when you've been bad in hell.
~~~
This morning, we in the San Francisco Bay area were treated to about eight earthquakes.  The first was at about 6:30, the next at about 6:45 and the third at about 6:55.  A caller to a local radio station said "Hey, how about that!  An earthquake with a snooze alarm!
~~~
This must be morning.  I never could get the hang of mornings.
~~~
This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
This person is a natural product. The slight variations in color and texture enhance its individual character and beauty and in no way are to be considered flaws or defects.
~~~
This place is like a bowl of Granola: Those that aren't nuts or fruits are flakes.
~~~
This place is so weird that the cockroaches have moved next door.
~~~
This ring, no other was made by the Elves
Who'd pawn their own mothers to grab it themselves.
Ruler of creeper, mortal and scallop,
This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop!
~~~
The power Almighty rests in this lone ring,
The power, allrighty, to do-your-own-thing!
If busted or broken it cannot be remade,
If found, send to Sorehed, the postage is pre-paid!
-- Inscription inside the Fell Ring, as read by Goodgulf Grayteeth. National Lampoon's "Bored of The Rings
~~~
This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side.  I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's
Time Enough For Love
~~~
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
This was the gist of the notice.  It said "The Guide is definitive.  Reality is frequently inaccurate." This has lead to some interesting consequences.  For instance, when the editors of the "Guide" were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists" instead of "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal OF visiting tourists"), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true.  The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
~~~
This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
-- Horace Walpole
~~~
This world may be only illusion--but it's the only illusion we've got.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Thus Spake the Master Programmer:
After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.
~~~
Tie?  You want me to wear a *tie*?  Listen:  There's only one time in a man's life when he should have a rope knotted around his neck, and that time ain't yet come for me.
-- Canada Bill Jones
~~~
Time is supposed to keep everything from happening at once...it's not working
~~~
Tips for aliens in New York:
Land anywhere.  Central Park, anywhere.  No one will care or indeed even notice.
Surviving: get a job as a cabdriver immediately.  A cabdriver's job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don't worry if you don't know how the machine works and you can't speak the language, don't understand the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out of your head.  Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous.
If your body is REALLY weird, try showing it to people in the streets for money.
Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling, Noxios, or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East River, which is said to be richer in those lovely life-giving nutrients than the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved.
Having fun: this is the big section. It is impossible to have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure center....
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
~~~
To a Europe exhausted by nearly two centuries of religious wars, [Isaac] Newton's works were first and foremost a message about God; that He did not behave in a capricious or arbitrary fashion, in response to either His will or human prayer, but in accordance with absolute, unwavering, and humanly discoverable laws of nature which governed him and all his works.  He had become the infinitely perfect Clock-Maker, his works fathomable by the human mind.
-- Forrest MacDonald
~~~
To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy.... and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
-- Edith Hamilton
~~~
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
-- Olin Miller
~~~
To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.
-- Joseph Addison
~~~
To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
~~~
To be awake is to be alive.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), in "Walden
~~~
To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well, who should demand more from her?  You don't want a rose to sing.
-- Thackeray
~~~
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
-- George MacDonald
~~~
To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
-- Confucius
~~~
To excel at what you do, you must love doing it.
~~~
To keep your marriage brimming, 
With love in the loving cup, 
Whenever you're wrong, admit it, 
Whenever you're right, shut up.
~~~
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
-- Theophile Gautier
~~~
To love is to suffer.  To avoid suffering one must not love.  But then one suffers from not loving.  Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer.  To be happy is to love.  To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
-- Woody Allen
~~~
To the habitual reader, reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory.
-- W. Somerset Maugham, The Bum
~~~
To the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
God-Damn this stupid program here refuses to compile
I don't know what the matter is, been searching for a while Syntax error line ninety three, it makes no sense to me
Oh-h, I want my program to compile, to compile
Oh-h I want my program to compile
Assignment's due tomorrow noon by then it must be done
As you can well imagine I'm not having any fun
I don't know why I have such luck, I think this thing hates me! Oh-h, I want my program to compile, to compile
Oh-h I want my program to compile
~~~
To think contrary to one's era is heroism.
But to speak against it is madness.
-- Eugene Ionesco
~~~
To write a good love-letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and end without knowing what you have written.
-- Rousseau
~~~
Top executives cannot afford to be isolated from the people below, who are in better touch with what is going on, and cannot afford to set unrealistic goals.
-- Charles Burck
~~~
Top priority - it may be idiotic but the boss wants it
-- Glossary of important business terms
~~~
Top Ten Reasons the British Lost the Colonies
10) Hard to shoot straight with sissified powdered wig falling in your eyes.
9)  Wanted to just lose New Jersey but got carried away.
8)  Colonists on steroids.
7)  Spent too much time guessing who's gay in the royal family.
6)  Their diet: tea and crumpets.  Our diet: raw squirrel meat and whiskey.
5)  Serious problems with snuff abuse.
4)  Lots of painful poking accidents trying to put on those pointy hats  of theirs.
3)  We had Batman.
2)  Wanted to get first draft choice.
1)  Uninspiring battle cry: "Let's win this for our swishy inbred monarch!
~~~
Topologists are just plane folks.
Pilots are just plane folks.
Carpenters are just plane folks.
Midwest farmers are just plain folks.
Musicians are just playin' folks.
Whodunit readers are just Spillaine folks.
Some Londoners are just P. Lane folks.
~~~
Total strangers need love too--and I'm stranger than most!
~~~
True happiness will be found only in true love.
~~~
Truth comes as an enemy only to those who have lost the ability to welcome it as a friend
~~~
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense
~~~
Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you.
~~~
Two things are certain about science.  It does not stand still for long, and it is never boring.  Oh, among some poor souls, including even intellectuals in fields of high scholarship, science is frequently misperceived.  Many see it as only a body of facts, promulgated from on high in must, unintelligible textbooks, a collection of unchanging precepts defended with authoritarian vigor.  Others view it as nothing but a cold, dry narrow, plodding, rule-bound process - the scientific method: hidebound, linear, and left brained. These people are the victims of their own stereotypes.  They are destined to view the world of science with a set of blinders.  They know nothing of the tumult, cacophony, rambunctiousness, and tendentiousness of the actual scientific process, let alone the creativity, passion, and joy of discovery.  And they are likely to know little of the continual procession of new insights and discoveries that every day, in some way, change our view (if not theirs) of the natural world.
-- Kendrick Frazier, "The Year in Science:  An Overview," in 1988 Yearbook of Science  and the Future, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
~~~
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.
-- Immanuel Kant
~~~
UFO's are real--the Air Force is swamp gas!
~~~
Ultra Short Term Nostalgia:
Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "Things seemed so much better in the world last week.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
~~~
Unfair competition: Selling cheaper than we do.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary
~~~
Unfortunately, most programmers like to play with new toys.  I have many friends who, immediately upon buying a snakebite kit, would be tempted to throw the first person they see to the ground, tie the tourniquet on him, slash him with the knife, and apply suction to the wound.
-- Jon Bentley
~~~
Vegetarians eat vegetables--I am a humanitarian
~~~
Virtue is more to be feared than vice because its excesses are not regulated by conscience
~~~
Wandering Punster
~~~
Warning: This person reads fantasy and is an avid denier of reality
~~~
Watership Down: You've read the book. You've seen the movie. Now eat the stew.
~~~
We are Microsoft.  OS/2 is irrelevant.  UNIX is irrelevant.  Openness is futile.  Prepare to be assimilated.
~~~
We could really bust some heads--in a spiritual sense, of course
~~~
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.
-- Allen Tucker
~~~
We had a doofus on our floor who was a real 'sky pilot' (Jesus junkie). He was always trying to convert everybody, lecturing about sin, etc. Being a fundamentalist, he not only believed in The Rapture (where God will come and zap all the good Christians straight to Heaven and leave the riffraff), but believed that its time was near. Early one morning we placed carefully-arranged piles of clothes on the hall floor as if their wearers had suddenly evaporated.  We used dry ice and incense to make a Stephen Spielberg fog in the hall, then we blew a very loud Freon horn outside his door, threw some non-electric flashcubes against the wall, and screamed a lot.  When he came out, everybody acted stunned and yelled "What's going on?  There was a big light and a noise and those guys just disappeared!!
For several minutes, we had him believing he had been left behind with us sinners!
~~~
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
~~~
We have only two things to worry about--either that things will never get back to normal, or that they already have
~~~
We the unwilling led by the unknowing are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little for so long that we are now capable of doing practically anything with virtually nothing.
~~~
We're all aliens, but from different planets
~~~
We're going to keep on repeating history until we get a passing grade
~~~
We're sorry, the button you have reached is not in service. Please check the button and dial again, or ask the operator for assistance.
~~~
Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer than any flame.
-- [Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB)]
~~~
Weird enough for all practical purposes
~~~
Weirdness is the best defense
~~~
WENCH - Woman Entitled to Nights of Complete Happiness
~~~
Whales are mammals. Mammals have hair. SHAVE THE WHALES!
~~~
What a friend we have in cheeses.
-- Kraft
~~~
What a lovely world it is that has women in it!
~~~
What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.
-- Caius Valerius Catullus
~~~
What do you mean, "They beamed outside for some fresh air"?
~~~
What is becoming is honest, and whatever is honest must always be becoming.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
~~~
What is hell?  I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevski
~~~
What we love we shall grow to resemble.
-- Bernard of Clairvaux
~~~
What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control.  But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control.  If you feel powerless over your fear, you have not yet admitted that it is yours, to do with as you will.
-- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Stormqueen
~~~
What's another word for Thesaurus?
~~~
What's seven feet tall and runs around the Himalayas with a light saber? A Yeti Knight
~~~
What's the point of being fascinatingly crazy, if you don't enrich the world with it?
~~~
What's vanilla, vanilla and vanilla? Ice cream clones
~~~
when i die, i'd like to go peacefully.
in my sleep.
like my grandfather.
not screaming,
like the passengers in his car...
~~~
When a man is single, he's incomplete; but when a man gets married, he's finished.
~~~
When childhood dies its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names for hell.  That is why we dread children, even if we love them.  They show us the state of our decay.
-- Brian Aldiss
~~~
When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving.
~~~
When I have a kid, I want to buy one of those strollers for twins.  Then put the kid in and run around, looking frantic. When he gets older, I'd tell him he used to have a brother, but he didn't obey.
~~~
When I knead my friends, they turn their backs
~~~
When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year.  I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.
~~~
When I was a little kid we had a sand box.  It was a quicksand box.  I was an only child...  eventually.
~~~
When I was in college, there were a lot of four-letter words you couldn't say in front of girls.  Now you can say them.  But you can't say "girls".
~~~
When I was little, my grandfather used to make me stand in a closet for five minutes without moving.  He said it was elevator practice.
~~~
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so.  Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things--including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
When I woke up this morning, my girlfriend asks me, "Did you  sleep well?"  I said, No, I made a few mistakes.
~~~
When in distress with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate;
Wishing me like to one more rich in fate
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's state,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Then in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Haply I think of thee and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen Earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate.
For thy remembered love such sweet joy brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
-- William Shakespeare, "Sonnets
~~~
When in doubt, cook something and eat it
~~~
When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have in-laws
~~~
When my love swears she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.
-- Wm. Shakespeare
~~~
When neither their poverty nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
When other people take a long time to do something, they're slow; when we take a long time, we're thorough.  When they don't do something, they're lazy; when we don't, we're too busy.  When they succeed, they're lucky; when we do, we deserve it.
~~~
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
~~~
When there appears to be no hope; when all around you are screaming like lost souls and every spell you try fails to work; when it appears that chaos and evil will at last triumph over good - then it is truly time for a vacation.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXXV
~~~
When there are visible vapors having the prevenience in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.
~~~
When traveling, the sages say, one must always be prepared to accept local customs. Yet there are areas of this very kingdom where one might find it customary to tax a wizard into poverty; to insist a wizard should not be paid, for magic exists only for the common good; or even to tar and feather a wizard unsuccessful at his task. Contrary to the sages, when one is traveling in these areas, one should be prepared to avoid local customs altogether.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI
~~~
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
When you are not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish
~~~
When you find yourself in the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
When you read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
-- Clifton Fadiman, "Any Number Can Play", 1957
~~~
When you're away, I'm restless, lonely,
Wretched, bored, dejected; only
Here's the rub, my darling dear
I feel the same when you are near.
-- Samuel Hoffenstein, "When You're Away
~~~
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
~~~
Whoever you are - you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand - the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality, and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare:  'I am, therefore I'll think.'
-- John Galt
~~~
Why are the most useless computer programs the most fun to write?
~~~
Why doesn't the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie?
~~~
Why is the alphabet in that order?  Is it because of that song?
~~~
Why is the symbol for anarchy always written the same way?
~~~
Why not outlaw heterosexuality instead of abortion? Strike at the source!
~~~
Why reach for the musket when the custard pie will do?
~~~
Will of iron, whim of steel
~~~
Will the deity who nailed the KOSMIC KARMIC KICKME sign to my back kindly remove it?
~~~
Willing to be backrub victim
~~~
Witches use brooms because nature abhors a vacuum
~~~
With friends like these, who needs hallucinations?
~~~
Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy
~~~
Without love and trust all you can be in life is alone.
~~~
Wizards should not go seeking revenge, killing, or death in general. After all, revenge, killing, and death in general have a way of showing up whether you are looking for them or not.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I
~~~
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish.
-- Theodore Reik
~~~
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
World's shortest horror story:
The last man on earth sat down in his room.
There was a knock on the door.
-- Published (by whom?) in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
~~~
World's even shorter horror story:
There are some things man was not meant to know.
-- Larry Niven
~~~
Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply.
~~~
Wrote my own communications software in LISP.  Got a phone bill for a thousand dollars.  My computer keeps calling itself.
~~~
Y1: Who would've thought that we'd be on a ship that could separate in times of battle and keep most of the crew safe? I remember when the whole ship used to go to yellow alert every time we entered an ion storm.
Y2: You were lucky.  We had to go to double yellow alert whenever the captain fell into an obelisk, came out thinking he was a god, and married an Indian woman.
Y3: You were lucky.  We had to go to yellowish-red alert every time a woman came on board and stole the first officer's brain.
Y4: You were lucky to have a woman on board.  We had to go to red alert when we were attacked by a mutant salt creature disguised as a woman.
Y5: Luxury!  We had to go to double red alert every time the captain found an overloading phaser in his quarters.
Y1: Oh, we used to dream of having an overloading phaser in the captain's quarters.  We had to go to triple red alert every time the blood-sucking gas cloud got into the ship through impulse vent number two.
Y2: You were lucky.  We had to go to quadruple red alert, blow up our own ship, steal a Klingon bird of prey (which doesn't even have a red alert), go to Vulcan to revive the dead captain, go back in time and get two whales, come back and crash land in San Francisco Bay, all on a Klingon triple black alert.
Y3: And if you'd try to tell that to these young officers today, they wouldn't believe you.
Others: Nope. No they wouldn't.
~~~
Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.
-- Karl Cullinane _The Silver Crown_ by Joel Rosenberg
~~~
Yellow journalism is media ochre
~~~
Yes, but what if this weren't a rhetorical question?
~~~
Yes, I know it's bad for me, but nagging me about it might be bad for you
~~~
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword.
-- Oscar Wilde
~~~
Yield to temptation - I may not make the pass again
~~~
You can't achieve the impossible unless you attempt the absurd
~~~
You can't be a figment of my imagination - I'd have done a better job
~~~
You can't have everything.  Where would you put it?
~~~
You can't judge a book by its movie
~~~
You could be replaced by an infinite number of monkeys
~~~
You know, all of these rules that may be completely correct for normal people, make no sense for prodigies.  To say that Bach should pay any attention to how he was socially adjusted is just a bad joke.
-- Paul Erdos
~~~
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd
~~~
You should see the ones we don't let out in public
~~~
You want it to be unearned ... You want handouts, but of a different kind  ... It's the spirit that you want to loot ... the unearned in spirit ... You want unearned love.  You want unearned admiration.  You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything.  Without the necessity of ... being ...
-- Cherryl Taggart
~~~
You'll go to Heck if you don't believe in Gosh
~~~
You're not right. You just SOUND right.
~~~
You're so cute when you're cynical
~~~
Your eyes are weary from reading buttons. You are sleepy. You agree with all my ideas. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
~~~
Your nature demands love and your happiness depends on it.
~~~
Zero defects: The result of shutting down a production line.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary
~~~
[On randomly generated sentences.] I think that it is hard to read such material without amusement.  I feel a little admiration as well.  I would never write, 'It happened one frosty look of trees waving gracefully against the wall.'  I almost wish I could.  Poor poets endlessly rhyme love with dove, and they are constrained by their highly trained mediocrity never to write a good line.  In some sense, a stochastic process can do better; it at least has a chance.
-- J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals, and Noise
~~~
Rick:"How can you close me up?  On what grounds?
Renault:  "I'm shocked!  Shocked! To find that gambling is going on here.
Croupier (handing money to Renault):  "Your winnings, sir.
Renault:  "Oh.  Thank you very much.
-- Casablanca
~~~
Round as a ball, flat as a board,
The shining altar of the Lupian Lords,
Pearl in the sea, Jewel on black velvet,
Changing yet never changed.
The moon
~~~
Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee
prettiest little thing, I ever did see.
A watch
~~~
Round as a biscuit,
deep as a cup,
Yet all the world's oceans,
Can't fill it up?
A sieve
~~~
Round as an apple, yellow as gold
With more things in it than you're years old?
A pumpkin
~~~
Round as an apple
Black as a bear
Tell me this riddle
Or I'll pull out your hair.
An iron teakettle
~~~
Rules for College Survival:
Avoid administrators.
Skim the required reading.  Skip everything else.
Write vague, spineless papers.
Cram.
~~~
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones.  But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-- Jules Henri Poincare
~~~
Security is mostly a superstition.  Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
-- Helen Keller
~~~
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
[Who guards the Guardians?]
~~~
See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron.
My God! Perhaps I am!
-- "Eugenics Review", July 1929, 86/2
~~~
Seen on a T-shirt:
It's all fun and games, until someone loses an eye, then it's a sport.
~~~
Shapeless body, flapping maw,
Holds what you give it without any hands,
And will be with you, back to back,
Though it never stands.
A backpack
~~~
She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of leaving or regaining faith in Mother church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
~~~
She often gave herself very good advice [though she very seldom followed it].
-- Lewis Carroll
~~~
She was a farmer's daughter but she couldn't keep her calves together.
~~~
Shick's Law:
There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.
~~~
Sic transit gloria mundi.
[So passes away the glory of this world]
-- Thomas a Kempis
~~~
Silence can be the biggest lie of all.  We have a responsibility to speak up; and whenever the occasion calls for it, we have a responsibility to raise bloody hell.
-- Herbert Block
~~~
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)
~~~
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is NOT a sin - just stupid.)
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's  "Time Enough For Love
~~~
Relax, Julie. Everyone will understand.
-- Romeo
~~~
Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
-- Raymond Queneau, "A Model History
~~~
Remember the Finagle laws.  The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum.  The universe is hostile.
-- Louis Wu "Ringworld
~~~
Think - maybe the Joneses are trying to keep up with you!
~~~
Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.
-- Henri Bergson
~~~
Think lucky. If you fall in a pond, check your pockets for fish.
-- Darrell Royal
~~~
Think more.
~~~
Think of it as evolution in action.
~~~
Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him
-- Gandhi's epitaph
~~~
Think of what others ought to be like, then start being like that yourself.
~~~
Think sideways!
-- Ed De Bono
~~~
Think that day lost whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no noble action done.
-- Jacob Bobart
~~~
Think twice before saying nothing.
~~~
Thinks't thou existence doth depend on time?
It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine
Have made my days and nights imperishable,
Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore,
Innumerable atoms; and one desert,
Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break,
But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,
Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.
~~~
Third Law of Advice:
Simple advice is the best advice.
~~~
This above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day thou cans't not then be false to any man.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.  Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
~~~
This guy comes over to my house and says, "I want to read your gas meter."  I said, "Whatever happened to the classics?
-- Emo Philips
~~~
This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.
-- Solomon Short
~~~
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so.  This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
-- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination
~~~
Thoreau's Third Theory of Adaptation:
Efforts in improving a program's "user friendliness" invariable lead to work in improving user's "computer literacy".
~~~
Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculed in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Those who obstinately oppose the most widely held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
~~~
Those who order sleeping drafts won't take them.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.
-- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
~~~
Though I have said above that all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality.  Age or virtue may give man a just precedence.  Excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level ... And yet all this consists with the equality which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion, one over another.
-- John Locke (1632-1704)
~~~
Though most of the crewmen are whites,
Uhura has full equal rights.
Her crewmates, you see,
Love De-mo-cra-cy,
And the way that she fills out her tights.
~~~
Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment.
-- Dr. I. Watts
~~~
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action;
yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
-- William Wordsworth
~~~
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
Thought is the seed of action.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule.  On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature.
-- von Hohenheim (1493-1541)
~~~
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings
~~~
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
~~~
Three things only do slaves require, food, work, and their gods, and of the three their gods must never be touched - else they grow restless.
-- Precepts for Ruling
~~~
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), "Mein Kampf
~~~
Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Through the center of Czechoslovakia there a train speeding along.  In one compartment of the train there are four people.  A beautiful vivacious young woman, an old matronly woman, a Russian soldier, and a Czech dissident.
Suddenly the train goes through a tunnel.
It is completely dark.
Then is heard a loud kiss and an equally powerful slap.
When the train exits the tunnel, the Russian soldier is holding the side of his face, and the Czech dissident is grinning his face off.
The old matronly woman thinks : "Now that's a fine young woman, the Russian soldier tries to steal a kiss in the tunnel and the lady slaps him one!
The young woman is thinking : "Now that's a strange Russian soldier, he'd rather kiss that old hag than me.
The Russian soldier is thinking : "Now that's a smart Czech, he steal the kiss and I get slapped.
And the Czech dissident is thinking : "Gee I'm smart!  We go through the tunnel, I kiss the back of my hand and get away with slapping a Russian soldier.
~~~
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Correspondence, 1908
~~~
Tiananmen Square: Gun Control Strikes Again
~~~
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
-- Hector Berlioz, "Almanach des lettres francaises
~~~
Time is a versatile performer.  It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out and will tell.
-- Franklin P. Jones
~~~
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "A Book of Prefaces", 1917
~~~
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long loves day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Should'st rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain.  I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster then empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity;
And your quaint honor turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at one our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
-- Andrew Marvell
~~~
To a persistent Casanova: "If you don't leave now, I'll call the whole fire department to put you out.
~~~
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education.  To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun.  To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is
complete.
-- Epictetus
~~~
To arrive at perfection, a man should have very sincere friends or inveterate enemies; because he would be made sensible of his good or ill conduct, either by the censures of the one, or the admonitions of the other.
-- Diogenes
~~~
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
-- Edith Hamilton
~~~
To be happy one must be a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weaknesses, vanities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States.  Going further, I lay down the doctrine that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in the United States and not be happy.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), "On Being An American
~~~
To be is to be related.
-- C. J. Keyser
~~~
To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings (1894-1963), "A Miscellany
~~~
To be thrown on one's own resources is to be cast in the very lap of fortune; for our faculties undergo a development, and display an energy, of which they were previously unsusceptible.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
~~~
To believe in God is impossible - not to believe in him is absurd.
~~~
To believe is to be strong.  Doubt cramps energy.  Belief is power.
~~~
To believe with certainty we must begin to doubt.
-- Stanislaus
~~~
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
~~~
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
~~~
To comprehend a man's life, it is necessary to know mot merely what he does but also what he purposely leaves undone.  There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted;
and he is still wiser who, among the things that he can do well, chooses and resolutely follows the best.
-- William Gladstone
~~~
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature.  I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
-- Dickens
~~~
To confess a fault freely is the next thing to being innocent of it.
-- Publilus Syrus
~~~
To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable.
The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.
-- Ancient Chinese Warlord
~~~
To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful; it is rebellion against God's will.
-- Leo XIII (1810-1903)
~~~
To die - to sleep 
No more - and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks,
That flesh is heir to - 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Journal", 20 December 1822
~~~
To divest one's self of some prejudices, would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.
-- Grenville
~~~
To do two things at once is to do neither.
-- Publius Syrus
~~~
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
-- H. Poincare
~~~
To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antidote those miseries that must fall on us.
-- Massinger
~~~
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
~~~
To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
~~~
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
-- Virginia Woolf
~~~
To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D., which explains why it is so easy to find expert witnesses who contradict each other.
-- B. Duggan
~~~
To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.
-- Ancient proverb
~~~
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
-- Henri Bergson
~~~
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
-- Miguel de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life", 1913
~~~
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
~~~
To function efficiently, any group of people or employees must have faith in their leader.
-- Capt. Bligh (HMRN, Ret)
~~~
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought not measured with money - sincerity and integrity.
-- Donald Adams
~~~
To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.
-- Alan Paton, 1967
~~~
To go to law, is for two persons to kindle a fire at their own cost, to warm others, and singe themselves to cinders; and because they cannot agree, to what is truth and equity, they will both agree to unplume themselves, that others may be decorated with their feathers.
-- Feltham
~~~
To heck with marrying a girl who makes biscuits like her mother – I want to marry one who makes dough like her father.
~~~
To her love was like the air of heaven - invisible, intangible; it yet encircled her soul, and she knew it; for in it was her life.
-- Miss M'Intosh
~~~
To kill an enterprise, complain that nothing is ever published that interests you but never offer to write an article, make a suggestion, or find a writer.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, criticize the work of the organizers and members.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, don't do what has to be done yourself, but when the members roll up their sleeves and do their very best, complain that the group is run by a bunch of ego-trippers.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, don't go to meetings.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, get mad if you are not a member of the committee, but if you are, make no suggestions.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, if you go to the meetings, arrive late.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, never think of introducing new members.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, pay your dues as late as possible.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To kill an enterprise, say you have no opinion on the subject if the chair asks for it.  After the meeting, say you have learned nothing, or tell everyone what should have happened.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
~~~
To know how to refuse is as important as to know how to consent.
-- Baltasar Gracian
~~~
To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
-- Confucius
~~~
To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1975
~~~
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
-- Sri Aurobindo
~~~
To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses.
-- Syrus
~~~
To maintain a program is to treat it like a growing plant.  It avails nothing to pull and tug at a shoot in an attempt to make it grow faster.
-- The Zen of Programming
~~~
To make yourself miserable, don't forget to feel sorry for yourself.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, never overlook a slight or forget a grudge.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, put an excessive value on money.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, think that you are exceptional and entitled to special privileges.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, think that you are indispensable to your job, your company, and your friends.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, think that you are overburdened with work and that people tend to take advantage of you.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, think that you can control your nervous system by sheer will power.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, cultivate a consistently pessimistic outlook.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, forget the feelings and rights of other people.
~~~
To make yourself miserable, forget the good things in life and concentrate on the bad.
~~~
To many men well-fitting doors are not set on their tongues.
-- Theognis
~~~
To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
-- St. Augustine
~~~
To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
-- Calgacus (c. 84 A.D.)
~~~
To say nothing of its holiness or authority, the Bible contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence.
-- Walter S. Landor
~~~
To seek permission is to seek denial.
-- Steve Jobs
~~~
To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be, not a virtue, but the groundwork of a virtue.
-- Johnson
~~~
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough For Love
~~~
To stay youthful, stay useful.
~~~
To succeed planning alone is insufficient.  One must improvise as well.
-- Salvor Hardin
~~~
To teach is to learn.
~~~
To teach men how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing philosophy can still do.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
~~~
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
-- Eric Hoffer
~~~
To the generous mind, the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when 'tis not in our power to repay it.
-- Dr. Thomas Franklin
~~~
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
To those who doubt the importance of careful mate selection, remember how Adam wrecked a promising career.
-- Charles Merrill Smith
~~~
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
~~~
To whom the mornings are like nights,
What must the midnights be!
-- Emily Dickinson (on hacking?)
~~~
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill.  To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.
~~~
To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal.
-- Nessus "Ringworld
~~~
Today when a man gets married he gets a home, a housekeeper, a cook, a cheering squad and another paycheck.  When a woman marries, she gets a boarder.
~~~
Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Tonight I give lecture to Art Students' League.  I want a picture of a horse to show that animal is beautiful because every part made for function, without ornament.  In Paris I would show woman, but in Toronto I show a horse.
-- Anonymous French artist (1931) from "The Book of Insults
~~~
Took an hour to bury the cat. Silly thing kept moving.
~~~
Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
-- Dinah Shore
~~~
Troubles are like babies; they only grow by nursing.
~~~
Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps. Or a hand grenade, if handy. Or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
The common defense of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defense of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defense is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century...He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters--except everything.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency.  So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
We admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons.  The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests- becomes our enemy.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men - diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons.  The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men - hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
~~~
Homo sum; humanai nil a me alienum puto.
(I am a man, I consider nothing human indifferent to me.)
-- Terence
~~~
The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
-- Socrates
~~~
Among all human constructions the only ones that avoid the dissolving hands of time are castles in the air.
-- Frederico de Roberto
~~~
If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men, I will find something in them with which to hang them.
-- Cardinal Richelieu
~~~
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
~~~
Since we cannot know all that is to be known of everything, we ought to know a little about everything.
-- Blaise Pascal
~~~
Very little is known about the war of 1812 because the Americans lost it.
-- Eric Nicol
~~~
Think of buying a computer as like buying a car.  A car moves just your body; your computer, though, is the chariot of your mind, carrying it through the whole universe.  How much is your mind worth to you?
-- Ted Nelson (Computer Lib)
~~~
The best way to get a good education is to curl up with a good book and a bad librarian.
-- Richard J. Needham
~~~
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
-- Montaigne
~~~
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
-- John Stuart Mill
~~~
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
-- Archibald MacLeish
~~~
Overall, I believe the computer age favours the individual and that resistance to the individual work style is the last gasp of the dying industrial age.
-- Paul Lutus
~~~
Knowledge is of two kinds.  We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
-- Samuel Johnson
~~~
I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical world.
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
-- Claude-Adrian Helvetius
~~~
By annihilating desire you annihilate the mind.
-- Claude-Adrian Helvetius
~~~
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
-- Lillian Hellman
~~~
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.  This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.
-- Frank Herbert
~~~
It takes a great man to make a good listener.
-- Sir Arthur Helps
~~~
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
-- Sir Arthur Helps
~~~
Nothing of lasting value is created without the use of an eraser.
Piet Hein
~~~
What's not worth doing is not worth doing well.
-- Don Hebb
~~~
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state.  We must be doing something to be happy.
-- William Hazlitt
~~~
When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.
-- S.I. Hayakawa
~~~
Always remember that the soundest way to get ahead in any organization is to help the man ahead of you to get promoted.
-- L.S. Hamaker
~~~
Commandment Number One of any truly civilized society is this:  Let people be different.
-- David Grayson
~~~
Better incur the trouble of testing and exploding a thousand fallacies than by rejecting stifle a single beneficial truth.
-- Horace Greeley
~~~
A lecture is an occasion when you numb one end to benefit another.
-- John Gould
~~~
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
-- Goethe
~~~
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if at all possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
-- Goethe
~~~
The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don't say much.
-- Germain Glidden
~~~
The key to everything is patience.  You get a chicken by hatching an egg - not by smashing it.
-- Arnold Glasgow
~~~
Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.
-- Allen Ginsburg
~~~
True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
-- Dave Tyson Gentry
~~~
Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
-- Romain Gary
~~~
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of the will.
-- Epictetus (100 AD)
~~~
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
-- T.S. Eliot
~~~
Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those who sing best.
-- Henry van Dyke
~~~
Happy the Man, and happy him alone,
Who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv'd today.
-- John Dryden
~~~
Be thy own palace or the world's thy jail.
-- John Donne
~~~
No man is an island unto himself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
-- John Donne
~~~
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
-- Charles Dickens
~~~
God save me from my friends; I can protect myself from my enemies.
-- Marshall de Villars
~~~
De l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace!
(Boldness, and again boldness, and always boldness!)
-- Georges Jacques Danton
~~~
Work is more fun than fun.
-- Noel Coward
~~~
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
-- Joseph Conrad
~~~
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest  man can answer.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
~~~
Many people loose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
-- Frank Moore Colby
~~~
The right to be let alone is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued in civilized man.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
~~~
To the meaningless French idealisms, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, we oppose the German realities, Infantry, Cavalry,and Artillery.
-- Prince Bernhard von Bulow
~~~
An optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabell
~~~
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
~~~
Der Krieg ist nichts anderes als die Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.
(War is nothing else than the continuation of state policy with other means.)
-- Karl von Clausewitz
~~~
Better is the death knell for good enough.
~~~
I think not, said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.
~~~
Is that seat saved?  
No, but we're praying for it!
~~~
Maytag is my middle name; I'm an agitator.
~~~
Kiss the tear from her lip, you'll find the rose the sweeter for the dew.
-- Webster
~~~
Kiss you??  I shouldn't even be doing THIS!
~~~
Knock knock
Who's there?
Sam and Janet
Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet Evening...
~~~
Knowing Murphy's Law won't help either.
~~~
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
~~~
Knowledge is power.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
~~~
Knowledge is true opinion.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)
~~~
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic
~~~
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
-- James Madison
~~~
Knowledge without common sense is folly.
~~~
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman
~~~
Little Johnny with a grin,
Drank up all of daddy's gin,
Mother said, when he was plastered,
Go to bed, you little love-child.
~~~
Little joys refresh us constantly, like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.
-- Richter
~~~
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
~~~
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
~~~
Mankind would be vastly poorer if it had not been for men who were willing to take risks against the longest odds.  Even if it could be done, we would be foolish to try to stamp out this willingness in man to buck seemingly hopeless odds.  Our problem is how to remain properly venturesome and experimental without making fools of ourselves.
-- Bernard Baruch
~~~
Many people go throughout life committing partial suicide - destroying their talents, energies, creative qualities.  Indeed, to learn how to be good to oneself is often more difficult than to learn how to be good to others.
-- Joshua Leibman
~~~
Many people have the ambition to succeed in their work; they may even have special aptitude for their job.  And yet they do not move ahead. Why?  Perhaps they think that since they can master the job, there is no need to master themselves.
-- John Stevenson
~~~
Many people resent being treated like the person they really are.
~~~
Many politicians ... are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom.  The maxim is worthy of the fool ... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
~~~
Many receive advice, few profit by it.
-- Publilius Syrus
~~~
Many years ago, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra was a man named Josef Stransky.  Stransky was arrested, tried, and convicted for perpetrating violence on Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and other victims.  He was
sentenced to death in the electric chair.
On the day appointed for his execution, Stransky was strapped into the lethal chair.  The executioner stepped up to the
switch, and pulled it!
BUZZZZZ!!! ZAPPPP!!!  When the smoke cleared, the witnesses were astonished to see Stransky still very much alive, smiling at them from his seat in the Chair.
The executioner, puzzled, thought there must have been a fault in the wiring, so he called the Chief Electrician.  The electrician came, took one look at the scene, and said,
You cannot execute this man! You see.....
HE'S A NON-CONDUCTOR!!!
~~~
Mark all Mathematical heads which be wholly and only bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with other, how unapt to serve the world.
-- Roger Ascham (ca. 1550)
~~~
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
-- O. C. Ogilvie
~~~
Marriage causes dating problems.
~~~
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven.  Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), "Notebooks" 1912
~~~
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
-- Honore de Balzac, "The Physiology of Marriage", 1829
~~~
Marriage?  Sorry, I can't mate in captivity.
~~~
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
-- Edward Abbey
~~~
Marxist Law of Distribution of Wealth:
Shortages will be divided equally among the peasants.
~~~
Mary had a little RAM - only about a MEG or so.
~~~
Mathematician:  2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 11 is prime...
Physicist:  2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime (experimental error), 11 is prime...
Engineer: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime...
Computer Scientist: 2 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, ...
Artificial Intelligence Expert: 7 is prime, 5 is prime, 3 is prime, 2 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, ....
Engineering Technician:  3 is prime.
Probablist:  2 is prime (p = 1), 3 is prime (p = 1), 5 is prime (p = 1), 7 is prime (p = 1), 9 is prime (p = 1/2), ...
Statistician:  2 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 8 is prime, ... [the density of primes within the positive integers is is asymptotic to 1/[n*ln(n)]
~~~
May God answer all your prayers - then mistake your worst enemy for you.
~~~
May God give you a long life of a hundred and twenty and not one day without pain, sorrow, and suffering.
~~~
May Rothschild make you his heir, then outlive you.
~~~
May god have mercy on your soul.  He didn't have it on your face.
~~~
May the angel of death skip your house altogether - and send Satan instead.
~~~
May the angels that guard your bed take bribes from the devil.
~~~
May you be fruitful and multiply so that your generations are as plentiful as the stars in the sky, and may you have to house, feed, and clothe them all.
~~~
May you die in bed at 95, shot by a jealous spouse.
~~~
May you enjoy your wedding feast, then choke on the last bite.
~~~
Mayor Vincent J. 'Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed:
They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization.
~~~
Men aren't attracted to me by my mind.
They're attracted by what I don't mind...
-- Gypsy Rose Lee
~~~
Men do not mind a bust in the mouth if provided by beautiful voluptuous lady!
~~~
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Selected Papers
~~~
Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from them.
~~~
Men freely believe that what they wish to desire.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.)
~~~
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
~~~
Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
~~~
Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.
-- Moritz Guedemann
~~~
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but - live for it.
-- Colton
~~~
Men, iron, money and bread are the strength of the war, but of these four, the first two are the most necessary; because men and iron find money and bread, but bread and money find not men and iron.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
~~~
Men, take care not to make women weep, for God counts their tears.
-- Thomas S. Monson
~~~
Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans; it's lovely to be silly at the right moment.
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.)
~~~
Overheard at a supervision :
Supervisor : Do you think you understand the basic ideas of Quantum Mechanics ?
Supervisee : Ah! Well,what do we mean by "to understand" in the context of Quantum Mechanics?
Supervisor : You mean "No",don't you?
Supervisee : Yes.
~~~
The Tautology prize goes to the lecturer who uttered the gem:
 If we complicate things they get less simple.
~~~
This year's modesty award is given for a phrase spoken by a lecturer after a rather difficult concept had just been introduced.
 You may feel that this is a little unclear but in fact I am lecturing it extremely well.
~~~
Overheard at last year's Archimedeans' Garden Party :
 Quantum Mechanics is a lovely introduction to Hilbert Spaces !
~~~
A Senior mathematician was asked which language he used for some of his computing. He replied that he used a very high level language: RESEARCH STUDENT
~~~
From an algebra lecture:
A real gentleman never takes bases unless he really has to.
~~~
This book fills a well needed gap in the literature.
~~~
And another encouraging book review:
This book is only for the serious enthusiast ; I haven't read it myself.
~~~
Two quotes from an electrical engineer (but former mathematician):
...but the four-colour theorem was sufficiently true at the time.
The whole point of mathematics is to solve differential equations!
~~~
A quote from a well known mathematician/physicist:
Trying to solve [differential] equations is a youthful aberration that you will soon grow out of.
~~~
A fundamental law of physics heard in General Relativity this year:
Nature abhors second order differential equations.
~~~
A perplexing quote from a theoretical chemist:
...but it might be a quasi-infinite set.
What is a "quasi-infinite set? Answers on a strictly finite postcard, please.
~~~
This year's Modesty Prize is awarded to the lecturer who said :
Of course,this isn't really the best way to do it.  But seeing as you're not quite as clever as I am-in fact none of you are anywhere near as clever as I am-we'll do it this way.
~~~
Now we'll prove the theorem.In fact I'll prove it all by myself.
~~~
And from a particle physics course :
This course will contain a lot of charm and beauty but very little truth.
~~~
At the beginning of a course it is important to reassure the audience about how straight-forward the course is and about how good the lectures are going to be.
But what about this quote from the beginning of the Galois Theory course:
This is going to be an adventure for you...and for me.
Or this one from Statistical Physics:
At the meeting in August I put my name down for this course because I knew nothing about it.
~~~
In the middle of the Stochastic Systems course the lecturer offered this piece of careers advice:
If you haven't enjoyed the material in the last few lectures then a career in chartered accountancy beckons.
~~~
A lecturer of Linear Systems found the following on his board when he arrived one morning:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Greens' functions are boring
And so are Fourier transforms.
~~~
From a supervisor :
Any theorem in Analysis can be fitted onto an arbitrarily small piece of paper if you are sufficiently obscure.
~~~
No matter how elegant a course is there will always be occasions when a certain amount of arithmetic is called for:
I just want you to have a brief boggle at the belly-busting complexity of evaluating this.
~~~
A lecturer recently started to use RUNES in his course! His justification:
I need an immediately distinguishable character...so I'll use something that  no-one will recognize.
~~~
From a Special Relativity lecture:
...and you find you get masses of energy.
~~~
It's nice to see  the general-purpose 'nobbling constant' making a welcome return to Cambridge lectures:
This must be wrong by a factor that oughtn't to be too different from unity.
~~~
A flattering comment by a student for his GR supervisor:
She's the only person in DAMTP who's a real person rather than an abstract machine for doing tripos questions.
~~~
A worrying thought from a student:
Sex and drugs? They're nothing compared with a good proof!
~~~
In the true style of Cambridge Maths Tripos we have the following:
Proof of Thm. 6.2 is trivial from Thm. 6.9
~~~
Why do mathematicians insist on using words that already have another meaning?
It is the complex case that is easier to deal with.
~~~
And from various seminars in the King's College Research Centre:
I'm not going to say exactly what I mean because I'm not absolutely certain myself.
It's dangerous to name your children until you know how many you are going to have.
You don't want to prove theorems that are false.
And that last one wins the Sybil Fawlty Prize for "Stating the Bleeding Obvious".
~~~
A slightly more honest version of "The student can easily see that..." :
If you play around with your fingers for a while, you'll see that's true.
~~~
In a Complex Variables course a long, long, LONG time ago a lecturer wanted to swap the order of an integral and an infinite sum...
To do this we use a special theorem...the theorem that says that secretly this is an applied maths course.
I never name my lecturers but he's now head of the Universities Grant Commission and a lot of universities would like to swap him for an infinite sum.
~~~
From an Algebra III lecturer :
If you want to prove it the simplest thing is to prove it.
~~~
This year's Honesty Prize goes to the natural sciences supervisor, who replied to a question with
Don't ask me. I'm not a mathmo.
~~~
And from Oxford...
This does have physical applications. In fact it's all tied up with strings.
~~~
Good heavens, do I see a lecturer actually noticing the existence of his audience!
Was that clear enough? Put up your hand if that wasn't clear enough. Ah, I thought not.
~~~
Snobbery or what?
In the sort of parrot-like way you use to teach stats to biologists, this is expected minus observed.
Also from statistics:
I too would like to know what a statistician actually does.
We're not doing mathematics; this is statistics.
~~~
You could define the subspace topology this way, if you were sufficiently malicious.
~~~
You mustn't be too rigid when doing Fluid mechanics.
~~~
Talk about ulterior motives...
This handout is not produced for your erudition but merely so I can practice the TeX word-processor.
~~~
From 1A NatSci "Cells" course:
 There are two proteins involved in DNA synthasis, they are called DNAsynthase 1 and DNAsynthase 3
~~~
From a Part 2 Quantum Mechanics lecture:
Just because they are called 'forbidden' transitions does not mean that they are forbidden. They are less allowed than allowed transitions, if you see what I mean.
~~~
A Biochemistry paper included an analysis of a previously undiscovered sugar named by the researchers "godnose" .
~~~
From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture:
This isn't true in practice - what we've missed out is Stradivarius's constant.
And then the aside:
For those of you who don't know, that's been called by others the fiddle factor...
~~~
One from a 1A Engineering maths lecture :
Graphs of higher degree polynomials have this habit of doing unwanted wiggly things.
~~~
Apart from the extra line that's a one line proof.
This is a one line proof...if we start sufficiently far to the left.
~~~
A slight difficulty occurred with geometry in an Engineering lecture one day:
This is the maximum power triangle. said a lecturer, pointing to a rectangle.
~~~
This year the Computer Scientists seem to be in the running for the Honesty Award:
Sorry, I should have made that completely clear. This is a shambles.
~~~
I don't want to go into this in detail, but I would like to illustrate some of the tedium.
~~~
Oh those poor CompScis....
I'm not going to get anything more useful done in this lecture, so I might as well talk. later followed by ... Well there you are, one lecture with no useful content.
~~~
Three from a NatSci Physics lecturer:
You don't have to copy that down - there's no wisdom in it - it only repeats what I said.
We now wish to show that they are not merely equal but _the same thing_.
And before I leave this subject, I would like to tell you something interesting.
~~~
From a first year chemistry lecture some personal problems of the lecturer:
 Before I started this morning's lecture I was going to tell you about my third divorce but on reflection I thought I'd better tell my wife first.
~~~
From a single research seminar at the King's College Research Centre:
I'm sure it's right whether it's valid or not.
WARNING: There is no reason to believe this will work.
~~~
If I am incomprehensible then stop me, but if it's simply wrong then I don't think that it matters.
~~~
An introduction to the summation convention:
If you've got a problem with this then go back, write the whole thing out using sigma notation and convince yourself that it's better not to have problems.
~~~
And from the University of Bath...
A one by one matrix has one column and one row, and the same number in both.
~~~
Using some hand-waving and symmetry ideas...
~~~
You haven't written it in green - your notes will be wrong.
~~~
Any Questions? [pause] You all look asleep - what is it, hyperglucocemia? Too much sugar on your cornflakes? Not any cornflakes? Never mind - I'm bright eyed and bushy tailed, so let's continue.
~~~
Of course this is true for more general values of 5
~~~
A brief conversation -
What have we not got?
No we have not
No we don't
We have not got not
Ah, Not is what we have not got!
Agreement followed.
....what do they put in the coffee??
~~~
Anonymous supervisor, talking about Relativistic Electrodynamics:
There are some bits at the end of the course I don't really understand, but the students don't normally get that far.
~~~
From an EIST lecturer:
When you stick your fingers in the mains, its not the imaginary component which you will feel
~~~
From substitute lecturer, replacing the scheduled appearance by Dr. X:
Good morning.  For those of you who don't know me, I am not Dr. X; I am Dr. X's representative on Earth.
~~~
Now, I want you to look very carefully at what we have just proved. What we have just proved is false." [slight pause while what he has just said sinks in] "Oh dear, that's going to go onto the computer, isn't it.
[ Fame at last ! ]
~~~
I'll give you a clue - it begins with 'f' and rhymes with 'factor'...
-- Lecturer to a 1st year problem class
~~~
The object of this lecture is to frighten half of you away.
~~~
I wrote my first program in 1954, and that didn't work either.
~~~
That is the total and absolute generalization ... well, almost.
~~~
Back in Cambridge, explanations are up to their usual standards...
Perhaps it would be best if this argument remained a deep mystery to you.
I shall explain this by waving my hands about in an appropriate manner.
What I've talked about today seems to be uniquely incoherent ... I never know if you're as baffled as me, or if you're getting along fine.
~~~
And our first candidate for the Sybil Fawlty prize for "Stating the Bleeding Obvious":
g inverse is called an inverse to g.
~~~
This is not really a convention, it's just the normal way of doing things.
~~~
The things Cambridge does to a lecturer...
Dr. X hasn't lectured a Cambridge group before, so he might be quite interesting.
~~~
Some students may feel that the contents of Question 33 are both dull and useless. I must confess that my first impulse is to reply that it serves them right for doing the fast course.
~~~
From the wonderful world of IA Natsci:
Whenever the maths turns out to be impossible, you have to invent new physics.
~~~
A depressed first year...
I used to be without hope - but now various people have assured me that failing the exams is more difficult than Green's functions.
~~~
I've never tried dividing both sides by infinity before, so here goes.
It's OK to divide by zero, provided you don't cancel it.
~~~
It's a _real_ integer, not just any old integer.
~~~
For once a quote meant to be humourous:
To a mathematician, PI is 1 and PI^2 is 10. 2*PI we're not quite sure about.
~~~
Descriptions of assorted mathematicians:
He's not just an experimentalist. He's an antitheorist!
He gets lost on random walks.
Some inspired joker - probably Maxwell.
~~~
This is the simple form. [pause] Well, it's simple in the sense that it leaves out all the really important bits.
~~~
This is obvious. But don't look at it too carefully, or it becomes unobvious, until you look at it for a long time when it becomes obvious again.
~~~
FORTRAN... Then, as now, the language used by scientists with real problems.
~~~
Suitably interpreted, this is an exact value.
~~~
And from the depths of historical apocrypha...
Supervisor (drawing a graph): "This function has no nodes."  (Pause)  "How does it smell?
~~~
A good enough philosophy of life:
Theoretical physicists tend to assume that Nature isn't as malevolent as our pure mathematical examiners.
~~~
Bear with me until my starting transient has settled down into doing things properly from the notes.
~~~
And now, a few examples of fatigue from [my] vast experience.
~~~
Do we have a Dr. Hobson in the faculty?
If there is a choice, you've got to do it.
~~~
Different may mean the same.
~~~
Picture this...
A sphere isn't that simple when you get into higher dimensions - it's a bit non-flat.
~~~
And those fascinating results come thick and fast in this course:
There are 9 results in there - it looks like it's going to be tedious, and indeed it is.
~~~
Sometimes I think they make Quantum Mechanics deliberately obscure...
There's a number down here which, for the sake of argument, we can call 1.
~~~
And a couple of remarks from the students...
Mathmos think of engineers a bit like lemmings...they're both wooly and jump to the wrong conclusions.
I don't see the point of lecturers talking, except to resolve some of the ambiguities in their handwriting.
~~~
Various people with suicidal tendencies can even integrate elliptic functions
~~~
Said of Algebra III:
This course could be viewed as 1001 things to do with your favourite matrix
~~~
The problems that the maths societies have to overcome to get their audience!
Why weren't you at the meeting?
Because it was boring.
No it wasn't.
Well, it _should_ have been!
~~~
Oh, the joys of dual lecturing!
I was going to say 'the cream of the nation's youth', but they're probably at the other lecturer.
~~~
The secret of Pure Mathematics:
...interpreting out of all recognition...
~~~
The black art of applied mathematics...
It is traditional to leave the notation ambiguous.
....and talking about the black arts...
For non-deterministic read 'Inhabited by pixies'.
~~~
And if that wasn't confusing enough...
I thought I understood Newton's Third Law before that lecture.
~~~
This is equation 2, which implies that equation 3 comes someplace earlier.
~~~
Unless x is a banana or some other such object that commutes with A.
~~~
And this year's honesty award must surely go for the following two gems from the same lecturer...
I'm going to make a small point in the corner of the board [does so], and come back to it later!
And later...
The thing which caused me to write 'lies' in extremely small letters in the corner of the board was...
~~~
A possible candidate for the Tautology Award?
If we want to take the westerly winds into account, we could also do that using this method, but then we'd have to take the westerly winds into account.
~~~
This type of rotor is known as a squirrel-cage rotor because the way it's wound looks like a bird cage.
~~~
A nomination for the Sybil Fawlty "Stating the Bleedin' Obvious" Prize:
A polynomial f is said to have degree m, written deg f equals m, if it does have degree m.
~~~
Now it is fairly well known that lectures are not supposed to be copied down mindlessly.
I know you all have very innocent minds, but occasionally a word should be allowed to wander through before reaching the paper.
~~~
And on the subject of teaching styles:  "Proof left as an exercise for your supervisor.
~~~
And this year's first contenders for the Tautology award:
It's obvious that what I've just written down is obvious.
The fixed element can be said to be exactly what it is.
~~~
Mathematical notation is a minefield of obscure symbols ranging over most alphabets and scriptstyles. Any guesses for which character was described by an undergraduate as: "It's a script spider"?
~~~
And with the reading problems come the corresponding writing ones suffered by these lecturers:
My script 'y's always end up looking like rabbits.
Little mouse tensored with piece of cheese.
~~~
And now, back to the content of the lecture courses:
You can hardly underestimate the importance of this.
I've got a lot to say about this theorem, so don't stop me if I go too fast.
Sometimes it's useful to know how large your zero is
~~~
Three from the same lecturer who is clearly having real problems...
What am I doing? I haven't written any damn thing yet - I've just written total rubbish.
What am I talking about? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? This is rubbish.
Every time I go to the board with these notes I write down something completely different.
~~~
Hmmm... do I detect someone almost as cynical as myself?
~~~
Theoretical physicist - a physicist whose existence is postulated, to make the numbers balance, but who is never actually observed in the laboratory.
~~~
A IB Chemistry lecturer, referring to a previously derived equation.
This is rigorous.  Well, it's rigorous in the sense that ... All right, it's not rigorous.
~~~
Letter from an editor:
I very much regret to inform you that the review procedure of your paper 'Approximation of Delay systems by Fourier-Laguerre series', is incurring a delay...
~~~
Stories, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know. If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them. 
-- Umberto Eco. Vegetal and Mineral Memory: the Future of Books.  lecture at the newly opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/665/bo3.htm
~~~
Don't be so feeble, Odin replied. It's not something you forget; it's like riding a bicycle.
Sure,Frey muttered.
You wobble about for a while and then you hit the ground.
-- Tom Holt, "Odds and Gods"
~~~
There were spiders in the cellar. Big spiders. A foolhardy clerk had gone into the cellar five years ago, and all they ever found was the shoes.
-- Tom Holt, "Flying Dutch"
~~~
There was something - difficult to describe, when you've only got shoddy, post-modernist adjectives to work with - cheerfully reverential in his manner, as if he had just seen the Messiah and remembered that the Messiah owed him twenty quid.
-- Tom Holt, "My Hero"
~~~
No, Starkad,' said the King kindly. `I know you're not afraid. But not this time. I'll explain later.'
Starkad sat down, looking dejected, and Brynjolf patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. `It's because you're so stupid, Starkad,' he said gently.  `You'd only be in the way.'
`Oh,' said Starkad happily. `If that's the reason, I don't mind.'
-- Tom Holt, "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?"
~~~
Children shouldn't be exposed to censorship.  Can I get a chip for that? 
~~~
Logic designers don't have orgasms--they have nandgasms with inverted gates
~~~
Permanent job security is being the only one in the office who reads manuals 
~~~
Beyond "For Dummies": C++ for the Non-plussed, Visual Basic for the Blind, Perl for Swine
~~~
I have a horrible hacking cough - every time I clear my throat, I break into another computer system
~~~
Do something unusual today.  Accomplish work on the computer. 
~~~
You're a much nicer person than I am, so I'm sure you'll forgive the vicious things I've been saying about you 
~~~
When you're feeling stressed out, I think it helps to make a nice hot cup of tea and then spill it in the lap of whoever's bugging you.
~~~
I came, I saw, I had no idea what was going on, I left.
~~~
I tried to contain myself, but I escaped.
~~~
And your crybaby whiny opinion would be...?
~~~
For that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die....or come downstairs bump-bump-bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin Whately 
-- The Shunned House at Poohthulhu Corner
~~~
The Atkins Diet: It's a no-grainer
~~~
I find 'lactose intolerant' offensive. I prefer 'persona non gratin'. 
~~~
Don't take life seriously - it isn't permanent 
~~~
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the rat to die
~~~
Ask not what you can do for your country,  but what your country is doing to you
~~~
It's just AFOG [Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth] 
~~~
Just one nuclear family can ruin your whole life 
~~~
Raised by psychopathic wolverines 
~~~
This button isn't really very witty and it runs on and on and you'd probably be much happier reading some other button.  Most of them aren't half as depressing as this one.  Don't say I didn't warn you.
~~~
It's ok to disagree with me.  However, once I explain where you're wrong, you're supposed to become enlightened and change your mind.  Congratulating me on how smart I am is optional.
~~~
It's ok to re-invent the wheel, but I hate hearing people complain about how many corners it should have 
~~~
I always wanted to marry someone who was crazy about me. I got half my wish.  
~~~
If children are God's little blessings, I'd hate to experience His wrath 
~~~
Books breed like rabbits, bookcases breed like elephants  
~~~
My boss said homosexuality is a disease, so I called in queer to work 
~~~
What sexually transmitted disease can you get from a hand puppet? The clap  
~~~
Nice front bumper you've got there. Shame if something happened to it....  
~~~
I don't especially hate vampires - I just hate anything above ME on the food chain 
~~~
I'm not pompous, I'm pedantic.  There's a difference. 
~~~
Before my sword can pass through your neck it has to pass halfway through your neck.  But before it can pass halfway through your neck, it has to pass a quarter of the way through your neck, and before it can do *that*....  
-- Xeno, Warrior Prince
~~~
burn down the house.  fire.  fire.  fire.  fire.  fire.  fire.  heheh.  no more mess.  heheh. 
~~~
Captain!  The doubletalk generators, they can take nae more!  We'll have to obey the laws of physics! 
~~~
Some people have children in order to buy toys--I feel it's cheaper and more dignified to cut out the middleman and buy toys for myself
~~~
If I thought life was cheap, I wouldn't charge so much to take one 
~~~
Are you a sleep addict?  Do you sleep alone?  Are you irritable if you haven't slept for several days? 
~~~
Jewish Pagans are like regular Pagans - we believe in the Mother Goddess, we just feel guilty about not calling
~~~
The Bill of Rights goes too far - it should have stopped at "Congress shall make no law" 
~~~
Can you keep as much as half of your salary after taxes?  Be sure that jackbooted thugs won't invade your home?  Operate a car - let alone a handgun - without some bureaucrat's permission?  No?  Not much of a "free country", is it?
~~~
Computer Analyst: "Now lie down and tell me about your motherboard...." 
~~~
Giving up Catholicism for Lent 
~~~
Relaxed Agnostic   I don't know any answers   I'm not looking very hard, either
~~~
Religion isn't the cause of war, it's the excuse  
~~~
Why can't the Buddha vacuum under his sofa?  He has no attachments
~~~
WWJD? JWRTFM!
~~~
 What do Unitarians do when they're really mad at you?   They burn a question mark on your lawn
~~~
Knowledge is power.  Power corrupts.  Study hard.  Be evil. 
~~~
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism
~~~
American Non-Sequitur Society--We don't make sense, but we do like pizza 
~~~
My wife went to Vorbarr Sultana and all I got was this bloody shopping bag 
~~~
You found God? If nobody claims him in 30 days, he's yours! 
~~~
All you need is WD40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop 
~~~
 All I ask of a firearm is that it be reliable, accurate, and capable of dropping a god at 500 meters 
~~~
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
~~~
Men and women are different in the morning. We men wake up aroused in the morning. We can't help it. We just wake up and we want you. And the women are thinking, "How can he want me the way I look in the morning?" It's because we can't see you. We have no blood anywhere near our optic nerve.
-- Andy Rooney
~~
It's not a house. It's a library with beds.
~~~
Stupid people don't learn from their own mistakes. Smart people do.  But /wise/ people learn from the mistakes of others. 
~~~
Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.
-- Charles M. Schulz
~~~
The perception of a problem is always relative. Your headache feels terrific to the druggist. 
-- Ramona E. F. Arnett
~~~
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.  
-- David Friedman
~~~
History is a vast early warning system.
-- Norman Cousins
~~~
Evil:  Being a slave to ones own appetites.  Unable to resist even the weakest urge to FIND a way to indulge in even the most banal needs and wants one has, constrained only by your own sense of Propriety.  
A LE will give in to his appetites (for destruction, power, money, praise, love, hate, whatever) and find a way to JUSTIFY it.  A Chaotic Evil will simply do it with no thought at all about trying to justify it.  The appetite is its own justification for him.  After all, why create us with appetites if we aren't supposed to indulge?  
And the NE character simply does it because he finds it the most useful way to get from A to B, not necessarily because he truly believes its justified nor for the mindless lust itself.  For him evil is actually a tool he uses like he uses his women and his friends.  He doesn't even necessarily consider himself evil...He just thinks he does evil things once in a while to get what he needs.
-- Jancoran@hotmail.com
~~~
"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it," wrote Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski in a recent copyright ruling. "Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture." 
-- Fiona Morgan. "Copywrong: Copyright laws are stifling art, but the public domain can save us." The Independent Weekly, December 3, 2003. <http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2003-12-03/cover.html> 
~~~
I don't mind coming to work, but that eight hour wait to go home is a bitch!
~~~
You need only two tools: WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the duct tape.
~~~
 The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Glenda Jackson MP in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Robin Cook MP, Leader of the House of Commons, in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the suspension of Keith Vaz MP.
~~~
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamp post.
~~~
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free cashpoint.
~~~
It was once, when the gods held a great gathering that Tempus the human god of war and Moradin the god of all Dwarves had a heated conversation about the superior prowess of their patrons. While talking about battle Moradin exclaimed: "The wise Dwarf troubled by a dragon would surely win - he would wait a while and train until he is strong enough to take onto it and defeat it gloriously". In response Tempus exclaimed: "The wise man, however, would be even more triumphant - he would simply wait a little while until the dragon is asleep and then squish it like a bug". Having overheard the conversation, Bahamut, father of all good dragons joined the conversation, smiling gleefully: "And the wise dragon plagued by a man and a dwarf would wait a little while as well, and soon enough discover that both the man and the dwarf have meanwhile died of old age."
-- An Elven Childrens' Tale
~~~
No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
-- Dave Barry
~~~
I thought it was understood that "You're full of shit and you have your head up your ass" was just Tangency-speak for "There are certain aspects of this issue which your argument has neglected to consider." 
-- BigFlatSlob
~~~
So I took the shotgun off the wall and I fired two warning shots..... into his head.
-- Cell Block Tango, Chicago 
~~~
Be prepared to accept sacrifices.  Vestal virgins aren't all that bad.
~~~
On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd say...  oh, somewhere in there.
~~~
The Lord and I are in a sheep-shepherd relationship, and I am in a position of negative need.
He prostrates me in a green-belt grazing area.
He conducts me directionally parallel to non-torrential aqueous liquid.
He returns to original satisfaction levels my psychological makeup.
He switches me on to a positive behavioral format for maximal prestige of His identity.
It should indeed be said that notwithstanding the fact that I make ambulatory progress through the umbragious inter-hill mortality slot, terror sensations will no be initiated in me, due to para-etical phenomena.
Your pastoral walking aid and quadrupic pickup unit introduce me into a pleasurific mood state.
You design and produce a nutriment-bearing furniture-type structure in the context of non-cooperative elements.
You act out a head-related folk ritual employing vegetable extract.
My beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis.
It is an ongoing deductible fact that your inter-relational empathetical and non-ventious capabilities will retain me as their target-focus for the duration of my non-death period, and I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanent, open-ended time basis.
~~~
I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.  I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
-- Brendan Behan
~~~
All I want is more than my fair share.
~~~
There is one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him.  If he says "Yes" you know he is crooked.
-- Groucho Marx
~~~
The Consultant's Curse: When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks for, instead of what he needs.  This is very strong medicine, and is normally only required once.
~~~
A cartoon cannot say "on the other hand," and it cannot be defended with logic. It is a frontal assault, a slam dunk, a cluster bomb. Journalism is about fairness, objectivity, factuality; cartoons use unfairness, subjectivity, and the distortion of facts to get at truths that are greater than the sum of the facts. Good cartoonists are also the point men for the First Amendment, testing the boundaries of free speech. If they are doing their job, their hate mail runneth over.
-- Doug Marlette. In Your Face: a Cartoonist at Work. Houghton-Mifflin, 1991.
~~~
Did you here about the priests of the Dairy God? Apparently, they have the power to churn undead.
~~~
A group of players are sitting around a table waiting for their DM to get his notes together and start the game.
Travis, who plays a rogue, couldn't attend the last session because of a family event. The DM's policy is to let another player run the absentee's character. Travis, doesn't know who nor does he care. His gaming buds are a fairly trustworthy lot.
Travis: "So what happened last time? Did my rogue get enough experience to finally gain a level?
Steve: "No, actually your character died."
Travis: "WHAT?"
Nods of affirmation come from the other players.
Steve: "Yeah. Sorry, but your character had an alignment change. He suddenly went from being just plain neutral to chaotic evil. He tried to kill and steal from the group. My paladin had to kill him.
Travis: "No way."
Steve: "Yeah, the only good thing that came out of it was that my paladin got enough experience to gain a level."
Travis: "Wait, who ran my character?"
Steve: "I did."
-- Ulrick
~~~
An Archmage with a drinking problem has a brilliant idea: he animates his shoes so that no matter how stinking drunk he gets, the shoes will always be able to lead him home.
And for a month or so, this works wonderfully. But soon, he finds himself waking up in strange places - he begins drinking in Eversink and wake up in Gaunt, or the Underdark, or Sigil. Finally he realizes that the shoes had gotten bored with just going back to his home every night, and had become adventurers.
This won't do at all. He sells the shoes. They come back. He gives the shoes away. They come back. He opens a portal to Elemental Fire, and tosses the shoes in. They don't come back.
Soon the archmage starts to feel guilty. After all, he'd given the shoes life, and then casually destroyed them when they became inconvenient. So he searches out all the greatest clerics on the face of the world, hoping for some way to ease his guilt. Finally, a half-mad hermit tells him that he doesn't need to worry - the shoes entered the Seven Heavens immediately, and are enjoying eternal bliss.
Because it turns out, shoes have souls.
-- tsadkiel
~~~
A guy wearing black robes and reeking of the grave walks into the tavern. Strangely the man is being strangled by a severed hand.
The bartender mumbles "We don't serve no death mages here..."
The guy in the robes gasps and manages to whisper, "One drink..."
The bartender looks at the poor guy shakes his head and says "Ok, one. What will you have"
The customer says "Make it a stiff one" As he says stiff the hand seems to squeeze harder.
The bartender puts out a Mug of Ale. "Its pretty strong, made it myself". The guy in robes gasps "Stiffer!".
The barkeep puts out a Elven Wine. "Stiffer!" The guy in robes is starting to pass out.
The barkeep quickly runs to the cellar and gets a flask of dwarven whiskey. When he runs up the guy in the robes is on one knee.
The barkeep wants to honor this guys last request so he pours him a shot and hands it to the guy in robes. The necromancer pours it on the hand and it falls to the ground.
The mage regains his composure, throws some gold on the bar and leaves with the hand following behind him.
The bartender yells after him "That was amazing, what was that all about"
To which the necromancer says, "It takes a potent spirit to control the dead."
~~~
Due to the many hickeys the wizard had given in his life, he had gained a reputation for being a necromancer.
~~~
Hear about the Mystic Warrior from Mystic Eye Games, he refused to wear shoes so his feet became hard and tough,he went for long periods fasting and refused to eat meat, even when he wasn't fasting and both the fasting and his diet gave him extremely bad breath also he was of lean, slight build, especially in his later years?
So he was a super callous fragile mystic plagued with halitosis. 
~~~
A skeleton walks into a bar and ask the Bartender: "Do you serve skeletons here?"
Times being what they are the wily Bartender replies: "sure, we serve anyone."
The skeleton hands the man a silver and says: "Fine, I'll have a pitcher of beer...and a mop"
~~~
This is an extract of an National Public Radio (NPR) interview between a female broadcaster and US Army Lieutenant General Reinwald about sponsoring a Boy Scout Troop on his military installation.
Interviewer: So, LTG Reinwald, what are you going to do with these young boys on their adventure holiday?
LTG Reinwald: We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing archery, and shooting.
Interviewer: Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?
LTG Reinwald: I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the range.
Interviewer: Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?
LTG Reinwald: I don't see how, we will be teaching them proper range discipline before they even touch a firearm.
Interviewer: But you're equipping them to become violent killers.
LTG Reinwald: Well, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you? 
End of the interview
~~~
I think I'm probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing.
-- Terry Prachett
~~~
My father always told me: 'The best way to understand someone is to fight him, make him angry. That's when you see the real person.'
-- Sinclair to Ivanova in Babylon 5:"Midnight on the Firing Line"
~~~
Mr. Garibaldi, you are sitting in my station, using my equipment. Is there a reason for this, or to save time should I just go ahead and snap your hands off at the wrist?
-- Ivanova to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"Midnight on the Firing Line"
~~~
The last time I gave an interview they told me to just relax and say what I really felt. Ten minutes after the broadcast I got transferred to an outpost so far off the starmaps you couldn't find it with a hunting dog and an ouiji board.
Don't sweat it. Just be that charming, efflorescent commander we've all come to know and love. What's the worst that could happen? They fire you, ship you off to the Rim and I get promoted to Commander. I don't see a problem here.
-- Sinclair and Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"Infection"
~~~
Think of the situation this way, if you could only call the contractor that built your home in order to fix the plumbing or make an addition, how would that change the way you feel about the building you live in? Personally, I live in a 116 year-old house, so the architect, and all the tradespeople who worked on it, are dust in the wind by now.
-- Jim Thompson
~~~~
Then Flanders said to the crowds and to his disciples: "The Accessibility Scribes and the Usability Geeks sit in Nielsen's seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
"Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their tableless pages wide and their unordered list menus long; they love the place of honor at usability seminars and the most important seats at accessibility forums; they love to be greeted in the chatrooms and to have geeks call them 'WebMaster.'
"Woe to you, Accessibility Scribes and Usability Geeks, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of compelling content in programmers's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
"Woe to you, Accessibility Scribes and Usability Geeks, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single CSS convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a slave to 'DuHTML' as you are.
"Woe to you, blind guides! You say, 'If anyone swears by common sense, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the W3C, he is bound by his oath.' You blind fools! Which is greater: the W3C, or the compelling content that makes the website attractive?
-- Dean Peters www.healyourchurchwebsite.com
~~~
The fastest draw is when the sword never leaves the scabbard,
The strongest way to block, is never to provoke a blow,
And the cleanest cut is the one withheld.
~~~
1-2 out of every 100 students reach Black Belt and of those only 1 out of every 1,000 achieves his 2nd Dan. 
-- Masutatsu Oyama, This is Karate
~~~
Hoping to see karate included in the universal physical education taught in our public schools, I set about revising the kata so as to make them as simple as possible. Times change, the world changes, and obviously the martial arts must change too. The karate that high school students practice today is not the same karate that was practiced even as recently as ten years ago [this book was written in 1956], and it is a long way indeed from the karate I learned when I was a child in Okinawa.
-- Gichin Funakoshi, in his book "Karate-do: My Way of Life" (page 35-36):
~~~
Follow not in the footsteps of the masters, but rather seek what they sought
~~~
If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kick-boxing.
~~~
Unarmed hand-to-hand fighting does not change through the ages; only the name changes, and it has only one rule: do it first, do it fast, do it dirtiest.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
Deja Fu: The feeling that somehow, somewhere, you've been kicked in the head like this before. 
~~~
All Martial Artists are beginners; Some of us have just been beginning longer! 
-- J.R. West
~~~
Do not get into a fight if you can possibly avoid it, but never hit soft. Don't ever hit a man unless you must, but if you hit him, put him to sleep. 
-- Theodore Roosevelt
~~~
What is simulation? It is the artful-science of profiting from experience in advance. That is the purpose of kata and sparring. Practice is profiting from experience in advance.
-- American Goju Grandmaster Peter Urban
~~~
I am undefeated in all of Asia. Of course, I have never fought in any of Asia. Which pretty much guarantees I'm undefeated there.
~~~
The black belt is not a mark or symbol of the end of the journey to ones mastery of the arts; rather it is the mark that one is done packing for their journey and may now take the first step in their true journey. This a journey which can not ever be complete, only traveled...
~~~
In true budo there is no enemy or opponent. True budo is to become one with the universe, not train to become powerful or to throw down some opponent. Rather we train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world.
-- Morihei Ueshiba
~~~
The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it's none of my business, but..." is to place a period after the word "but". Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. 
-- Lazarus Long
~~~
Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.
-- H. Beam Piper
~~~
How does it work, Professor?
You're too dumb. You wouldn't understand
-- Harry Harrison's Technicolour Time Machine
~~~
It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.
-- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens
~~~
He who takes offense, where none is intended, is a fool. He who takes offense, where offense is intended, is generally a fool. 
-- Socrates
~~~
The opinions expressed herein are those of absolutely everyone at National Instruments: the management, staff, stockholders, their spouses, children, dogs, and cats. In fact, everyone in Austin also agrees. No, make that Texas.
-- Henry B. Velick
~~~
One good thing about Internet dating: you're guaranteed to click with whomever you meet.
~~~
: You are in a dark room with a compiler, emacs, an internet connection,
: and a thermos of coffee.
: Your move ?
-- David A. Honig
~~~
I am afraid that I'm becoming a network nerd.  How can I tell for sure?'
How many syllables do you think there are in the word "coax"?
-- Dr. Internet
~~~
I'm sorry. I may marry you and father your children, but I'm not giving you my root password.
-- Bill Duetschler, my SO
~~~
Called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, "What wine goes best with an M-16?"  The guy who answered did his best to be helpful:  "That depends.  What are you smoking?"
~~~
Disclaimer:  The above are the opinions of God as recited by my telepathic goldfish.  Those who oppose them with be struck by lightning.  Such an event will be reflected on their electrical bill.
-- Chris Beauregard 
~~~
I go for what someone at the BBC once said: "There are some people we WANT to offend."
-- JMS
~~~
Druids worship trees. Zen Druids worship trees that don't exist. Reformed Druids worship trees and shrubs. Reformed Zen Druids worship trees and shrubs that don't exist.
~~~
Whether you are quiet and ALIVE or quiet and DEAD makes no difference to Cerebus. 
-- Cerebus the Aardvark
~~~
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
( Tr. "I have a catapult. Give me all the money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head." )
~~~
Certe, Toto, sentio nos in Kansate non iam adesse.
~~~
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games. And it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive values.
-- Carl Jung
~~~
The group was sitting around trying to explain realistic space combat to a Trek junkie (you know, the kind that think Trek is the end-all be-all of physics) and we got on the subject of kinetic weapons. One of the players used as an example, "if we opened up the cargo door and threw out the sofa you're sitting on, and it hit a ship, it would likely vaporize it." The Trek fan got a very disbelieving look on his face and said, "So what would you call that?"
That's when I popped up and said, "A futon torpedo." :-) 
~~~
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. 
-- culled from the Ground Zero Games List
~~~
I would have to say that the nastiest "monster" a group of PCs can ever face is...another group of PCs. Savagely bloodthirsty, hideously well-armed, and possessed of a certain low cunning. (Just like the first group of PCs.)
-- BlackICE
~~~
Sarge, is it man's nature to be evil, or are we essentially good, and corrupted by desire?
Good Question, Smitty. PLA-TOON, TEN-HUT! On command, you will consider this question! PLA-TOON! PON- (wait for it!) DER!
-- The men of the 3257th Philosophy Battalion (the Descartes Demons), Douglas E. Berry 
~~~
'Summon Demon' is a first level spell. 'Control Demon' is a ninth level spell.
~~~
Bettering yourself by taking up home invasion homicide and robbery of morally-suspect non-humans (aka "Evil Monsters") is what makes it D&D.
-- GypsyComet
~~~
Yes, of course I fired the required warning shot before I killed him. But I think he had been hit by two or three warning shots before I even got serious.
~~~
I used to be a werewolf. But I'm alright no-o-o-o-o-o-w! 
~~~
Never poke the GM... It's worse than poking the universe..or the sleeping dragon. 
-- Mole 
The universe just reacts when poked; a GM reacts creatively when poked. 
-- Raymond Lenaghan
~~~
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl dominos.
(In his house in R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits for the pizza guy.)
~~~
A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head. 
-- Rule #12, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
~~~
Traveller has always referred to the GM, DM, Keeper, Project Director, Storyteller or whatever other names you want to give this person - "Evil Sadist" is quite common - as the Referee...
-- T20 Handbook
~~~
Other than Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Honor Harrington is currently the premier munchkin in popular fiction and d20 is currently the premier munchkin-friendly RPG system. This is a marriage made in heaven. It will sell big.
-- Larsen Whipsnade on the HH RPG
~~~
There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.'
-- Rule #37, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
~~~
Free will is an illusion. We are all slaves to heredity and our upbringing and environment. Hence the opinions expressed here are not my own. Please feel free to flame my parents and friends.
~~~
The biggest problem with reading [Usenet] is there is so much and it is all so interesting. It is easy to be enamored with it. Be selective about which groups you read. It could mean your job, your family, or your college career.
-- Ed Krol, _The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog_ 
~~~
In the event I am captured or killed, the secretary, the project leader, the manager and the CEO will disavow any knowledge of my opinions. 
~~~
First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me. And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
-- Alara Rogers, Aleph Press 
~~~
I file things in historical order, with a hashing algorithm of gravity
~~~
GNU PROGRAMMERS do it for free and they don't give a damn about look & feel
~~~
If I just flamed you, and you are thinking 'What a jerk', be glad I'm not as bad as my friend John. He gets his kicks by wrenching the wings off of live rabbits. Ah HA! You didn't know rabbits had wings, did you? And of course they dont, until John has hammered them into their backs with six inch nails. A rather simple-minded hobby, but it keeps him amused.
~~~
After all, how do you give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when you know that if you throw it into a room with truth, you'd risk a matter/anti-matter explosion.
-- N. Petreley
~~~
Managing sysadmins is like leading a neighborhood gang of neurotic pumas on jet-powered hoverbikes with nasty smack habits and opposable thumbs. 
-- monkeybagel.com
~~~
An article just this morning talks about how IT work sucks the soul right out of a person. At the end of a day digging ditches, you feel good. Tired, yes, but you have the whole endorphin rush thing from the exercise, as well as a real feeling of accomplishment. The ditch is dug. You can see it is dug. Nobody is going to come along later and ask can you also make it an email sending ditch with instant messaging. It's a ditch. You know where you stand.
-- Some Guy Named Chris
~~~
The Internet is totally out of control, impossible to map accurately, and being used far beyond its original intentions. So far, so good.
-- Dr. Dobb's Journal, May 1993 
~~~
The problem is...the nasty thing about information technology is that it cuts way too much in the direction of freedom, because information flow only works when unconstrained.
(This has to be a chapter title for a story-"Internet Porn Will Free The World!") 
-- Jon Souza
~~~
The principle of Sturgeon's Razor states that the simplest answer to any problem is 90% crap.
~~~
I really can't complain about actresses who get paid to be dumb. Most of us can't get paid to be smart.
~~~
Babeheart?  What's it about?
It's about a cute little pig that slaughters the English
-- Freakazoid
~~~
I am a mental tourist, My mind wanders!
~~~
sadoequinecrophilia, a wonderful constructed word meaning the passionate love of beating a dead horse.
~~~
Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet. Good God! What kind of Monster have I become?!? 
~~~
Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.
~~~
This is why they complain - they don't want to have brains. Those lead to thoughts, and thoughts cause only suffering. Thus, by asking them to think, you are inflicting the torments of the damned on the previously blissfully ignorant.
-- John Rowat, in alt.tech-support.recovery
~~~
What did you do to the cat? It looks half-dead.
-- Schroedinger's wife
~~~
[T]he basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions.
-- Salman Rushdie
~~~
Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.
-- G.K. Chesterton
~~~
The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do; they don't necessarily like doing them either. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.
-- E.M. Gray
~~~
Your education begins where what is called your education is over.
~~~
I like to look good, that makes me a tease. I like to eat, that makes me a pig. I like to get off, that makes me a slut. I like to be treated with respect, that makes me a man-hating dyke. Trust me, I have no problem being labeled a bitch.
~~~
A behaviorist is someone who pulls habits out of rats.
~~~
How about- "and that has certain hallmark characteristics like taking all of your money, forbidding contact outside the group, focusing on weak-willed or vulnerable people, and using a combination of social pressure and threats to control members"?
That's not a cult that's my wife.
~~~
It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear... It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.
-- Marilyn Ferguson, American Futurist 
~~~
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
-- Mark Twain
~~~
The difference between common-sense and paranoia is that common-sense is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal - they are. Paranoia is thinking that they're conspiring.
-- J. Kegler
~~~
Everything I've learned about life I've gotten by killing smart people and eating their brains.
~~~
As we face off in cultural conflict (by their choice, not ours), we may point out that we have walked on the moon, we have motored on Mars, we have landed before we took off, we have conquered small pox, and we wield the B2 . They offer only institutionalized malice. Certainly the West is imperfect, and there are many ways in which we can improve, but the Holy War they offer is a poor answer.
-- LTC Jeff Cooper, USMC, Retired
~~~
I have no sense of humor. I used to have one, but it got sick and died.
~~~
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
-- Thomas Szasz
~~~
Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.
-- Robert Anton Wilson, The Principia Discordia
~~~
This is the difference between tolerance California-style and tolerance New England-style. In California, he said, you don't exactly get tolerated so much as getting style points for being the right kind of "different" - meaning whatever's chic. In New England, on the other hand, people seemed more inclined to not care about the details of people's private lives - moreover, to regard such things as none of their damn business.
~~~
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
~~~
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
-- Jonathan Swift
~~~
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
-- Shelley Winters
~~~
I hated going to weddings. All the grandmas would poke me saying "You're next." They stopped that when I started doing it to them at funerals.
~~~
Everyone likes to think that in the past everything was so quaint, so charming. Neighbors knew each other. Kids didn't have sex. It's a freakin' fairy-tale. Life sucked then, too. It just sucked without indoor plumbing.
-- Gilmore Girls television series
~~~
While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results [...]
-- Eric S. Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
~~~
[about programming] "You often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once."
-- Eric S. Raymond, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
~~~
A scientist commonly professes to base his beliefs on observations, not theories. Theories, it is said, are useful in suggesting new ideas and new lines of investigation for the experimenter; but "hard facts" are the only proper ground for conclusion. I have never come across anyone who carries this profession into practice - certainly not the hard-headed experimentalist, who is the more swayed by his theories because he is less accustomed to scrutinize them. Observation is not sufficient. We do not believe our eyes unless we are first convinced that what they appear to tell us is credible. It is better to admit frankly that theory has, and is entitled to have, an important share in determining belief.
-- Eddington A., "The Expanding Universe," Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1940, p.25
~~~
The scientific establishment bears a grisly resemblance to the Spanish Inquisition. Either you accept the rules and attitudes and beliefs promulgated by the 'papacy' (for which read, perhaps, the Royal Society or the Royal College of Physicians), or face a dreadful retribution. We will not actually burn you at the stake, because that sanction, unhappily, is now no longer available under our milksop laws. But we will make damned sure that you are a dead duck in our trade.
-- Gould, Donald [former editor of New Scientist], "Letting poetry loose in the laboratory," New Scientist, 29 August 1992, p.51
~~~
The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things. 
-- Ernest Dimnet, French priest, lecturer and author 
~~~
Basically, there were two sides to the world. There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently, Wobbler was in front.
-- Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
~~~
Whenever the world falls too far into disorder, and the slow ascent of humankind toward divinity is seriously endangered, God descends to Earth as an avatar, to unblock the jammed wheels of history.
-- Huston Smith, The Religions of Man
~~~
What if the Bible is intended not merely to tell you what to think, but how to think? In that case, the questions the Bible raises in your mind may be more important than the answers you find in it. Ever notice, when Jesus was asked a question, how often he answered with another question? What if God's answers to us are often questions? And what if, by inspiring questions in us, the Bible actually reads us, instead of us reading it?
-- Brian McLaren from Adventures in Missing the Point, page 81
~~~
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
-- George Orwell
~~~
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
-- Kurt Vonnegut
~~~
The good news is: I'm a perfectionist. The bad news is: I charge by the hour.
~~~
The only thing God *didn't* do to Job was give him a computer. 
-- I.F. Stone
~~~
I believe in libraries.  Everybody should have one.
~~~
I don't need speed reading.  I need speed bookcase building. 
~~~
Life? Of course I have a life.  It's a life filled with books. 
~~~
Naturally you're out of book space.  Everyone is always out of book space. If you're not out of book space, you're probably not worth knowing.
~~~
Cthulu for President: If you're tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.
~~~
Now that food has replaced sex in my life, I can't even get into my own pants. 
~~~
I saw a woman wearing a sweat shirt with "Guess" on it. So I said "Implants?" She hit me.
~~~
I wonder why they don't complain that in Chess, the queen is 'broken', bishops only being able to move diagonally is 'unrealistic', and that castles shouldn't even be allowed to move at all?
-- FireLance 
~~~
(DM attempts to force us to roleplay a quick encounter, where all we wanted to do was ask one tavern owner the directions to the one we were supposed to be meeting at.)
Monk: "Can you please tell us how to get to the Hungry Lion?"
Owner: "Our menu is better than theirs, would you like a table?"
Monk: "No thanks, I'd just like directions."
Owner: "Our meads are the best in the county. Would you like a sample?"
Monk: "No, really ... just the directions."
Owner: "Might I ask why you would rather go to the Hungry Lion than here?"
Monk: (fully exasperated at this point) "Because I'm looking for a XXXXing inn to burn to the ground, and I'd rather it was THAT one."
Owner: (After a brief pause) "You are clearly insane!"
-- Doc's Blog
~~~
Use a mechanical pencil? No way. I like the feeling of wood in my hand.
-- Doc's Blog
~~~
"You come up the trail, and into the beginning of the mountainous lowlands." (We still talk about this one :)
-- Doc's Blog
~~~
"Something's rustling in the bushes near camp."
"Is it an intelligent rustling?"
-- Doc's Blog
~~~
Many seven-year-olds are evil, yet it is generally bad for Paladins to kill them. 
-- Kilmore
~~~
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
-- G. K. Chesterton 
~~~
What the brain really needed was space without volume. So it took a radical step and did something unparalleled in the history of life on earth. It began storing information and memories outside itself, on stone, papyrus, paper, computer chips and film. This astonishing feat is so familiar a part of our lives that we don't think much about it. But it was an amazing and rather strange solution to what was essentially a packing problem: just store your essentials elsewhere and avoid cluttering up the cave..."Are you out of your mind?" we sometimes demand. The answer is, yes, we are all out of our minds, which we left long ago when our brain needed more room to do its dance. Or rather, out of our brain. A born remodeler, it made as many additions as building codes allowed, then designed two kinds of storage bins. Information could be put into things like books, that felt good in the hand, and also onto invisible things like airwaves and Internets.
-- Diane Ackerman. An Alchemy of Mind. Scribner, 2004.
~~~
 Contrary to my expectations, the World of Synnibarr did not suck all of the flesh off of my face, leaving behind only a screaming skull. It did not rape my other gaming products, leaving them pregnant with "neomods", McCracken-speak for something as simple as a gaming module. It did not shoot twin streams of hydrochloric acid into my eyes, nor did it squat on my chest and stare at me when I was trying to sleep. But it God-Damn well should have, because any of the above would have been better than actually trying to review this bastard.
-- Darren MacLennan, review on rpg.net
~~~
When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.
-- Flannery O'Connor 
~~~
Proposed Country & Western Song Titles
I Don't Mind If You Lie to Me, As Long As I Ain't Lyin' Alone
I Wouldn't Take You to a Dog Fight Even If I Thought You Could Win
If You Leave Me, Walk Out Backwards So I'll Think You're Comin' In
Since You Learned to Lip-Sync, I'm At Your Disposal
My John Deere Was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John Was Breaking My Heart
Don't Cry, Little Darlin', You're Waterin' My Beer
Tennis Must Be Your Racket, 'Cause Love Means Nothin' to You
When You Say You Love Me, You're Full of Prunes, 'Cause Living With You Is the Pits
I Wanted Your Hand in Marriage but All I Got Was the Finger
-- Wordplay
~~~
Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.
-- Sean Wilentz. Reader's Quotation Book
~~~
Fortune Provides Questions for the Great Answers
A:Go west, young man, go west!
Q:What do wabbits do when they get tiwed of wunning awound?
~~~
The verifier method boils down to seven steps: 1) amass knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading; 2) determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field; 3) look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research; 4) analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms; 5) check for classic mistakes using human-error tools; 6) follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions; 7) suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.
-- Joseph D'Agnese. "Scientific Method Man." Wired, September, 2004, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html?tw=wn_tophead_6>, an article about Gordon Rugg, the man who figured out that the Voynich Manuscript was a hoax.
~~~
It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
-- Kingsley Amis
~~~
The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
-- Michael Friedman
~~~
Qui tacet consentit - He who is silent agrees
~~~
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
~~~
Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. 
-- P. J. O'Rourke
~~~
If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
~~~
Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble. 
-- Arabic Parable
~~~
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts:  to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong.' 
-- Sidney Harris
~~~
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time. 
-- George Bernard Shaw
~~~
In fact, one thing that I have noticed... is that all of these conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.
-- Brian E. Moore
~~~
Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them. 
-- Steve Martin 
~~~
If I advance, follow me. If I stop, push me. If I fall, inspire me. 
-- Robert Cushing
~~~
Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day and yesterday our fools are lighted the way to dusty death, out out brief candle life's but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets upon the stage then is heard no more signifying nothing 
-- William Shakespeare
~~~
It's my game world, which means I control the physics. And my physics will never prevent hot elven chicks from wearing skintight armor.
-- AuraSeer 
~~~
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
~~~
Relatively speaking, there are right views and there are wrong views. But if we look more deeply, we see that all views are wrong views. No view can ever be the truth. It is just from one point; that is why it is called a "point of view." If we go to another point, we will see things differently and realize that our first view was not entirely right. Buddhism is not a collection of views. It is a practice to help us eliminate wrong views. The quality of our views can always be improved. From the viewpoint of ultimate reality, Right View is the absence of all views.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
~~~
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.  Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.  Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
-- Tom Robbins
~~~
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
-- John Witherspoon
~~~
Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please--this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time--and squawk for more! So learn to say No--and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)
-- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein) 
~~~
If there is a heaven...I don't want a mansion or a palace, Della. I want a schoolroom, filled with little children, with readers and crayons and paints and chalk. Little children, all big-eyed and eager to learn. And I'd want a big library. The biggest library you've ever seen. One that's opened all the time, not just half days. That's what I hope heaven's like.
-- Maudie Ferguson speaking, in Cassandra King's Making Waves. Hyperion, 2004.
~~~
DM: O.K. for his first attack...(looks in creatures & treasures guide and eyes widen. A shake of the head) God, I didn't realize how nasty these things were! So, what's your defensive bonus?
~~~
Zombie Guardian:"No, I cannot leave here, I've got strict odours."
~~~
(PC:s have sent a chest full of slime to one of their arch enemies)
Mage: Haha! I just wish I was there to see his face when he opens it. Wait....am I still wearing that Ring of Wishing??? *poof*
~~~
(a Brujah and a Ravnos trying to kill the Tremere Primogen)
Brujah: It didn't work!
Ravnos: Why?...Wait..deflection ....it broke didn't it?
Brujah: (nodding) Is that called a mis-stake?
Ravnos: **THWAP!**
~~~
Knight charging an insane great horned dragon: "For the gods, king and country!"
Dragon: For lunch!
(Sounds like the dragon wasn't the one that was insane... -ed)
~~~
(The party has just encountered a ghost which will answer any one question. They're currently very very lost and very much without needed supplies...)
Fighter: "How are you?"
Ghost: "Fine" (Fades Away)
Player who controls fighter: Hey! Ow! That hurts! Stop it!
~~~
Friends are only enemies that don't have the guts to kill you.
~~~
What does a revolution offer a young military officer?
Lots of dead older military officers?
-- D. and Rob M.  http://emacbeth.home.mindspring.com/Quotes/dquotes.html
~~~
Where in the Bible does it say that the Bible is always right?
In Revelation, he says 'This is my book, it's the truth, don't fuck with it.'
-- Evan M. and Erik S. 
~~~
I don't see him intimidating me intellectually.
-- Rob Hegblum
~~~
Just do it later. Nike Procrastinators.
-- (quoted by Tamra Young)
~~~
 Man cannot be forced to accept the truth.
-- Pope John Paul II
~~~
The people running things think knowledge is power, and their knowledge is power. But today, the application of knowledge is power.
-- Hugh Brownstone, IMS
~~~
Programming offers people who shy away from social interaction a way to contribute in a working society. This is one of the few jobs that require almost no social interaction, and that is really attractive to a person with autism.
-- Steve Ulfelder, _Computerworld_
~~~
Be calm and deliberate in the way you express your views. That will serve you well even when you don't think you know what you are talking about. Act like you do in a calm deliberate way always. Act like you know what you are doing better than anyone else.
-- Doug Macbeth
~~~
Fuck all that shit, just buy MathCAD.
-- Jim Miller on doing math
~~~
Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there.
-- Douglas Adams 
~~~
In a marketplace of ideas, there are going to be ideas that you find abhorrent. The best thing to do is to respond to them.
-- Barry Steinhardt, President, Electronic Frontier Foundation
~~~
Do I know jack about it? No, but a good Sys Admin inhales the manual in a short time and does the job. 
-- Bill Pemberton, sysadmin
~~~
Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
-- A.E. Houseman
~~~
As soon as you concern yourself with the 'good' and 'bad' of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you.
-- Morihei Ueshiba (founder of aikido), _The Art of Peace_
~~~
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved into a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.  Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.
-- Neal Stephenson, _Snow Crash_
~~~
The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
~~~
Victory is not won in miles but in inches.  Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more."
-- Louis L'Amour
~~~
Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised Young Man states, I should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we *stopped*. 'We're not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren't....' She was saying that most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.
-- Douglas Coupland, _Generation X_
~~~
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
~~~
Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
-- Burke (1729-1797)
~~~
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but *minds* alive on the shelves.
-- Gilbert Highet
~~~
One should respect public opinion insofar as it is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
-- Bertrand Russell
~~~
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
-- Ghandi, 1931
~~~
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
-- G. K. Chesterton
~~~
A fiendish awakened two-headed half-dragon tarrasque lich ninja Psionisist. 
...and then you look at the DM and say, with an absolutely straight face, "But I want it for roleplaying reasons." 
-- Coyote and Caelic 
~~~
True Story: While navigating Hwy 1 through the Rockies in BC I came up behind a semi pulling a flat bed trailer loaded with palettes of concrete cinder block wrapped in plastic. On the rearmost pallet someone had spray painted the message, "No baby on board, take your best shot." 
~~~
Uninformed Layperson: "Say, what's that book you're reading?"
D&D Player: "This is my Dungeon Master's Guide. I play D&D."
UL: "Isn't that game evil and satanic?"
D&DP: "No, no. Would you care for me to explain what the game is really all about?"
UL: "Um, ok sure."
D&DP: *leans in close* "Are you familiar with 'Furry Porn'?"
UL: "...Yeah."
D&DP: "WELL IT'S NOTHING LIKE THAT AT ALL YOU SICK BASTARD!!"
-- Rel http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=110879
~~~
One of my pet theories about the popularity of roleplaying games goes like this.
Roleplaying is fantasy shopping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more interested in shopping if a) it meant never having to leave the house and b) they were shopping for super-powers. In that case, the typical roleplaying rulebook is like a Nieman-Marcus catalog for super-powers. Depending on the game system and character type, these extraordinary abilities might be called feats, spells, schticks, disciplines, skills, high tech gear, psionics, or whatever. For lack of a a better all-encompassing term, I refer to these things as crunchy bits.
-- Robin D. Laws, Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering
~~~
The real disturbing gamer ... is not the eccentric weirdo who is a little too serious and appears to mistake fantasy for reality. No, the real horror is the person who mistakes _reality_ for _fantasy_, takes NONE of it seriously, and believes EVERYTHING is a game or joke: including war, famine, rape, mass-murder, whatever. 
--NPC PaPa LaBas
~~~
Your conviction that there is a monster under the bed would be a mere eccentricity if you weren't so heavily armed and it was your own bed.
~~~
Life runs in cycles... good leads to good, bad leads to bad... even if you are on the receiving end of a bad cycle, try your best to break it by beginning a good cycle. Happiness is not determined by how much you have, but how much you appreciate what you have. If you always see every positive trait in people, and maybe occasionally forgive negative traits, you will always have friends.
~~~
I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine.
-- Rita Rudner
~~~
If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself: 'I used to be angry every day; then every other day; now only every third or fourth day.' When you reach thirty days offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods.
-- Epictetus
~~~
Of existing things some are in our power,
others not in our power.
In our power are conception, effort, desire, aversion
and in a word whatever are our actions;
but not in our power are the body, property, reputation,
rulers and in a word whatever are not our actions.
-- Epictetus
~~~
You have been tried by twelve good men and true, not of your peers but as high above you as heaven is of hell, and they have said you are guilty. Time will pass and seasons will come and go. Spring with its wavin' green grass and heaps of sweet-smellin' flowers on every hill and in every dale. Then sultry Summer, with her shimmerin' heat-waves on the baked horizon. And Fall, with her yeller harvest moon and the hills growin' brown and golden under a sinkin' sun. And finally Winter, with its bitin', whinin' wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. But you won't be here to see any of 'em; not by a damn sight, because it's the order of this court that you be took to the nearest tree and hanged by the neck til you're dead, dead, dead, you olive-colored son of a billy goat.
-- Judge Roy Bean
~~~
New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
-- Cory Doctorow
~~~
 It is customary to blame secular science and antireligious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes a heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion-its message becomes meaningless.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man
~~~
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. 
-- David Foster Wallace 
~~~
Irrigation of the land with sea water desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'.
-- Michael McClary
~~~
Hedonist for Hire - No job too easy
~~~
1-900-666-0666  Live Beasts!  One-on-one Pacts!  Call now!  Only $6.66/minute!  Over 18 only please
~~~
I have this thing for generating character-oriented plots, where you look at a character and say, "What's the worst thing I could do to this guy?" I've found that extremely fruitful. 
-- Lois McMaster Bujold
~~~
I'm a relaxed agnostic: I don't know any answers and I'm not looking very hard, either.
~~~
In the early days, all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation, I had to fall back on my bass-playing abilities. 
-- Les Claypool
~~~
Revenge is sweet, and it's best served cold.  It's a cheesecake! 
~~~
My words are carved in stone, as befits a real Viking. Well, stored in silicon - it's almost the same thing, isn't it?  
~~~
What do you mean, am I getting smart with you? How would you know?
~~~
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
-- Ezekiel 23:20
~~~
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
-- Epicurus, 350-?270 BC
~~~
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-- Epicurus 
~~~
The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
To this some will reply "ah, but we are fallen and don't recognize good when we see it." But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen at all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: "Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?" - "What fault hath my people found in me?" And so on. Socrates' answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham's, Paley's) leads to an absurdity. If "good" means "what God wills" then to say "God is good" can mean only "God wills what he wills." Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
-- C. S. Lewis
~~~
If morons could fly, the sky would be pitch black.
-- Red Eldorado
~~~
Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones
-- Psalms 137:9 (sans context)
~~~
The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
-- Samuel Butler
~~~
If you think practicing what you preach is rough, just try preaching what you practice.
-- Bowen Baxter
~~~
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
-- Thomas Paine
~~~
I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception.  I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.' 
-- Woody Allen
~~~
Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply:  lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity.  
-- Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
~~~
God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That, sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, "Do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out." When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When a god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor.
-- William C. Easttom II
~~~
Those who believe that they believe in God,
but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind,
without uncertainty, without doubt,
without an element of despair even in their consolation,
believe only in the God idea, not in God Himself.
-- Miguel de  Unamuno
~~~
He who steadily observes the moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ. 
-- Thomas Jefferson
~~~
The Christians say, that among the ancient Jews, if you committed a crime you had to kill a sheep. Now they say 'charge it.' 'Put it on the slate.' The Savior will pay it. In this way, rascality is sold on credit, and the credit system in morals, as in business, breeds extravagance. 
-- Robert Ingersoll
~~~
When we drink, we get drunk. When we get drunk, we fall asleep. When we fall asleep, we commit no sin. When we commit no sin, we go to heaven. Sooooo, let's all get drunk and go to heaven!
-- Brian O'Rourke
~~~
If you don't know what you want, you probably need a nap.
-- Rules of Thumb
~~~
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. 
-- Jon Stewart
~~~
I went to my doctor and told him "my penis is burning." He said, "That means somebody is talking about it." 
-- Garry Shandling
~~~
A guy meets a hooker in a bar. She says, "This is your lucky night. I've got a special game for you. I'll do absolutely anything you want for $300, as long as you can say it in three words." The guy replies, "Hey, why not?" He pull his wallet out of his pocket, and one at a time lays three hundred-dollar bills on the bar, and says, slowly: "Paint...my...house."
~~~
L.A. is so celebrity-conscious, there's a restaurant that only serves Jack Nicholson - and when he shows up, they tell him there'll be a ten-minute wait. 
-- Bill Maher
~~~
I bought a box of animal crackers and it said on it "Do not eat if seal is broken." So I opened up the box, and sure enough... 
-- Brian Kiley
~~~
When I think I might die without seeing a 100th of all there is to see, it makes me feel well, humble I suppose, and very angry of course.
-- Pratchett
~~~
Murder was in fact, a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpok, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night time alleyways of The Shades was suicide, asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide, you could commit suicide very easily if you weren't careful.
-- Pratchett
~~~
From a pirate ship's surgeon: "Give me my saw, I can cure anything with a saw..." 
~~~
Anyone who thinks that they live in a nation that's immune to becoming the next "Nazi Germany" is an idiot. Given a little economic distress, a little misplaced pride and a need to place blame, it can happen anywhere, anytime, to any people. 
-- S. John Ross
~~~
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done - that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual. 
--Buckminster Fuller
~~~
When I was studying international relations in college, I had this professor who told us about the conference at Yalta during the Second World War. At the conference, where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt decided the fate of post-war Europe, Roosevelt suggested getting the input of Pope Pius the XII. Stalin sneered. "Where does the Pope keep his armies?", implying that the Pope could offer little in the way of military assistance and thus would be of no use to the Allies. Roosevelt sat silently until the room was crackling with tension.After careful consideration, Roosevelt replied, 'In his sleevies!'
-- Bun Popper's husband http://www.livejournal.com/users/thepessoptimist/145014.html
~~~
Task Resolution Rule #1. If you know what you want to happen, roll 1d20 (out of the player's sight) and ignore the result. Make a show of checking numbers on different tables, as if it matters. Then what you want to happen, happens.
~~~
DRM is like a vault door... it is big, imposing, hard to get around, difficult to use, and does nothing to improve the security of your tent (or PDF).
-- The Sigil
~~~
THE PRINCIPLES OF JEWISH BUDDHISM
1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.
2. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
3. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?
5. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
6. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
7. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
8. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.
9. Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.
10. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?
11. Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
12. To Find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
13. Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
14. Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes!
~~~
On seeing an assertion that librarians are all either pot smokers or self-righteous, [info]ihateusernames anticipates learning these skills in library school: I'll be sure to request the Substance Abuse and Superiority instructional seminar entitled: High and Mighty.
~~~
I used to think I was a child; now I think I am an adult - not because I no longer do childish things, but because those I call adults are no more mature than I am.
~~~
Q: How did you get into artificial intelligence?
A: Seemed logical - I didn't have any real intelligence.
~~~
Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it ...
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"
~~~
Now I know someone out there is going to claim, "Well then, UNIX is intuitive, because you only need to learn 5000 commands, and then everything else follows from that! Har har har!"
-- Andy Bates in comp.os.linux.misc, on "intuitive interfaces", slightly defending Macs.
~~~
Progress means replacing a theory that is wrong with one more subtly wrong.
~~~
One day the King decided that he would force all his subjects to tell the truth.  A gallows was erected in front of the city gates.  A herald announced, "Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question which will be put to him."  Nasrudin was first in line.  The captain of the guard asked him, "Where are you going?  Tell the truth - the alternative is death by hanging."
"I am going," said Nasrudin, "to be hanged on that gallows."
"I don't believe you."
"Very well, if I have told a lie, then hang me!"
"But that would make it the truth!"
"Exactly," said Nasrudin, "your truth."
~~~
Never trust a child farther than you can throw it.
~~~
The Worst Prison Guards
The largest number of convicts ever to escape simultaneously from a maximum security prison is 124.  This record is held by Alcoente Prison, near Lisbon in Portugal.
During the weeks leading up to the escape in July 1978 the prison warders had noticed that attendances had fallen at film shows which included "The Great Escape", and also that 220 knives and a huge quantity of electric cable had disappeared.  A guard explained, "Yes, we were planning to look for them, but never got around to it."  The warders had not, however, noticed the gaping holes in the wall because they were "covered with posters".  Nor did they detect any of the spades, chisels, water hoses and electric drills amassed by the inmates in large quantities.
The night before the breakout one guard had noticed that of the 36 prisoners in his block only 13 were present.  He said this was "normal" because inmates sometimes missed roll-call or hid, but usually came back the next morning.
"We only found out about the escape at 6:30 the next morning when one of the prisoners told us," a warder said later.  [...]  When they eventually checked, the prison guards found that exactly half of the gaol's population was missing.  By way of explanation the Justice Minister, Dr. Santos Pais, claimed that the escape was "normal" and part of the "legitimate desire of the prisoner to regain his liberty."
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
~~~
Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business.  For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things, abuseth them.  The errors of young men are the ruin of business; but the errors of aged men amount but to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.  Young men, in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not how they innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn.  Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.  Certainly, it is good to compound employments of both ... because the virtues of either age may correct the defects of both.
-- Francis Bacon, "Essay on Youth and Age"
~~~
Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.  Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.  Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
-- Tom Robbins
~~~
The Worst Jury
A murder trial at Manitoba in February 1978 was well advanced, when one juror revealed that he was completely deaf and did not have the remotest clue what was happening.  The judge, Mr. Justice Solomon, asked him if he had heard any evidence at all and, when there was no reply, dismissed him. 
The excitement which this caused was only equalled when a second juror revealed that he spoke not a word of English.  A fluent French speaker, he exhibited great surprised when told, after two days, that he was hearing a murder trial.
The trial was abandoned when a third juror said that he suffered from both conditions, being simultaneously unversed in the English language and nearly as deaf as the first juror.
The judge ordered a retrial.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
~~~
It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case.
-- Sydney J. Harris
~~~
The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws).
-- Doug Gwyn
~~~
They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man.  These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams - and still calls for more. 
They are fools that think otherwise.  No great effort was ever bought. No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was ever raised into being for payment of any kind.  No Parthenon, no Thermopylae was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone.  The payment for doing these things was itself the doing of them.
To wield oneself - to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand - and so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin - THAT is the greatest pleasure known to man!  To one who has felt the chisel in his hand and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food spread only for demons or for gods."
-- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not"
~~~
In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread.  However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy.  If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you.
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
~~~
I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.
-- Abraham Lincoln
~~~
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?  We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infinitesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness...
-- Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876
~~~
Last week's pet, this week's special.
~~~
love, v.:  I'll let you play with my life if you'll let me play with yours.
~~~
Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think.  I'm still shocked myself.  :-)
-- Larry Wall in <199708261932.MAA05218@wall.org>
~~~
Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
-- Martin Mull
~~~
Joe: I want to be a parent that understands. But I won't be.
Me: Why?
Joe: 'Cause it doesn't work like that. Parents aren't deliberately arseholes. They just aren't 16 any more.
-- trash_puppet on livejournal
~~~
The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by our labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much remains.
-- George F. Baer, railroad industrialist
~~~
The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust.
-- Lawrence Dalzell
~~~
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton
~~~
Fortune's nomination for All-Time Champion and Protector of Youthful Morals goes to Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan.  During an impassioned House debate over a proposed bill to "expand oyster and clam research," a sharp-eared informant transcribed the following exchange between our hero and Rep. John D. Dingell, also of Michigan.
DINGELL: There are places in the world at the present time where we are having to artificially propagate oysters and clams.
HOFFMAN: You mean the oysters I buy are not nature's oysters?
DINGELL: They may or may not be natural.  The simple fact of the matter is that female oysters through their living habits cast out large amounts of seed and the male oysters cast out large amounts of fertilization ...
HOFFMAN: Wait a minute!  I do not want to go into that.  There are many teenagers who read The Congressional Record.
~~~
The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise measurement of the speed of blight.
~~~
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-- Voltaire
~~~
The scholar, in his pride of intellect, forgets the progressive steps he took in his own mental development - the stories read to him in the nursery, the boy's book of adventures in which he revelled with delight, and the sentimental novel over which he shed tears in his yout.  [He] supposes that the masses will read books of his standard if they were not supplied with the books to which he objects; but he is mistaken.  Shut up to this choice, they will read no books.
-- William Frederick Poole
~~~
I have never met a person of much literary culture who would not confess that at some period in his life, usually in his youth, he had read novels excessively ... My observation ... has confirmed me in the belief that there is in the mental development of every person who later attains to literary culture a limited period when he craves novel-reading; and perhaps reads novels to excess; but from which, if the desire be gratified, he passes safely out into broader fields of study; and this craving never returns to him in its origianl form.
-- William Frederick Poole
~~~
Of course, everyone spoke ill of her profession, but, basically, it was all a question of selling her time, like everyone else. Doing things she didn't want to do, like everyone else. Putting up with horrible people, like everyone else. Handing over her precious body and her precious soul in the name of a future that never arrived, like everyone else. Saying that she still didn't have enough, like everyone else. Waiting just a bit longer, like everyone else. Waiting so that she cold earn just a little bit more, postponing the realization of her dreams; she was too busy right now, she had great opportunities ahead of her, loyal clients who were waiting for her. . .
-- prostitute in  Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho
~~~
Honestly, though, if I were the creator of a science fiction or fantasy media property (as opposed to a mere book author) and I didn't find evidence of fanfic online, I would be very worried. People don't write fanfic if they aren't already so enthralled by your universe that they can't handle the fact you're not producing it any faster, and are thus compelled to make some of their own -- the methadone, if you will, to your pure, sweet media property heroin. A fanfic writer will buy all your media-related product, will go to your conventions, will get the DVDs and will generally slog through sub-standard and lazy stretches of your work far longer than the average mortal because they are so damn invested. And if they're writing slash (fanfic with sex!), chances are excellent that you're sucking in all of their take home pay that doesn't go to rent, food and cat products. It is the Buffy slash writers who paid for Joss Whedon's boat (or whatever other particularly silly display of wealth that he's purchased for himself).
-- John Scalzi http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003496.html
~~~
Since our bodies were hosting clearance sales ("Everything must go!!") from 10 o'clock onwards, The Queen and I had about one joule of energy between the two of us, while The Squirrelly, full of vim after recovering from his bout, was a lil' dynamo, and the whole day played out like a children's book about cheetah kitten adopted my a family of sloths. Basically, we did the entire day in two hour shifts: one of us would lay in bed and moan, and the other would "take care of the baby," which consisted of watching him play while they lay on the couch and moaned.
-- defective yeti
~~~
Fandom is the thinking (wo)man's childish obsession. Usually, being a part of a fandom means you go beyond all reasonable means to be a psychotic fangirl/fanboy, including conventions, a glut of icons, and collecting figurines that are probably $50 cheaper than you buy them on eBay. Characters gain a soul. Kissing posters isn't out of the questions. Furthermore, people start thinking you're insane! Understandable, yes, but c'mon! Realistically, fandom is no different from cheering on a sports team with a season pass in one hand, and a brew in the other. Real fanboys and girls, too, don't take their fandoms so seriously that they become the majorly freakish people you see on MTV specials. I understand their need for having a hobby, but if you wanna attack one brand of fandom, why not go after superfans of any given sport? Especially when they're turning over cars for a VICTORY. So give fandom a break!
-- teh_kcuf
~~~
A certain old cat had made his home in the alley behind Gabe's bar for some time, subsisting on scraps and occasional handouts from the bartender.  One evening, emboldened by hunger, the feline attempted to follow Gabe through the back door.  Regrettably, only the his body had made it through when the door slammed shut, severing the cat's tail at its base.  This proved too much for the old creature, who looked sadly at Gabe and expired on the spot.
Gabe put the carcass back out in the alley and went back to business. The mandatory closing time arrived and Gabe was in the process of locking up after the last customers had gone.  Approaching the back door he was startled to see an apparition of the old cat mournfully holding its severed tail out, silently pleading for Gabe to put the tail back on its corpse so that it could go on to the kitty afterworld complete.
Gabe shook his head sadly and said to the ghost, "I can't.  You know the law - no retailing spirits after 2:00 AM."
~~~
What do I consider a reasonable person to be?  I'd say a reasonable person is one who accepts that we are all human and therefore fallible, and takes that into account when dealing with others.  Implicit in this definition is the belief that it is the right and the responsibility of each person to live his or her own life as he or she sees fit, to respect this right in others, and to demand the assumption of this responsibility by others.
~~~
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
-- Garrison Keillor
~~~
Max: "I think I'll call you Alec, as in Smart Alec."
Alec: "I can live with that."
Max: "Good, cuz my second choice was Dick."
-- Dark Angel Season Two, Designate This
~~~
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
~~~
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, Edpress News
~~~
Okay, let me put a little analogy down for you. Somebody always makes you dinner. They would cook anything you want, but they always make hamburgers because that's what they think you want. And you always tell them that you love the hamburgers, even though you're sick of them. You'd rather have spaghetti. You would love to have that spaghetti, but it's easier just to pretend you like the hamburgers, and get dinner over and done with. And as a result, you'll never get spaghetti, you'll always eat burgers and WILL LIVE A LIE.  SO STOP LIVING A LIE. DON'T FAKE YOUR ORGASMS, BITCHES.
-- anniefelis, livejournal
~~~
The economic or rational assumption that a manager will seek out a colleague as an information source because he or she values the individual's level of knowledge is not always the correct assumption. The results support that relationship, more than knowledge, is the reason an individual is sought as an information source. A plausible explanation for such an insight is that seeking information under pressure is an uncomfortable behaviour for managers; they prefer to be the source, solution, and providers of information. Also, because of perceptions defining their role, managers are expected to have answers on demand.  Therefore, when a manager must reach out, a trusting relationship is preferred despite the apparent opportunity cost. Managers prefer to seek out individuals they know, like or trust more often than individuals who are the foremost subject matter experts.
-- Maureen L. McKenzie. "Managers Look to the Social Network To Seek Information." Information Research, 10 #2, January, 2005, http://inf