The Big, Huge, Unsorted, Uncategorized file
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Gangs are never goin' to die out. You all goin' to get us jobs?
-- 16 year old Grape Street Crip Gang-member
There is considerable evidence that great empires and civilizations have been undone not by barbarian invaders but by climatic change.
-- 1977 CIA report
Excuse me, Worker, I'll just be a nanosecond.
-- A computer, from Firesign Theater's “I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus”
If you took everyone who's ever been to a Dead show, and lined them up, they'd stretch halfway to the moon and back . . . and none of them would be complaining.
-- a local Deadhead in the Seattle Times
One man's Mede is another man's Persian.
-- A member of the Algonquin Round Table
If you've seen one Grand Canyon, you've seen them all.
-- a member of the Monkey Wrench Gang
Morality is one thing. Ratings are everything.
-- A Network 23 executive on Max Headroom
[May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated, or, if beetles and wasps, in cow-dung, or if butterflies, locusts, shellfish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied matter, which is to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed[?] To question this is to question reason, sense, and experience. If he doubts this, let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of the Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants.
-- A seventeenth century opinion quoted by L. L. Woodruff, in *The Evolution of Earth and Man*, 1929
I am here by the will of the people and I won't leave until I get my raincoat back.
-- a slogan of the anarchists in Richard Kadrey's Metrophage
The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.
-- A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
Flappity, floppity, flip
The mouse on the mobius strip;
The strip revolved,
The mouse dissolved
In a chronodimensional skip . . ..
And malt does more than Milton can
to justify God's ways to man
-- A. E. Housman
Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time.
Moping, melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.
-- A. E. Housman
This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they're in trouble
And I am not.
-- A. E. Housman
Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
-- A. E. Housman
Crime does not pay . . .as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
-- A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
The words `I am . . .' are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.
-- A. K. Kitselman
Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the remaining errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote to this design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be the result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the system.
-- A. L. Scherr, Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage Operating Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and Philosophies, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1973, pp. 382-400
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.
-- A. P. Herbert
There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist.
-- A. Trevor Hodge
I'm against any law that I wouldn't break if I could get away with it.
-- A. Whitney Brown, SNL
The Baptists' basic theology is that if you hold someone under water long enough, he'll come around to your way of thinking. It's a ritual known as 'Bobbing for Baptists.'
-- A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture
The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born. They also believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery. At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end.
-- A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture
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
If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.
-- A.A. Milne (1882-1956)
No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.
-- A.A. Milne (1882-1956)
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
-- A.J. Liebling
How could I lose to such an idiot?
-- Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935), a shout from chess grandmaster
His ignorance is encyclopedic.
-- Abba Eban (1915-)
Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban (1915-)
Stay away from needle drugs. Richard Nixon is the only dope worth shooting.
-- Abbie Hoffman
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman
Ford is a fucking bimbo. Even in that famous picture of him making his own breakfast, he was marmalading the wrong side of his English muffin.
-- Abbie Hoffman, Playboy Interview - May 1976
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.
-- Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Urine Test
ABC News will be right back with the Great Quake of '89, brought to you by Subaru.
-- ABC News, October 18, 1989.
Patriotism in the female sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.
-- Abigail Adams, Letter to John Adams [June 18, 1782]
Whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken--and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.
-- Abigail Adams, Letter to John Adams [May 7, 1776]
In Biblical times, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Just like today.
-- Abigail Van Buren
The best index to a person's character is a) how he treats people who can't do him any good and b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
-- Abigail Van Buren
How should they answer?
-- Abigail Van Buren, in reply to the question: Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
-- Abraham Kaplan
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some respects, both. 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 (1809-1865)
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
It's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Neither Heaven nor Hell. It is simply Purgatory.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Prohibition . . . strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
One of the great joys in my life is sitting on my back porch, playing a Hohner Harmonica, and smoking a hemp cigarette.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), according to Hohner Harmonica Co.
Bookstore avis screen deans ago, our fort fathers brownies front it on fits continent a new nation, concerned in in berry and bridge area to fire proposition that air me fire created erasers.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), Gettysburg Address if he'd been writing his notes on a Newton instead of paper.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), quoted in Jack London's The Iron Heel
Do not be deceived. Revolutions do not run backwards.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), railsplitter, lawyer, imperialist
The Ten Commandments contain 297 words, the Bill of Rights 463 words, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address 266 words. A recent federal directive regulating the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.
-- According to an article in the New York Times
[Be it resolved] that all women, of whatever age, rank, profession, or degree; whether virgin maids or widows; that shall after the passing of this Act, impose upon and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's male subjects, by scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the laws now in force against witchcraft, sorcery, and such like misdemeanours, and that the marriage, upon conviction, shall stand null and void.
-- Act of Parliament, 1670
For John Caputo, hermeneutics means radical thinking without transcendental justification: attending to the ruptures and irregularities in existence before the metaphysics of presence has a chance to smooth them over. Radical Hermeneutics forges a closer collaboration between the hermeneutics and deconstruction than has previously been attempted.
-- ad for 'Radical Hermeneutics, Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutics Project'
Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.
-- ad slogan 'Pepsi Comes Alive' as initially translated into Chinese
Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it.
-- Adam Cooper (19th century)
All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with.
-- Adam Richardson
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 neccessities but of their advantages.
-- Adam Smith (1723-1790)
The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be . . .. The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.
-- Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Illuminate the Opposition!
-- Adam Weishaupt, Grand Primus Illuminatus
OK, that one's called a 'bug.' So is that one. They're all just 'bugs.' I ain't doin' em all.
-- Adam, naming the animals (Genesis 2:19-20)
God made man, and then said I can do better than that and made woman.
-- Adela Rogers St. John
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.
-- Adela Rogers St. John
I think every woman is entitled to a middle husband she can forget.
-- Adela Rogers St.John
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
Flattery is all right -- if you don't inhale.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
I don't mind a little praise - as long as it's fulsome.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
If we are to begin packaging ourselves as boxes of cereal, Democracy will die . . . for you could not win the presidency without proving unworthy of the job.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
In America, anyone can become president. That's one of the risks you take.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.
-- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
Responsiblity is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it.
-- Admiral Hyman Rickover
The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Theater, art, literature, cinema . . . must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world . . .
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Without Gun Confiscation, The Streets Would Not Be Safe For The SS.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her . . . the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), Mein Kampf
The perfect host requires the perfect parasite.
-- Adopted from Lance Fusco.
My wife has never worked. She's the least ambitious person I've ever met. She's a terrific wife. She hasn't the slightest interest in doing a career. She kind of lives this with me, and it's a terrific feeling. I come home and she's there.
-- Adrian Lyne, director of Fatal Attraction
Be careful in revising those immigration laws of yours. We got careless with ours.
-- advice given to Herbert Humphrey by an American Indian from New Mexico
Confound those who have said our remarks before us.
-- Aelius Donatus
Don't get the idea that I'm knocking the American system.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
I don't even know what street Canada is on.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
Vote early and vote often.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
When I sell liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it’s called hospitality.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
-- Al Capp
George Bush taking credit for the Berlin Wall coming down is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.
-- Al Gore - during 1992 Vice Presidential debate
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
-- Alain van der Heide
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.
-- Alan Alda
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.
-- Alan Corenk
The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization.
-- Alan Coult
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
-- Alan Dean Foster To the Vanishing Point
Nobody wants justice.
-- Alan Dershowitz
Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.
-- Alan Holbrook
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
-- Alan Kay, Computer Software, Scientific American, September 1984
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
-- Alan Kay, Computer Software, Scientific American, September 1984
If you want to read about love and marriage, you have to buy two separate books.
-- Alan King
Like the ski resort full of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
-- Alan McKay
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
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of Fortran.
-- Alan Perlis
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
-- Alan Turing
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the bible were used to beat plowshares into swords . . .
-- Alan Watts
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
-- Alan Watts
The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky gamble, is the security of the police state.
-- Alan Watts
A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.
-- Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956), U.S Vice President (1949-1953)
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Integrity has no need of rules.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
. . .one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I should have been a plumber.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
If A equals success, then the formula is: A= X + Y + Z X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it is an enemy.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The important thing is never to stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have not legitimacy.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) (paraphrase)
Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) (Quoted in Saturday Review obituary, April 30, 1955)
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) when asked to describe radio
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), July 7, 1921
People and things do not upset us, rather we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us.
-- Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Therapy
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
-- Albert Schweitzer
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgi
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
-- Aldo Leopold
A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, he said, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Millitary.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The totality is present even in the broken pieces.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
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 (1894-1963), The Devils of Loudun
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), The Devils of Loudun
The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular
-- Aleister Crowley
Let's face it . . .most relationships you have in life don't work out.
-- Alex Bennett
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
-- Alex Comfort
My fondest hope is that Roots may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.
-- Alex Haley, Playboy Interview - January 1977
My best score ever is 103, but I've only been playing for 15 years.
-- Alex Karras - Detroit Lions defensive lineman on his golf game
Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.
-- Alexander Graham Bell
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
-- Alexander Haig
The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards
-- Alexander Jablokov, The Place of No Shadows
The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but hold hands.
-- Alexander Penney
A family is but too often a commonwealth of malignants.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
-- Alexander Smith
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--bit right through every human heart--and all human hearts.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.
-- Alexander Woollcott
I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas, fils
If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.
-- Alexandre Dumas, fils
The only good cat is a stir fried cat.
-- ALF
Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans.
-- Alf Landon, during his speech in his presidential campaign against FDR
It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
-- Alfred Adler
Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Disney, of course, has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor, he just tears him up.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
I have a perfect cure for a sore throat. Cut it.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
-- Alfred Jarry
You may have heard that a dean is to faculty as a hydrant is to a dog.
-- Alfred Kahn
The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform.
-- Alfred Kinsey
There are two was to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
-- Alfred Korzybski
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth-while.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), 1963, in The History of Manned Space Flight
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
-- Alfred Stieglitz, circa 1895, about the Romantic-Impressionist school of photography
Who call him spurious and shoddy Shall do it o'er my lifeless body. I heartily invite such birds To come outside and say those words!
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-- Alice Kahn
Calvin Coolidge looks as if he had been weaned on a pickle.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980) Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, from Mrs. L. Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth
A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it.
-- Alistair Cooke
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
-- Allen Ginsberg
Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a communist.
-- Alvin Dark, former baseball coach
. . .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)
. . .It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
A penny saved is a penny to squander.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Absolute: Independent, irresponsible. An absolute monarchy is one in which the sovereign does as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins. Not many absolute monarchies are left, most of them having been replaced by limited monarchies, where the soverign's power for evil (and for good) is greatly curtailed, and by republics, which are governed by chance.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Abstainer: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Better late than before anybody has invited you.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
But as records of courts of 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)
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Disobedience: The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Mausoleum: The final and funniest folly of the rich.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Noncombatant: A dead Quaker.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
One evening Mr. Rudolph Block, of New York, found himself seated at dinner alongside Mr. Percival Pollard, the distinguished critic. Mr. Pollard, said he, my book, _The Biography of a Dead Cow_, is published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its authorship. Yet in reviewing it you speak of it as the work of the Idiot of the Century. Do you think that fair criticism? I am very sorry, sir, replied the critic, amiably, but it did not occur to me that you really might not wish the public to know who wrote it.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Before undergoing a surgical operation, arrange your temporal affairs. You may live.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Calamites are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Christian, n. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Clergyman, n. - A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Conservative. noun. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Critic, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Experience, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Fork, n. An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Happiness, noun. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
I think I think, therefore, I think I am.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Impiety, noun. Your irreverence toward my deity.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Lawsuit n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Lawyer, n. One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Love, n - A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Opera, n. A play representing life in another world whose inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures, and no postures but attitudes.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Phonograph, n. An irritating toy that restores life to dead noises.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Pig: An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it balks at pig.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Pleasure, n. The least hateful form of dejection.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Politician: An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Presidency: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Proboscis: The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Reporter: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Reverence: the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Saint, noun. A dead sinner revised and edited.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Success is the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
The covers of this book are too far apart.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
The ocean is a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy . . .
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, _Cogito ergo sum_. . . The dictum might be improved, however, thus: _Cogito cogito _ _ergo cogito sum_-- I think that I think, therefore I think that I am; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) - The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary
Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Cabbage, n.: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Dentist, n.: A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls coins out of one's pockets.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Interpreter: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Mad, adj: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Politics: The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) The Devil's Dictionary
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
-- Amelia Earhart
Psychographic marketing techniques helped Raid roach spray marketers discover that the reason low-income Southern women were the heaviest users of roach spray was that a lot of their feelings about the roach were very similar to the feelings that they had about the men in their lives, said the advertising executive on the account. They said the roach, like the man in their life, only comes around when he wants food. The act of spraying roaches and seeing them die was satisfying to this frustrated, powerless group.
-- American Demographics, Nov. 1991
Reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!
-- Amiga ROM Kernel Manual
A student asked the master for help . . . does this program run from the Workbench? The master grabbed the mouse and pointed to an icon. What is this? he asked. The student replied That's the mouse. The master pressed control-Amiga-Amiga and hit the student on the head with the Amiga ROM Kernel Manual.
-- Amiga Zen Master Peter da Silva
I've been trey-dueced.
-- An Algonquinite with a hand of threes and twos
I shall fold my tens and silently slip away.
-- An Algonquinite with a losing card hand
I can see the time when every city will have one.
-- An American mayor's reaction to the news of the invention of the telephone
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
Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper . . .. everyone was eating paper and a policeman was at the door. Now all you have to do is bend a disk.
-- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity, commenting on the benefits of using computers in support of their movement
You know why there are so few sophisticated computer terrorists in the United States? Because your hackers have so much mobility into the establishment. Here, there is no such mobility. If you have the slightest bit of intellectual integrity you cannot support the government . . .. That's why the best computer minds belong to the opposition.
-- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity
Isn't it a blessing of God it didn't hit him in the eye?
-- an elderly woman, when she and two others found a dead robber on the road, shot through the right temple
Heute Die Welt Morgens das Sonnensystem!
-- An Erisian Hymn by Rev. Dr. Mungojerry Grindlebone, KOB Episkopos, THE RAYVILLE APPLE PANTHERS
There is no singular historic distinction to this particular rest area site, other than it is part of the stage for greater happenings. A witness to the tides of history.
-- an excerpt from an actual rest area site in South Dakota:
Remember, IBM has always prided itself on its marketing prowess, and market segmentation was an essential part of that. The last thing IBM wanted to do was compete with itself. But it looks like that kind of thinking isn't going to work anymore.
-- An unnamed IBM official, InfoWorld, February 26, 1990, page 1, about the unhappiness of the AS/400 group that the System/6000 had an aggressive price/performance ratio, and a larger number
Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
-- Anais Nin
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
-- Anais Nin
One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.
-- Anatol Rapoport
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way to take advantage of them
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
The impotence of God is infinite.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
Know thyself? A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
No theory is good except on condition that one uses it to go beyond.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.
-- Andre Gide (1876-1951)
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
-- Andre Malraux
What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
-- Andre Malraux
Never give a statist an even break. The State has never given us one.
-- Andre Marrou
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - gunpowder and romantic love.
-- Andre Maurois
Now, more than ever, it is evident that `good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo.
-- Andre Peret
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
-- Andre Previn
If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.
-- Andrew A. Rooney
The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.
-- Andrew A. Rooney
Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
-- Andrew Brown
One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.
-- Andrew Carnegie
I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us -- a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society.
-- Andrew D. White, author, first president of Cornell University, 1896
The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood: the person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's liberty. Are you free?
-- Andrew Ford
Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked. Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence, what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . . Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . . I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by the firelight, afraid of the night.
-- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed, San Jose Mercury News, May 8, 1988
It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-- Andrew Jackson
War is a blessing compared with national degradation.
-- Andrew Jackson
He used statistics the way a drunkard uses lampposts - for support, not illumination.
-- Andrew Lang
It is bad luck to be superstitious.
-- Andrew W. Mathis
Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young
The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.
-- Andrew Young, Playboy Interview - July 1977
And then the Lion ate up Androcles, put the thorn back in his paw, and lay down by the side of the road to wait for another sucker.
-- Androcles and the Lion (lost version)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-- Andy Finkel, computer guy
Reliable software must kill people reliably.
-- Andy Mickel
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
-- Andy Rooney
Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good night.
-- Andy Warhol
I am a deeply superficial person.
-- Andy Warhol
Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.
-- Andy Warhol
Two people kissing always look like fish.
-- Andy Warhol
Virtue is its own punishment.
-- Aneurin Bevan
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
-- Aneurin Bevan
It was the wrong answer. He should have given the Marilyn Quayle answer.
-- Angela Buchanan, sister of Pat Buchanan, on Bush's remark that he would stand by a grand-daughter's decision about abortion.
At the moment of climax, there is a oneness with you and your husband and God. When you come together, it's like when the church is brought up to meet Christ in the air.
-- Anita Bryant, Playboy Interview - May 1978
Ah yes, we must mollify angry fanatics who seek our destruction because otherwise . . . they might get mad and seek our destruction.
-- Ann Coulter, 9/26/2002
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
We want to create puppets that pull their own strings.
-- Ann Marion
Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
-- Anna Freud
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones -- maybe only the stones -- understood.
-- Annie Dillard _An American Childhood_
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
-- Annie Dillard, _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_
Anyone who isn`t confused here, doesn`t really understand what’s going on.
-- Anonymous Belfast citizen in 1970.
Once I was a tadpole, in the beginning of the begin; Then I was a toadfrog with my tail tucked in. Then I was a monkey in a banyan tree; Now I'm a professor with a Ph.D.
-- Anonymous creationist's view of evolution
I can give you a sentence with the word punctilious. There's a farmer with two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punctilious.
-- Another member of the Algonquin Round Table
9W
-- Answer to the question: Do you spell your name with a V, Mr. Vagner? Steve Allen, from the Question Man segment on the Steve Allen Show
God is good when He gives us a grilled steak.
-- Anthony Burgess, Playboy Interview – 1974
Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.
-- Anthony Burgess, Playboy Interview - September 1974
One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. These two plus two more will produce half again as many ideas. These four plus four more begin to represent a creative meeting, and the ratio changes to one quarter as many . . .
-- Anthony Chevins
Draft politicians, not human beings.
-- antidraft slogan coined by Jeff Daiell, 1979
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de St. Exupery
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
-- Antoine de St. Exupery
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 (1860-1904)
I don't understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.
-- Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.
-- Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
'Truth' never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation.
-- Anton LaVey
To be or not to be is true.
-- apocrypha of George Boole
HP had a unique policy of allowing its engineers to take parts from stock as long as they built something. They figured that with every design, they were getting a better engineer. It's a policy I urge all companies to adopt.
-- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Will Wozniak's class give Apple to teacher? EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45
Do not expose your LaserWriter to fire or intense heat
-- Apple LaserWriter manual
We regret we are unable to give you the weather. We rely on weather reports from the airport, which is closed because of the weather. Whether we are able to give you the weather tomorrow depends on the weather.
-- Arab News
Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.
-- Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Anyone can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Education is the best provision for old age.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
The gods too are fond of a joke.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Wit is educated insolence.
-- Aristotle (384-322 BC)
If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
-- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
-- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist. What's in that pipe that he's smoking?
-- Arlo Guthrie
It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior imapartiality.
-- Arnold Bennett
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
-- Arnold Edinborough
Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to.
-- Arnold H. Glasgow
After one week [visiting Austria] I couldn't wait to go back to the United States. Everything was much more pleasant in the United States, because of the mentality of being open-minded, always positive. Everything you want to do in Europe is just, 'No way. No one has ever done it.' They haven't any more the desire to go out to conquer and achieve -- I realized that I had much more the American spirit.
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger
I know that if you leave dishes in the sink, they get stick and hard to wash the next day.
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Playboy Interview - January 1988
America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
-- Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
Excuse me, George Herbert irregular-heart-beating, read-by-line-lipping, slipping-in-the-polls, do-nothing, deficit-raising, make-less-money-than- Millie-the-White-House-dog-last-year, Quayle-loving, sushi-puking Bush! I don't remember inviting your ass on my show.
-- Arsenio Hall in response to Bush's comment that he would appear on any talk show except Arsenio Reprinted from the Seattle Times, Tuesday, August 4, 1992, page B-1
It's nice to see a Democrat blow something besides an election.
-- Arsenio Hall, after Clinton's saxophone debut on his show
I worship the quicksand he walks in.
-- Art Buchwald
If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?
-- Arthur Hoppe
One of the problems I've always had with propaganda pamphlets is that they're real boring to look at. They're just badly designed. People from the left often are very well-intended, but they never had time to take basic design classes, you know?
-- Art Spiegelman
Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction . . .
-- Art Spiegelman
I have already given two cousins to the war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
-- Artemus Ward (1834-1867)
Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
-- Arthur Baer (1896-1975)
Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
-- Arthur Balfour (1848-1930)
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke's Second Law: The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Technology and the Future
Working in the theater has a lot in common with unemployment.
-- Arthur Gingold
I'm proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is I could be just as proud for half the money.
-- Arthur Godfrey
Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.
-- Arthur Hays Sulzberger
The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
-- Arthur Honegger
We all worry about the population explosion -- but we don't worry about it at the right time.
-- Arthur Hoppe
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
-- Arthur Koestler
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.
-- Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, London, 1970, p. 253
‘God gives burdens; also shoulders.’ Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the end of the 1980 election. At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I can't find it anywhere. I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why would he lie about a thing like that?
-- Arthur Naiman
A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit. The first thing he notices is that the arms are too long. No problem, says the tailor. Just bend them at the elbow and hold them out in front of you. See, now it's fine. But the collar is up around my ears! It's nothing. Just hunch your back up a little . . .no, a little more . . .that's it. But I'm stepping on my cuffs! the man cries in desperation. Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack. There you go. Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly. So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the street. Reba and Florence see him go by. Oh, look, says Reba, that poor man! Yes, says Florence, but what a beautiful suit.
-- Arthur Naiman
An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. Well, zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute. The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, And from this he makes a living?
-- Arthur Naiman
Chicken Soup: An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin, cocaine, interferon, and TLC. The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother.
-- Arthur Naiman
Gay shlafen: Yiddish for go to sleep. Now doesn't gay shlafen have a softer, more soothing sound than the harsh, staccato go to sleep? Listen to the difference: Go to sleep, you little wretch! . . . Gay shlafen, darling. Obvious, isn't it? Clearly the best thing you can do for you children is to start speaking Yiddish right now and never speak another word of English as long as you live. This will, of course, entail teaching Yiddish to all your friends, business associates, the people at the supermarket, and so on, but that's just the point. It has to start with committed individuals and then grow . . .. Some minor adjustments will have to be made, of course: those signs written in what look like Yiddish letters won't be funny when everything is written in Yiddish. And we'll have to start driving on the left side of the road so we won't be reading the street signs backwards. But is that too high a price to pay for world peace? I think not, my friend, I think not.
-- Arthur Naiman
Goy: . . . The distinction between Jewish and goyish can be quite subtle, as the following quote from Lenny Bruce illustrates: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. The B'nai Brith is goyish. The Hadassah is Jewish. Marine Corps -- heavy goyish, dangerous. Kool-Aid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes -- goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them . . .
-- Arthur Naiman
Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, Let me have a nice half-done. Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
-- Arthur Naiman
Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring Chile. Murray just got a new camera and is constantly snapping pictures. One day, without knowing it, he photographs a top-secret military installation. In an instant, armed troops surround Murray and Esther and hustle them off to prison. They can't prove who they are because they've left their passports in their hotel room. For three weeks they're tortured day and night to get them to name their contacts in the liberation movement.. Finally they're hauled in front of a military court, charged with espionage, and sentenced to death. The next morning they're lined up in front of the wall where they'll be shot. The sergeant in charge of the firing squad asks them if they have any lasts requests. Esther wants to know if she can call her daughter in Chicago. The sergeant says he's sorry, that's not possible, and turns to Murray. This is crazy! Murray shouts. We're not spies! And he spits in the sergeants face. Murray! Esther cries. Please! Don't make trouble.
-- Arthur Naiman
One of the oldest problems puzzled over in the Talmud is: Why did God create goyim? The generally accepted answer is somebody has to buy retail.
-- Arthur Naiman
There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that someone isn't Jewish. For example, you'll never meet a Jew named Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or Larsen or Jenks. But some goyisha names just about guarantee that every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish. Why is this? Who knows? Learned rabbis have pondered this question for centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think you can find one? Get serious. You don't even understand why it's forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster -- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter. You don't even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz? Fat Chance.
-- Arthur Naiman
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
-- Arthur Rimbaud
It is [the] belief in absolutes, I would hazard, that is the great enemy today of the life of the mind. This may seem a rash proposition. The fashion of the time is to denounce relativism as the root of all evil. But history suggests that the damage done to humanity by the relativist is far less than the damage done by the absolutist - by the fellow who, as Mr. Dooley once put it, does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts in th' case.
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
No national political party is going to nominate another right-wing candidate for a long time.
-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Playboy Interview - May 1966
All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third it is accepted as being self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
If we weren't all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting we couldn't endure it.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination.
-- Arthur Wing Pinero
I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. I haven't had time for tobacco since.
-- Arturo Toscanini
Assassins!
-- Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra
GIVE CHEERS To Asahi Draft Beer And Your Life Be Marvelous
-- Asahi Beer Cans
Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Maybe I’m lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Please don't ask me what the score is, I’m not even sure what the game is.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Please don't lie to me, unless you're absolutely sure I'll never find out the truth.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof
-- Ashley Montague
The Good Book - one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
-- Ashley Montague
[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there . . .. It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public . . ..The astrologer is quite glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They have not proved their case . . ..It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable -- you test it. And in that astrology is really quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC News Nightline, May 3, 1988
UNIX should be used as an adjective.
-- AT&T
Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.
-- Atari founder Nolan Bushnell
When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago so I can still be active in politics.
-- atributed to Rep. Charlie Rangel of NY).
We're here to give you a computer, not a religion.
-- attributed to Bob Pariseau, at the introduction of the Amiga
Oh beautiful, for smoggy skies, o'er insectide waves of grain, and strip-mined mountain's majesty, above the asphalt plains! America, America, man sheds his waste on thee! And hides the pines, with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea!
-- Attributed to George Carlin
Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.
-- Attributed to Sigmund Freud (1871-1922)
I'm a mean green mother from outer space
-- Audrey II, The Little Shop of Horrors
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
-- August Strindberg
Any ordinary man can . . .surround himself with two thousand books . . .and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
-- Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)
I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most writers on logic strongly object to all symbols. . . I should advise the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which has produced no growth of symbols.
-- Augustus De Morgan
Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no square root; thirdly that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle is to the diameter.
-- Augustus de Morgan
How could they tell?
-- Author Dorothy Parker when told of President Calvin Coolidge's death
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country's been doing to you.
-- Avengers
I am interested in politics so that someday I will not have to be interested in politics.
-- Ayn Rand
If all philosophers were required to present their ideas in novels, to dramatize the exact meaning and consequences of their philosophies in human life, there would be far fewer philosophers -- and far better ones.
. . .and a lot more really bad novels!
-- Ayn Rand
Jeremy York, jeremy@milton.acs.washington.edu
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
-- Ayn Rand
The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
-- Ayn Rand
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
-- Ayn Rand
We never make assertions, Miss Taggart, said Hugh Akston. That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell -- we *show*. We do not claim -- we *prove*.
-- Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_
Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live - that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values - that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others - that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human - that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay - that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live - that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road - that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up - that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, from Galt’s speech
The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself -- for a while -- from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as ‘deficit financing.’ It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods -- but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.
-- Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, Egalitarianism and Inflation
The government has no source of revenue, except the taxes paid by the producers. To free itself - for a while - from the limits set by reality, the government initiates a credit con game on a scale which the private manipulator could not dream of. It borrows money from you today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you day after tomorrow, and so on. This is known as deficit financing. It is made possible by the fact that the government cuts the connection between goods and money. It issues paper money, which is used as a claim check on actually existing goods - but that money is not backed by any goods, it is not backed by gold, it is backed by nothing. It is a promissory note issued to you in exchange for your goods, to be paid by you (in the form of taxes) out of your future production.
-- Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, Egalitarianism and Inflation
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
-- B. F. Skinner
If we can't fix it -- we'll fix it so nobody can.
-- B. Gibbons
It is important to note that probably no large operating system using current design technology can withstand a determined and well-coordinated attack, and that most such documented penetrations have been remarkably easy.
-- B. Hebbard, A Penetration Analysis of the Michigan Terminal System, Operating Systems Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, June 1980, pp. 7-20
I am thankful for one leg.
To limp is no disgrace
I may not be number one,
but I can still run the race.
-- B.C.
If an eel lunges out,
And it bites off your snout,
That's a Moray . . .
-- B.C.
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
The President of these overly-united States was shaking hands with the NY Yankees one day -- apparently during summer. When he got to Babe Ruth, the Bambino opened with, Hot as Hell, ain't it, Prez?
-- Babe Ruth
When told he was making more per year than the President, Babe Ruth replied, Well, I had a better year than he did.
-- Babe Ruth
For I lean on no dead kin, my name is mine for fame or scorn.
And the world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.
-- Charles Badger Clark
Yes, and I feel bad about rendering their useless carci into dogfood . . .
-- Badger comics
While you are away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend, Tom Selleck is kissing your lady, Bart Simpson is making love to your wife.
-- Baghdad Betty, Iraqi radio announcer, to gulf war troops
I can't see the point in the theatre. All that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home. Apart from the sex, of course.
-- Baldrick - Sense and Senility
With molasses you catch flies, with vinegar you catch nobody.
-- Baltimore City Councilman Dominic DiPietro
I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell my children that, they just about throw up.
-- Barbara Bush
And who knows? Somewhere out there in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president's spouse. I wish him well!
-- Barbara Bush, commencement address to Wellesley College
I believe that mink are raised for being turned into fur coats and if we didn't wear fur coats those little animals would never have been born. So is it better not to have been born or to have lived for a year or two to have been turned into a fur coat? I don't know.
-- Barbi Benton, ex-playboy bunny
I am a mass of contradictions
-- Barbra Streisand, Playboy Interview - October 1977
It takes a smart man to know when he's stupid.
-- Barney Rubble
I don't know what their gripe is. A critic is simply someone paid to render opinions glibly. Critics are grinks and groinks.
-- Baron and Badger, from Badger comics
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phatasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
-- Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716)
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
-- Baron Henry Peter Brougham
We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.
-- Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing
The day is long since past when one had to decide whether to cast one's lot with pro-technological or anti-technological forces. Serious thinkers understand that technology, for better or for worse, is part of the human condition, that it always has been, and that it presumably always will be. The task at hand is to render it servicable to human life.
-- Barry Katz, Technology and Culture
The view of technological progress as a linear development, in which some restless metaphysical impulse marches inexorably westward, is inaccurate, implausible, but deeply ingrained.
-- Barry Katz, Technology and Culture: A Historical Romance
While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates real transcendence from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity. When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking. The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, cosmic conciousness, and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, The Brain and Conciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171
Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous incarnations or from a universal mind (the repository of all past wisdom and creativity) not only are implausible but also unfairly demean the stunning achievements of individual human brains.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
-- Barry M. Goldwater
Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process.
-- Barry M. Goldwater
I'm not sure I've even got the brains to be President.
-- Barry M. Goldwater in 1964
However, on religious issures there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism.
-- Barry M. Goldwater, from the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass.
-- Barry M. Goldwater, when asked what he thought of Jerry Falwell's suggestion that all good Christians should be against Sandra Day O'Connor's nomination to the Supreme Court
A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds.
-- Basil (329-379 A.D.)
Equation (1.2-9) is a second order, nonlinear, vector, differential equation which has defied solution in its present form. It is here therefore we depart from the realities of nature to make some simplifying assumptions . . .
-- Bate, Mueller & White, 1971, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics
[F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.
-- Battaille
Everyone is chasing their own personal road runner . . .so when he shoots you point blank in the face with a cannon, you have no choice . . .you've got to just get up off your lazy ass, strap on that ACME jet pack and ghim!
-- Bayley 101, a personal philosophy
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Beckett
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
-- Beecher
One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.
-- Beilby Porteus (1731-1808)
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks
I don't see any way that you can justify somebody making $1 million or more a year when the low-level workers aren't making enough money to afford a house.
-- Ben Cohen, chairman and CEO of Ben & Jerry's, , who last year kept his salary to $84,000 (the company limits its top salaries to no more than seven times the pay of the lowest-paid full-time worker):
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
-- Ben Hecht
Confound these ancestors . . .. They've stolen our best ideas!
-- Ben Jonson
Snowy, Flowy, Blowy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy, Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy. The Twelve Months.
-- Benham. _Book of Quotations._
The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.
-- Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword.
-- Benjamin Dana
The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
I feel a very unusual sensation - if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
As to Jesus of Nazareth . . .I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
God heals, and the doctor takes the fee.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim at the top.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Many men die at twenty-five and aren't buried until they are seventy-five.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Well done is better than well said.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Ben Franklin was a little stout later in life and it was said that in Paris a young woman, tapping him on his protruding abdomen, said, Dr. Franklin, if this were on a woman, we'd know what to think. And Franklin replied, Half an hour ago, Mademoiselle, it was on a woman, and now what do you think?
-- Benjamin Franklin, from the Humes File
You must believe in God in spite of what the clergy say.
-- Benjamin Jowett
Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions.
-- Benjamin Spock
I'm not drunk. I can see perfectly well that cat coming toward me has only one eye.
-- Benny Hill
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
-- Benny Hill
The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.
-- Benny Hill
Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
-- Benoit Mandelbrot
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us . . . a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird . . . a social being . . . capable of actual affection . . . nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family . . .
-- Berke Breathed, Bloom Country Babylon
This document describes the usage and input syntax of the Unix Vax-11 assembler As. As is designed for assembling code produced by the C compiler; certain concessions have been made to handle code written directly by people, but in general little sympathy has been extended.
-- Berkeley Vax/Unix Assembler Reference Manual (1983)
I like the word `indolence.' it makes my laziness seem classy.
-- Bern Williams
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
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
-- Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
-- Bernard M. Baruch
Honesty: the most important thing in life. Unless you really know how to fake it, you'll never make it.
-- Bernard Rosenberg
I have five dollars for each of you.
-- Bernhard Goetz
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
-- Bert Lantz
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
-- Bert Whitney
Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
I don't trust him. We're friends.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
On thinking about Hell, I gather My brother Shelley found it was a place Much like the city of London. I Who live in Los Angeles and not in London Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be Still more like Los Angeles.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
There are times when you have to choose between being a human and having good taste.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
War is like love; it always finds a way.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Why be a man when you can be a success?
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Something ignoble, loathsome, undignified attends all associations between people and has been transferred to all objects, dwelling, tools, even the landscape itself.
-- Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) on America
All movements go too far.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instincts can be perceived.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
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 (1872-1970)
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Sin is geographical.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
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 (1872-1970)
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Playboy Interview - March 1963
He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.
-- Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America. And to the wee puppet for witch's hands. One Asian, under God, in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all.
-- Bette Bao Lord, age 8. [Newsweek, 7/6.]
If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to?
-- Bette Midler
Giving a man space is like giving a dog a computer: the chances are he will not use it wisely.
-- Bette-Jane Raphael
I mean, certainly no one actually wants to be whipped or spanked, right?
-- Bettie Page (50's pinup model) on bondage scenes: Playboy, March 1993
No Woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor
-- Betty Friedan
It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar system would see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel, destructive, wasteful, and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic evolution. Viewing us as the culmination of *anything* is grotesque; viewing us as a transitional species makes more sense -- and gives us more hope.
-- Betty McCollister, Our Transitional Species, Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1
Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object. The difference is that is not all she longs to be.
-- Betty Rollin
The woman who is truly Spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband . . .This is a truly liberated woman. Submission is God's design for women.
-- Beverly LaHaye, The Spirit-Controlled Woman
Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
-- Beverly Nichols
Governing sense, mind and intellect, intent on liberation, free from desire, fear and anger, the sage is forever free.
-- Bhagavad Gita (c. B.C. 400)
Jesus was a crackpot.
-- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - San Francisco Chronicle 12/17/85
Study nature, not books.
-- Big framed inscription in the library of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, attributed to Louis Agassiz.
You don't really jerk out the eyeball, you just sorta *spring* it so it pops outa the socket.
-- Big Frank, in Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
Polka tots make polka teens, and polka teens make human beans!
-- Big Joe ("The Big Joe Polka Show," RFDTV)
www.polkacatalog.com
You killed Ted, you medieval dickweed!
-- Bill
Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies
-- Bill Bulko
At the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington this weekend, after he did a turn on his sax, Clinton said, I might have to pick an FBI Director, and it's going to be hard to fill J. Edgar Hoover's pumps.
-- Bill Clinton
To middle-class Americans who have paid a great deal for the last 12 years and from whom I ask a contribution tonight, I will say again . . . you're not going at it alone anymore - you're certainly not going first, and you're not going to pay more for less as you have too often in the past.
-- Bill Clinton, Joint session of Congress, February 17, 1993
I had hoped to invest in your future by creating jobs, expanding education, reforming health care and reducing the debt without asking more of you . . . But I can't - because the deficit has increased so much beyond my earlier estimates and beyond even the worst official government estimates from last year. We just have to face the fact that to make the changes our country needs, more Americans must contribute today so that all Americans can do better tommorrow.
-- Bill Clinton, The Oval Office, February 15, 1993
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby
I really do plan to get out of show business within five years or so.
-- Bill Cosby, Playboy Interview - May 1969
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
-- Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
There's always been Tower of Babel sort of bickering inside Unix, but this is the most extreme form ever. This means at least several years of confusion.
-- Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft, about the Open Systems Foundation
Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly' . . .. Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-friendly' on the cover.
-- Bill Gates, Pres., Microsoft, Inc.
Failure to understand reality is not reality's fault.
-- Bill Henneman
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
-- Bill Hirst
I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
-- Bill Hoest
What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick!
-- Bill Kirchenbaum, comedian
The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough.
-- Bill Maher
The only problem with drawing Nixon is restraint. Your tendency is to let your feelings come out. He's such a loathsome son of a bitch, and he looks so loathsome.
-- Bill Mauldin
Of course, the person I was fleeing most fearfully was myself, for I drive, and I'm burning a collapsed barn behind the house next week because it is much the cheapest way to deal with it, and I live on about four hundred times the money that Thoreau conclusively proved was enough, so I've done my share to take this independent, eternal world and turn it into a science fair project.
-- Bill McKibbon, The End of Nature
I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of people waiting to abuse me.
-- Bill Murray, Ghostbusters
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
-- Bill Nye (1850-1896) (also attributed to Mark Twain)
I couldn't remember things until I took that Sam Carnegie course.
-- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach
Lead us in a few words of silent prayer.
-- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach
I think, therefore ackphthh
-- Bill the Cat
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
-- Bill Vaughan
Muscles come and go; flab lasts.
-- Bill Vaughan
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
-- Bill Vaughan
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?
-- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
-- Bill Watterson, cartoonist
I've added to my understanding that you refer to calling a bullshitter a bullshitter as ``quasi-religious didacticism''.
-- Bill Wells (bill@twwells.com)
Your posting is just the kind of BS that leads me to believe that moderation is necessary. As it happens, you are simply wrong. On all counts.
-- Bill Wells (bill@twwells.com)
There is only one nature – the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole. ;
-- Bill Wulf
Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse.
-- Billy Connolly on ABC's Head Of the Class
I had a dream that Connie Chung is doing a newscast about my death and they show a clip from Soap.
-- Billy Crystal, Playboy Interview – March 1988
God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.
-- Billy Graham
Now we all have a face, that we hide away forever and we take them our and show ourselves when everyone has gone. Some are satin, some are steel, some are silk and some are leather They're the faces of the Stranger but we love to try them on.
-- Billy Joel - The Stranger
Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs painting.
-- Billy Rose
France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.
-- Billy Wilder
In science, right conduct consists of evaluating evidence honestly and according to the canons of scientific reasoning. To misrepresent the evidence and the criteria of judgement is not merely to provide misinformation; it is to set an example of dishonesty. Telling lies to naive and trusting young persons is bad. Doing so for the purpose of proselytizing is worse.
-- biologist Michael T. Ghiselin
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
-- Biologist P. B. Medawar
A little caution outflanks a large cavalry
-- Bismarck
You kids today have it easy. When I was a kid everything was HUGE. My dad was nearly four times bigger than me. You couldn't even see the tops of counters . . .. Then gradually everything became smaller until it was the manageable size it is today.
-- Bizarro (comic strip)
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder but when you do it blows away your whole leg
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup in The C++ Programming Language
Our land is more valuable than your money. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals; therefore, we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.
-- Blackfoot chief, (c. 1880)
It's not whether you win or lose, but who gets the blame.
-- Blaine Nye - former Dallas Cowboy
I must've seen it in a USENET posting; that's sort of like hearsay evidence from Richard Nixon.
-- Blair Houghton
In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt.
-- Blair P. Houghton, regarding C Code indentation
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Uncertain fortune is thoroughly mastered by the equity of the calculation.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
This [letter] would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Lettres Provinciales.
Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensees(II,72)
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), quoted by Rebecca West in BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON: A JOURNEY THROUGH YUGOSLAVIA, 1940.
Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.
-- Blake Clark
As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs . . .
-- Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
If it's not loud, it doesn't work!
-- Blank Reg, from Max Headroom
You are WRONG, you ol' brass-breasted fascist poop!
-- Bloom County
Hi. This is Dan Cassidy's answering machine. Please leave your name and number . . . and after I've doctored the tape, your message will implicate you in a federal crime and be brought to the attention of the F.B.I . . . BEEEP
-- Blue Devil comics
Right now I feel that I've got my feet on the ground as far as my head is concerned.
-- Bo Belinsky, Baseball pitcher
Water generally flows downhill in this area.
-- Bob Bennett, WDIV News 4, Detroit, reporting on a flood that destroyed some suburban basement apartments.
There has been an alarming increase lately In the number of things about which I know absolutely nothing.
-- Bob Cain (rcain@netcom.com)
Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader, called Bush's re-election attempt Dr. Kevorkian's first effort as a campaign manager. Noticing Al Gore's position leading environmental policy, Sen. Dole had this to say: Al, I think the lawn looks great.
-- Bob Dole
Any man not busy being born is busy dying.
-- Bob Dylan
I've always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot.
-- Bob Dylan, Playboy Interview - March 1966
A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
-- Bob Edwards
Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of dead cow.
-- Bob Ekstrom, Pitt, MN
What's the difference between a Dice Clay concert and a Klan rally? Nothing. Trick question.
-- Bob Goldthwait
I've been traveling so much, I haven't had time to grow it.
-- Bob Horner, Atlanta Braves third baseman, on why he hadn't grown a beard
Baby carriage bumper sticker: ``POO-POO HAPPENS!''
-- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com)
Decaffeinated coffee? Kinda like kissing your sister.
-- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com)
Love is always having to say I'm sorry.
-- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com)
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
-- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com)
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
The world is proof that God is a committee.
-- Bob Stokes
My empty waterdish mocks me.
-- Bob the Dog
Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues today, but to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that's a much greater feat.
-- Bob Uecker
The way to catch a knuckle ball is to wait until the ball stops rolling and then pick it up.
-- Bob Uecker
They have Easter egg hunts in Philadelphia, and if the kids don't find the eggs, they get booed.
-- Bob Uecker
And we heard him exclaim As he started to roam: `I'm a hologram, kids, please don't try this at home!'
-- Bob Violence (Howie Chaykin's little animated 3-dimensional darling, Bob Violence)
It might be worth reflecting that this group was originally created back in September of 1987 and has exchanged over 1200 messages. The original announcement for the group called for an all inclusive discussion ranging from the writings of Gibson and Vinge and movies like Bladerunner to real world things like Brands' description of the work being done at the MIT Media Lab. It was meant as a haven for people with vision of this scope. If you want to create a haven for people with narrower visions, feel free. But I feel sad for anyone who thinks that alt.cyberpunk is such a monstrous group that it is in dire need of being subdivided. Heaven help them if they ever start reading comp.arch or rec.arts.sf-lovers.
-- Bob Webber
I've got one word for the eighties. One word. Handguns. Disposable Handguns.
-- Bobbi Harlow's father to Steve Dallas in Bloom County
. . .One thing is that, unlike any other Western democracy that I know of, this country has operated since its beginnings with a basic distrust of government. We are constituted not for efficient operation of government, but for minimizing the possibility of abuse of power. It took the events of the Roosevelt era -- a catastrophic economic collapse and a world war -- to introduce the strong central government that we now know. But in most parts of the country today, the reluctance to have government is still strong. I think, barring a series of catastrophic events, that we can look to at least another decade during which many of the big problems around this country will have to be addressed by institutions other than federal government.
-- Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy directory of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC.
The Middle East is certainly the nexus of turmoil for a long time to come -- with shifting players, but the same game: upheaval. I think we will be confronting militant Islam -- particularly fallout from the Iranian revolution -- and religion will once more, as it has in our own more distant past -- play a role at least as standard-bearer in death and mayhem.
-- Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy director of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC.
This is a bad election. It's like going to an adult novelty store and trying to pick out the least painful dildo.
-- Bobcat Goldthwait
Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken
-- Book of Chan compiled by O.P.U. sect
Lie Down and Roll Over and 159 Other Ways To Say I Love You
-- Book title by Erskine & Moran – 1981
There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
-- Booker T. Washington
I would like to see a dictionary of Usenet slang written and added to the n.a.newusers postings.
-- Boyd Nation (boyd@ingr.com)
IMHO, if some newby wants a n.a.n newsfroup dictionary of net.slang put in the crontab of a net.god's backbone site, the silly JEDR should email him instead of posting the start of a flamefest I have to put in my kill file or unsubscribe to. BTW, that posting was a megabyte gilly. What a maroney! Almost half a waldron of pompousity. Imminent death of the net predicted. Perhaps he should ask his SO or MOTOS what net.slang means. Of if his MOTAS is a MOTSS, he should ask him? Or just post his question to /dev/null.
BTW, IMHO if you understood this whole posting, you've been on the net far too long. BCNU :-) TTFN.
-- Brad Templeton (brad@looking.on.ca)
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.
-- Bradley's Bromide
They communicated by tap-dancing and farting.
-- Breakfast of Champions
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how its done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
-- Brendan Behan
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
-- Brendan Behan
To read your own poetry in public is a kind of mental incest.
-- Brendan Behan's father quoted by Shay Duffrin in his one-man show Confessions of an Irish Rebel 1984
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
-- Brendan Gill
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
-- Brendon Behan
Surrealism aims at the total transformation of the mind and all that resembles it
-- Breton
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
-- Brian Aldiss
That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched delusion now.
-- Brian Kantor (brian@ucsd.Edu)
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
-- Brian Kernighan
Trying is the internalization of the failure of omnipotence.
-- Brian O'Shaugnessy
I refuse to consign the whole male sex to the nursery. I insist on believing that some men are my equals.
-- Brigid Brophy
Whenever people say we mustn't be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, we must be realistic, they mean they are going to make money out of it.
-- Brigid Brophy
If you'll excuse me a minute, I'm going to have a cup of coffee.
-- broadcast from Apollo 11's LEM, Eagle, to Johnson Space Center, Houston July 20, 1969, 7:27 P.M.
It is fatal to be right when the rest of the world is wrong.
-- Brother Theodore
But what about Bill Cosby . . . the man who is to fathers what Marla Maples is to slutty chorines?
-- Bruce Handy
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
-- Bruce Leverett - Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers
In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late.
-- Bruce Sterling
Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!
-- Buckaroo Banzai
No matter where you go, there you are . . .
-- Buckaroo Banzai
Living with a conscience is like driving a car with the brakes on.
-- Budd Schulberg
He don't know me vewy well, DO he?
-- Bugs Bunny
Eeny Meeny, Jelly Beanie, the spirits are about to speak.
-- Bullwinkle J. Moose
Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what *can* you believe?!
-- Bullwinkle J. Moose
When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest.
-- Bullwinkle J. Moose
We wish to incorporate into the machine -- in the form of circuits -- only such logical concepts as are either necessary to have a complete system or highly convenient because of the frequency with which they occur and the influence they exert in the relevant mathematical situations.
-- Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann (1946) (from _Computer Stuctures: Readings and Examples_, C. Gordon Bell (ed) McGraw-Hill Book Company, (c) 1971, page 97)
Don’t lose
Your head
To gain
a minute
You need
your head
Your brains
are in it.
-- Burma Shave
Oh well, it's six dozen of one, half the other.
-- Bus Driver, NYC, 19 Dec 1990
Sometimes insanity is the only alternative
-- button at a Science Fiction convention.
Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read.
-- Button from the Computer Museum, Boston, MA
Usenet isn't a right. It's a right, a left, and a swift uppercut to the jaw.
-- Button from the Computer Museum, Boston, MA
Do not allow this language (Ada) in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is critical, i.e., nuclear power stations, cruise missiles, early warning systems, anti-ballistic missle defense systems. The next rocket to go astray as a result of a programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a harmless trip to Venus: It may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one of our cities. An unreliable programming language generating unreliable programs constitutes a far greater risk to our environment and to our society than unsafe cars, toxic pesticides, or accidents at nuclear power stations.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
To those who were robbed of life: the unborn, the weak, the sick, the old, during the dark ages of madness, selfishness, lust and greed for which the last decades of the twentieth century are remembered . .
-- C. Everett Koop, MD
Lucas cannot consistently assert this sentence.
-- C. H. Whitely
Algol 60 was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
-- C. Hoare
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
-- C. K. Chesterton
. . .public television is one of the most extravagant, over-capitalized institutions in our society .. a huge national conglomerate . . .l almost every one of the major local stations in public television has an elaborate, state-of-the-art, and very expensive production facility. Most . . . are scarcely used . . . but there they are: costing money and gathering dust.
-- C. M. Lichenstein, former Sr. VP, PBS
Perfection is achieved only on the point of collapse.
-- C. N. Parkinson
No one is fit to be trusted with power. . . . No one. . . . Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capabe of. . . . And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate.
-- C. P. Snow, The Light and the Dark
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists, Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
-- C. P. Snow, The two Cultures
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended -- civilizations are built up -- excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.
-- C. S. Lewis
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
. . . 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-- C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C.A.R. Hoare
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-- C.G. Jung (1875-1961)
I do not know how other people would set about the task. I can therefore only tell you how I myself have approached the matter, and I must submit to the reproach that my way of solving the problem is the outcome of my individual prejudice. Indeed, this objection is so entirely true, that I should not know how to meet it. I might, perhaps, content myself by referring to Columbus, who, by using subjective assumptions, a false hypothesis, and a route abandoned by modern navigation, nevertheless discovered America.
-- C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups . . .. Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
-- C.P. Snow, _The Two Cultures_ and the Scientific Revolution_, (1959 Rede Lecture) p. 3
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.
-- C.S. Lewis
Failing to get them to do it your way might mean they're stupid, but it also means you failed to get them to do it your way.
-- Cal Keegan
If your computer doesn't multitask, it ain't shit.
-- Cal Keegan
Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television.
-- Cal Keegan
Never ascribe to malice that which is caused by greed and ignorance.
-- Cal Keegan
The chain that can be yanked is not the cosmic chain.
-- Cal Keegan
I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.
-- California Govenor Jerry Brown, San Francisco Examiner, Oct 12, 1980
A big book is a big bore.
-- Callimachus (c. 260 B.C.)
More people out of work leads to higher unemployment.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
You don't have to explain something you never said
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
Changing a college curriculum is like moving a graveyard--you never know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them!
-- Calvin Coolidge or Woodrow Wilson
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll invite himself over for dinner.
-- Calvin Keegan
Anybody caught selling macrame in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.
-- Calvin Trillin
Before I go out to take a picture of someone, I just stop at the city desk and say, 'Do you want him gazing out toward the sunset or picking his nose?'
-- Calvin Trillin
Health food makes me sick.
-- Calvin Trillin
If law school is so hard to get through . . . how come there are so many lawyers?
-- Calvin Trillin
Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucini, but sharing the burden of finding the fettucini restaurant in the first place.
-- Calvin Trillin
Marriage is part of a sort of 50's revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition.
-- Calvin Trillin
Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.
-- Calvin Trillin
The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
-- Calvin Trillin
There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want
-- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.
-- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
Verbing weirds language.
-- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, MINE are even WORSE!
-- Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
Your life is a Fellini movie lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.
-- Camille Paglia - Spy Magazine
Opportunity for all means making taxes fair. I'm not out to soak the rich. But I do believe the rich should pay their fair share. For twelve years, the Republicans have raised taxes on the middle class. It's time to give the middle class tax relief.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, Announcement Speech, October 3, 1991
[George Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, Democratic National Convention, July 16, 1992
No wonder Americans hate politics when, year in and year out, they hear politicians make promises that won't come true because they don't even mean them - campaign fantasies that win elections but don't get nations moving again.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, Detroit Economic Club, August 21, 1992
Ronald Reagan and George Bush pushed through programs that raised taxes on the middle class. I think it's time to cut them. And in my administration I'll offer a middle-income tax cut that will cut rates on the middle class.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, Georgetown University, November 20,1991
I'm not going to raise taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for the programs I've recommended.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, Presidential Debate, October 19, 1992
We have to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share again. Their incomes went up in the 1980s and their taxes went down. We can't ask the middle class to pay more; their incomes went down and their taxes went up.
-- Candidate Bill Clinton, U.S. Conference Of Mayors, Houston, June 22, 1992
It is blatantly false . . . It is a disgrace to the American people that the President of the United States would make a claim that is so baseless, that is so without foundation, so shameless in its attempt to get votes under false pretenses.
-- Candidate Lying Bill Clinton, on Bush's charge that Clinton would increase taxes on all Americans making $36,600/year
We will lower the tax burden on middle-class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle-class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in the income tax rate.
-- Candidates Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Putting People First, 1992
No matter what temptation there is after an accident to be economical with the truth when rationalising it with hindsight, please remember it would be unforgivable if, by not revealing the facts or the complete truth, a similar incident became an unavoidable accident.
-- Captain Colin Seaman, British Aerospace's head of safety
Remember kids, if there's a loaded gun in the room, be sure that you're the one holding it
-- Captain Combat
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
-- Cardinal de Richelieu
Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), while working, when informed that his wife is dying
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, There is something not right, no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.
-- Carl G. Jung in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes' Analysis der Kinderseele (The Inner World of Childhood) 1931
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
-- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
-- Carl Sagan
I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.
-- Carl Sagan, “The Burden Of Skepticism,” The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
-- Carl Sagan, Contact
. . .Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 12, pg. 46
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
I'm often asked the question, Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelli- gence? I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, Yeah, but what do you really think? I say, I just told you what I really think. Yeah, but what's your gut feeling? But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
-- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Parade, February 1, 1987
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
-- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Parade, February 1, 1987
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)
-- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, Parade, February 1, 1987
I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
-- Carl Sandburg
The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted . . . Some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.
-- Carl Van Doren
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
-- Carl Zwanzig
Actions lie louder than words.
-- Carolyn Wells
Six years for possession of a cigarette? . . .I got six months for possession of a deadly weapon!
-- cartoon by S. Harris
I improve on misquotation.
-- Cary Grant
My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.
-- Cary Grant
Before I say anything at all, I want to tell you something.
-- Casey Stengal (1891-1975), opening a press conference
I was not successful as a ballplayer, as it was a game of skill.
-- Casey Stengel (1891-1975)
In ten years, Ed Kranepool has a chance to be a star. In ten years, Greg Goossen has a chance to be thirty.
-- Casey Stengel (1891-1975), on a pair of twenty-year-olds on his New York Mets squad
Ain't never been another fighter like me. Ain't never been no nothing like me.
-- Cassius Clay, Playboy Interview - October 1964
After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he had one.
-- Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave.
-- Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
If you say you can, or if you say you can't, you're right.
-- Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is!
-- Catullus (87?-54? BC)
Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when the words won't come at all and the other is logorrhea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time.
-- Cecilia Bartholomew
To know the world one must construct it.
-- Cesare Pavese
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
-- Channing Pollock
Streaking. Mooning. Ballwalking. Leg Shaving. Belly/Navel Shots. Chicken Fights. Butt Biting.
-- Chapter headings from the Pentagon's Tailhook report
To block hats, that is everything.
-- character in a Woody Allen short story
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.
-- Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897)
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- Charles Anthony Richard Hoare
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
-- Charles Bukowski
It takes a lot to buzz a pro.
-- Charles Bukowski
Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
-- Charles Bukowski
That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers.
-- Charles Chincholles
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
-- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
How can one conceive of a one party system in a country that has over 200 varieties of cheese.
-- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
Old age is a shipwreck.
-- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
-- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
A married man with a family will do anything for money.
-- Charles De Talleyrand (1754-1838)
He would make a lovely corpse.
-- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
The pure and worthy Mrs. Stowe Is one we all are proud to know As mother, wife and authoress – Thank God, I am content with less!
-- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Get hold of portable property.
-- Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations
The least practical solutions have the best acronyms.
-- Charles Evans Hughes
Everyone realized that Computervision stock was the golden goose. But one grabbed the leg, another grabbed a wing, another got the neck, all pulling hard, and they realize now they could kill the goose if they keep this up.
-- Charles Foundyller of Daratech, from 8/14/92 Wall St Journal
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
-- Charles Galton Darwin
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
[Pornography] causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in boys, wantonness in girls . . . Attention is given to sensationalists such as Kinsey and Eberhard . . . who, finding fellow travelers in erstwhile respectable media, manage to disseminate, directly and indirectly, their absurd and dirty bleatings and pagan ideas. It seems strange to me that we credit -- I should say that our mass media credit -- the unestablished generalities of a few so-called experts, but ignore the overwhelming testimony of the true experts like J. Edgar Hoover.
-- Charles H. Keating, Jr., former anti-porn activist, the financier behind the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal (his anti-porn organization got in trouble in 1962 (!) for spending over 90% of the funds they raised)
I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behavior.
-- Charles Handy - The Age of Unreason
There is no place for the incompetent - there are few hiding places in these organizations. Do not look to the new intelligent organizations with their intelligent machines and their cultures of consent for days of gossipy coffee breaks or for boring but untaxing jobs. The culture of consent is not, as the British would say, going to be everyone's cup of tea unless they are educated and prepared for it. There lies the challenge for our society.
-- Charles Handy - The Age of Unreason
Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
-- Charles Ives
Lawers, I suppose, were children once.
-- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.
-- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Nothing to me is more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a newly married couple.
-- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Son, in war times it is not safe to think unless one travels with the mob.
-- Charles Lindberg Sr. to Charles Lindberg Jr. in 1917
Speculations and loans in foreign fields are likely to bring us into war . . . The war-for-profit group has counterfeited patriotism.
-- Charles Lindberg Sr., 1915
Life changed after that jump . . .I'd suddenly stepped to the highest level of daring, a level above even that which airplane pilots could attain.
-- Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) describing his first skydive
The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.
-- Charles Luckman
Contrariwise, continued Tweedledee, if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!
-- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898)
When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master - that's all.
-- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898)
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
-- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898), Through the Looking Glass
There is scarcely an occurrence in nature which, happening at a certain time, is not looked upon by some persons as a prognosticator either of good or evil. The latter are in the greatest number, so much more ingenious are we in tormenting ourselves than in discovering reasons for enjoyment in the things that surround us.
-- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions. . .
You can convince anyone of anything if you just push it at them 100% of the time. They may not believe it completely, but they will still use it to form opinions, especially if they have nothing else to draw on.
-- Charles Manson
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art.
-- Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier that other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
-- Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755)
There is no one, says another, whom fortune does not visit once in his life; but when she does not find him ready to receive her, she walks in at the door, and flies out at the window.
-- Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part.
-- Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, in a pamphlet published by the American Life League
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles Schultz
I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.
-- Charles Schultz
No problem is so big that you can't run away from it.
-- Charles Schulz (Snoopy)
Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Charles Schulz (Snoopy)
Name me and emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.
-- Charles V (1500-1558)
To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me.
-- Charles William Stubbs
In the end, everything is a gag.
-- Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
-- Charlie McCarthy
When I get smitten, I stay smut.
-- Charlie McCarthy
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
-- Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen, 1903-1978)
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
-- Charlotte P Gilman
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
-- Charlotte Whitton
One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.
-- Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
I get my exercise acting as a pallbearer to my friends who exercise.
-- Chauncey Depew (1834-1928)
I've got some amyls. We could either party later or, like, start his heart.
-- Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
Well, now, hold onta yer horses, there, Frazier. I mean, as a psychiatrist, isn't it your job to, uh, `seek and uphold the truth'? Oh, get real, Cliff.
-- Cheers
Reason and Justice tell me that there is more love of man in electricity and steam, than in chastity and refusal to eat meat.
-- Chekov of Tolstoy
Call my dad, my mom's too busy.
-- Chelsea Clinton, when the school nurse told her parental permission would be necessary for her to take some aspirin.
When I was 16 years old, I fucked Warren Beaty. Just like that. I did it because my girlfriends were so crazy about him, and so was my mother.
-- Cher, Playboy Interview – December 1988
Feminism is the radical concept that women are people.
-- Cheris Kramarae & Paula Treichler
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
-- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)
The mistakes are all there waiting to be made.
-- Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitcyh Tartakower (1887-1956), on the game's opening position.
A donut without a hole . . .is a Danish.
-- Chevy Chase on SNL's Weekend Update
I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth.
-- Chico Marx (1891-1961)
I think people believe that the only strategy we have is to put a lot of police officers on the street and harass people and make arrests for inconsequential kinds of things. Well, that's part of the strategy, no question about it.
-- Chief Gates
We may be finding that in some Blacks when [the carotid chokehold] is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.
-- Chief Gates explaining the rash of deaths of young blacks while being held in custody
I always turn to the sports pages first, which record people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.
-- Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974)
God damn a potato!
-- Chief Washakie of the Soshone tribe, responding to white bureaucrats who were trying to convert his people to the settled life of the farm.
A lot of the stuff I do is so minimal, and it's designed to be minimal. The smallness of it is what's attractive. It's weird, 'cause it's so intellectually lame. It's hard to see me doing that for the rest of my life. But at the same time, it's what I do best.
-- Chris Elliot, writer and performer on Late Night with David Letterman
If I promise to miss you, will you go away?
-- Chris Weikart.
May your future be limited only by your dreams.
-- Christa McAuliffe
So finally the fact is, that to come to this, to make a thing which has the character of nature, and to be true to all the forces in it, to remove yourself, to let it be, without interference from your image-making self - all this requires that we become aware that all of it is transitory; that all of it is going to pass. Of course nature itself is also always transitory. The trees, the river, the humming insects - they are all short-lived; they will all pass. Yet we never feel sad in the presence of these things. No matter how transitory they are, they make us feel happy, joyful. But when we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.
-- Christopher Alexander – The Timeless Way of Building, 1979
The attempt to have a victory for a one-sided view of the world cannot work anyway, even for the people who seem to win their point of view. The forces which are ignored do not go away just because they are ignored. They lurk, frustrated, underground. Sooner or later they erupt in violence; and the system which seems to win is then exposed to far more catastrophic dangers./The only way that a pattern can actually help to make a situation genuinely more alive is by recognizing all the forces which exist, and then finding a world in which these forces can slide past each other./Then it becomes a piece of nature./When we see the pattern of the ripples in a pond, we know that this pattern is simply in equilibrium with the forces which exist; without any mental interference which is clouding them./And, when we succeed, finally, in seeing so deep into a man-made pattern, that it is no longer clouded by opinions or by images, then we have discovered a piece of nature as valid, as eternal, as the ripples in the surface of a pond.
-- Christopher Alexander, 1979, The Timeless Way of Building
Suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more efficient would the current models be? If you have not already heard the analogy, the answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for $2.75, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you were interested in miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead.
-- Christopher Evans
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.
-- Christopher Fry
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.
-- Christopher Hampton
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.
-- Christopher Isherwood
The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insuating reminder, You've come a long way, baby and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy . . ..It emancipates women and children from patriarchal autonomy, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.
-- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
-- Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
-- Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.
-- Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
-- Christopher Morley (1890-1957)
Home is the place where your computer lives and runs your life.
-- Chrome Cowboy, sobiloff@thor.acc.stolaf.edu
I have heard from my master that those who have cunning devices use cunning in their affairs, and that those who use cunning in their affairs have cunning hearts. Such cunning means the loss of pure simplicity. Such a loss leads to restlessness of the spirit, and with such men the Tao will not dwell.
-- Chuang Tzu, 3rd Century BC
Uh-oh. Atarians can't hold a candle to the insecurity of Mac owners. You rankled Mac owners who feel the need defend yourself, please do so by flaming in private. And don't start something you can't finish. I'm sure Apple's OS for the 68000-based Macintoshs will support multitasking just as soon as Jean Louis-Gasse invents it. In the meantime, do whatever you need to do to make sure other systems that have advanced the state of personal computers don't enter your peripheral vision. You'll be a lot happier, we'll be a lot happier.
-- Chuck McManis (cmcmanis@sun.com)
I think their experience with us may have helped their contemptuousness; the ignorance they come by naturally.
-- Chuck McManis (personal communication)
Rules are made for people who aren't willing to make up their own.
-- Chuck Yeager (1923- )
The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame.
-- Chuq Von Rospach
I criticize by creation - not by finding fault.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
No Sane man will dance.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
What a time! What a civilisation!
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
-- Cicero (106-43 BC)
What a time! What a civilization!
-- Cicero (106-43 BC)
The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.
-- Cicero (B.C.E. 106-43)
If the truth were self-evident, eloquence would be unnecessary.
-- Cicero, De Oritare
When the French Academy was preparing its first dictionary, it defined crab as, A small red fish which walks backwards. This definition was sent with a number of others to the naturalist Cuvier for his approval. The scientist wrote back, Your definition, gentlemen, would be perfect, only for three exceptions. The crab is not a fish, it is not red and it does not walk backwards.
-- Civier
I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
No good deed goes unpunished.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom, Justice is what comes out of a courtroom.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the last half by our children.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
-- Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)
Art is I; science is we.
-- Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.
-- Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.
-- Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
The investigator should have a robust faith -- and yet not believe.
-- Claude Bernard (1813-1878) , French physiologist
The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
-- Claude Levi-Strauss
If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
-- Claude McKay (A Long Way from Home, 1937)
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-- Clement Richard Atlee (1883-1967), British prime minister (1945-1951)
I can't take a well-tanned person seriously.
-- Cleveland Amory
There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.
-- Cleveland Amory
How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.
-- Clifford Truesdell
There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again.
-- Clint Eastwood
I'm sure if somebody were pointing a gun at me and I were standing there with a six-pack, I'd say, 'Care for one?'
-- Clint Eastwood, Playboy Interview - February 1974
The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
-- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live
Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk.
-- Codoso diBlini
Shut up and tell me what that other idiot ish doing! No, but look, if I've got to shut up, how can I -- The knife at his throat became a hot streak of pain and Rincewind decided to give logic a miss.
-- Cohen the Barbarian interrogates Rincewind (Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)
(Clemenceau) once said that war is too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he may have been right . . .but now, war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought . . .And I can no longer, sit around and allow Communist subversion, Communist corruption, and Communist infiltration of our precious bodily fluids.
-- Col. Jack Ripper, commander of Burbleson AFB to Group Capt. Mandrake (Peter Sellers) in Dr. Strangelove
We are simple killers of people and destroyers of property.
-- Col. Wm. Whitaker (USAF), 3/3/83
Last summer's meadow died. Next summer's will be the same meadow.
-- Colin McEnroe
Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell.
-- Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, at the General People's Congress in Tripoli in October, 1989
I woke up this morning, and I realized that somebody had broken into my apartment, stolen all my things and replaced them with exact duplicates. I asked my roommate if he noticed anything, and he said, 'Who are you?'
-- comedian Steven Wright
My father built a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually.
-- comedian Steven Wright
My friend Bob is a radio DJ, and when he walks under a bridge, you can't hear him talk.
-- comedian Steven Wright
The other day I . . .. No, that wasn't me.
-- comedian Steven Wright
That's the trouble with graduate students. Every couple of days, they fall asleep.
-- Comment by a professor observing two students unconscious at their keyboards:
The cautious seldom err.
-- Confucius
Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.
-- Confucius (B.C. 551-479)
The superior man [or woman] understands what is right; the inferior man [or woman] understands what will sell.
-- Confucius (B.C. 551-479)
A woman's nature is, simply, other-oriented . . ..Women are ordained by their nature to spend themselves in meeting the needs of others.
-- Connaught C. Marshner, The New Traditional Woman 1982
I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I speak the truth, and they never believe me.
-- Conte Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861)
Equal Rights were created for everyone.
-- contestant in 1990 Mr. New Jersey Male pageant
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr fortune: Segmentation violation
-- Core dumped
I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
-- Corporal Hicks, in Aliens
We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr Dogbody is a detective in the police farce.
-- Correction Notice in the Ely Standard, a British newspaper
Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrow - it empties today of strength.
-- Corrie ten Boom
If crime went down 100%, it would still be 50 times higher than it should be
-- Councilman John Bowman commenting on the high crime in Washington
This is the era of the police. If I were chief, I'd ask for as many as I could.
-- Councilmember Richard Alatorre
This cowboy looked at me and said With a sort of a smile, ‘A sorry hand is in the way all the time, A good one just once in awhile.’
-- Cowgirl poet Georgie Sicking
Well, I believe in the soul. The cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are overindulgent, overrated crap . . . I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone! I believe that there oughta be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. Good night.
-- Crash Davis, (catcher) played by Kevin Costner to Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon in the movie Bull Durham
The Creation of the Universe was made possible by a grant from Texas Instruments.
-- Credits, The Creation of the Universe (A PBS scientific documentary)
Nothing is as Nice as Developing Fontana
-- Current official slogan of city of Fontana
I'm pleased God made my skin black. I wish He had made it thicker
-- Curt Flood
Can women imagine anything finer than to experience centuries and millennia with the beloved husband in a cozy home in reverent attention to the inner workings of creative motherhood?
-- Curt Rosten, The ABC's of National Socialism, 1933
This one's got a lot more, uh, 640K that it can memorize.
-- CVN cable TV shopping channel
You pathetic jugglers never lowered yourselves to developing the software. You should have paid a little more attention to R & D.
-- Cyberpunk comics
The world would be a better place as one huge nudist colony. No concealed weapons!
-- Cyra McFadden
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.
-- Cyril Connolly
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
-- Cyril Connolly
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
-- Cyril Connolly
What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
-- Cyril Connolly
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
-- Cyril Parkinson
To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
. . . and thereof do I repent: I only plucked an occasional flower when I might have gathered an ample harvest of fruit -- such are the just grounds for the regrets I have . . .
-- D. A. F. Sade, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man
Make no little plans. They have no Magic to stir Men's blood.
-- D. B. Hudson
Io, the greek goddess of input and output.
-- D. E. Knuth
Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
-- D. J. Hicks
Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural function are perfectly correlated, that one is completely caused by the other. There is no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the brain now and then and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise. Actually, of course, this is a working assumption only . . ..It is quite conceivable that someday the assumption will have to be rejected. But it is important also to see that we have not reached that day yet: the working assumption is a necessary one and there is no real evidence opposed to it. Our failure to solve a problem so far does not make it insoluble. One cannot logically be a determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in psychology.
-- D. O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, 1949
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- D. P. Barron
One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.
-- D.H. Lawrence
I'll rob that rich person and give it to some poor deserving slob. That will *prove* I'm Robin Hood.
-- Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes, _Robin Hood Daffy_
Consequences, Schmonsequences! So long as I'm rich!
-- Daffy Duck, Looney Tunes, “Ali Baba Bunny” (1957, Chuck Jones)
Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-- Dalton Camp
When a woman behaves like a man, why can't she behave like a nice man?
-- Dame Edith Evans
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
-- Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
-- Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong -- but that's the way to bet it.
-- Damon Runyon, More Than Somewhat
I'm a genetic mutant.
-- Dan Aykroyd, Playboy Interview - May 1977
This will be dynamically handled, possibly correctly, in 4.1.
-- Dan Davison on streams configuration in SunOS 4.0
Do you deny recurring rumors of topless sunbathing and wild lesbian polygamous skinhead devil-worshipping adulterous underage racist cross-dressed kitten juggling?
-- Dan McGirt, Dirty Work
Another way to look at this is: if your computer is not capable of saturating *your* I/O bandwidth, you may be pissing away *your* wetware power. And last I checked, mine isn't increasing exponentially . . .
-- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu)
Don't forget about the importance of the family. It begins with the family. We're not going to redefine the family. Everybody knows the definition of the family. [Meaningful pause] A child. [Meaningful pause] A mother. [Meaningful pause] A father. There are other arrangements of the family, but that is a family and family values. I've been very blessed with wonderful parents and a wonderful family, and I am proud of my family. Anybody turns to their family. I have a very good family. I'm very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It's one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it. I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family -- which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be . . . The very beginnings of civilization, the very beginnings of this country, goes back to the family. And time and time again, I'm often reminded, especially in this Presidential campaign, of the importance of a family, and what a family means to this country. And so when you pay thanks I suppose the first thing that would come to mind would be to thank the Lord for the family.
-- Dan Quayle
El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans . . . I have heard a single voice.
-- Dan Quayle
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.
-- Dan Quayle
I love California. I grew up in Phoenix.
-- Dan Quayle
I not going to focus on what I have done in the past what I stand for, what I articulate to the American people. The American people will judge me on what I am saying and what I have done in the last 12 years in the Congress.
-- Dan Quayle
I want to be Robin to Bush's Batman.
-- Dan Quayle
I would guess that there's adequate low-income housing in this country.
-- Dan Quayle
It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.
-- Dan Quayle
Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That's a statement in and of itself.
-- Dan Quayle
Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
-- Dan Quayle
One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.
-- Dan Quayle
Quayle stumbled in response to a question about his opinion of the Holocaust. He said it was an obscene period in our nation's history. Then, trying to clarify his remark, Quayle said he meant this century's history and added a confusing comment. We all lived in this century, I didn't live in this century, he said.
-- Dan Quayle
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
-- Dan Quayle
The real question for 1988 is whether we're going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the -- to the back!
-- Dan Quayle
Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
-- Dan Quayle
We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights.
-- Dan Quayle
We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in 'Red Storm Rising'.
-- Dan Quayle
We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world.
-- Dan Quayle
Why wouldn't an enhanced deterrent, a more stable peace, a better prospect to denying the ones who enter conflict in the first place to have a reduction of offensive systems and an introduction to defensive capability. I believe that is the route this country will eventually go.
-- Dan Quayle
Who would have predicted . . . that Dubcek, who brought the tanks in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is now being proclaimed a hero in Czechoslovakia. Unbelievable.
-- Dan Quayle (Actually, Dubcek was the leader of the Prague Spring.)
I can identify with steelworkers. I can identify with workers that have had a difficult time.
-- Dan Quayle addressing workers at an Ohio steel plant,1988
You have a part-time job, and that's better than no job at all.
-- Dan Quayle after the manager of the Burger King had said that the jobs offered were part-time minimum wage jobs, which didn't pay enough to live on, and that It's hard to find people who want to actually show up for the job.
It was just a job. It wasn't any special interest in consumer affairs. I needed a paycheck and the Attorney General said that I would be best to go down there, because he knew I was anti-consumer.
-- Dan Quayle and talking about his job as Chief investigator, consumer protection division of the Indiana Attorney General's office from 1970-1971
[I will never have] another Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy, Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter grain embargo, Jimmy Carter grain embargo.
-- Dan Quayle during the Benson debate
Target prices? How that works? I know quite a bit about farm policy. I come from Indiana, which is a farm state. Deficiency payments - which are the key - that is what gets money into the farmer's hands. We got loan, uh, rates, we got target, uh, prices, uh, I have worked very closely with my senior colleague, (Indiana Sen.) Richard Lugar, making sure that the farmers of Indiana are taken care of.
-- Dan Quayle on being asked to define the term target prices. Quayle's press secretary then cut short the press conference, after two minutes and 30 seconds.
. . . getting [cruise missiles] more accurate so that we can have precise precision.
-- Dan Quayle referring to his legislative work dealing with cruise missiles
Well, it looks as if the top part fell on the bottom part.
-- Dan Quayle referring to the collapsed section of the 880 freeway after the San Francisco earthquake of 1989. [this may be a joke; the source is unclear. but it's still funny]
Lookit, I've done it their way this far and now it's my turn. I'm my own handler. Any questions? Ask me . . . There's not going to be any more handler stories because I'm the handler . . . I'm Doctor Spin.
-- Dan Quayle responding to press reports of his aides having to, in effect, potty train him.
It's not to keep him from running off our property. It's to protect my putting green.
-- Dan Quayle telling a guest at his house why his dog, Breezy, wears a special collar that emits a painful jolt of electricity should the dog try to run away. (reported in the NY Daily News, 6/30/92 - taken from The Quayle Quarterly, Summer/Fall 92)
Certainly, I know what to do, and when I am Vice President -- and I will be -- there will be contingency plans under different sets of situations and I tell you what, I'm not going to go out and hold a news conference about it. I'm going to put it in a safe and keep it there! Does that answer your question?
-- Dan Quayle when asked what he would do if he assumed the Presidency,1988
What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.
-- Dan Quayle winning friends while speaking to the United Negro College Fund
People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
-- Dan Quayle, 09/88
Vietnam is a jungle. You had jungle warfare. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, you have sand. [There is no need to worry about a protracted war because] from a historical basis, Middle East conflicts do not last a long time.
-- Dan Quayle, 10/2/90 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
This election is about who's going to be the next President of the United States!
-- Dan Quayle, 1988
We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.
-- Dan Quayle, 1988
We'll let the sunshine in and shine on us, because today we're happy and tomorrow we'll be even happier.
-- Dan Quayle, 1988
[The U.S. victory in Gulf war was] a stirring victory for the forces of aggression.
-- Dan Quayle, 4/11/91 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
My fellow astronauts
-- Dan Quayle, beginning a speech at an Apollo 11 anniversary celebration
Cal Thomas: Are you going to stay in Washington or move back to Indiana?
Dan Family Values Quayle: I don't know. It depends on the kids. For 16 years I've sort of done what I wanted to do and I've got to think of them now.
-- Dan Quayle, from an interview at the White House Thursday Nov 5 92
Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is IN the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.
-- Dan Quayle, Hawaii, September 1989
The US has a vital interest in that area of the country.
-- Dan Quayle, referring to Latin America.
Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war.
-- Dan Quayle, remarks at Arlington National Cemetery.
You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.
-- Dan Quayle, to the American Samoans, whose capital Quayle pronounces Pogo Pogo
If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure.
-- Dan Quayle, to the Phoenix Republican Forum, March 1990
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
-- Dan Quayle, US News and World Report (10/10/88)
[On Mars] there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
-- Dan Quayle, VP of the United States
He doesn't have the greatest smarts in the world. His main interests in school were broads and booze.
-- Dan Quayle's Father, 08/23/88
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
-- Dan Stanford
Strange how the older generations can't program a VCR if their life depended on it, but they managed to operate the climate contol system of their 1958 Ramblers, which consisted of six unmarked knobs, one labeled AirFloMatic in unreadable cursive script, and four levers underneath the dash, which you had to turn, then pull.
-- Dan Tasman
I find women with well developed flesh very attractive. The scrawny little things doing commercials on my television set are slightly repulsive -- like famine victims.
-- Dana Hatch
You only live once, so live under as many false names as possible.
-- Dana McManus
God is the Celebrity-Author of the World's Best-Seller. We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
-- Daniel Boorstin
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. From CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED p. 177
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
-- Daniel J. Boorstin
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
The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright. The easiest response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign. A contagious good cheer is the hallmark of this presidency, even when the most dismal matters are concerned. But this time, it isn't funny. It's plain scary.
-- Daniel S. Greenberg, Editor, _Science and Government Report_, writing in Newsday, May 5, 1988
How do you know?
-- Dan'l Danehy Oakes (djo@PacBell.COM)
. . .Or, I may not feel that my belief-system needs to be self-consistent in a post-Goedelian epoch.
-- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
-- Danny Kaye
Question Authority and the Authorities will question You.
-- Danny Low (dlow%hpspcoi@hplabs.hp.com)
Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost,
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love,
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here.
-- Dante Alighieri, Divina Comedia (This is the inscription above the gates of Hell)
Between the ages of 16 and 60 no man is completely sane except for the 10 minutes immediately following orgasm.
-- Dapper Dan Collins, 20th century utilitarian philosopher, con-man and robber of coin-boxes
As we anarchists say: There's no government like no government.
-- D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid)
It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.
-- Darin Weinberg
. . . casual drug users should be executed for aiding the enemy in time of war.
-- Darryl Gates, former LAPD Chief
I find you lack of faith in the forth dithturbing.
-- Darse (Darth) Vader
This is war . . .we're exceedingly angry . . ..We want to get the message out to the cowards out there, and that's what they are, rotten little cowards - we want the message to go out that we're going to come and get them.
-- Daryl Gates, Ex-LAPD chief
After all these investigations, that's exactly what they're going to find out: This is a great department.
-- Daryl Gates, Playboy Interview - August 1991
And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople Get Ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report.
-- Dave Barry
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
-- Dave Barry
If at all possible, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat farmer when the president starts feeling international tension.
-- Dave Barry
If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
-- Dave Barry
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
-- Dave Barry
The following is not for the weak of heart or Fundamentalists.
-- Dave Barry
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
-- Dave Barry
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
-- Dave Barry
You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls simplified, which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last names. Here's the complete text: (1) How much did you make? (AMOUNT) (2) How much did we here at the government take out? (AMOUNT) (3) Hey! Sounds like we took too much! So we're going to send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME) household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST NAME), that it pays to file the short form! The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form.
-- Dave Barry, Sweating Out
All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?
-- Dave Barry, Sweating Out Taxes
Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.
-- Dave Barry, Sweating Out Taxes
The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes . . .
-- Dave Barry, Sweating Out Taxes
Well, you know, it sounds like they've got their own nuts on an anvil and they're hammering away at them.
-- Dave Crocker
If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff.
-- Dave Enyeart
As a rule software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
-- Dave Parnas, Communications of the ACM (33, 6 June 1990 p.636)
Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.
-- Dave Platt
Falling in love makes smoking pot all day look like the ultimate in restraint.
-- Dave Sim, author of Cerebrus.
My skin still burns in places where she touched me . . .
-- David Allan Coe
. . .proper attention to Earthly needs of the poor, the depressed and the downtrodden, would naturally evolve from dynamic, articulate, spirited awareness of the great goals for Man and the society he conspired to erect.
-- David Baker, paraphrasing Harold Urey, in The History of Manned Space Flight
Forget computers; it's hard enough getting humans to pass the Turing test.
-- David Bedno
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets.
-- David Bedno (davidbe@sco.COM)
It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insa- tiable, implacable.
-- David Brin _The Postman_
On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins. From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader. . . .stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures. And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof . . . The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow deaths.
-- David Brin, Startide Rising
Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.
-- David Brinkley
We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
-- David Brower
When vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead, it is time to pause and wonder.
-- David Brower
Old wives don't dieif they're getting alimony
-- David Brown
Better to have loved and lost a short person than never to have loved a tall.
-- David Chambless
In the mirrorlike relationship between wine and human beings, Zinfandel owned more reflective properties than any other grape; in its infinite mutability, it was capable of expressing almost any philosophical position or psychological function. As a result, its own true nature might never be known.
-- David Darlington from his novel Angels Visits: An Inquiry into the Mystery of Zinfandel
Fourth Law of Thermodymanics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.
-- David Ellis
Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
-- David Fasold
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
-- David Frost
I love America. You always hurt the one you love.
-- David Frye impersonating Nixon
Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time.
-- David Gries, in Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, circa 1969.
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
-- David Hume (1711-1776)
Truth, springs from agrument amongst friends.
-- David Hume (1711-1776)
You have to be deviant if you're going to do anything new.
-- David Lee
From the News: The meek shall inherit shit.
-- David Lee Roth
A host is a host from coast to coast And no one will talk to a host that's close Unless the host (that isn't close) is busy, hung or dead.
-- David Lesher (wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu)
An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.
-- David Letterman
Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
-- David Letterman
Delta: A real man lands where he wants to.
-- David Letterman
Delta: The kids will love our inflatable slides.
-- David Letterman
Delta: We never make the same mistake three times.
-- David Letterman
Delta: We're Amtrak with wings.
-- David Letterman
Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.
-- David Letterman
Fine art and pizza delivery, what we do falls neatly in between!
-- David Letterman
If Ricky Schroder and Gary Coleman had a fight on television with pool cues, who would win? 1) Ricky Schroder 2) Gary Coleman 3) The television viewing public
-- David Letterman
Interesting survey in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology: New York City has a higher percentage of people you shouldn't make any sudden moves around than any other city in the world.
-- David Letterman
New York . . . when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.
-- David Letterman
This isn't brain surgery; it's just television.
-- David Letterman
Tourists -- have some fun with New york's hard-boiled cabbies. When you get to your destination, say to your driver, Pay? I was hitchhiking.
-- David Letterman
Xerox sues somebody for copying?
-- David Letterman
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
-- David Letterman, from Late Night with David Letterman, Feb. 9, 1984
Most of the class clowns in my high school are doing time now.
-- David Letterman, Playboy Interview - October 1984
Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit.
-- David McCord
What profits a man if he keeps his eternal soul when he could have lived life to the full and been forgiven at the end of it all anyway?
-- David Merritt, a.k.a. THE RED SHARK
Personally, should I ever form a globe spanning comglomerate, I intend to do it fairly and without malice or dirty politics. I hope you fellows don't make that too difficult a task; I would have to have to have you all killed.
-- David Neal (abbadon@nuchat.uucp)
When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.'
-- David Parnas
The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of its crowning achievement, the human brain.
-- David Rogers, Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan - a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.
-- David Steinberg
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
-- David T. Wolf
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
-- Dean Acheson
Perhaps the best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
-- Dean Acheson
Never try to explain your hacks to a theoretician -- he may understand them better than you do
-- Dean Daniels, 3/27/83
A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.
-- Dean Inge
Metric is definitely communist. One monetary system, one language, one weight and measurement system, one world - all communist! We know the West was won by the inch, foot, yard, and mile.
-- Dean Krakel, Director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame
It was always thus; and even if 'twere not, 'twould inevitably have been always thus.
-- Dean Lattimer
Higher emotions are what separate us from the lower orders of life . . . Higher emotions, and table manners.
-- Deanna Troi, _Imzadi_ Start Trek - The Next Generation
This manual contains information about DCL commands and qualifiers, system services, RTL routines, and VMS utilities and components that are now obsolete. The manual also contains an appendix of DCL commands and qualifiers, system services, RTL routines, and VMS utilities and components that have been eliminated from VMS.
-- DEC Manual, order number : AA-LB25A-TE
Software is the heart and soul of a computer company.
-- DEC President Ken Olsen
Nature loves a vacuum. Digital doesn't.
-- DEC sales letter
We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
The full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
-- definition of happiness by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Even paranoids have real enemies.
-- Delmore Schwartz
Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.
-- Denis de Rougemont
Place on one side of the scales the actual advantages of the most sublime sciences, and on the other side the advantages of the mechanical arts . . .. You will discover that far more praise has been heaped upon those men who spend their time making us believe we are happy, than on those who actually bring us happiness. How strangely we judge!
-- Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
All children are essentially criminal.
-- Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
-- Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.
-- Dennie van Tassel
This place makes Mayberry look like a think tank.
-- Dennis Miller (told to me by a CV employee)
I have the distinction of speaking to you from one of the few countries that still has a communist party.
-- Dennis Miller, MCing the 1991 Emmies
Israel today announced that it is giving up. The Zionist state will dissolve in two weeks time, and its citizens will disperse to various resort communities around the world. Said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, 'Who needs the aggravation?'
-- Dennis Miller, Satuday Night Live News
The Soviet Union, which has complained recently about alleged anti-Soviet themes in American advertising, lodged an official protest this week against the Ford Motor Company's new campaign: `Hey you stinking fat Russian, get off my Ford Escort.'
-- Dennis Miller, Saturday Night Live
In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.
-- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update
A lot of people voting for Pat Buchanan say they are doing so to send a message. Apparently that message is, Hey, look at me, I'm an idiot.
-- Dennis Miller, talk-show host
Those who believe in astrology are living in houses with foundations of Silly Putty.
-- Dennis Rawlins, astronomer
The C committee took something that wasn't broken, and tidied it up without breaking it.
-- Dennis Ritchie (dmr@alice.UUCP), about ANSI C standard X3J11
Standards committees are not the best ways to create a standard. Standards meetings and standards themselves are horribly political things. One thing that people forget is that many standards are made by rather small groups of people. A few good people can really save the day, and a few idiots can really make it miserable for years to come.
-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix
In his '90 Usenix presentation, Dennis Ritchie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X-windows was brain-dead and would soon die. He was half-right. Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix, from an article in Unix Today
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is -- if not dead -- certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of Unix, Usenix keynote speech from Summer 1990
Sudden de-compression Sucks!
-- Dennis Robert Gorrie, GORRIEDE@UREGINA1.BITNET
Most of our future lies ahead.
-- Denny Crum, Louisville basketball coach
I'm a man of the world, Andy. Why, I've even been to Raleigh!
-- Deputy Barney Fife (Don Knotts on the Andy Griffith Show)
Remember, an int is not always 16 bits. I'm not sure, but if the 80386 is one step closer to Intel's slugfest with the CPU curve that is aymptotically approaching a real machine, perhaps an int has been implemented as 32 bits by some Unix vendors . . .?
-- Derek Terveer
Instead of conceiving of society as something established for the defense of individual rights, fair contracts, and due process of law, we are invited to see it in terms of the biblical vision. This way of living, thinking, and acting where autonomy and related rights take priority has seriously jeopardized the meaning and values of all institutions in our society.
-- Detroit Archbishop Adam J. Maida, in a speech to Catholic judges including Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, and O'Connor
Quite a number of people also describe the German classical author, Shakespeare as belonging to the English literature, because - quite accidentally born at Stratford-on-Avon, he was forced by the authorities of that country to write in English.
-- Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, 1940
Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.
-- dialogue from 'Attack of the Crab Monsters'
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
-- Dick Brandon
Dick Cavett: Do you consider yourself a disciplined guy? Do you get up every day and `go to work'? Jimi Hendrix: Well, yeah. I try to get up every day.
-- Dick Cavett
It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
-- Dick Cavett
PS. Did you ever realize that Peter O'Toole has a double-phallic name?
-- Dick Cavett quoting Groucho Marx
Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
-- Dick Gregory
There are two ways to improve on human factors in computing: Make the programmers less stupid and/or make the users less stupid. Both are necessary, neither are likely.
-- Digital Teddy Bear (dlarson@blake.acs.washington.edu)
Software Engineering: How to program if you cannot.
-- Dijkstra
If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate.
-- Diogenes the Cynic (412 - 323 B.C.)
Before you can use your Woodie . . . if there is a plastic strip coming out of it, please take hold of it and pull it out. If there is no plastic strip, press down from above to operate.
-- Directions found on a toy
Separate together in a bunch. [And don't] stand around so much in little bundles!
-- director Michael Curtiz to movie extras
This compact disc is made from analog masters recorded without noise reduction. Half the tracks, in fact, were recorded in a dismal, cheap basement eight-track studio with puddles of water on the floor. Digital technology will now faithfully reproduce these noisy, low-fi, un-professional masters at great expense.
-- Disclaimer on a CD
Where imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple T.V. is the only wet nurse that would create a cripple On television, the drug of a nation Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.
-- Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
-- Disraeli
The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.
-- Dizzy Dean , after being hit on the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series.
I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum.
-- dmr@alice.UUCP
What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?
-- Doctor Who
You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap.
-- Dolly Parton
MY KARMA JUST RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA
-- Dolly Rosicrution
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
-- Dolores Ibarruri
It is generally agreed that Hello is an appropriate greeting because if you entered a room and said Goodbye, it could confuse a lot of people.
-- Dolph Sharp
Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than being flat broke and having a stomach ache.
-- Dolph Sharp, I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist
-- Dom Helder Camara
Come quickly, I am tasting stars!
-- Dom Perignon (1638-1715) at the moment of his discovery of champagne
’Hello,’ he lied.
-- Don Carpenter, quoting a Hollywood agent
When I said my prayers as a kid, I'd tell the Lord I wanted to be a pro hockey player. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention National Hockey League, so I spent sixteen years in the minors.
-- Don Cherry - Boston Bruins coach
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
-- Don DeLillo
A lot of women are getting alimony who don't earn it.
-- Don Herold
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.
-- Don Herold
If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
-- Don Marquis
A pessimist is a person who has to listen to too many optimists.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
An idea is not responsible for the people who think it.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity marry, and perpetuate his kind.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
-- Don Marquis (1878-1937)
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.
-- Don Quinn
The future is much like the present, only longer.
-- Don Quisenberry
Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman.
-- Don Quixote
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
-- Donald E. Knuth
Do not try to solve all life's problems at once -- learn to dread each day as it comes.
-- Donald Kaul
For him who fain would teach the world
The world holds hate in fee—
For Socrates, the hemlock cup;
For Christ Gethsemane.
-- Donald Marquis (1878-1937), The Wages
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people.
-- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people.
-- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King
[D]esires cannot be observed, counted, or measured; they are inferred from what people say and do. If each of us constructs a model of other minds by analogy with his own, it may be easier to imagine that some external force -- society, culture, etc. -- causes members of the opposite sex to act at variance with their truest implulses than it is to imagine that males and females have different impulses.
-- Donald Symons
Plasticity is a double-edged sword: the more flexibile an organism is the greater the variety of maladaptive, as well as adaptive, behaviors it can develop; the more teachable it is the more fiully it can profit from the experiences of its ancestors and associates and the more it risks being exploited by its ancestors and associates; the greater its capacity for learning morality the more worthless superstitions, as well as traditions of social wisdom, it can acquire; the more cooperatively interdependent the members of a group become the greater is their collective power and the more fulsome are the opportunities for individuals to manipulate one another; the more sophisticated language becomes the more subtle are the lies, as well as the truths, that can be told.
-- Donald Symons
Leona Helmsley is a truly evil human being.
-- Donald Trump, Playboy Interview - March 1990
Sometimes I get bored riding down the beautiful streets of L.A. I know it sounds crazy, but I just want to go to New York and see people suffer.
-- Donna Summer
My sense of purpose is gone! I have no idea who I AM! Oh, my God . . . You've.. You've turned him into a DEMOCRAT!
-- Doonesbury
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then a cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air
-- Doris Lessing
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
COMMENT
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
FIGHTING WORDS
Say my love is easy had,
Say I'm bitten raw with pride,
Say I am too often sad –
Still behold me at your side.
Say I'm neither brave nor young,
Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue –
Still you have my heart to wear.
But say my verses do not scan,
And I get me another man!
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Here in my heart, I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Sta_el;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.
Here in my soul I am Sappho;
Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me R'ecamier vies with Kitty O'Shea,
With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell.
I'm all of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Higgeldy piggledy, my white hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat
To come across for the proletariat.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
I can give you a sentence with the word horticulture. You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
I went to a convent in New York and was fired finally for my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
If all these sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprises.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled –
Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world –
And I wish I'd never met him.
My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams –
And I wish he were in Asia.
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway or the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart –
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
One more drink and I'll be under the host.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
SANCTUARY
My land is bare of chattering folk;
the clouds are low along the ridges,
and sweet's the air with curly smoke
from all my burning bridges.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Scratch an actor - and you'll find an actress.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
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.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
THEORY
Into love and out again,
Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Someone dropped me on my head?
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle –
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends accumulating dividends,
and making enviable names in science, art, and parlor games.
But I despite expert advice, keep doing things I think are nice,
and though to good I never come inseperable my nose and thumb.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
. . .a certain gentleman who shall be nameless, being already possessed of all the other characteristics of one born out of wedlock . . .
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) [About a bridge partner]
He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) [From a book review]
Oh wait, I think I'm going to be able to use the word 'opium' in a sentence. I opium mother is feeling better. No, I guess I'm not, either.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) from a book review
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) In a review of a book by Margot Asquith
Where does she find them?
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) Upon hearing Clare Boothe Luce admit she was always kind to her inferiors
I wish I could drink like a lady
I can take one or two at the most.
Three and I'm under the table –
Four and I'm under the host!
-- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), [when asked to compose a poem on the spot, after four drinks]
Failure? I never encoutered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.
-- Dottie Walters
A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten.
-- Doug Larson
A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
-- Doug Linder
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams
It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear.
-- Douglas Adams
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
-- Douglas Adams
We will rediscover a [New York City] river so extravagantly polluted that new life forms will emerge from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights.
-- Douglas Adams
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
-- Douglas Adams - Life, the Universe and Everything
Since this Galaxy began, vast civilizations have risen and fallen, risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it's quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be (a) something akin to seasick—space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing, and (b) stupid.
-- Douglas Adams - Life, the Universe and Everything
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life? Don't talk to me about life!
-- Douglas Adams (Marvin the Paranoid Android), The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point B are so keen to get t__h__e__r__e__. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
-- Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea . . .
-- Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.
-- Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem-- all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that To seek self- knowledge is to embark on a journey which . . . will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter
When you're not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish.
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter, from Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Tortoise: But we must be careful in combining sentences. For instance, you'd grant that Politicians lie is true, wouldn't you? Achilles: Who could deny it? Tortoise: Good. Likewise, Cast-iron sinks is a valid utterance, isn't it? Achilles: Indubitably. Tortoise: Then, putting them together, we get Politicians lie in cast-iron sinks . . .
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman
Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preperations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD
I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjution with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonder child.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD
The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation . . .to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak . . . I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing materail aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD
Big nations are like chickens. They like to make big noises, but very often it is no more than squabbling.
-- Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Playboy Interview - December 1963
Nature abhors normality.
-- Dr. Blockhead, X-files
Largely because it is so tangible and exciting a program and as such will serve to keep alive the interest and enthusiasm of the whole spectrum of society . . .It is justified because . . .the program can give a sense of shared adventure and achievement to the society at large.
-- Dr. Colin S. Pittendrigh, in The History of Manned Space Flight
Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.
-- Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate in chemistry
There is nothing so deadly as not to hold up to people the opportunity to do great and wonderful things, if we wish to stimulate them in an active way.
-- Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate in chemistry
What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent? In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life. First, a base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done. Second, a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human activities must exist. Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses the national attention upon the direction to proceed. Finally, an articulate and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with words and action the great thing to be accomplished. The motivation of young Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of conditions . . .. The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John Kennedys appear. We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they, and thier young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward.
-- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt, Sen., New Mexico
The anatomical juxtaposition of 2 orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction.
-- Dr. Henry Gibbons
The difference between a rabbit and a rock is the information content, and the difference between a living and a dead rabbit is in the availability or usability of the information.
-- Dr. John A. Ball
Conjugation of the verb firm I am firm. You are stubborn. He is pig-headed.
-- Dr. K. J. Stavrinides
Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.
-- Dr. Karl Bowman (1888-1973)
Human society -man in a group -rises out of its lethargy to new levels of productivity only under the stimulus of deeply inspiring and commonly appreciated goals. A lethargic world serves no cause well; a spirited world working diligently toward earnestly desired goals provides the means and the strength toward which many ends can be satisfied . . .to unparalleled social accomplishment.
-- Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, in The History of Manned Space Flight
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The idea of man leaving this earth and flying to another celestial body and landing there and stepping out and walking over that body has a fascination and a driving force that can get the country to a level of energy, ambition, and will that I do not see in any other undertaking. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we needed that impetus extremely strongly. I sincerely believe that the space program, with its manned landing on the moon, if wisely executed, will become the spearhead for a broad front of courageous and energetic activities in all the fields of endeavour of the human mind -activities which could not be carried out except in a mental climate of ambition and confidence which such a spearhead can give.
-- Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, 1962, in The History of Manned Space Flight
I know engineers. They love to change things.
-- Dr. McCoy
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus.
-- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, quoted in The Technique, Georgia Tech's newspaper, after the computer worm hit the Internet
In ecology, as in economics, TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. Failure to recognize the no free lunch law causes the buffalo-hunter mentality syndrome -- the unthinking assumption that there will always be plenty because there alwayss has been plenty.
-- Dr. Robert W. Prehoda
A young man called and said, Dr. Ruth, my girlfriend and I love each other very much. We want to get married. I said, Good. What's your problem? He said, My girlfriend likes to toss fried onion rings on my erect penis.
-- Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Playboy Interview - January 1986
. . . Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.
-- Dr. Seuss, AKA Theodore Giesel
From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.
-- Dr. Seuss, AKA Theodore Giesel
You make 'em, I amuse 'em. [children]
-- Dr. Seuss, AKA Theodore Giesel
We can no more blame our loss of freedom on congressmen than we can prostitution on pimps. Both simply provide broker services for their customers.
-- Dr. W Williams
The great American formula for sex is: a kiss on the lips, a hand on the breasts and a dive for the pelvis.
-- Dr. William Masters, Playboy Interview - November 1979
Oh dear, now I've made a terrible mess of things. And all I wanted to do was rule the universe.
-- Dr. Zachary Smith
If we didn't have bonuses, we wouldn't have had anybody working for us.
-- Drexel Burnham Lambert spokesperson, explaining why the company gave over $195 million in bonuses just before it filed for bankruptcy
Now I've got the bead on you with MY disintegrating gun. And when it disintegrates, it disintegrates. (pulls trigger) Well, what you do know, it disintegrated.
-- Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century
Daddy, Daddy, make Santa Claus go away!
I can't, son; he's grown too powerful.
HO HO HO!
-- Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre
We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France.
-- Duke of Wellington
All things are either sacred or profane. The former to ecclesiasts bring gain; The latter to the devil appertain.
-- Dumbo Omohundro
BUGS Rejects any file with the string IBM in it. This is considered to be a feature by some.
-- dvips Manual Page
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is now in the American experience . . . We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications . . . We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . .by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his farewell address in 1961
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its _stupidity_.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
One of these days, the people are going to demand peace of the government, and the government is going to have to give it to them.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Listen, there is no courage or any extra courage that I know of to find out the right thing to do. Now, it is not only necessary to do the right thing, but to do it in the right way and the only problem you have is what is the right thing to do and what is the right way to do it. That is the problem. But this economy of ours is not so simple that it obeys to the opinion of bias or the pronouncements of any particular individual, even to the President. This is an economy that is made up of 173 million people and it reflects their desires, they're ready to buy, they're to spend, it is a thing that is too complex and too big to be affected adversely or advantageously just by a few words or any particular - say a little this and that, or even a panacea so alleged.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) in response to the question: Has government been lacking in courage and boldness in facing up to the recession? Verbatim transcript from a press conference.
Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), address at Guildhall, London, 7/12/45
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), April 16, 1953
The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit
-- Dwight Morrow
An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.
-- Dylan Thomas
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
-- e e cummings (1894-1962)
The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.
-- e e cummings (1894-1962), on the death of Warren G. Harding, 1923
When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident . . . or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
-- E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic
An intelligence service is, in fact, a stupidity service.
-- E.B. White (1899-1985)
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
-- E.B. White (1899-1985)
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
-- E.B. White (1899-1985)
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
-- E.M. Cioran
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
-- E.M. Cioran
The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
-- E.M. Cioran
The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
-- E.M. Cioran
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
A reasonable probability is the only certainty.
-- E.W. Howe
Virtue is its own revenge.
-- E.Y. “Yip” Harburg (1898-1981)
Love is a series of 'darlings' and 'dearies,'
Of 'honeys,' and 'sweeties' and sugared entreaties.
Of moonings, and swoonings, and cooings and billings
All tempered, of course, by occasional killings.
-- E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, (1898-1981)
Someday Louisiana is going to get good government. And they ain't gunna like it.
-- Earl K. Long
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
-- Earl of Kent, _The_Tragedy_of_King_Lear_
I've never cut a guy hitting that high before. But he was making the rest of us look bad with that average.
-- Earl Weaver - manager Baltimore Orioles after cutting outfielder Drungo Hazewood who was hitting .583 in spring training
If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
-- Earl Wilson
Women's liberation will not be achieved until a woman can become paunchy and bald and still think that she's attractive to the opposite sex.
-- Earl Wilson
We're telling the real story of what it's like living in places like Compton. We're giving [the fans] reality. We're like reporters. We give them truth. People where we come from hear so many lies that the truth sticks out like a sore thumb.
-- Eazy-E, lead rapper of NWA
In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
-- Ecclesiastes 1:18
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.
-- Ed Bluestone
The magnitude of a problem can be gaged by the number of acronyms associated with its potential solutions.
-- Ed Dinsmore
Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.
-- Ed Howe
God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.
-- Ed McMahon
You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt.
-- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict
CALIFORNIA: From Latin 'calor', meaning heat (as in English 'calorie' or Spanish 'caliente'); and 'fornia', for sexual intercourse or fornication. Hence: Tierra de California, the land of hot sex.
-- Ed Moran, Covina, California
The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.
-- Ed Parker
The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.
-- Ed Parker, Grandmaster, American Kenpo.
Traditionalists often study what is taught, not what there is to create.
-- Ed Parker, Grandmaster, American Kenpo.
I have nothing against homosexuals. You should fuck whoever the fuck you feel like fucking.
-- Eddie Murphy, Playboy Interview - February 1990
Aviation is proof, that given the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.
-- Eddie Rickenbacker
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
-- Eden Phillpots
Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.
-- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.
-- Edith Wharton
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 Blackadder - Head
Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle. . . chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome _insects_ of the hour.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France
Vexed sailors curse the rain
For which poor shepherds prayed in vain.
-- Edmund Waller
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another- it is one damn thing over and over.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Spring
To what purpose April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted steps.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill
April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.
-- Edouard Manet
If the conjecture `You would rather I had not disturbed you by sending you this.' is correct, you may add it to the list of uncomfortable truths.
-- Edsgar Dijkstra
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense.
-- Edsgar Dijkstra
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
The prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the Italian painting of the martyr whose intestines are slowly being unwound from his body on a reel.
-- Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904) 1868
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
-- Edward Abbey
The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
-- Edward Abbey (Vox Clamans in Deserto)
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
-- Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977)
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
-- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
It's only by amusing oneself that one can learn.
-- Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
I'm not a homosexual
-- Edward Koch, Playboy Interview - April 1982
I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle - so all is peace.
-- Edward Lear (1812-1888)
If I've done anything I'm sorry for, I'm willing to be forgiven.
-- Edward N. Westcott
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
-- Edward Teller
Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.
-- Edward Teller
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
-- Edward Teller
Things are not as simple as they seems at first.
-- Edward Thorp
. . . The subtlety of these methods implies an important source of unreliability; unreliable error recovery. Thus it is important that system testing pay meticulous attention to fault simulation to uncover weaknesses in the recovery. Data taken on electronic switching systems show that failure to recover from simplex faults is usually a significant source of total outage time . . ..
-- Edwin A. Irland, Assuring Quality and Reliability of Complex Electronic Systems: Hardware and Software, Proceedings of the IEEE, January 1988
Pathetic, he said. That's what it is. Pathetic. (crosses stream) As I thought, he said, no better from this side.
-- Eeyore
Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.
-- Egyptian Inscription Recorded at the Time of the Invention of Writing.
While I am not a fan of corporal punishment, I am not a fan of his friends Major Nuisance or General Disturbance.
-- Elaine Richards
A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other . . .until death do them join.
-- Elbert Hubbard
A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.
-- Elbert Hubbard
Death: To stop sinning suddenly.
-- Elbert Hubbard
Editor: a person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
-- Elbert Hubbard
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
-- Elbert Hubbard
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
The woman who cannot tell a lie in defense of her husband is unworthy of the name of wife.
-- Elbert Hubbard
Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
The cheerful loser is the winner.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
-- Elbert Hubbard (1859-1915)
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
. . .Veloz is indistinguishable from hundreds of other electronics businesses in the Valley, run by eager young engineers poring over memory dumps late into the night. The difference is that a bunch of self-confessed car nuts are making money doing what they love: writing code and driving fast.
-- Electronics puts its foot on the gas, IEEE Spectrum, May 88
Eagles soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
-- Elf Sternberg
Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you've got a pretty neck.
-- Eli Wallach
Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
-- Elias Canetti
Before emphasizing what I believe, perhaps I should point out what I do not believe, or what I no longer believe: I no longer believe in the magic of the spoken word. It signifies not order but disorder. It does not eliminate chaos, it only conceals it. It no longer carries men's hopes but distorts them. It has ceased to be a vehicle, only to become an obstacle. It does not signify sharing but compromise.
-- Elie Weisel, From the Kingdom of Memory
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel
As long as I am an American citizen and American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.
-- Elija Lovejoy (1802-1837)
American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced.
-- Elinor Glyn
. . .cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable, challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self. That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in Count Zero, with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself, rather than its output.
-- Eliot Handelman
The richer your friends, the more they will cost you.
-- Elisabeth Marbury (1856-1933)
The iron gate ground its teeth to let me pass!
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Irony is the hygiene of the mind.
-- Elizabeth Bibesco
Success is a great deodorant.
-- Elizabeth Taylor
I think Michael is like litmus paper -he's always trying to learn.
-- Elizabeth Taylor, absurd non-sequitir about Michael Jackson
A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue . . ..Not that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism . . ..Creationists actually got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were scientific colleagues . . ..It has been clear for a long time that the president is averse to science . . .In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American turf . . ..But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of laetrile to eye of newt to the movment of planets. We lose the capacity to make rational – scientific -- judgments. It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers Group
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
-- Ellen Parr
Except for 75% of the women, everyone in the whole world wants to have sex.
-- Ellyn Mustard
You need tender loving care once a week -so that I can slap you into shape.
-- Ellyn Mustard
‘Faith’ can be defined as ‘any man's hope that the human spirit is capable of understanding that anything actually matters in the larger universe; and that understanding anything could be important outside of our own selfish whims and desire to survive. . . .and somehow, because it is important, understanding can go on without us, waiting only to be rediscovered by the future, or at worst, pissed away, in spite of all our prayers, and work, and suffering. Every expression of the human spirit is an act of faith.’
-- Ellyn Mustard (mustard@ficc.ferranti.comm)
You tweachewous miscweant!
-- Elmer Fudd
Ye have enemies? Good, good- that means ye've stood up for something, sometime in thy life.
-- Elminster of Shadowdale
Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.
-- Elsa Schiaparelli
The French are just useless. They can't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
-- Elton John
Why don't the Japanese live in the mountains? Certainly, they could; apparently they just don't want to.
-- elturner@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
-- Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
It wasn't lies. It was just bullshit, that's all.
-- Elwood Blues
It's got cop tires, cop shocks, cop suspension, a 440 cubic inch power plant with no catalytic converter, so it'll run good on regular gas, is it the new Blues Mobile or what?
-- Elwood Blues, “The Blues Brothers”
Years ago my mother said to me, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
-- Elwood P. Dowd, “Harvey”
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-- Emile Zola (1840-1902)
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-- Emile Zola (1840-1902)
Free love? As if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love.
-- Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love (from the Anarchist Sampler)
Anything anybody can say about America is true.
-- Emmett Grogan
A friend of mine gave me a Philip Glass record. I listened to it for five hours before I realized it had a scratch on it.
-- Emo Philips
At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.
-- Emo Philips
I discovered my wife in bed with another man, and I was crushed. So I said, 'Get off me, you two!'
-- Emo Philips
I go from stool to stool in singles bars hoping to get lucky, but there's never any gum under any of them.
-- Emo Philips
I was at a bar nursing a beer. My nipple was getting quite soggy.
-- Emo Philips
I was in a bar the other night, hopping from barstool to barstool, trying to get lucky -- but there wasn't any gum under any of them.
-- Emo Philips
I was walking down the street, something caught my eye . . . and dragged it fifteen feet.
-- Emo Philips
I went into Gus's artificial organ and taco stand. I said Give me a bladder por favor. The guy said Is that to go? I said Well what else would I want it for?
-- Emo Philips
I'm from Downers Grove, Illinois. We had a blackout there the other day, but fortuantely the police made him get back into his car before he got too far.
-- Emo Philips
My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.
-- Emo Philips
Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
-- Emo Philips
The IRS sent back my tax return saying I owed $800. I said 'If you'll notice, I sent a paper clip with my return. Given what you've been paying for things lately, that should more than make up the difference'
-- Emo Philips
The other day a woman came up to me and said, ‘Didn't I see you on television?’ I said, I don't know. You can't see out the other way.
-- Emo Philips
You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers . . . damn anthropologists.
-- Emo Philips
Women! Ya can't live with 'em and ya can't get 'em to wear skimpy little Nazi outfits.
-- Emo Phillips
It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.
-- Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)
'If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ? . . . Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.'
-- Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
-- Eric Ambler
No man is a hero to his wife's psychiatrist.
-- Eric Berne
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
-- Eric Berne
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa; yeah, right. To paraphrase, the net finds its own uses for garbage.
-- Eric Hughes (hughes@math.berkeley.edu)
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
-- Eric Idle
Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost it.
-- Eric Nicol
The triumph of libertarian anarchy is nearly (in historical terms) at hand . . . *if* we can keep the Left from selling us into slavery and the Right from blowing us up for, say, the next twenty years.
-- Eric Rayman, usenet guy, about nanotechnology
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
-- Eric Sevareid
Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what we have now.
-- Eric Sheppard (ce1zzes@prism.gatech.EDU)
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.
-- Eric Temple Bell
And remember, rebooting your brain can be tricky.
-- Eric Townsend (erict@flatline)
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
-- Erica Jong
I discovered masturbation to orgasm when I was about 13, and I was sure nobody else had ever done it.
-- Erica Jong, Playboy Interview - September 1975
I'm a very oral person. I like licking a lot. I also like barking.
-- Erica Jong, Playboy Interview - September 1975
My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
-- Erica Jong, Playboy Interview - September 1975
Only a person who has faith in himself can be faithful to others.
-- Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is man may become robots.
-- Erich Fromm
All religions have in common the periodical childlike surrender to a Provider or providers who dispense earthly fortune as well as spiritual health; some demonstrations of man's smallness by means of reduced posture and humble gesture, the admission in prayer and song of misdeeds, of misthoughts, and of evil intentions; fervent appeal for inner uni- fication by divine guidance; and finally, the insight that individual trust must become part of the ritual practice of man, and must become a sign of trustworthiness in the community.
-- Erik Erikson, psychologist
I see music as the augmentation of a split second of time.
-- Erin Cleary
It is fast approaching the point where I don't want to elect anyone stupid enough to want the job.
-- Erma Bombeck
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
-- Erma Bombeck
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, I used everything you gave me.
-- Erma Bombeck
I know a mother-in-law who sleeps with her glasses on, the better to see her son-in-law suffer in her dreams.
-- Ernest Coquelin
Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how littly you have.
-- Ernest Haskins
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
To be a successful father there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
I'm not going to climb into the ring with Tolstoy.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) from a letter
Never mistake motion for action.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
I admire his confidence in talking about a subject of which he has taken the trouble to learn so little.
-- Ernest Rutherford on Lord Kelvin
Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.
-- Ernestine Ulmer
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
-- Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967)
Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.
-- Erving Goffman
I don't like it and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it.
-- Erwin Schrodinger commenting on Schrodinger's equations
A system of economy is good when . . . the farmer, the manufacturer, and the trader enjoy the full liberty of their property, their production, and their industry.
-- Eschasseriaux
There is no royal road to geometry.
-- Euclid to king Ptolemy I
This country needs a spear chucker, and I think we've got him up on this podium.
-- Eugene Dorff, mayor of Kenosha, Wisconsin, introducing presidential candidate Jesse Jackson. He said later he had intended to say straight shooter
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
-- Eugene McCarthy
He imagined the past and remembered the future.
-- Eugene McCarthy, on Ronald Wilson Reagan
Science is about skepticism.
-- Eugene Miya
I think the problem isn't the amount of knowledge we have to assimilate in our world, but the rate at which we can assimiliate it. Science, engineering, and technology do not yield the whys of truth. only the hows. In fact, they are not truths, but opinions from the current reigning theories of how we think the physical world works.
-- Eugene Miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat (Whom God wishes to destroy, he first drives mad).
-- Euripides 480-406 BC
Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in.
-- Evan Davis
State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent.
-- Evan Leibovitch
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
It is a curious thing . . . that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Of children as of procreation - the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) (I assume in reference to the similar Lord Chesterfield quote)
It seems to me to be a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant, and remove it.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), when Randolph Churchill had a benign tumour removed from his lung
A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon it adds up to real money.
-- Everett Dirksen (1896-1969)
It's hard to recognize speech.
-- Example of why it is difficult to get computer to recognize human speech. (phonetically equivilant to: It's hard to wreck a nice beach.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
-- Example of why it is difficult to get computers to understand human speech
There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.
-- Eykis
Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
-- Ezra Pound
For the man who has everything . . . Penicillin.
-- F. Borquin
Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.
-- F. J. Raymond
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for everything.
-- F. Jeff Stiles, Southern Baptist preacher
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.
-- F. P. Jones
Our best work is done when it needs to be.
-- F. Phelps
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Writers aren't exactly people . . .they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
I've brought Gatsby to life. I've accounted for his money. I've fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII). I've improved his first party. I've broken up his long narrative in Chapter VIII.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, on revising his galley proofs
That orgy of wishful thinking that has passed for logic in the present century.
-- F.W. Lawvere
Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.
-- Farley Mowat
In the South of California has gathered the larges and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations.
-- Farnsworth Crowder
If you look good and dress well, you don't need a purpose in life.
-- Fashion consultant Robert Pante
The average person thinks he isn't.
-- Father Larry Lorenzoni
The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.
-- Father Robert F. Capon
I've been a chief executive for something for 15 years and now that I have some time to myself, I realize working is overrated.
-- Fay Vincent
After all, he thought he was God.
-- FBI agent on why it was difficult to negotiate with David Koresh
A penny for your thoughts? A dollar for your death.
-- Felix and Oscar, from the Odd Couple
To some lawyers all facts are created equal.
-- Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965)
The main thing is the play itself. I swear that greed for money has nothing to do with it, although heaven knows I am sorely in need of money.
-- Feodor Dostoyevsky
God made the cat in order that man might have the pleasure of caressing the lion
-- Fernand Mery
I believe that all of us ought to retire relatively young.
-- Fidel Castro, Playboy Interview - January 1967
An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
Don't jump on a man unless he's down.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
Most vegetarians look so much like the food they eat that they can be classified as cannibals.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
The Puritans gave thanks for being preserved from the Indians, and we give thanks for being preserved from the Puritans.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
How can you be two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?
-- Firesign Theater
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
-- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
-- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
Let him who wishes for peace prepare for war.
-- Flavius Vegetius Renatus, c. 390 AD
The Hidden stone ripens fast,
then laid bare like a turnip
but even then the danger isn't past.
That man lives best who's fain
to live half mad, half sane.
-- Flemish Poet Jan Van Stijevoort, 1524.
I believe in a God which doesn't need heavy financing.
-- Fletch
Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
-- Fletcher Knebel
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
-- Florida Scott-Maxwell
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
-- Florynce Kennedy
Male heckler: Are you a lesbian? Florynce Kennedy: Are you my alternative?
-- Florynce Kennedy
Nice boy, but about as sharp as a sack full of wet mice.
-- Foghorn Leghorn
Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married.
-- Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier (1657-1757) Eloge de le Leibniz.
It's said that if you can't say something good about a dead person, don't say it. Well, I consider him dead.
-- Former Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), on President Bush
They have, and bring with them, that upper-body strength. They have apparently developed that in their childhood and growing up, and they've further advanced in that regard.
-- Former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates on lesbians in the LA Police Dept.
The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
-- Fortran manual for Xerox Computers
There is nothing like good food, good wine, and a bad girl.
-- Fortune cookie
A Chinese philosopher once had a dream that he was a butterfly. From that day on, he was never quite certain that he was not a butterfly, dreaming that he was a man.
-- found in a .sig
If you are ever in an S&M relationship, make damn sure you are the S.
-- Found in a .sig quoting his mother
This gum tastes funny.
-- found written on a condom machine
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Being a woman is of special interest to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is simply a good excuse not to play football.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Favorite animal: steak.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
-- Fran Lebowitz
I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not
-- Fran Lebowitz
If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.
-- Fran Lebowitz
If you can stay in love for more than two years, you're on something.
-- Fran Lebowitz
If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
-- Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
-- Fran Lebowitz
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.
-- Fran Lebowitz
Now I lay me down to sheep
I pray the Lord the sheep's asleep
If, perchance, the sheep should wake
Simple friendship shall I fake.
-- Frances Grimble
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, But depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Of Beauty
Croesus said to Cambyses; that peace was better than war; because in peace the sons bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers bury their sons.
-- Francis Bacon, _Apophthegms, New and Old_ (1625)
Theorists almost always become too fond of their own ideas. It is difficult to believe that one's cherished theory, which really works rather nicely in some respects, may be completely false.
-- Francis Crick
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
-- Francois De La Rochefoucauld
There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.
-- Francois, Duc De La Rouchefoucald
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.
-- Francois-Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-- Frank Dane
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
-- Frank Herbert
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
I will say this about being an optimist-- even when things don't turn out well, you are certain they will get better.
-- Frank Hughes
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
-- Frank Leahy
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
The truth is more important than the facts.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
Television: chewing gum for the eyes.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959)
A man is a fool is he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright, on his before-dinner custom of a single Irish whisky with water chaser, _New York Times_, June 11, 1958
A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word but which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative -- before they tell you. Thus: I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but . . . (a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut).
-- Frank Mankiewicz
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
-- Frank Moore Colby
Strategy is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner. Tactics is getting her to drink it.
-- Frank Muir
I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
-- Frank Sinatra, Playboy Interview - February 1963
When lip service to some mysterious deity permist bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday - cash me out.
-- Frank Sinatra, Playboy Interview – February 1963
Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there.
-- Frank Zappa
Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, so don't kid yourself . . .
-- Frank Zappa
Help! I'm a rock!
-- Frank Zappa
If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty.
-- Frank Zappa
I'm in a big dilemma about my Big-Leg Emma.
-- Frank Zappa
I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white.
-- Frank Zappa
In every language, the first word after Mama! that every kid learns to say is Mine! A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say Mine! when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.
-- Frank Zappa
Is that a real poncho, I mean a Mexican poncho, or is that a Sears poncho?
-- Frank Zappa
It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side.
-- Frank Zappa
Kill Ugly Radio
-- Frank Zappa
Maybe you should stay with yo' mama
She could do your laundry 'n' cook for you
Maybe you should stay with yo' mama
You're really kinda stupid 'n' ugly too
You ain't really made for bein' out in the street
Ain't much hope for a fool like you
'Cause if you play the game, you will get beat
-- Frank Zappa
Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
-- Frank Zappa
Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best.
-- Frank Zappa
Say, could I interest you in a pair of Zircon-encrusted tweezers?
-- Frank Zappa
Some of you might not agree
'Cause you probably likes a lot of misery
But think a while and you will see . . .
Broken hearts are for assholes
Broken hearts are for assholes
Are you an asshole?
Well, ladies you can be an asshole too
You might pretend you ain't got one at the bottom of you
But don't fool yourself girl
It's looking at you
But don't fool yourself girl
It's going right up you poop chute
-- Frank Zappa
Some scientists claim that hydrogen because it is so plentiful is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen and that is the basic building block of the universe.
-- Frank Zappa
Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe.
-- Frank Zappa
The bigger the cushion, The better the pushin'
-- Frank Zappa
The Book says BURN and DESTROY repent and redeem and revenge and deploy and rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum 'cause they don't go for what's in the Book and that makes 'em BAD.
-- Frank Zappa
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
-- Frank Zappa
This is a message to all the cute people in the world. If you are cute, if you are even beautiful, listen: there are more people like us ugly motherfuckers than you, so watch out . . .
-- Frank Zappa
Watch out where the huskies go Don't you eat the yellow snow.
-- Frank Zappa
Who could imagine That they could freak out in Kansas Who could imagine That they could freak out in Washington D.C. Everybody's clean, it can't happen here, no, no And they thought it couldn't happen here They were so sure it couldn't happen here It can't happen here
-- Frank Zappa
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid
-- Frank Zappa
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the _best!_
-- Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage ( -Dec 4, 1993)
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
-- Frank Zappa ( -Dec 4, 1993)
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
-- Frank Zappa ( -Dec 4, 1993)
Those things are so carefully constructed that it breaks my heart when people don't dig into them and see all the levels that I put into them.
-- Frank Zappa explaining the making of America Drinks and Goes Home
Remember: there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
-- Frank Zappa He's got 20 million dollars in his heavenly bank account.
Fuck me, you ugly son of a bitch! Stick it out! Stick out your hot curly weenie! Make it go fast! In and out! Till it squirts . . . FIRE! Don't get no jeez upon that sofa!
-- Frank Zappa Lyrics to Joe's Garage
Why does it hurt when I pee? My balls feel like a pair of maracas! I got it from the toilet seat! It jumped right up and grabbed my meat!
-- Frank Zappa Lyrics to Joe's Garage
They're serving burgers in the back . . . If you go for burgers, you'll love the burgers here. They have some burgers in this place, when you open your mouth you know, you hold 'em like this, and go way in the back where nobody can see you . . . Some people eat them that way . . .
-- Frank Zappa You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore vol. 1
In every language, the first word after Mama! that every kid learns to say is Mine! A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say Mine! when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.
-- Frank Zappa, _The Real Frank Zappa Book_
Enforced recreation live on stage in London . . . I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow . . .
-- Frank Zappa, “You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore”
Carnegie Hall! What the fuck are we doing here?
-- Frank Zappa, 1971
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
-- Frank Zappa, Bebop Tango
Brown shoes
Don't make it
Quit School
Why fake it
Tee Vee dinner by the pool
Watch your brother grow a beard . . .
Be a loyal plastic robot
For a world that doesn't care
Smile at every ugly
Shine on your shoes
And cut your hair
Be a jerk, go to work, be a jerk, go to work,
Do your job and do it right
-- Frank Zappa, Brown Shoes Don't Make It
Do you love it do you hate it There it is the way you made it
-- Frank Zappa, Brown Shoes Don't Make It
She's leaving with your friend Disco Boy, that's the way it goes So wipe you nose And try again to get a little pussy tomorrow.
-- Frank Zappa, Disco Boy
Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes America great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we have tolerated the last eight years?
-- Frank Zappa, Feb 1, 1989
I have the thing you need, I am endowed beyond your wildest Clearasil-spattered fantasies, Oh! oh! oh! Oh Oh oh oh oh oh oh ohhhhhh!
-- Frank Zappa, Fillmore East '71 lyrics to Bwana Dik
Well, the toilet went crazy yesterday afternoon, The plumber he said, Never flush a tampoon!, This great information cost me half a week's pay, And the toilet blew up, later on the next day!
-- Frank Zappa, Flakes, 1979
I'm a beautiful guy And you have just walked by And I have gave you the eye But you pretend to be shy I'm a beautiful guy (You know what I mean? You know what I mean?)
-- Frank Zappa, I'm a beautiful guy
This is a song called King Kong. It’s about a giant gorilla who was living in the jungle and doing all right until some Americans found him and thought that they would take him home with them. They brought the giant ape back to the United States and used him to make money. Then, they killed him.
-- Frank Zappa, Introduction to King Kong
another day, another sausage . . .
-- Frank Zappa, Jezebel Boy
Call any vegetable,
Call any vegetable,
And the chances are good
That the vegetable
Will respond to you.
-- Frank Zappa, Lyrics in Absolutely Free
Never try to get your pecker sucked in France.
-- Frank Zappa, lyrics to “Down in France”
. . .'cause anyone who would buy this record couldn't give a fuck if there's good musicians on it . . .. 'cause this is a STUPID song . . . . . .AND THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT!
-- Frank Zappa, lyrics to Little Green Rosetta in Joe's Garage
Take the day
And walk around
Watch the Nazis
Run your town
And then go home
And check yourself
-- Frank Zappa, lyrics to Plastic People
And in your dreams you can see yourself As a prophet saving the world The words from your lips I just can't believe you are such A fool.
-- Frank Zappa, Oh No.
Lord have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat. And Lord have mercy on the fate of this movie and God bless the mind of the man in the street
-- Frank Zappa, Strictly Genteel
Eat that pork, eat that ham, laugh till you choke on Billy Graham Moses, Aaron and Abraham, they're all a waste of time!
-- Frank Zappa, The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
Those Jesus Freaks Well, they're friendly but The shit they believe Has got their minds all shut
-- Frank Zappa, The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.
-- Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
From the time Mr. Developing Nation was forced to read _The Little Red Book_ in exchange for a blob of rice, till the time he figured out that waiting in line for a loaf of pumpernickel was boring as fuck, took about three generations. . . . Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.
-- Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
If we were the Monkees, we'd be ready by now.
-- Frank Zappa, while band is tuning instruments ( -Dec 4, 1993)
Do what you wanna, do what you will; Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill. And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip.
-- Frank Zappa, You Are What You Is
They're serving burgers in the back . . . If you go for burgers, you'll love the burgers here. They have some burgers in this place, when you open your mouth you know, you hold'em like this, and go way in the back where nobody can see you . . . Some people eat them that way . . .
-- Frank Zappa, You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore vol. 1
When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic -- or at least extremely abnormal -- behavior that has characterized so many of them. Luther, Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations (visions). St. Theresa almost certainly was a hysteric. The book The Psychotic Personality, by Leon J. Saul and Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the psychotic personalities of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones . . . It seems significant that the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul, also suffered from epilepsy.
-- Frank Zindler, Religiosity as a Mental Disorder, American Atheist magazine, April 1988, p. 27
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow.
-- Franklin K. Dane
I hate the pollyanna pest who says that all is for the best.
-- Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960)
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary.
-- Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960)
There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel.
-- Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960)
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy
-- Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
-- Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.
-- Franz Xavier Kroetz
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
An income tax form is like a laundry list -- either way you lose your shirt.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
California is a great place to live if you're an orange.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
If you took all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it in the navel of a fruit fly, you'd still have room for three carraway seeds and a producer's heart.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
The vice-president of an advertising agency is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conference.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Do we really deserve top billing?
-- Fred Allen (1894-1956) to Henry Morgan at a meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews
The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style.
-- Fred Astaire
. . .computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price gain in 30 years.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
. . .when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build: They hyave very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving, describing, and testing them hard. Software systems have orders-of-magnitude more states than computers do.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
In the pitiful, multipage, connection-boxed form to which the flowchart has today been elaborated, it has proved to be useless as a design tool -- programmers draw flowcharts after, not before, writing the programs they describe.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike. If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine -- open or closed. In this respect, software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
The so-called desktop metaphor of today's workstations is instead an airplane-seat metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference -- one can see only a very few things at once.
-- Fred Brooks, Jr.
Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
-- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
Why can't they invent something for us to marry instead of WOMEN?
-- Fred Flintstone
There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
-- Fred Hoyle
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.
-- Frederick Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
How does a project get to be a year late? . . . One day at a time.
-- Frederick Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation.
-- Frederick Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
The tar pit of software engineering will continue to be sticky for a long time to come. One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and . . . humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations.
-- Frederick Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
The world's as ugly as sin, And almost as delightful
-- Frederick Locker-Lampson
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 omelette, 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. Software customers have had the same choices.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr, The Mythical Man-Month
The hypothesis: Amid a wash of paper, a small number of documents become the critical pivots around which every project's management revolves. These are the manager's chief personal tools.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
Probable-Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how.
-- Frederick Winsor
Bibo, ergo sum. - I drink, therefore I am
-- Fredirect Toyou
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect.
-- Freeman Dyson
Committees do harm merely by existing.
-- Freeman Dyson
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
-- Freeman Dyson
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
-- French philosopher Charles Peguy
The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want?
-- Freud, Letter to Marie Bonaparte, in Ernest Jones's [1955] v.2, pt.3, ch.16;, quoted in the electronic Oxford Dict. of Quotations [1991]
The doer alone learneth.
-- Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844-1900)
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star!
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
We have art to save ourselves from the truth.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
If you gaze long into an abyss the abyss will gaze back into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
It is either through the influence of narcotic potions, of which all primitive peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, penetrating with joy all of nature, that those Dionysian stirrings arise, which in their intensification lead the individual to forget himself completely. . . .Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once again by the magic of the Dionysian rite, but alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Man is more ape than many of the apes.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Plato was a bore.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The overman . . .Who has organized the chaos of his passions, givne style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Wer mit Ungeheuern ka mpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einem Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein. (Translation) He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Whis is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Without music, life would be a mistake.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Woman was God's second mistake.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Only sick music makes money today.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in 1888
Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) Thus Spake Zarathustra
What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: `This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence . . . The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again--and you with it, you dust of dust!'--Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you answered him: `You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!' If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: `do you want this again and again, times without number?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon your actions.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), [1977], edited and translated R.J. Hollingdale, pp.249-250
Whoever struggles with monsters might watch that he does not thereby become a monster. And when you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 IV, no 157
He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), Beyond Good and Evil, IV, 146
One should never know too precisely whom one has married.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), on Lohengrin
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you. WE HAVE KILLED HIM - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light candles in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Gay Science
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
-- Frof. Steiner
. . .and the possibility of developing paranoia, slight memory loss and laziness. But, it says, the lethal dose of cannabis is a 2-kilo block dropped on your head from the 25th floor of a high-rise building. In other words - cannabis can't kill you, it is not a poison like alcohol, and not addictive like cigarettes.
-- from _Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Drugs, but Were Afraid to Ask Your Children_
State Rep. Doug Teper has introduced legislation which would require the Georgia laws against fornication, adultery, and sodomy to be posted in hotel rooms. For those who don't comprende English, Teper has called for International Symbols describing these fun activities. Get out your drafting tools, let your imagination run wild, and send us the results. We'll publish the winning entry.
-- From _Southern Voice_, a local weekly:
Resolved, that the 67th General Convention affirm the glorious ability of God to create in any manner, whether men understand it or not, and in this affirmation reject the limited insight and rigid dogmatism of the Creationist movement . . .
-- from a 1982 resolution of the Episcopal Church
I'm a solipsist and, I have to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us.
-- from a letter to Bertrand Russell
A killer stalks the halls of my high school. Innocent cheerleaders die by knife. Teachers lock the classroom doors. I must find him, or I'll flunk.
-- From a poem by Peggy Nadramia
1. At the rise of the hand of the policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him or otherwise disrespect him.
2. If pedestrian obstacle your path, tootle horn melodiously. If he continue to obstacle, tootle horn vigorously and utter vocal warning such as Hi, Hi. [ . . .]
5. Beware of greasy corner where lurk skid demon. Cease step on, approach slowly, round cautiously, resume step on gradually.
-- from an official Japanese guide for English-speaking drivers, 1936
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
No wife of *mine* is doing any dishes. That's what we had the kid for.
-- from Deathlok comics #1
Even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!
-- from Fiddler On The Roof
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
-- from John F. Kennedy's address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association September 12, 1960.
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are correct.
-- from Manual of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan
Most non-Catholics know that the Catholic schools are rendering a greater service to our nation than the public schools in which subversive textbooks have been used, in which Communist-minded teachers have taught, and from whose classrooms Christ and even God Himself are barred.
-- from Our Sunday Visitor, an American-Catholic newspaper, 1949
We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
-- From Petronii Arbitri Satyricon AD 66., (Attributed to Gaius Petronus, a Roman General who later committed suicide)
It's curtains for you, Mighty Mouse! This gun is so futuristic that even *I* don't know how it works!
-- from Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
-- from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
network: anything reticulated or decussated, with interstices between the intersections
-- from the Dictionary of Samuel Johnson
On my first acid trip, I thought I was God. On my second acid trip I thought I was Jesus. On my third trip I thought I was Napoleon and on my fourth trip I thought I was a toadstool. It's been going down that way, trip after trip, until my last acid trip when I thought I was Richard M. Nixon and I'm not going to take any more acid.
-- from The Great Escape: A Source Book of Delights and Pleasures for the Mind & Body
The love we hold back is the only pain that follows us here. And the memory of that love shouldn't make you unhappy for the rest of your life.
-- From the movie Always
Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
-- from the movie Back to School
You're a creature of the night, Michael. Wait'll Mom hears about this.
-- from the movie The Lost Boys
For Is and Is-not though with Rule and Line And Up-and-down by Logic I define, Of all that one should care to fathom, I Was never deep in anything but -- Wine.
-- from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, (Translation by Edward Fitzgerald)
When you stay on the tracks, ignoring the facts, you can't blame the wreck on the train.
-- from the song, You Can't Blame . . .
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
Sun is chuckling over a recent robbery in Silicon Valley: seems the thieves broke into a place and ripped off five Sun workstation, bypassing the new HP 700s and using a 705 as a door stop.
-- From Unigram #405 (Oct 4, 1992)
program -- A set of instructions, given to the computer, describing the sequence of steps the computer performs in order to accomplish a specific task. The task must be specific, such as balancing your checkbook or editing your text. A general task, such as working for world peace, is something we can all do, but not something we can currently write programs to do.
-- From Unix User's Manual Manual, Supplementary Documents, p. 14-3:
GRATEFUL DEAD The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero's coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny either to pay the man's debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion's disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.
-- FUNK & WAGNALLS NEW PRACTICAL STANDARD DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BRITANNICA WORLD LANGUAGE EDITION, VOL.1, 1955
Free your mind . . . and your ass will follow.
-- Funkadelic
The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.
-- Fyodor Dostevsky
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
-- Fyodor Dostoevski
If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.
-- Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov, Pt 1, Bk i, Ch 6
. . .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
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- G. B. Shaw
G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home: Go on writing plays, my boy. One of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his secretary, 'Is there a play from Shaw this morning?' and when she says 'No,' he will say, 'Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.' And that's your chance, my boy.
-- G. B. Shaw
NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Guiseppe? Everything he says is wrong.
GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.
-- G. B. Shaw
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it
-- G. B. Shaw
Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone.
-- G. B. Stearn
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-- G. Gordon Liddy
In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn't budge a log, they didn't try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn't be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers.
-- G. Hopper
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
-- G. Hopper
I may not practice what I preach, but God forbid that I preach what I practice.
-- G. K. Chesterton
. . .a science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the destribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
-- G.H. Hardy
Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
-- G.H. Hardy, in _A Mathematician's Apology_
’My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
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 (1874-1936)
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Nowadays a citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The classes that wash most are those that work least.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
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.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
-- G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it.
-- G.L. Glegg, The Design of Design
The *evident* character of this defective cognition of which mathematics is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore of a kind that philosophy must spurn.
-- G.W.F. Hegel
. . .they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had lept over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Love in the Time of Cholera
I'm a nymphomaniac of the heart.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Playboy Interview - February 1983
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
-- Gail Godwin
God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
-- Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted in The Conspiracy of Catiline by Sallust (c. 50 BC)
We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
-- GAIUS PETRONIUS ARBITER, first century:
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei
They ought to make butt-flavored cat food.
-- Gallagher
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.
-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?
-- Garrison Keillor
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
-- Garrison Keillor
To your left is the marina where several senior cabinet officials keep luxury yachts for weekend cruises on the Potomac. Some of these ships are up to 100 feet in length; the Presidential yacht is over 200 feet in length, and can remain submerged for up to 3 weeks.
-- Garrison Keillor
He didn't run for reelection. `Politics brings you into contact with all the people you'd give anything to avoid,' he said. `I'm staying home.'
-- Garrison Keillor, _Lake_Wobegone_Days_
. . .if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world.
-- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days
Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode.
-- Garry Peterson, about Survival Research Labs
America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.
-- Garry Trudeau
Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
-- Garry Wills
Catch a fly. Put it in the freezer compartment of your refrigerator for 5 to 10 minutes. This slows him down considerably, so he's easier to handle. While he's in there, make a miniature paper airplane with a wing-span about double that of the fly. Take the cool dude out of the ice-box and super glue his tiny feet onto the upper surface of the paper airplane. As he warms up and revives, he will begin doing that most natural of all fly activities: he will try to fly. If you have not made your little airplane too heavy, the fly's wing beats will be adequate for lift off. However, carrying the added weight quickly tires the fly, so in mid-air, he will stop beating his wings, and the airplane will soar downward. Seeing his plight causes the fly to once again attempt to fly, with the same result. Little bursts of energy as the plane gains altitude, alternated with slow downward glides. A thread super glued to the plane will keep your aerial circus in the same room, or you can take your new pet fly out for a walk, er, fly.
-- Gary Benson (inc@fluke.tc.com)
Double your intelligence or no money back!
-- Gary Larson
Off days are a part of life, I guess, whether you're a cartoonist, a neurosurgeon, or an air-traffic controller.
-- Gary Larson
I said to my girl, 'Was it good for you too?' And she said, 'I don't think this was good for anybody.’
-- Gary Shandling
I'm dating a woman now who, evidently, is unaware of it.
-- Gary Shandling
Those who worked the hardest are the last to surrender.
-- Gary Ward
It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity Barrier and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance.
-- gavin@krypton.sgi.com
A man has a sense of detachment from his penis. He walks around with a stranger in his pants.
-- Gay Talese, Playboy Interview - May 1980
I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed . . .but I am saying that we'll have no more than 15-20 million killed . . ..depending on the breaks.
-- Gen. Buck Turgidson (Geroge C. Scott) to President Muffley (Peter Sellers) while trying to convince him to launch an all out nuclear sneak attack in Dr. Strangelove
The tide is turning . . . the enemy is suffering terrible losses
-- Gen. Geo. A. Custer
An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he'd have someone to look up to.
-- Gene Fowler (1890-1960)
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
-- Gene Fowler (1890-1960)
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind- boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
-- Gene Spafford, 1992 found in a .sig of: tom coradeschi <+ tcora@pica.army.mil
Once again, we see that interesting correlation between saying Blessed Be! and being an idiot.''
-- Gene W. Smith, gsmith@garnet.berkeley.edu
What do you take me for, an idiot?
-- General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction.
-- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.
-- General George Patton (1885-1945)
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
-- General George Patton (1885-1945)
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
-- General George Patton (1885-1945)
Give me an Army of West Point Graduates, and I'll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I'll win a war.
-- General George Patton (1885-1945) West Point graduate
A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.
-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
If a man does his best, what else is there?
-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves, whether they are to have any property they can call their own, whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed and themselves confined to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.
-- General George Washington in an address to the Continental
Army
When we jumped into Sicily, the units became separated, and I couldn't find anyone. Eventually I stumbled across two colonels, a major, three captains, two lieutenants, and one rifleman, and we secured the bridge. Never in the history of war have so few been led by so many.
-- General James Gavin
Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.
-- General Robert E. Lee
And God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth . . . to you it shall be for meat.
-- Genesis 1:29
After having her legs waxed, Marlene liked to watch rainwater puddle up on them.
-- Geof Brooks cartoon
The hallucenogenic drugs such as psilocybin, Mescaline, and peyote are not rude per se. But it can be difficult to observe all the niceties of manners when you're being chased down the street by a nine-headed cactus demon.
-- Geoff E. Wiggs, .sig line of geoffw@cwis.unomaha.edu
The trouble with my wife is that she is a whore in the kitchen and a cook in the bed.
-- Geoffrey Gorer
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our eyes.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the book?
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
The people are that part of the state that does now know what it wants.
-- Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
-- Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
-- George Ade (1866-1944)
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A dramatic critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
All my life, affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
CAESAR: Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
He who has never hoped can never despair.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned, for it must be bad.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
It is most unwise for people in love to marry
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most me dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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 would be tolerable but for its amusements.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Nobel prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Nothing ever is done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The 100% American is 99% an idiot.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The chief objection of playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The Golden Rule is that there are no Golden Rules.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The liar's punishment . . . is that he cannot believe anyone else.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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 (1856-1950)
The love of money is the root of all virtue.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The seven deadly sins . . . Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The worst sin toward 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)
There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
There is no sincerer love than the love of food. ;
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege - my *privilege* to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence . . .on pain of liquidation.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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 (1856-1950)
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 exalted, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (in a letter to H.G. Wells)
Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Ceasar and Cleopatra
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't 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 can't find them, make them.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Mrs. Warren's Profession
You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), said of William Morris
I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
-- George Burns
I don't worry about getting old. I'm old already. Only young people worry about getting old. When I was 65 I had cupid's eczema. I don't believe in dying. It's been done. I'm working on a new exit. Besides, I can't die now - I'm booked.
-- George Burns
Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.
-- George Burns
[Leslie Stahl was] a pussy compared to Rather.
-- George Bush
It's a weird year.
-- George Bush
A recent poll tells why the people of New Hampshire are supporting George Bush. Forty percent like my foreign policy. Forty percent support my economic policy. And 20 percent believe I make a good premium beer.
-- George Bush campaigning in NH in 1988
I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
-- George Bush in Free Inquiry magazine, Fall 1988
No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
-- George Bush to Robert Sherman of American Atheist Press at the Chicago airport while announcing federal disaster relief for Illinois
Obviously no country can claim a special place in God's heart, yet we are better as a people because He has a special place in ours . . .I want to thank you for helping America, as Christ ordained, to be a light unto the world . . .
-- George Bush, commending the National Religious Broadcasters for their support in the war to drive Iraq from Kuwait
You have to. I don't believe that an atheist could be President of the United States - anybody that did not have something bigger than himself or herself. And faith is the answer, and I've said this to friends. To some degree religion for me has been a private thing. But I can tell you that when the going is tough, and even when it's not -- in our family we say our prayers. We say our prayers at meals and we say our prayers when we go to bed. Barbara and I do. but it's something that the more I'm there, the more I understood what Lincoln meant.
-- George Bush, in a August 27, 1992 700 Club interview, in answer to Abraham Lincoln said he couldn't handle the job except on his knees. Have you found recourse to God in prayer often in your presidency?
I've told you I don't live and die by the polls. Thus, I will refrain from pointing out that we're not doing too bad in those polls.
-- George Bush, in the New Republic
Nobody said it was going to be easy, and nobody was right.
-- George Bush, quoted in Asiaweek magazine
I believe with all my heart that one cannot be America's president without a belief in God, without the strength that your faith gives you.
-- George Bush, to convention of National Religious Broadcasters
Get this (economic plan) passed. Later on, we can all debate it.
-- George Bush, to New Hampshire legislators
Frisbeetarianism, n.: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck..
-- George Carlin
I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes.
-- George Carlin
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
-- George Carlin
My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol.
-- George Carlin
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
-- George Carlin's version of an old patriotic classic:
First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.
-- George Carrette [1990]
Ignorance is the mother of admiration.
-- George Chapman (1599?-1634)
. . . And may God bless Chocolate City and its vanilla suburbs.
-- George Clinton in Parliament's Chocolate City
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot (1819-1880)
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off _in medias res_. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.
-- George Eliot (1819-1880), from _Daniel Deronda_
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
-- George F. Will
The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.
-- George F. Will
Today there may be more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than in Eastern Europe.
-- George F. Will
The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying.
-- George F. Will
. . .in the lexicon of the political class, the word sacrifice means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.
-- George F. Will - Newsweek, 2/22/93
I could prove God statistically.
-- George Gallup
Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
-- George Gaylord Simpson
I have never been drunk, but often I've been overserved.
-- George Gobel
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
What men call gallantry and gods adultery
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
With just enough of learning to misquote.
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
I hate to hunt down a tired metaphore.
-- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) Don Juan
Every opportunity we have to run our R&D scientists and engineers against our customers, we do it.
-- George Heilmeier, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas
. . .there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.
-- George Jacob Holyoake
Be satisfied with life always, but never with oneself.
-- George Jean Nathan
I drink to make other people interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan
I only drink to make other people seem interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan
Marriage is based on the theory that when man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go work in the brewery.
-- George Jean Nathan (1882-1958)
I must admit, it would be nice if I had a few more exciting personal qualities than I do.
-- George McGovern, Playboy Interview - August 1971
The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.
-- George Miller
If there were no husbands, who would look after our mistresses?
-- George Moore
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face-- forever . . . And remember that it is forever.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950) – 1984
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950) Politics and the English Language, 1946
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the
human face -- forever. And remember that it is forever.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), 1984
At 50, every man has the face he deserves.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), From his notebooks, published in Collected Essays.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm
In order to solve this differential equation you look at it until a solution occurs to you.
-- George Polya
Mathematical concepts and facts gain in vividness and clarity if they are well connected with the world around us and with general ideas, and if we obtain them by our own work through successive stages instead of in one lump.
-- George Polya
I want to gain 1,500 or 2,000 yards, whichever comes first.
-- George Rogers, Saints running back
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. . . . those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
The last years of life are the best, if you are a philosopher.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express.
-- George Santayana, Soliloquies In England
We plan absentee ownership. I'll stick to building ships.
-- George Steinbrenner, 1973
On the Plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the Dawn of Victory, sat down to wait, and waiting . . . died.
-- George W. Cecil (under the pseudonym William A. Lawrence)
A physicist is an atoms way of knowing about atoms.
-- George Wald
I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head
-- George Wallace
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.
-- George Washington
Our Constitution . . . gives to bigotry no sanction.
-- George Washington
The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion
-- George Washington
I wonder how so insupportable a thing as a bookseller was ever permitted to grow up in the Commonwealth. Many of our modern booksellers are but needless excrements, or rather vermin.
-- George Wither (1588-1667)
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.
-- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.
-- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
-- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), (also attributed to Oscar Wilde)
Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.
-- Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794), to his executioner
Once you've had real champagne, you can never go back to Asti Spumanti.
-- Georgette Lundberg
When I was born and how I have lived are unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
-- Georgia O'Keefe
Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.
-- Gerald Ford
Whenever I think of program maintenance, I conjure up a picture of the Great Dust Bowl of the 30's. We have seen thousands of stirring films on How the West was Won but who wants to see a film on How the West was Make Liveable After It was Won? There was one such film, Grapes of Wrath. Pretty depressing too.
-- Gerald M. Weinberg
Nothing fails like success.
-- Gerald Nachman
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
-- Gerald Weinberg
We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals. Not just anyone, with any background, or any training, can do a fine job of programming. Programmers know this, but then why is it that they think that anyone picked off the street can do documentation? One has only to spend an hour looking at papers written by graduate students to realize the extent to which the ability to communicate is not universally held. And so, when we speak about computer program documentation, we are not speaking about the psychology of computer programming at all -- except insofar as programmers have the illusion that anyone can do a good job of documentation, provided he is not smart enough to be a programmer.
-- Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming
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??)
Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.
-- Germaine Greer
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
-- Germaine Greer
Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches television.
-- Germaine Greer
Mother Theresa epitomizes for me the blinkered charitableness upon which we pride ourselves and for which we expect reward in this world and the next. There is very little on earth that I hate more than that.
-- Germaine Greer
When two dogs fight for a bone, and the third runs off with it, there's a lawyer among the dogs.
-- German proberb
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
-- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
It takes a lot of time being a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing.
-- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Money is always there, but the pockets change.
-- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there.
-- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical, About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot of news -- With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
-- Gilbert & Sullivan The Pirates of Penzance
The proof of this law is too boring for words.
-- Gilbert Strang, Linear Algebra and its Applications, p. 26
I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
-- Gilda Radner
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
-- Gioacchino Rosini
Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.
-- Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.
-- Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798)
Avoid falsehoods like the plague except in matters of taxation, which do not count, since here your are not lying to take someone else's goods, but to prevent your own from being unjustly seized.
-- Giovanni Morelli
Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease. Disraeli replied, That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
-- Gladstone/Disraeli
The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.
-- Glenda Jackson
Keep the wind in your solar sails . . .
-- Glenn Clapp
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
-- Gloria Leonard
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
-- Gloria Leonard
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
-- Gloria Steinem
If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.
-- Gloria Steinem
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
-- Gloria Steinem
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
-- Gloria Steinem
There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
-- Gloria Steinem
I can't mate in captivity.
-- Gloria Steinem, on why she never married
Every man has within himself a continent of undiscovered character. Happy is he who proves the Columbus of his soul.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
More light! Give me more light!
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
The unnatural, that too is natural.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
What we do not understand we do not possess.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
Don't be so humble - you are not that great.
-- Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat
How long can you be cute?
-- Goldie Hawn, Playboy Interview - January 1985
I'm glad we don't have to play in the shade.
-- Golfer Bobby Jones (1902-1971) on being told that it was 105 degrees in the shade
. . . Perhaps of even greater significance is the continuous and profound distrust of science and technology that the environmental movement displays. The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement
-- Good Quotations by Famous people
A lady with one of her ears applied To an open keyhole heard, inside, Two female gossips in converse free -- The subject engaging them was she. I think, said one, and my husband thinks That she's a prying, inquisitive minx! As soon as no more of it she could hear The lady, indignant, removed her ear. I will not stay, she said with a pout, To hear my character lied about!
-- Gopete Sherany
Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it
-- Gordon R. Dickson
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
-- Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
-- Gore Vidal
For certain people after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.
-- Gore Vidal
I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon. I cannot understand the love affair.
-- Gore Vidal
I don't want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diner's Club.
-- Gore Vidal
I might be President by now if it weren't for this 'queer' thing
-- Gore Vidal
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
-- Gore Vidal
I'm a born-again atheist.
-- Gore Vidal
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-- Gore Vidal
Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.
-- Gore Vidal
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no one must make another one.
-- Gore Vidal, Conversations With Gore Vidal - 1981
Bush is into the Contra business up to his eyeballs.
-- Gore Vidal, Playboy Interview - December 1987
I was far too polite to ask.
-- Gore Vidal, when asked whether the first person he had slept with was male or female
Money is good for bribing yourself through the inconveniences of life.
-- Gottfried Reinhardt
When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it and didn't inhale and never tried it again.
-- Gov. Bill Clinton
I like to play saxophone because you don't inhale.
-- Gov. Bill Clinton, on a radio talk show in New York
If the bloodbath must come, then let's get on with it!
-- Gov. Ronald W. Reagan tothe U.C. Board of Regents
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels
-- Goya
It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
-- Grace Murray Hopper
Remember what the doormouse said . . . FEED YOUR HEAD . . .
-- Grace Slick
I used to be indecisive; now Im not sure.
-- Graffiti
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
-- Graffiti
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
-- Graffiti
'To the Workers of the world, I am sorry.' -- Karl Marx
-- Graffiti on the side of an East German factory
One hundred thousand lemmings can't be wrong.
-- Graffito - as given in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 2nd ed.
Cogito ergo spud. (I think, therefore I yam.)
-- Graffito reported by Herb Caen San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 1980
Bad spellers of the world, untie!
-- Grafitto
Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance.
-- Graham Clarke
. . .You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.
-- Graham Green, *The Quiet American*
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
-- Graham Greene, _The Heart of the Matter_
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-- Granville Hicks (1901-1982)
. . .every once in a while, you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you just look at it right . . .
-- Grateful Dead
Natural selection won't matter soon, not anywhere as much as concious selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognizably.
-- Greg Bear
If the signals are flashing and the gates are all down,
and the whistle is blowing in vain,
if you stay on the tracks, ignoring the facts,
then don't blame the wreck on the train.
-- Greg Tamblyn
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not D.N.A.
-- Gregory Bateson, Mind and Matter
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities-- potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry-- that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.
-- Gregory Benford - Timescape
You're a parasite for sore eyes
-- Gregory Ratoff, Actor
Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Don't look now, but there's one too many in this room and I think it's you.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
I've had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
My mother loved children - she would have given anything if I had been one.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
She's afraid that if she leaves, she'll become the live of the party.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his mouth shut and his checkbook open.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing; if you can fake that, you've got it made.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
There is no sweeter sound than the crumbling of one's fellow man.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977) from You Bet Your Life in response to a man whose reason for fathering 10 children was: Well, I love my wife
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977), A Day at the Races - 1936
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
-- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)
We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack?
-- Group Capt. Mandrake (Peter Sellers) to Col. Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove
If I didn't have a Unix machine, I'd feel naked.
-- Guess Who
Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.
-- Guindon cartoon caption
A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
. . .exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.
-- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), _Madame Bovary_, ch. 12
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
-- Guy Davenport
Celibacy is not hereditary.
-- Guy Goden
God is love, but get it in writing.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee
She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of Ten Best.
-- H. Allen Smith (1906-1976)
When there are two conflicting versions of a story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
-- H. Allen Smith (1906-1976)
On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks.
-- H. Allen Smith, Let the Crabgrass Grow
Lord FINCHLEY tried to mend the Electric Light Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right! It is the business of the wealthy man To give employment to the artisan.
-- H. Belloc
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
-- H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927
The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- H. P. Lovecraft
Models are to be used, not believed.
-- H. Theil `Principles of Econometrics'
Voting for the right is doing nothing for it.
-- H.D. Thoreau, An Essay on Civil Disobedience, 1849.
Advertising is legalized lying.
-- H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
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?'
-- H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
-- H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death
-- H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.
-- H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
You can't expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school.
-- H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. Byron _Our Boys_
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Alimony: the ransom the happy pay to the devil.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
An unwarlike Marine is as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
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 (1880-1956)
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Creator: a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
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 (1880-1956)
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
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 (1880-1956)
Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Men have a much better time of it than woemn; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing they die earlier.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
New York: A third-rate Babylon.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish proofs are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents . . .
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol to his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to The Bill of Rights.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
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 (1880-1956)
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The worshiper is the father of the gods.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
When women kiss, it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Wife: a former sweetheart.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Congress consists of 1/3, more or less, scoundrels; 2/3, more or less, idiots; and three thirds, more or less, poltroons.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
. . .no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) - The Allied Arts
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) (1930)
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) on Shakespeare
It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume . . .that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), [1927]: Life under Bureaucracy, pp.241-2
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 (1880-1956), Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks - 1956 (p.48)
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity . . ..
-- H.L. Mencken, 1930
No one in this world, as far as I know . . .has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
-- H.L. Mencken, Notes on Journalism, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 19, 1926,
Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards.
-- H.L. Mencken, writing of William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the supporters of Tennessee's anti-evolution law at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.
. . .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 (there is) no cause to value one above the other.
-- H.P. Lovecraft
You have dreamed too well, O wise archdreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away from the world of all men's vision to that which is wholly yours, . . .
-- H.P. Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
O words of love, O words divine! The silver thought, the golden line! Of all men's words, there's none so fine, As these three words: 'I've got mine!'
-- Hagar the Horrible
All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and meaningless in some sense.
-- Hagbard Celine H.M. S.H.
Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements, sooner or later the product will speak for itself.
-- Hajime Karatsu
In order to succeed in any enterprise, one must be persistent and patient. Even if one has to run some risks, one must be brave and strong enough to meet and overcome vexing challenges to maintain a successful business in the long run. I cannot help saying that Americans lack this necessary challenging spirit today.
-- Hajime Karatsu
No one so thoroughly appreciates the value of constructive criticism as the one who's giving it.
-- Hal Chadwick
Dammit, we're all going to die, let's die doing something *useful*!
-- Hal Clement, on comments that space exploration is dangerous
To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
-- Hamlet II:ii
This is revisionist history. This is crap. This is a lie. This is boring. This is USENET . . .
-- Hank Bovis (hb@Virginia.EDU), other attributions removed to protect the guilty
Knowledge is expensive.
-- Hanna Gray, current president of the University of Chicago
Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
-- Hannah Arendt.
Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it, and that a very severe one.
-- Hannah Moore
When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my revolver.
(Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning.)
Literally: When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my Browning (rifle).
Alternate: When I hear the word ‘culture’ I release my pistol’s safety-catch.
-- Hanns Johst (1890-?), 1934, in "Schlageter" (play); spoken by character Friedrich Thiemann
Attributed to Hermann Göering (and variously to others)
When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.
-- Hans Johst (c. 1939)
For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.
-- Hans Konig
We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from nonlife to life.
-- Hans Moravec (on artificial intelligence)
Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.
-- Harlan Ellison
Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.
-- Harlan Ellison
My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths. . .
-- Harlan Ellison
Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repetition and time that has been killed.
-- Harlan Ellison
The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
-- Harlan Ellison.
The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth.
-- Harold Evans
I am against Government by crony.
-- Harold Ickes, on resigning as Secretary of the Interior (Feb 1946)
Soldiers are the tradesmen of killing, but officers are the managers of violence.
-- Harold Lasswell
I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.
-- Harold Macmillan b. 1894, British prime minister (1957-1963)
Hemingway was a jerk.
-- Harold Robbins as quoted in Leslie Halliwell's The Filmgoer's Companion, 1984
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
-- Harold S. Kushner
If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
. . . The book is worth attention for only two reasons: (1) it attacks attempts to expose sham paranormal studies; and (2) it is very well and plausibly written and so rather harder to dismiss or refute by simple jeering.
-- Harry Eagar, reviewing Beyond the Quantum by Michael Talbot, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 200-201
This fellow Charles Lindbergh will never make it. He's doomed.
-- Harry Guggenheim, millionaire aviation enthusiast
Can machines have souls? You ask me that and I ask you if souls can learn. If they can't -- then of what importance is this concept? Sterile and empty and unchangeable for eternity. How much more preferable it is to understand that we create ourselves. Slowly and painfully, shaped basically by our genes, modified steadily by everything we see and hear and attempt to understand. That is the reality and that is how we function, learn and develop.
-- Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, The Turing Option
New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts.
-- Harry Hershfield
Living in California adds ten years to a man's life. And those extra ten years I'd like to spent in New York.
-- Harry Ruby
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar . . ..He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972)
Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972), Apr 28, 1959
He'll sit here and he'll say, Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen.
-- Harry S Truman (1884-1972), on presidential power
Our religious faith gives us the answer to the false beliefs of Communism . . . I have the feeling that God has created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.
-- Harry S Truman Public Papers of the President of the United States: Harry S. Truman - 1951 U.S. Gov. 1966 pp548-549
Democracy is, first and foremost, a spiritual force, it is built upon a spiritual basis - and on a belief in God and an observance of moral principle. And in the long run only the church can provide that basis. Our founder knew this truth - and we will neglect it at our peril.
-- Harry Truman, Public Papers of the President of the United States: Harry S. Truman - 1951 U.S. Gov. 1966 p1063
Everything is true -- Everything is permissible!
-- Hassani Sabbah 5.
The place where optimism flourishes the most is the lunatic asylum.
-- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
-- Hawkwind
Seek into the Chao if thou wouldst be wise And find ye delight in Her Great Surprise! Look into the Chao if thou wantest to know What's in a Chao and why it ain't so!
-- HBT; The Book of Advise, 1:1
Climb into the Chao
with a friend or two
And follow the Way it carries you,
Adrift like a Lunatic Lifeboat Crew
Over the Waves in whatever you do.
-- HBT; The Book of Advise, 1:3
The words of the Foolish and those of the Wise Are not far apart in Discordian Eyes.
-- HBT; The Book of Advise, 2:1
Hung Mung slapped his buttocks, hopped about, and shook his head, saying ‘I do not know! I do not know!’
-- HBT; The Book of Gooks, Chap. 1
!!ELECTION TIME!! Winner - Bill Clinton!! Losers - Middle Class!!
-- headline
Forward goes the vanguard of the lunatic fringe, tickling the death clowns of normality.
-- HealNorm
I'll moider da bum.
-- Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
-- Hebrews 13:2
Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.
-- Hedda Hopper
Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son metier. (God will forgive me. It's his job.)
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
Oh, what lies there are in kisses!
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged.
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them
-- Heisenberg
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-- Helen Keller
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature . . . Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
-- Helen Keller
The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but has no vision.
-- Helen Keller
A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won't even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
Marriage is a bargain, and somebody has to get the worst of the bargain.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
To a woman the first kiss is just the end of the beginning but to a man it is the beginning of the end.
-- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.
-- Henny Youngman
Most affections are habits or duties we lack the courage to end.
-- Henri de Montherlant
It is well to write love letters. There are certain things for which it is not easy to ask your mistress face to face, like money for instance.
-- Henri De Regnier
Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means . . ..[A] machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.
-- Henri Poincare
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Norwegian Playwright
Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Norwegian Playwright
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Norwegian Playwright
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) Norwegian Playwright
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
-- Henry Adams
Hell must be isothermal; for otherwise the resident engineers and physical chemists (of which there must be some) could set up a heat engine to run a refrigerator to cool off a portion of their surroundings to any desired temperature.
-- Henry Albert Ben, The Second Law
It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.
-- Henry Allen
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
-- Henry Brook Adams
As if there were safety in stupidity alone.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. . . . If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Men have become the tools of their tools
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish fill the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The man for whom law exists -- the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), in Journal, Jan. 3, 1861
To be awake is to be alive.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), in Walden
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Maine Woods, `Chesuncook'
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden, the Conclusion
A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
He, in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Jonathan Wild
Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it; if you are sick, you shouldn't take it.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
History is bunk.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Reading musses up my mind.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
The country couldn't run without Prohibition. That is the industrial fact.
-- Henry Ford (1863-1947), 1929
Euphoric, Intoxicating, Meaningful, Beautiful, Free, Tranquil, Exciting, Sexual, Radiant, Ecstatic, Colorful, Creative, Peaceful, Festive, Utopian, Hopeful, Pure, Insightful, Original, Inspiring, Alive
-- Henry Grantham grantham@milton.u.washington.edu
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
-- Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
-- Henry Kissinger (1923- )
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
-- Henry Kissinger (1923- )
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
-- Henry Kissinger (1923-)
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
-- Henry Kissinger (1923-)
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
-- Henry Kissinger (1923-)
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, hypocrites, poltroons.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980)
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980)
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980)
Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980) _Tropic_Of_Capricorn_
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980) _Tropic_Of_Capricorn_
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980), _The_Colossus_Of_Maroussi_(1941)
A man with his belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.
-- Henry Miller (1891-1980), Tropic of Cancer 1934
A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flaming.
-- Henry Spencer
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
-- Henry Van Dyke
There is not much practical Christianity in the man who lives on better terms with angels and seraphs, than with his children, servants and neighbors.
-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
All American cars are basically Chevrolets.
-- Herb Caen
Isn't it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?
-- Herb Caen
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
-- Herb Caen
The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, it's there.
-- Herb Caen
I don't like her. But don't misunderstand me: my dislike is purely platonic.
-- Herbert Beerbohm Tree
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
-- Herbert Hoover
What the world needs today is a definite, spiritual mobilization of the nations who belive in God against this tide of Red agnosticism. . . .And in rejecting an atheistic other world, I am confident that the Almighty God will be with us.
-- Herbert Hoover, in proposing the abolition of the United Nations in favor of a cooperation of God-fearing free nations Address upon the American Road 1948-1950 p66
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together
-- Herbert Prochnow
For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent . . . It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.
-- Herbert Schiller
. . .those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded . . . Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena-- care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!
-- Herbert Spencer
A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.
-- Herbert Spencer
Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.
-- Herbert Westren Turnbull
A mighty work deserves a mighty theme.
-- Herman Melville
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
-- Herman Melville
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!
-- Herman Melville (1819-1891) - Moby Dick
You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.
-- Hermann Weyl
Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns.
-- Hermione Gingold
Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
-- Herodotus (484-425 B.C.)
Religions change; beer and wine remain.
-- Hervey Allen (1889-1949)
Prometheus, most crafty god of all You are happy that you stole the fire and tricked me But it will be a great sorrow to you And to men who come after
-- Hesiod, Works and Days 8th Century BC (?)
A liberal is a man who leaves the room when the fight begins.
-- Heywood Broun
Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
-- Heywood Broun
But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.
-- Hilaire Belloc
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
-- Hippocrates
Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. . . . It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit . . .
-- Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.C.), The Sacred Disease
You can't imagine the extra work I had when I was a god
-- Hirohito (1901-1989), Emperor of Japan
There is a theory that states: If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bazaarly inexplicable. There is another theory that states: This has already happened . . ..
-- Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
Your development gets rotten if you take too long to market it.
-- Hitoshi Aoike, JVC Ltd., Tokyo
You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
-- Ho Chi Minh
If projectile vomiting ever becomes an Olympic event, you'll do your country proud.
-- Hobson, Arthur II
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
-- Hofstadter's Law: by Douglas R. Hofstadter, from Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Man is a dog's idea of what God should be.
-- Holbrook Jackson
The greatest warriors are the ones who fight for peace.
-- Holly Near
The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle: they're on TV!
-- Homer Simpson
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
This coffee plunges into the stomach . . .the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle . . .. Memories charge at full gallop . . .the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
-- Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) - The Physiology of Marriage, 1829
A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.
-- Horace Porter (1837- --), a bon-mot in the Cleveland-Blaine campaign of 1884.
Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
-- Horace Smith
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.
-- Horace Walpole
Foolish writers and readers are created for each other.
-- Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.
-- Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent.
-- Horton – from Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken
I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon.
-- Howard Chaykin
Women get a little pip, a little perk out of it. It's like, Here I am at this very serious business meeting and they really don't know that I'm wearing a garter belt!
-- Howard Gross, president of Victoria's Secret
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long.
-- Howard Kandel
Was all this bloodshed and deceit - from Columbus to Cortes, Pizarro the Puritans - a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization? Was Morison right in burying the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be made - as it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and Truman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?
-- Howard Zinn
Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
-- http://www.geocities.com/Paris/4378/gestures.html
Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. Its's what you do with what you have left.
-- Hubert Humphrey
Hugh Downs' Four Rules for Investigating the Universe:
Rule #1: When confronted with an apparent infinite or infinitely repeating pattern, expect some variant that keeps it from being infinite.
Rule #2: When all investigation supports Rule 1, look for a situation which violates it.
Rule #3: Be prepared for an infinite oscillation between Rules 1 and 2.
Rule #4: Apply Rule 1.
-- Hugh Downs
I'm not apt to be getting married in the near future and my lifestyle isn't apt to dramatically change as a result of any new relationship.
-- Hugh Hefner, Playboy Interview - January 1974
Man alone is brought forth naked and unarmed, his reason shines forth much more brilliantly in inventing these things than ever it would have if man had naturally possessed them.
-- Hugh of St. Victor (1096 - 1141)
If you get somebody to give you a dollar, they'll vote for you for the rest of their lives.
-- Hugh Parmer, Democratic candidate for the 1990 U.S. Senate, from Texas
The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions - which time and mediocrity can solve.
-- Hugh Trevor-Roper - Men and Events
The problem with the world is that it's about three drinks behind.
-- Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart didn't write any of the things he said in Casablanca, or any other movie. He did say, during the McCarthy Era: They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.
-- Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) American film actor of the Un-American Activities Committee Nancy J. Gill, Quinquagenarian
A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
At the end of the decade, no one will be sure of anything except sex will kill you, politicians lie, rain is poison, and the world is run by whores. These are terrible things to accept, even if you are rich.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Faster, faster, till the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
The time has come to kick ass
-- Hunter S. Thompson
We are, after all, professionals.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
What is there left to a generation that has been told that there is poison in the rain and sex is death? Nothing but TV and relentless masturbation.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
That is the problem with this rich and anguished generation. Somewhere a long time ago they fell in love with the idea that politicians-- even the slickest and brightest presidential candidates-- were real heroes and truly exciting people. That is wrong on its face. They are mainly dull people with corrupt instincts and criminal children.
-- Hunter S. Thompson -- Generation of Swine
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
-- Hunter S. Thompson alias Raoul Duke alias Dr Gonzo
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of _writing_ from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language-- and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, A Generation of Swine
He had that rare weird electricity about him--that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving normally.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing '72
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas . . . with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
If there is, in fact, a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix . . .
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine
Its okay to get jacked up and head out onto the highway, but I've been there and I can tell you that the fast lane is littered with countless smoldering wrecks.
-- Hunter S.Thompson
Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
-- I.F. Stone 1907-1989
In the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, it's often useful to have a nice, solid piece of wood in your hands.
-- Ian Faith, manager of Spinal Tap
Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.
-- Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
You look at your needs, at your competitors, at what you can afford, and you cut your cloth accordingly.
-- Ian Ross, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Favorite color: I hate colors.
-- Ian Shoales
I know what love is: Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall, Romeo and Juliet, Jackie and John and Marilyn . . ..
-- Ian Shoales
Sigmund Freud was a half baked Viennese quack. Our literature, culture, and the films of Woody Allen would be better today if Freud had never written a word.
-- Ian Shoales
All these black people are screwing up my democracy.
-- Ian Smith
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.
-- IBM maintenance manual, 1925
You've got be careful about getting locked into open systems.
-- IBM salesman
I think they will be very effective in keeping Catholic legislators away from the Communion rail.
-- Idaho Senator Mike Blackbird, about ecclesiastical sanctions against politicians
I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that would be distributed equally throughout the world.
-- Idi Amin
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
-- Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
-- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt . . ..but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.
-- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Basically a dog person. I certainly, though, wouldn't want to offend my constituents who are cat people, and I should say that being, I hope, a sensitive person, that I have nothing against cats, and had cats when I was a boy, and if we didn't have the two dogs might very well be interested in having a cat now.
-- Incoming Missouri Congressman James Talent, responding to the question Are you a dog or a cat person?
I'm a scientist; nothing shocks me.
-- Indiana Jones
Repel them. Repel them. Induce them to relinquish the spheroid.
-- Indiana University fans' chant for their perennially bad football team
Well, Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, And Lightness has a call that's hard to hear.
-- Indigo Girls
This is the trick, I give it to you, you can use it. We looked at the program and divided it into the essential elements, which turned out to be thirty odd. And we proceeded methodically to make one hundred studies of each element. At the end of the hundred studies we tried to get the solution for that element that suited the thing best, and then set that up as a standard below which we would not fall in the final scheme. Then we proceeded to break down all logical combinations of these elements, trying to not erode the quality that we had gained in the best of the hundred single elements; and then we took those elements and began to search for the logical combinations of combinations, and several of such stages before we even began to consider a plan. And at that point, when we felt we'd gone far enough to consider a plan, worked out study after study and on into the other aspects of the detail and the presentation./It went on, it was sort of a brutal thing, and at the end of this period, it was a two-stage competition and sure enough we were in the second stage. Now you have to start; what do you do? We reorganized all elements, but this time, with a little bit more experience, chose the elements in a different way (still had about 26, 28, or 30) and proceeded: we made 100 studies of every element; we took every logical group of elements and studied those together in a way that would not fall below the standard that we had set. And went right on down the procedure. And at the end of that time, before the second competition drawings went in, we really wept, it looked so idiotically simple we thought we'd sort of blown the whole bit. And we won the competition. This is the secret and you can apply it.
-- Industrial designer Charles Eames describing the trick process that he and Eero Saarinen used in designing a chair for a competition.
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
-- Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)
No one can forbid us the future.
-- Inscription on the base of Paris's monument to Leon Gambetta
Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees.
-- Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989
What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?
-- Irv Kupcinet
I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
Truth is shorter than fiction.
-- Irving Cohen
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
-- Irving Kristol
Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
-- Irwin Edman (1896-1954)
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-- Isaac Asimov
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
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
THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
-- Isaac Asimov
To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the scientific establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.
-- Isaac Asimov
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
-- Isaac Asimov
United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.
-- Isaac Asimov
We know that a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer
There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.
-- Isaac Stern
One man's religion is another mans' belly laugh.
-- Isacc Azimov
A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to comprehend his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.
-- Israel Zangwill
Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost.
-- Ivan Chtcheglov
What can I wish to the youth of my country who devote themselves to science? . . .Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
-- Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: 'Great God, grant that twice two be not four.'
-- Ivan Tuergenev, Prayer
I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
-- J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
Justice is incidental to law and order.
-- J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
-- J. Frank Dobie - A Texan in England, 1945
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
-- J. K. Galbraith
The subspace W inherits the other 8 properties of V. And there aren't even any property taxes.
-- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b
The nicest thing about the Alto is that it doesn't run faster at night.
-- J. Morris
If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
-- J. Paul Getty
The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.
-- J. Paul Getty
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, The pessimist fears it is true.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.
-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.
-- J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose.
-- J.B.S. Haldane
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose.
-- J.B.S. Haldane On Being the Right Size in the (1928) book Possible Worlds
To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.
-- J.B.S. Haldane, On Being the Right Size in the (1928) book Possible Worlds
I readily accept all that biologists postulate in respect of my brain, yet I find my own consciously experiencing self not satisfactorily accounted for . . . The further we progress in research, the more each of us will realise the tremendous mystery of our personal existence as a consciously experiencing being with imagination and a sense of value and a systematisation of knowledge.’
-- J.C. Eccles, Facing Reality (1971).
It's currently a problem of access to gigabits through punybaud.
-- J.C.R. Licklider
God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place.
-- J.D. McCoughey
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
-- J.D. Salinger
Take most people, they're crazy about cars. I'd rather have a goddamn horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.
-- J.D. Salinger
You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
-- J.D. Salinger
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
-- J.G. Ballard
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- J.K. Galbraith
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
-- J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)
I am not young enough to know everything.
-- J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)
I know not, sir whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
-- J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)
When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death.
-- J.P. Donleavy
J.P Morgan, when asked what the stock market will do, replied, It will fluctuate.
-- J.P. Morgan
Extremism in the defense of extremism is no vice.
-- J.R. Bob Dobbs, Rant Tape 16 (1980)
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, And people who will see a world that I shall never know. But all the while I sit and think of times that were before, I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Never judge a book by its movie.
-- J.W. Eagan
For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.
-- J.W.N. Sullivan
A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid.
-- Jack Benny (1894-1974)
Somehow the texture, out of nowhere, Produces a species of Atavistic anomie, a Melancholy memory of food.
-- Jack Collom
Suddenly, masked hombres seized Petunia Pig And Made her into a sort of dense Jell-O.
-- Jack Collom
Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics. I'd already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy.
-- Jack Kemp - Former Buffalo Bills quarterback and U.S. House Representative
The censors say they're protecting the family unit in America, when the reality is, if you suck a tit, you're an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you're a PG.
-- Jack Nicholson, Playboy Interview - April 1972
When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature!
-- Jack Nicholson's character in The Witches of Eastwick
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
-- Jack Paar
A communist is a person who publicly airs his dirty Lenin.
-- Jack Pomeroy
Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.
-- Jack Warner
It's our fault. We should have given him better parts.
-- Jack Warner on hearing that Ronald Reagan had been elected governor of California
It isn't easy being a fat narcissist.
-- Jackie Gleason
I drink for the honorable purpose of getting bagged.
-- Jackie Gleason, Playboy Interview - December 1962
There's no fool like an old fool -- you can't beat experience.
-- Jacob Braude
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.
-- Jacob Bronowski
Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him.
-- Jacqueline Susann (1921-1974), after reading Portnoy's Complaint
There is nothing outside the text.
-- Jacques Derrida – the quote is the foundation of Deconstruction
It wasn't my fault. An old friend came in from out of town. My suit didn't come back from the cleaners. I got a flat tire. My cab didn't show. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locust!! IT WASN'T MY FAULT!!!
-- Jake Blues (John Belushi), _The Blues Brothers_
If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?
-- Jalai Al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)
Never whistle while you FTP.
-- Jalb
My own life has been spent chronicling the rise and fall of human systems, and I am convinced that we are terribly vulnerable . . .. We should be reluctant to turn back upon the frontier of this epoch. Space is indifferent to what we do; it has no feeling, no design, no interest in whether or not we grapple with it. But we cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.
-- James A. Michener
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
-- James Agate
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
-- James Baldwin
A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.
-- James Beard
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
-- James Bryant Conant
Courtly love-poetry may first have been written during long periods of abstinence on the Crusades, but it would not have flourished in the cold of northern Europe without some help from the chimney.
-- James Burke
Take that, you hostile sons-of-bitches!
-- James Coburn, in the finale of “The President's Analyst”
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.
-- James F. Byrnes
The most annoying trait of Right-Wing Outlaws in general is a lazy incuriosity about the real world. They know their lines, they're sure who the good guys and the bad guys are. Therefore they view the passing world as a kind of animated Bartlett's Quotations - that is, as handy source material with which to illustrate, rather than challenge, preconceived views.
-- James Fallows
The personal computer market is about the same size as the total potato chip market. Next year it will be about half the size of the pet food market and is fast approaching the total worldwide sales of pantyhose
-- James Finke, Pres., Commodore Int'l Ltd.(1982)
Ignorance transcends architecture.
-- James Gaskin
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset.
-- James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978)
I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.
-- James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978)
It still brings to mind the question of what (if anything) can be done to show the media that 'cyberpunks' aren't just a bunch of pimple-faced geeks who sit around trying to break into bank computers or whatever.
-- James Hartman (phaedrus@flatline.UUCP)
Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway.
-- James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate
Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.
-- James J. Ling
The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.
-- James Joseph Sylvester
During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.
-- James Madison (1751-1836)
We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.
-- James Madison (1751-1836)
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.
-- James Magary
A man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.
-- James Mellon, who paid $300 for a civil war Union army deferment.
The federal procurement system is like a software system with bugs. Every time it's broken down, somebody has patched it. But keeping it together is getting harder and harder and costing more money. And at that point, an experienced software engineer would throw up his hands and say, 'Hey! Let's toss this out and start over.'
-- James Paul, House Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.
It is unnecessary to understand electromagnetic theory before wiring a lamp or to study physics in order to repair a pump. We count on our fingers and give no heed to the proliferating implications of the act.
-- James R. Newman
There are. . . scientific works-- star catalogues, for example-- which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, very personal responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.
-- James R. Newman
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.
-- James Reston
Why yes--a bulletproof vest.
-- James Rodges, a murderer, on his final request before the firing squad
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-- James Russell Lowell
I'm out of ammunition on this.
-- James Stockdale - during 1992 Vice Presidential debate, concluding his answer to a question about health policy
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
A woman's place is in the wrong.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
Early to rise and early to bed Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
I hate women because they always know where things are.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand.
-- James Watt
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
-- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
-- Jane Austen (1775-1817)
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
-- Jane Austen (1775-1817)
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
-- Jane Bryant Quinn, Reader's Digest, 1 Dec. 1980.
They HATE my father! They filled his well with manure and made him talk to lawyers!
-- Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou
All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific.
-- Jane Wagner
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat.
-- Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin
You have class, Claire! You have class up the butt!!
-- Janitor Joe, A Sinful Life
It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.
-- Janov Pelorat in Asimov's Foundation's Edge
We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
-- Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks
What a price we pay for experience, when we must sell our youth to buy it.
-- Javan
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.
-- Jay Leno
Governor Bill Weld (R. Mass) was quoted as saying Dan Quayle had the sharpest political mind in the White House. That's true. At the time, George Bush was out campaigning, and Barbara was out walking Millie the dog.
-- Jay Leno
How would it be if we discovered that aliens only stopped by earth to let their kids take a leak?
-- Jay Leno
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know He is.
-- Jean Anouilh
The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest amount of hissing.
-- Jean Baptiste Colbert
The affections are like lightning; You cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen
-- Jean Baptiste Lacoraire
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
-- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
-- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails they try to poison you. If this fails too the finish by loading honors on your head.
-- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like.
-- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
-- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
-- Jean de La Bruyere (1645-1696)
Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist.
-- Jean Icbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
-- Jean Kerr
I don't want to see the uncut version of anything.
-- Jean Kerr, quoted by Gerald Nachman, San Francisco Chronicle 1/2/83
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
-- Jean Rostand
On tue un homme, on est un assasin. On tue des millions d'hommes, on est un conquŽrant. On tue les nous, on est un dieu. (Kill a man, you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, you are a conqueror. Kill all, you are a god.)
-- Jean Rostand
No statue has ever been put up to a critic.
-- Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
The main thing is you and I should exist, and that we should be you and I. Apart from that let everything go as it likes. The best order of things to my way thinking, is the one I was meant to be part of, and to hell with the most perfect of worlds if I am not in it. I would rather exist, even as an impudent argufier, than not exist at all.
-- Jean-Francois Rameau
They smell, they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they're sneaky, selfish and not at all smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free environment.
-- Jean-Michel Chapereau, on cats
A chic type, a rough type, an odd type -- but never a stereotype
-- Jean-Michel Jarre
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
-- Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973)
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Hell is other people.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Slime is the agony of water.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
So we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness acts as our guide and our doubts serve to reassure us.
-- Jean-Pierre de Caussade, eighteenth-century Jesuit priest
When people aren't stupid Usenet is even more useful. Too bad this happens so rarely.
-- Jef Poskanzer
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night Removes the colors from our sight Red is gray, and yellow white But we decide which is right And which is a quantization error.
-- Jef Poskanzer, from the doc to his oh-so-cool program that converts color bitmaps to greyscale ones.
Earth is a great funhouse without the fun.
-- Jeff Berner
That to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life
-- Jeff Chance
I'm a lover, not a hacker.
-- Jeff Daiell
Taxes? We don't need no stinking taxes.
-- Jeff Daiell
When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money'. When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket'. When the State demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax'.
-- Jeff Daiell
One man's mate is another man's passion.
-- Jeff Daiell's description of adultery
Everyone's head is a cheap movie show.
-- Jeff G. Bone
I think for the most part that the readership here uses the c-word in a similar fashion. I don't think anybody really believes in a new, revolutionary literature -- I think they use `cyberpunk' as a term of convenience to discuss the common stylistic elements in a small subset of recent sf books.
-- Jeff G. Bone
So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*. Surely we don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and philosophical message in all this, do we? So if this `cyberpunk' thing is just a term of convenience, how can somebody sell out? If cyberpunk is just a word we use to describe a particular style and imagery in sf, how can it be dead? Where are the profound statements that the `Movement' is or was trying to make? I think most of us are interested in examining and discussing literary (and musical) works that possess a certain stylistic excellence and perhaps a rather extreme perspective; this is what CP is all about, no? Maybe there should be a newsgroup like, say, alt.postmodern or somthing. Something less restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk.
-- Jeff G. Bone
Well, punk is kind of anti-ethical, anyway. Its ethics, so to speak, include a disdain for ethics in general. If you have to think about some- thing so hard, then it's bullshit anyway; that's the idea. Punks are anti- ismists, to coin a term. But nonetheless, they have a pretty clearly defined stance and image, and THAT is what we hang the term `punk' on.
-- Jeff G. Bone
pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.
-- Jeff Meyer
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-- Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal
And thou shalt smite thine enemy even unto the wall, gnashing thy teeth, and he shall grow small in thy mirrors.
-- Jeff Zurschmeide
Anyone who tries to `enlighten' you is probably selling something.
-- Jen Howard.
Every law is an infraction of liberty.
-- Jeremy Bentham
Lawers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
-- Jeremy Bentham
The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.
-- Jeremy Rifkin
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
It is impossible to enjoy idling unless there is plenty of work to do.
-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.
-- Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking.
-- Jerome Lettvin
At least when I was governor, cocaine was expensive.
-- Jerry Brown
Sometimes even powerlessness has a power of its own. Who is it who took India? Some guy in his underwear.
-- Jerry Brown, Playboy Interview - April 1976
Put all your eggs in one basket, and WATCH THAT BASKET!
-- Jerry Buchmeyer
I listen to the feminists and all these radical gals - most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have married, but they've married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of these feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men -- that's their problem.
-- Jerry Falwell
The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight.
-- Jerry Falwell
We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism . . . we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today . . .our battle is with Satan himself.
-- Jerry Falwell
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe. That's why I think it's important to get high. I'm not talking about unconscious or zonked out. I'm talking about being fully conscious.
-- Jerry Garcia
Tipper and Al came to a show the last time we were in Washington. They're nice people, a nice family. We made every effort not to frighten them.
-- Jerry Garcia, on rumors the Grateful Dead may play at the Inaugural. Boston Globe, Dec 12, 1992.
If I die tonight and you wake up tomorrow, don't send flowers. Don't come around with your tears. Picket. To to PTA meetings. Fight for higher wages. Make the most of it.
-- Jesse Jackson, Playboy Interview - November 1969
Boot leather flashing and spur-necks the size of my thumb. This high-born hunter had tastes as strange as they come. Unbridled passion: I took the bit in my teeth. Her standing over: me on my knees underneath.
-- Jethro Tull – Hunting Girl
Now I may tell you that it's love and not just lust. And if we live the lie, let's lie in trust. On golden daffodils, to catch the silver stream That washes out the wild oat seed on Velvet Green.
-- Jethro Tull - Velvet Green
I'll make love to you in all good places under black mountains in open spaces. By deep brown rivers that slither darkly through far marches where the blue hare races.
-- Jethro Tull, Acres Wild
In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.
-- Jethro Tull, Aqualung
. . .cops and reporters are much alike. Both are absolutely dedicated to doing the job at hand, regardless of obstacles. And both, deep down, really believe the rules don't apply to them.
-- Jim Barlow, Houston Chronicle
All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.
-- Jim Fiebig
It is no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.
-- Jim Grue
I think the best way I've heard this put is Pascal gives you a water pistol filled with distilled water. C not only gives you a loaded .357, it points it at your head as a default. Why do you think Pascal is taught in school? And which would you rather have when there was a hungry bear in the area?
-- Jim Harkins (jharkins@sagpd1.UUCP)
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
-- Jim Horning
Behind every old war story is a bloody battle and a victim who died horribly. On every piece of ill-gotten booty are the fingerprints of the oppressed. And behind the mask of the cuddly old storyteller is not a warrior, but a skulking, cowardly killer, who cannot face his own deeds.
-- Jim Royal
The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.
-- Jim Samuels
I woudn't recommend sex, drugs, or Unix for everyone, but they work for me.
-- Jim Thompson (jthomp@central.sun.com), paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson
After winning the decathlon, Jim Thorpe was told by the King of Sweden, You are the world's greatest athlete. Thorpe replied, Thanks, King.
-- Jim Thorpe
Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.
-- Jimmy Cannon (1910-1973)
England produces the best fat actors.
-- Jimmy Cannon (1910-1973)
Fishing, with me, has always been an excuse to drink in the daytime.
-- Jimmy Cannon (1910-1973)
I'm growing older, but not up.
-- Jimmy Cannon (1910-1973)
You can't legislate morality. We tried to outlaw comsumption of alcoholic beverages. We found that violation of the law led to bigger crimes and bred disrespect for the law.
-- Jimmy Carter, 1976.
Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.
-- Jimmy Carter, Message to Congress, August 2, 1977
I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.
-- Jimmy Carter, Playboy Interview - November 1976
No
-- Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy when asked by a reporter if she had any message for the children of America.
I desire the Poles carnally.
-- Jimmy Carter's mistranslation in a 1977 speech in Poland
I don't need bodyguards.
-- Jimmy Hoffa, Playboy Interview - December 1975
Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.
-- Jimmy Swaggart
So-called Christian rock. . . . is a diabolical force undermining Christianity from within.
-- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocrite and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll., The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rythm of the music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better.
-- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll., The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.
-- Jimmy Swaggart, TV preacher, self-described pornography addict who paid prostitutes to commit pornographic acts, hypocrite
California: The west coast of Iowa.
-- Joan Didion
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on a bus
Trying to make his way home
-- Joan Osborne, "One of Us"
What if God was one of us trying to make his way home?
-- Joan Osborne, One of Us
A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.
-- Joan Rivers
I caused my husband's heart attack. In the middle of lovemaking I took the paper bag off my head. He dropped the Polaroid and keeled over and so did the hooker. It would have taken me half an hour to untie myself and call the paramedics, but fortunately the Great Dane could dial.
-- Joan Rivers
Not one man has ever told me I'm beautiful - in my entire life. I think that's what's made me the aggressive wreck I am today.
-- Joan Rivers, Playboy Interview - November 1986
Will your long-winded speeches never end? What ails you that you keep on arguing?
-- Job 16:3
Life is a pinball machine. You bounce around for a while, and then you drain.
-- Joe Bak
If life had a vomit meter, we'd be off the scale.
-- Joe Bob Briggs
SURE-FIRE SINGLES AD: Famous Writer needs woman to organize his life and spend his money. Loves to turn off Sunday football and go to the Botanical Gardens with that special someone. Will obtain plastic surgery if necessary.
-- Joe Bob Briggs
By the time of the Great Renaming, net.suicide, along with net.rumors, was mainly populated by refugees from net.bizarre, which was the first popular group ever dropped by the backbone. This group of people acted like a roving gang. Ah, here's a NEW almost-empty group to post train schedules and core dums in! Imagine their squeals of joy when they discovered that posting to net.test got them mail from all over the net.
-- Joe Buck, jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu, gives us some Usenet history
Sometimes, too long is too long.
-- Joe Crowe
Just the facts, Ma'am
-- Joe Friday
A detective digs around in the garbage of people's lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage.
-- Joe Gores
There are, however, people in this world who seldom pick up a newspaper, people who, when watching television, sneer in displeasure and change channels at the first glimpse of an anchorperson. While such willfully uninformed citizens are rare, emerging from seclusion only to serve on juries in trials of great national significance, they do exist.
-- Joe Keenan
I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.
-- Joe Mullally, computer salesman
I guess from the termites' perspective, the damage they do to our homes is 'progress.'
-- Joe Sobran
I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
-- Joe Walsh
Lack of skill dictates economy of style.
-- Joey Ramone
Far beyond all other pleasures, rarer than jewels or treasures, sweeter than grape from the vine. Yes! Yes! Greatest of pleasures! Coffee, coffee, how I love its flavor, and if you would win my favor, yes! yes! let me have coffee, let me have my coffee strong!
-- Johann Sebastian Bach, Coffee Cantata
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves, too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)
Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers!
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832)
I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.
-- Johannes Kepler, Astronomis nova
People are so busy lengthening their lives with exercise they don't have time to live them.
-- Johathan Miller
A ship in harbor is safe-- but that is not what ships are for.
-- John A. Shedd
Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.
-- John A. Wheeler
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory.
-- John A. Wheeler
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
-- John Adams
We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.
-- John Adams
Jefferson still survives.
-- John Adams (1735-1826), last words after a lifetime competing with Thomas Jefferson
. . .a revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.
-- John Adams (Diary, 1786)
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
-- John Archibald Wheeler (1911- )
A man must properly pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra had to be subsidized.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Brides aren't happy - they are just triumphant.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Method acting? There are quite a few methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass and some cracked ice.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
The good die young - because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
You never realize how short a month is until you pay alimony.
-- John Barrymore (1882-1942)
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
-- John Barrymore's dying words (1882-1942)
It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we admire him.
-- John Barth
If we burn ourselves out with drugs or alcohol, we won't have long to go in this business.
-- John Belushi, Playboy Interview - May 1977
I knew I'd been living in Berkeley too long when I saw a sign that said 'Free firewood and my first thought was Who was Firewood and what did he do?'
-- John Berger
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither produce utopian trash.
-- John Berger
It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger then the previous record.
-- John Blasik
He grounds the warship he walks on.
-- John Bracken on Captain Barney Kelly who ran the USS Enterprise into the mud of San Francisco Bay in May 1983
Here's to our wives and sweethearts - may they never meet.
-- John Bunny (1866-1939)
In prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
-- John Bunyan (1628-1688), English writer, allegorist
The best prayers have often more groans than words.
-- John Bunyan (1628-1688), English writer, allegorist
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
IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-in-the-ground technique' to destroy the competition . . ... IBM digs a big HOLE in the ground and covers it with leaves. It then puts a big POT OF GOLD nearby. Then it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all this gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the competitor approaches the pot, he falls into the pit
-- John C. Dvorak
Rather, she [ Death ] simply is the Ultimate Hostess who tells you when your table's ready. It's up to other powers what section you're seated in (smoking or non-smoking).
-- John C. Straffin
Failures are divided into two classes - those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.
-- John Charles Salak
A dollar saved is a quarter earned.
-- John Ciardi
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
-- John Ciardi
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
-- John Ciardi
Language works the way it does because it does.
-- John Ciardi
There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.
-- John Ciardi
I want to suggest to you today, that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes - I might almost say a positive attitude toward them - we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully. Now, of course, if you now say to me, Look here, you weird Limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel? I will reply, No. There are mistakes - and mistakes. There are true, copper-bottom mistakes like spelling the word rabbit with three Ms; wearing a black bra under a white shirt; or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. These are the kind of mistakes described by Mr. David Letterman as Brushes With Stupidity, because they have no reasonable chance of success.
-- John Cleese
If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking 'Do you want fries with that?'
-- John Cleese
We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish.
-- John Culkin
Mathematicians are the people you don't want to meet at cocktail parties.
-- John D. Barrow
I believe that the power to make money is a gift from God.
-- John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937)
Riches: A gift from Heaven signifying, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
-- John D. Rockefeller, (slander by Ambrose Bierce)
I epitomize America.
-- John Denver
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
-- John Dewey
No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; 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 thy 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 (1571? - 1631), _Meditation XVII_
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
-- John E. E. Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902), The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ch. 1 (1907)
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on mankind the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitiable.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
When I became President, what surprised me most was that things were just as bad as I'd been saying they were.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) in 1960, As given in A. Schlesinger Jr's, A Thousand Days
I think 'Hail to the Chief' has a nice ring to it.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) when asked what is his favorite song
Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.
-- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), remarks to the trustees of the national cultural center (now The Kennedy Center), November 14, 1961, _Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States:John F. Kennedy, 1961_, p. 719
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
-- John Galsworthy
The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits.
-- John Gay
It depends on your definition of asleep. They were not stretched out. They had their eyes closed. They were seated at their desks with their heads in a nodding position.
-- John Hogan, Commonwealth Edison Supervisor of News Information, responding to a charge by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector that two Dresden Nuclear Plant operators were sleeping on the job.
The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.
-- John Hospers
Why think? Why not try the experiment?
-- John Hunter
I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk
-- John Huston
The history of the rise of Christianity has everything to do with politics, culture, and human frailties and nothing to do with supernatural manipulation of events. Had divine intervention been the guiding force, surely two millennia after the birth of Jesus he would not have a world where there are more Muslims than Catholics, more Hindus than Protestants, and more nontheists than Catholics and Protestants combined.
-- John K. Naland, The First Easter, Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2
While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged. Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each second.
-- John K. Stevens, Reverse Engineering the Brain Byte magazine, Page 287, April 1985,
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.
-- John Keats
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
-- John Keats
Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.
-- John Keats
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
You will find that the State is the kind of ORGANIZATION which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), U.S. economist. Guardian (London, 28 July 1989).
. . .the value of the constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless.
-- John Kormylo
The most important question in the study of government is 'how can we prevent government from going beserk and killing off half the population?'
-- John Kormylo
Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy's girlfriend in an Italian restaurant, he said to the waiter, Hold the spumoni -- I'm going to follow the chick an' catch a Tory.
-- John L. Ashman
Today, a successful Congressman has the fundraising ability of a hooker trying to raise cab fare home . . ..
-- John L. Jackley, New York Times, 10/29/90, p. A15.
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
-- John Lennon (1940-1980)
There's a great woman behind every idiot.
-- John Lennon (1941-1980) on Yoko Ono
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
-- John Lilly
You are not your opinion of yourself.
-- John Lilly
On our campus the UNIX system has proved to be not only an effective software tool, but an agent of technical and social change within the University.
-- John Lions (U. of Toronto (?))
Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, somethimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturbe them.
-- John Locke (1632-1704)
It is one Thing, to show a Man that he is in an Error, and another, to put him in possession of Truth.
-- John Locke An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding 1690
Hi, I'm Professor Alan Ginsburg . . . But you can call me . . . Captain Toke.
-- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL
I mean, like, I just read your article in the Yale law recipe, on search and seizure. Man, that was really Out There. I was so WRECKED when I wrote that . . .
-- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL
Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
-- John Masefield (1878-1967)
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
In the long run we are all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
I'm in favor of it.
-- John McKay - Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach following a loss to Cleveland when asked what he thought of his team's execution
The cow is nothing but a machine with makes grass fit for us people to eat.
-- John McNulty
It is not miserable to be blind; it is miserable to be incapable of enduring blindness.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
-- John Morley
You did what you thought was right,' she said, surprisingly sympathetically. But then she added, `Do be careful not to do what you think's right again. It does seem to have disastrous results.'
-- John Mortimer,Rumpole for the Prosecution, p.246 (hb)
The vice-presidency ain't worth a pitcher of warm spit.
-- John Nance Garner (1868-1967)
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.
-- John O'Hara
Climbing would be a great, truly wonderful thing if it weren't for all that damn climbing.
-- John Ohrenschall
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
-- John Paul Getty
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
-- John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)
The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
-- John Philpot Curran
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
-- John R. Searle MINDS, BRAINS AND SCIENCE, p 44
The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.
-- John Randolph
You can rot here without feeling it.
-- John Rechy (referring to Los Angeles)
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies for instance.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
The point to remember is what the government gives it must first take away.
-- John S. Coleman
That's not a bug. It's a creature.
-- John S. Quarterman
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is blissfully ignorant.
-- John Simon
Dinner theater is anti-culture.
-- John Simon
Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'.
-- John Sladek
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight: nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety: is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions and blood of better men than himself.
-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
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. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), "On Liberty," 1859
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight: nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety: is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions and blood of better men than himself.
-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), "On Liberty," 1859
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
-- John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_ (1859)
I'm sort of hot-blooded. That doesn't mean necessarily I'm promiscuous. It means I really enjoy sex.
-- John Travolta, Playboy Interview - December 1978
Class is material consumed.
-- John Trudell
Pessimists have already begun to worry about what is going to replace automation.
-- John Tudor
Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-- John Tudor
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
-- John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
-- John Updike
Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
-- John von Neumann (1903-1957)
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
-- John von Neumann (1903-1957)
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
-- John von Neumann (1903-1957)
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)
Pioneering basically amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die
-- John W. Campbell
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy . . .neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-- John W. Gardner
. . .it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.
-- John W.N. Sullivan
I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.
-- John Waters
Oh honey, this is just the beginning. Stick with me and we'll claw our way to the top.
-- John Water's Hairspray
Yer beautiful in yer wrath! I shall keep you, and in responding to my passions, yer hatred will kindle into love.
-- John Wayne as Genghis Kahn to Susan Hayward, in the movie The Conqueror, 1956
I don't feel guilty that five or ten generations ago these people were slaves. Now, I'm not condoning slavery. It's just a fact of life.
-- John Wayne, Playboy Interview - May 1971
Even overweight cats instinctively know the cardinal rule: when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses
-- John Weitz
Laugh-a while you can-a, monkey-boy!
-- John Whorfin
Jesus saves sinners . . . and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!
-- John Wichers (wichers@husc4.HARVARD.EDU)
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-- John Wicker
Anyone can hate. it costs to love.
-- John Williamson
It is not possible to convey sarcasm to certain members of the net without using a 2x4. The smiley face merely reminds them of why their head is being dented.
-- John Woods
A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry - that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three-Mile Island.
-- Johnny Carson
The Hollywood tradition I like best is called ‘sucking up to the stars.’
-- Johnny Carson
It means that you have, as performers will call it, 'fuck you' money . . . All that means is that I don't have to do what I don't want to do.
-- Johnny Carson on success
Blow in its ear.
-- Johnny Carson on the best way to thaw a frozen turkey
How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?
In all honesty, Johnny, we are often at the mercy of the White House for the news we report. Frequently, we simply repeat verbatim what the White House tells us.
-- Johnny Carson to Connie Chung
Connie Chung to Johnny Carson
Who could follow Carson? Well, believe me, somebody can - and will.
-- Johnny Carson, Playboy Interview - December 1967
I think trash is the most important manifestation of culture we have in my lifetime.
-- Johnny Legend
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
-- Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson
Love is two minutes fifty-two seconds of squishing noises. It shows your mind isn't clicking right.
-- Johnny Rotten
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
-- Johnson (1709-1784)
An old puzzle asks how a barometer can be used to measure the height of a building. Answers range from dropping the instrument from the top and measuring the time of its fall to giving it to the building's superintendent in return for a look at the plans. A modern version of the puzzle asks how a personal computer can balance a checkbook. An elegant solution is to sell the machine and deposit the money.
-- Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls
If we cannot learn from our mistakes, we just rename them; ‘Success.’
-- Jon Loux
There has to be some way to measure success in the Service. British Leyland can measure success by the size of its profits. . . .. However, the Civil Service does not make profits or losses. , we measure success by the size of our staff and budget.
-- Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, [1988], p.59
Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival.
-- Jonathan Miller
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Modest Proposal
This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whoe body, all which he entered upon paper, and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation.
-- Jonathon Swift (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
We walked on the moon -- you be polite.
-- Joni Mitchell
. . . a book should not reveal things. A book should simply help us discover them.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
An honest election, under democracy, is an act of innocence which does not take place more than once in the history of a given nation.
-- Jose Marie Gil Robles; speech in Madrid, 1933
In Mexico we have a word for sushi: bait.
-- Jose Simon
A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. Well, it's quite nice, he replied, but don't you think it would be better if . . . If what? asked the composer. If . . . if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?
-- Josef Hoffman
The only way to succeed is to make people hate you.
-- Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969)
Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.
-- Joseph Addison
[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
-- Joseph Campbell
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.
-- Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
-- Joseph Conrad
Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won’t either.
-- Joseph Fischer
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
-- Joseph Heller Catch-22
Newspapers should have no friends.
-- Joseph Pulitzer
I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure.
-- Joseph Scheidler, Director, Pro-Life Action League
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
-- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
-- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
-- Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, _Computer Power and Human Reason_
Any fully matured science of ecology will have to grapple with the fact that from the ecological point of view, man is one of those animals which is in danger from its too successful participation in the struggle for existence.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
They say the veil that holds the future from us was woven by an angel of mercy.
-- Josephine Hart - from the book Sin
We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace-it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund. It needs replenishment. Not only because evil flourishes, and is, most indefensibly, defended. But because goodness is no longer a respectable aim in life. The hound of hell, envy, has driven it from the house.
-- Josephine Hart - Sin
We bury with many different emotions. Rarely with intimations of mortality. 'Buried' is the ultimate separation of them and us. As other's lives are often only dreams to us, so also others' deaths.
-- Josephine Hart - Sin
It may be risky to marry for love, but it's so honest that the Lord just has to smile on it.
-- Josh Billings (1818-1885)
The best way to convince a fool she is wrong is to let her have her own way.
-- Josh Billings (1818-1885)
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
-- Josh Billings (1818-1885)
Heaven is down. Hell is up. This is proven by the fact that the planets and stars are orderly in their movements, while down on earth we come close to the primal chaos. There are four other proofs, but I forget them.
-- Josh the Dill King Kong Kabal
The boys never meant any harm against the girls. They just meant to rape.
-- Joyce Kithira, deputy principal of a Kenyan boarding school, commenting on a raid of a girls' dormitory by a gang of boys who raped 71 girls and killed 19
Don't piddle on my leg and tell me it's raining.
-- Judge Judy
You'll get a fair trial followed by a first class hanging.
-- Judge Roy Bean
We are . . . opposed to all forms of birth control with the exception of natural family planning [the rhythm method.]
-- Judie Brown, President, American Life Lobby
We are totally opposed to abortion under any circumstances. We are also opposed to abortifacient drugs and chemicals like the Pill and the IUD, and we are also opposed to all forms of birth control with the exception of natural family planning.
-- Judie Brown, President, American Life Lobby
Have you ever dated someone because you were too lazy to commit suicide?
-- Judy Tenuta
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
-- Jules de Gaultier
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.
-- Jules Feiffer
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
-- Jules Feiffer
Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence.
-- Jules Feiffer
I grew up to have my father's looks - my fathers speech patterns - my father's posture - my father's walk - my father's opinions and my mother's contempt for my father.
-- Jules Feiffer
Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
-- Jules Feiffer
The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen, and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean that you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.
-- Jules Feiffer
I am not sincere, not even when I say I am not.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you find it.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving any excuse.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.
-- Jules Renard (1864-1910)
It's so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone's fingers have been all over it.
-- Julia Child on nouvelle cuisine
I paint paintings because I can't get the experience in any other way but there are many more experiences that are equally satisfying to me and equally inept at answering all my questions, but hover in exactitude in describing themselves and defying me to define their logic.
-- Julian Schnabel
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? . . Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and squeaking for our sakes was the world created.
-- Julian The Apostate
Right now I'm a freshman in my fourth year at U.C.L.A., but my goal is to become a veternarian, 'cause I love children.
-- Julie Brown
People readily believe what they want to believe.
-- Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, 49 B.C.
Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.
-- Julius Frontinus, 1st century A.D.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States)
Nothing is more intolerable than a wealthy woman.
-- Juvenal (60? - 140?)
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? (But who will watch the watchmen?)
-- Juvenal, Satires
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
-- K. Dunn, Geek Love
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
-- Kahlil Gibran
When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.
-- Kahlil Gibran
If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
-- Kahlil Gibran, 1923
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
-- Kahlil Gibran. The Voice of the Master, pt. 2, ch. 8 (1960; repr. in A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran, tr. by Anthony Ferris, 1962).
Great men are not always idiots.
-- Karen Elizabeth Gordon
If you demand money from someone in exchange for your silence, it's called ``blackmail.'' If your lawyer demands money from someone in exchange for your silence, it's called ``a settlement.''
-- Karl
You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? [pauses to light cigarette.] No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, It's not what you know . . .
-- Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein
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
Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
I and my public understand each other very well; it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself a therapy.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Sexual enlightenment is justified insofar as girls cannot learn too soon how children do not come into the world.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?
-- Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
. . .and it's finished! It only has to be written.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
e-credibility: the non-guaranteeable likelihood that the electronic data you're seeing is genuine rather than somebody's made-up crap.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
Even if you start your laundry before 8 AM on Saturday, you will not finish folding it until after midnight on Sunday.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
Hold still while I flame you.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
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
Kill Ugly Processor Architectures
-- Karl Lehenbauer
Memories of you remind me of you.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
My computer can beat up your computer.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
The more you have, the more you have that needs fixing.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
There are bugs and then there are bugs. And then there are bugs.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
We're the weirdest monkeys ever.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
What's the definition of a good flame? One you agree with . . .
-- Karl Lehenbauer
You can hardly do anything that won't seem stupid later.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
You know, I've never acidentally drilled a hole in myself while programming.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
If you don't read news.groups, the net appears to be a rather tranquil place.
-- Karl Lehenbauer, about Usenet
Last words are for people who haven't said anything in life.
-- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.
-- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
War is nothing but the continuation of politics with a mixture of other means.
-- Karl von Clausewitz - Vom Kriege (On War)
He who uses force unsparingly, without reference against the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application . . .. To introduce into a philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.
-- Karl von Clausewitz, 1819
We fall into error if we attribute to strategy a power independent of tactical results.
-- Karl von Clausewitz, On War
Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.
-- Karl Wallenda
A box of punchcards could theoretically store 240,000 bytes of information, and usually stored less than 80,000. Think about it.
-- Karlie-q
And they told us, what they wanted . . . Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance.
-- Kate Bush
I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.
-- Katharine Whitehorn
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
-- Katherine Anne Porter
I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking. ;
-- Katherine Cebrian
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
Spring makes everything look filthy.
-- Katherine Whitehorn
In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.
-- Kathy Norris
Dubito ergo sum - I doubt therefore I am
-- Kayvan Sylvan
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
Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
-- Kehlog Albran, The Profit
If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops.
-- Kelvin Throop
Judging a piece of fiction by the quality of its writing without considering its subject matter is like buying a car because it has a pretty paint job, without considering the state of its engine and transmission.
-- Kelvin Throop
To get the attention of a large animal, be it an elephant or a bureaucracy, it helps to know what part of it feels pain. Be very sure, though, that you want its full attention.
-- Kelvin Throop
A survey is being made of this: We need more time to think of an answer.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Conference: A place where conversation is substituted for the dreariness of work and the loneliness of thought.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Note and initial: Let's spread the responsibility of this.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Poverty: An unhappy state that persists as long as anyone lacks anything he would like to have.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Program: Any assignment that cannot be completed with one telephone call.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Statistics: A system for expressing your political prejudices in convincing scientific guise.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Status quo: The mess we're in.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Under active consideration: We're searching the files for it.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Under consideration: We never heard of it.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Unfair competition: Selling cheaper than we do.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
Zero defects: The result of shutting down a production line.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
‘Freedom’ has no meaning of itself. There are always restrictions, be they legal, genetic, or physical. If you don't believe me, try to chew a radio signal.
-- Kelvin Throop, III
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
-- Kelvin Throop, III
In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe.
-- Ken Jenkins
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
-- Ken Kesey
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.
-- Ken Thompson, quoted by Dennis Ritchie
Burnt Sienna. That’s the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas.
-- Ken Weaver
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, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate.
-- Kenneth E. Iverson
It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never really needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.
-- Kenneth E. Iverson commenting on the Leaning Tower of Pisa
Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purpose.
-- Kenneth Hildebrand
Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the American people should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that satanists are taking over America's day care centers . . . An unjustified crusade against those perceived as satanists could result in wasted resources, unwarranted damage to reputations, and disruption of civil liberties.
-- Kenneth Lanning, head of the FBI's special unit in charge of investigating claims about satanic-cult crimes, in a report of his findings, June, 1989
The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now.
-- Kenneth Patchen
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
-- Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980)
Without an adequate theory, reality is irrelevant.
-- Kent Sparky Gregory
Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!
-- Kermit the frog
Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)
-- Kernighan & Plauger - The Elements of Programming Style
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 & Plauger The Elements of Programming Style
Bondage on a budget is much more satisfying.
-- Kevin A. Geiselman
It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either.
-- Kevin White, mayor of Boston
If you juggle with knives, you're likely to get cut.
-- Kieran Donegal
A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
A woman will buy anything she thinks the store is losing money on.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Never get married while you're going to college; it's hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you've already made one mistake.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he's overcharging you.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Of all the unbearable nuisances, the ignoramus that has travelled is the worst.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
One of the simple but genuine pleasures in life is getting up in the morning and hurrying to a mousetrap you set the night before.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
The only time some fellows are ever seen with their wives is after they've been indicted.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
When you consider what a chance women have to poison their husbands, it's a wonder there isn't more of it done.
-- Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas.
-- Kingfish
S.F.'S NO GOOD!! They bellow till we're deaf. But this looks good. WELL THEN IT'S NOT S.F.!!
-- Kingsley Amis
If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
-- Kinsgley Amis
If you were a gay illegal-alien looking for an abortion, it was a humdinger of a week.
-- Kirk Fordice 1/29/93
The cowards never start and the weak die along the way.
-- Kit Carson
If it runs GNUemacs it's a computer, otherwise it's a peripheral.
-- kjj@pondscum.phx.mcd.mot.com (Kevin Johnson)
Sometimes you just have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down.
-- Kobi Yamada
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
-- Konrad Adenauer
I believe I've found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
-- Konrad Lorenz, zoologist
The filter has discreting sources.
-- KSC FIDO, 1/28/86
It's not peace I want, not mere contentment. It's boundless joy and ecstasy for me.
-- Kugell
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
-- Kulawiec
I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We are what we pretend to be.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Breakfast of Champions
Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili.
-- L words of Kit Carson, American frontiersman (1809-1868), (alleged)
My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch? Next April?
-- L. Mulloy
If you really want to make a lot of money, start your own religion.
-- L. Ron Hubbard (attributed)
It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
-- L. Sprague de Camp
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
-- La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
-- La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
People would never fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.
-- La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves.
-- La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
-- La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
The only thing I like about rich people is their money.
-- Lady Astor
Mr. Churchill, you're drunk!
Yes, and you, Madam, are ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober.
-- Lady Astor to Winston Churchill
His reply
Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink.
Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.
-- Lady Astor to Winston Churchill
His reply
Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.
-- Lady Violet Bonham Carter (1887-1969)
If you don't make money off of it, it had better be either a religious experience or a hobby.
-- Lance Cooper
The farther you go, the less you know.
-- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
[advise] the ruler to govern the state as one cooks a small fish -- that is, don't turn it so often in the pan that it disintegrates.
-- Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)
A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
-- Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)
Prepare for the difficult while it is still easy. Deal with the big while it is still small. Difficult undertakings have always started with what's easy. Great undertakings always started with what is small. Therefore the sage never strives for the great, And thereby the great is achieved.
-- Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)
Tonight we pick 'em up for anything and everything.
-- LAPD spokesman
People in the neighborhood instead of being on our side, make all kinds of accusations.
-- LAPD spokesperson complaining after a police supersweep done as part of Operation HAMMER
After a year in therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, Maybe life isn't for everyone.
-- Larry Brown
The average person thinks he isn't.
-- Larry Lorenzoni, Father
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
-- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty
The raytracer of justices recurses slowly, but it renders exceedingly fine.
-- Larry Phillips (lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca)
You are in a train, in Germany. The train is sinking.
-- Lars Von Trier, Europa
Goodnight
-- Last word of George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Thank God, I have done my duty. Kiss me, Hardy.
-- Last words of Adm. Horatio Nelson, 21 Oct 1805.
The life of human beings is very short. We are all going to die. Why should we cling so much to power?
-- Last words of Algerian President Muhammad Boudiaf, seconds before being assassinated. Newsweek July 13, 1992
So little done--so much to do.
-- Last words of Cecil John Rhodes {Founder of the Rhodes Scholarships}, 1902.
And now, in keeping with Channel 40's policy of always bringing you the latest in blood and guts, in living color, you're about to see another first--an attempted suicide.
-- Last words of Chris Hubbock, TV newscaster who shot herself during a broadcast (1970)
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
-- Last words of Crowfoot (1890), Blackfoot warrior and orator
I still live.
-- Last words of Daniel Webster, 24 October 1852.
I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record . . .
-- Last words of Dylan Thomas, poet, d. 1953
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
-- Last words of Edith Cavell, before her execution by the Germans, 12 October 1915.
Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.
-- Last words of Edmund Gwenn (1875-1959), actor
. . .the fog is rising.
-- Last words of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-- Last words of George Saunders
How is the Empire?
-- Last words of George V, 21 January 1936.
It is well, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.
-- Last words of George Washington, 14 December 1799.
I have tried so hard to do the right.
-- Last words of Grover Cleveland, 1908.
Go away. I'm all right.
-- Last words of H.G. Wells (1885-1946)
That was a great game of golf, fellers.
-- Last words of Harry Lillis Bing Crosby, singer / actor, d. October 14, 1977
Die my dear Doctor? That's the last thing I shall do!
-- Last words of Henery John Temple Palmerston (1784-1865), Prime Minister of GB (1855-1858 and 1859-1865)
Now comes the mystery.
-- Last words of Henry Ward Beecher, (1813-1887), 8 March 1887.
. . ..I've got to get to the top of the hill..
-- Last words of John Pierpont Morgan (1913)
This is the last of earth! I am content.
-- Last words of John Quincy Adams, 21 February 1848.
Wish I had time for one more bowl of chili.
-- Last words of Kit Carson (attributed)
This isn't Hamlet, you know, It's not meant to go into the bloody ear.
-- Last Words of Lawrence Olivier, spoken to his nurse, who spilt water over him while trying to moisten his lips. Reported by his son Tarquin
That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.
-- Last words of Lou Costello, comedian, d. March 3, 1959
Friends applaud, the comedy is over.
-- Last words of Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827)
I don't feel good.
-- Last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
Stay outta churches son, all they got is the key to is the shithouse.
-- Last words of Mortimer Carsons
Chief of the Army.
-- Last words of Napoleon I [Napoleon Bonaparte], 1821.
I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
-- Last words of Nathan Hale, 22 September 1776.
Turn up the lights -- I don't want to go home in the dark.
-- Last words of O. Henry [William Sydney Porter], 5 June 1910.
Drink to me.
-- Last words of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
-- Last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923), Mexican revolutionary
Strike the tent.
-- Last words of Robert E[dward] Lee, 12 October 1870.
All right, then, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick.
-- Last words of Spanish playwright Lope de Vega on being assured on his deathbed that the end was very near
Put out the light.
-- Last words of Theodore Roosevelt, 6 January 1919.
Let us cross the river, and rest under the trees.
-- Last words of Thomas Jonathan [Stonewall] Jackson, 10 May 1863.
I now have no time to be tired.
-- Last words of Wilhelm I, 8 March 1888.
We are hypnotised into believing that two TV sets will make us twice as happy as one TV set
-- Laura Huxley (wife of Aldous)
A bore is a fellow talking who can change the subject back to his topic of conversation faster than you can change it back to yours.
-- Laurence J. Peter
An economist is an expert who will know tommorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than going to the garage makes you a car.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.
-- Laurence J. Peter
All that embellishment, the ruffles, lace and frills, women don't seem to want that much. They seem to want quieter, more realistic things. They want clothes to be taken seriously in. I guess they don't like looking superfluous.
-- Lawrence Wilsman, buyer for Saks's Fifth Avenue
I am a spy of life.
-- Lech Walesa, Playboy Interview - February 1982
And as we wind on down the road, Our shadows taller than our soul, There walks a lady we all know, Who shines white light and wants to know How everything still turns to gold. And if you listen very hard, The tune will come to you at last, When all are one and one is all, To be a rock and not to roll.
-- Led Zeppelin
While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-- Lee Gomes, San Jose Mercury News
I'm not a Japan basher.
-- Lee Iacocca, Playboy Interview - January 1991
She ain't my mother, so I ain't gonna get her nothin'.
-- Lee Trevino on a Mother's Day gift for his wife
In one celebrated incident, 300 members of Church of the New Song requested $6000 worth of filet mignon and Harvey's Bristol Cream for a crucial religious ceremony at the federal prison in Atlanta.
-- Legal Times, 2/15/93
Philosophy is the discipline where you kick up a lot of dust and then complain you can't see.
-- Leibniz
Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.
-- Leibniz Monadology
Oh boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a REALLY BIG ram disk!
-- lennox@shire.hw.stratus.com
Because I'm Jewish, a lot of people ask why I killed Christ. What can I say? It was one of those parties that got out of hand. I killed him because he wouldn't become a doctor.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Comedy = Tragedy + Distance
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Communism is like one big phone company.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
Never trust a preacher with more than 2 suits
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
You can't get snot off of a suede jacket.
-- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)
The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi
If you're going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it.
-- Leo Rosten
Most men do not mature, they simply grow taller.
-- Leo Rosten
The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish child, was propounded to me by my father: What is it that hangs on the wall, is green, wet -- and whistles? I knit my brow and thought and thought, and in final perplexity gave up. A herring, said my father. A herring, I echoed. A herring doesn't hang on the wall! So hang it there. But a herring isn't green! I protested. Paint it. But a herring isn't wet. If its just painted its still wet. But -- I sputtered, summoning all my outrage, a herring doesn't whistle!! Right, smiled my father. I just put that in to make it hard.
-- Leo Rosten
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) What is Religion
It is a faith (not alwaays justified) of theoretical physics that if man proposes what is sufficiently elegant, nature, pleased and flattered, will say yes.
-- Leon N. Cooper, Introduction To The Meaning & Structure Of Physics
I was simply furnishing a home. I love music . . . and I don't think a $130,000 indoor-outdoor stereo system is extravagant.
-- Leona Helmsley – 1990, refuting charges that her lifestyle was excessive
Donald Trump is a snake.
-- Leona Helmsley. Playboy Interview - November 1990
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein
He's a fine friend. He stabs you in the front.
-- Leonard Louis Levinson
I find the question Why are we here? typically human. I'd suggest Are we here? would be the more logical choice.
-- Leonard Nimoy
And if they despise me who am an inventor, how much more should they be blamed who are not inventors but trumpeters and reciters of the works of others.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
Marriage: putting one's hand into a bag of snakes on the chance of drawing out an eel.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
There is nothing more practical than a good theory.
-- Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, quoted in V Rich, Nature, 1977, 270, pp470-1
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries . . .
-- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), literary essayist, author
Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster.
-- Leslie Stephen, An agnostic's Apology, Fortnightly Review, 1876
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 infintesimal 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
That's part of American greatness, is discrimination. Yes, sir. Inequality, I think, breeds freedom and gives a man opportunity.
-- Lester Maddox, ex-governor of Georgia
Keeping proprietary and confidential information secret is the key to moving the computer industry into the 21st century.
-- Letter from Apple Computer and Rasterops to the Macintosh user community
Boys don't make passes at female smartasses.
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks.
-- Lew Col
I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.
-- Lewis Carroll
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright
And this was very odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
-- Lewis Carroll
Well now that we have seen each other, said the Unicorn, if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?
-- Lewis Carroll
Alice laughed: There's no use trying, she said; one can't believe impossible things.
I daresay you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
Where shall I begin, please your Majesty? he asked. Begin at the beginning, the King said, gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Being a newspaper columnist is like marrying a nymphomaniac - It's great for the first two weeks.
-- Lewis Grizzard
I don't think I'll get married again. I'll just find a woman I don't like and giver a house.
-- Lewis Grizzard
Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
-- Lewis Grizzard
. . . once in each man's life, at least, Good luck knocks at his door; And wit to seize the flitting guest Need never to hunger more. But while the loitering idler waits Good luck beside his fire, The bold heart storms at fortune's gates, And conquers its desire.
-- Lewis J. Bates (b. 1832) Good Luck
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
-- Lewis Mumford
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.
This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.
-- Lichtenberg
Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin.
-- Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
-- Lillian Hellman
The only thing good about it is you're not dead.
-- Lillian Hellman (1907-1984) on aging
I can handle reality in small doses, but as a lifestyle it's much too confining.
-- Lilly Tomlin
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
-- Lily Tomlin
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
-- Lily Tomlin
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
-- Lily Tomlin
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain
-- Lily Tomlin
No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.
-- Lily Tomlin
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch
-- Lily Tomlin
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
-- Lily Tomlin
Thank God kids never mean well
-- Lily Tomlin
Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?
-- Lily Tomlin
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
-- Lin Yutang
Some rainy winter Sundays when there's a little boredom, you should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know exactly that you're always making a choice.
-- Lina Wertmuller
What if there had been room at the inn?
-- Linda Festa on the origins of Christianity
Not problem is too big it can't be run away from
-- Linus
Children are a great comfort in your old age - and they help you reach it faster, too.
-- Lionel Kauffman
Its not the size of the ship, its the size of the waves.
-- Little Richard
He's a complete and total psychopath. I don't mean that in the criminal sense, of course, but in a professional sense. People like that will do anything to hold on to their jobs.
-- Liz Trotta on Dan Rather
Any person of average intelligence could write a better commentary than he does. He hasn't covered a story in years.
-- Liz Trotta on John Chancellor
I just couldn't convince Texans that Dukakis was Greek for Bubba.
-- Lloyd Benson
If Jerry Brown is the answer, it must be a very peculiar question.
-- Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas
Resistance is irrelevant. You will become one with the Borg.
-- Locutus
Thank heavens the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
What is more enchanting than the voices of young people when you can't hear what they say?
-- Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
Would I turn on the gas if my pal Mugsy were in there? You might, rabbit, you might!
-- Looney Tunes, Bugs and Thugs (1954, Friz Freleng)
And do you think (fop that I am) that I could be the Scarlet Pumpernickel?
-- Looney Tunes, The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950, Chuck Jones)
Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!
-- Looney Tunes, What's Opera Doc? (1957, Chuck Jones)
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
-- Lord Acton
Promise me that if you become a Christian you'll become a Presbyterian.
-- Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964) to Josef Stalin in 1941
Most people enjoy the inferiority of their friends.
-- Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
-- Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
-- Lord Dunsany, My Ireland 1938
Character is who you are in the dark.
-- Lord John Whorfin
Home is where you wear your hat. I feel so break up: I want to go home
-- Lord John Whorfin
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.
-- Lord Kelvin
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
-- Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night)
We cannot prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much reason. On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?
-- Lord Thomas B. Macaulay (1800-1859), English historian and statesman
I'm glad we're not going to the Gator Bowl.
-- Lou Holtz - Arkansas football coach after being showered with oranges thrown by fans celebrating the Razorbacks' invitation to the Orange Bowl
Welcome to The Lou Holtz Show. Unfortunately, I'm Lou Holtz.
-- Lou Holtz - Arkansas football coach opening his weekly television program during one particularly tough stretch
Her life was saved by rock and roll.
-- Lou Reed
I like to think of us as Clearasil on the face of the nation. Jim Morrison would have said that if he was smart, but he's dead.
-- Lou Reed on his band
From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place - full of old, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America - full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wildcat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people.
-- Louis Adamic
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.
-- Louis Adamic
The Beauty of Mother Nature is her ability to make complex things appear simple.
-- Louis E. Samuels, M.D.
The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.
-- Louis Ferdinand Celine
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
-- Louis Kronenberger
In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared.
-- Louis Pasteur
. . .the American dream, in recent years the object of much denigration even within our own borders, turns out to have been the world's dream, as well.
-- Louis Rukeyser on events in Eastern Europe
Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external.
-- Louise Guiney
The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
-- Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards
The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets . . ..The press in its historical connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.
-- Lowell v. City of Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452 (1938)
I could be chasing an untamed ornithoid without cause.
-- Lt. Commander Data - Star Trek, TNG
The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
-- Lucille S. Harper
It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. -A.D. 65)
What once were vices are manners now.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4? BC - 65 AD)
If there were a verb meaning to believe falsely, it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
If it is true that words have meanings, why don't we throw away words and keep just the meanings?
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein via Anatol Holt
Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than receiving an Oscar.
-- Luis Bunuel
Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided, father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
-- Luke 12:51-53
. . . one who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one.
-- Luke 22:36
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you have misunderstood the situation.
-- Lurking in the November issue of Playboy:
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.
-- Lyall Watson
Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
-- Lynda Barry
I do not believe that this generation of Americans is willing to resign itself to going to bed each night by the light of a Communist moon . . .
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
If you do everything, you'll win.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
Gerry Ford is a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
While you're saving your face you're losing your ass.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)
Lenin probably wouldn't understand. But then, no one around he seems to care what he would think.
-- Lynn Ashby's report on Romania
The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.
-- Lynn Lavner - as published in PFLAG
[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
-- Lynn White, Jr., The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203-1207.
. . .the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality tools is essential to meet ever increasing demands for software.
-- M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson and B. A. Tague
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.
-- M. F. K. Fisher The Art of Eating
Whoever said, It's not whether you win or lose that counts, probably lost!
-- M. Navratilova
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!
-- M. Python
You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
-- M. Somerset Maugham
He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
-- M.C. Escher
I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.
-- M.C.Escher
If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.
-- Ma Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority.
-- Machiavelli
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.
-- Machiavelli
It's Fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour!
-- Macy's
Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them
-- Madonna
Straight men need to be emasculated. I'm sorry. They all need to be slapped around. Women have been kept down for too long. Every straight guy should have a man's tongue in his mouth at least once.
-- Madonna
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
-- Madrak, in _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, by Roger Zelazny
He who hesitates is a damned fool.
-- Mae West (1892-1980)
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.
-- Mae West (1892-1980)
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
-- Mae West (1893-1980)
Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
-- Mae West (1893-1980)
Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.
-- Mae West (1893-1980)
Women with pasts interest men . . . they hope history will repeat itself.
-- Mae West (1893-1980)
Save a boyfriend for a rainy day--and another, in case it doesn't rain.
-- Mae West (1893-1980), _New York Mirror_, April 6, 1958
Where desire writhed there stands a stone; the change was sudden and complete.
-- Maggie Roche
Only the extreme is interesting
-- Magnus Lindberg
In a way, we're a kind of Peace Corps.
-- Maj. A. Lincoln German, Training Director of the Green Beret Special Warfare School, Ft. Bragg, N.C.
I've been to one world's fair, a picnic and a rodeo and that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard come over a set of headphones.
-- Major Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr. Strangelove
Well boys, looks like it's nu'clr combat, toe-to-toe with the Rooskies.
-- Major Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr. Strangelove
Well boys, we're running low on fuel, we got more holes in us than a horse trader's mule, and if we was flying any lower we'd need sleigh bells on this thing . . ..but we do have one thing going for us . . ..at this altitude, they may harpoon us but they're sure not going to spot us on any Rooshian radar.
-- Major Kong (Slim Pickens) in Dr. Strangelove
The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.
-- Major Major's father
Never despise fashion. It's what we have instead of God.
-- Malcolm Bradbury
The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.
-- Malcolm De Chazal
If you have a job without aggravations, you don't have a job.
-- Malcolm Forbes
When in doubt, duck.
-- Malcolm Forbes
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge
As an old man, Bill, looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly--that the only thing that's taught anyone anything is . Not success, not happiness, not anything like that.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge, 9/5/80, in Buckley's , p.464
Christ wasn't white. Christ was black.
-- Malcolm X, Playboy Interview - May 1963
What did -you- answer when you very first died and that angel asked you if you preferred smoking or non-smoking?
-- Man in Hell to another, Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro
Ever since our love for machines resplaced the love we used to have for our fellow man, catastrophes proceed to increase.
-- Man Ray
Ill-chosen abstraction is particularly evident in the design of the ADA runtime system. The interface to the ADA runtime system is so opaque that it is impossible to model or predict its performance, making it effectively useless for real-time systems.
-- Marc D. Donner and David H. Jameson.
Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will give you back the lever.
-- Marc Drexler - at a very crowded party
Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are sexually compatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in various other circumstances.
-- Marc Maihueird
Puritanism . . .helps us enjoy our misery while we are inflicting it on others.
-- Marcel Ophuls
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
One of a hostess's duties is to act as procuress.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
The charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
The only paradise is paradise lost.
-- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
When you have no basis of argument, abuse the plaintiff.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC (106-43 BC)
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre
When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment . . . it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.
-- Margaret Hilda Thatcher, on the Falklands Conflict.
The little things are most worthwhile - quiet word, a look, a smile.
-- Margaret Lindsey
One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
-- Margaret Mead
Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible.
-- Margaret Mead
If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said No.
-- Margaret Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears.
-- Margaret Thatcher, about Ronald Reagan, in the 6/2/88 issue of The New York Times
Stay away from that jazz man, Lisa. Nothing personal, I just fear the unfamiliar
-- Marge Simpson (The Simpson's)
I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'
-- Margo Kaufman
Remarriage is an excellent test of just how amicable your divorce was.
-- Margo Kaufman
What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.
-- Margot Asquith
If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted.
-- Marguerite Emmons
Love is so much better when you are not married.
-- Maria Callas
No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people; and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise. :
-- Marian Anderson, on CBS TV, December 30, 1957
Live long and prosper, die short and in poverty, makes no difference to me.
-- Marian Dodson/Anna Woodruff
There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability.
-- Marian Engel
Sun Microsystems openly acknowledges that we are not after (employees seeking) the gold watch. That's an old notion.
-- Marianne Jackson, Director, Human Resources for Sun Microsystems, West Coast Operations, quote appeared in San Jose Mercury News
Isn't there any other part of the matzo you can eat?
-- Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) on being served matzo ball soup three meals in a row
I finally found a bank I can really enjoy. It's S&M banking, at Naughty American Savings & Moan. It's great. They give you like a free whipping with every deposit. And they have dominatrix tellers and crawl-up banking-my favourite. I went in to see my customer sadist representative the other day, and she said Shut up! Sit Down! Give me that! It felt great. It kept me tied up there all day. I applied for a loan. I was turned down. I felt humiliated. I just *loved* it. Naughty American Savings & Moan. The bank that gives you what you *really* deserve.
-- Marilyn Pitman, All Out Comedy
If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
-- Mario Andretti
One of the advantages of living alone is that you don't have to wake up in the arms of a loved one.
-- Marion Smith
Now with the abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our country I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day.
-- Mark Bavaro, player for the NY Giants, in a video titled Champions for Life, produced by Giants owner Wellington Mara, and distributed to schoolchildren
Well, sometimes, anyway.
-- Mark Brader
After several minutes of utterly dull conversation I began to think of her not as a woman but as a human, then not as a human but as an animal, then not as an animal but as a source of high-grade protein.
-- Mark Gooley
'Virtual Reality' is a name being slapped on almost anything these days, especially if it's lame.
-- Mark Hamilton
Nothing can stop him. Not even common sense.
-- Mark Komarinski
Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all across the country know about it.
-- Mark Leeper
Never date a woman you can hear ticking.
-- Mark Patinkin
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
-- Mark Russell
An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth.
-- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments
Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation.
-- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments
But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery – go!
-- Mark The Bard Twain
. . .an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often picturesque liar.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
. . .poetry, like chastity, can be carried too far.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Always do right – this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Carlyle said, A lie cannot live; it shows he did not know how to tell them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
George Washington as a boy was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth -- he could not even lie.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.)
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved it.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill always came together, who would escape hanging?
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If we had less statemanship we could get along with fewer battleships.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It could probably be show by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you: the one to slander you, and the other to bring the news to you.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It's a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
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 (1835-1910)
Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places and does not cure or even diminish it.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre but they are more deadly in the long run.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all other days of the year put together. This proves, by the numbers left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The difference between the right word and a similar word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The holy passion of Friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The trouble isn't that there are too many fools, but that the lightning isn't distributed right.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
There are times when one would like to end the whole human race, and finish the farce.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Two men once wrote to Mark Twain. Not having his address, they marked the envelope,
Mark Twain
God knows where
They received a response from him: He did.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
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 on a hot stove lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
When I think of the number of disagreeable people that I know who have gone to a better world, I am sure hell won't be so bad at all.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The Bible has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all./Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910) A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
I have done some indiscreet things in my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the worst. Still, it had its ameliorations. A prophet doesn't have to have any brains. They are good to have, of course, for the ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional work. It is the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your intellect and lay it off somewhere in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it alone; it will work itself. The result is prophecy.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910) from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A man came into the the office one day and said he was a sailor. We cured him of that.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), on his days as a doctor's apprentice in California
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Mysterious Stranger
Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Cartha- ginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain -- not that those barbarians had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans, as Satan explained. Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs of the progress of the human race, as Satan observed. And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars -- all over Europe, all over the world. Sometimes in the private interest of royal families, Satan said, sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose -- there is no such war in the history of the race. Now, said Satan, you have seen your progress down to the present, and you must confess that it is wonderful -- in its way. We must now exhibit the future. He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen. You perceive, he said, that you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Mysterious Stranger
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
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 kind- hearted 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 prejuidice 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
You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things -- broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them -- and by laughting at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon -- laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug -- push it a little -- weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Mysterious Stranger
In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.
-- Marlene Dietrich
Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.
-- Marlo Thomas
Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.
-- Marlo Thomas
The most repulsive thing you could ever imagine is the inside of a camel's mouth. That and watching a girl eat octopus or squid.
-- Marlon Brando, Playboy Interview - January 1979
DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch! Roger . . ..hatch blown!
-- MAROONED
Warning: Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.
-- Marshall Clow
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff [head of RCA] made this statement: We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value. . . . There is nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. . . . It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but _add_ itself on to what we already are.
-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
Gifts are like hooks.
-- Martial (40?-102?)
There is no glory in otustripping donkeys.
-- Martial (40?-102?)
You may send poetry to the rich, to poor men give substantial presents.
-- Martial (40?-102?)
I'm against group sex because I wouldn't know where to put my elbows.
-- Martin Cruz Smith
It was like passing the scene of a highway accident and being relieved to learn that nobody had been seriously injured.
-- Martin Cruz Smith, on being asked how he liked the movie version of his novel Gorky Park.
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
-- Martin Fraquhar Tupper
. . .It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
-- Martin Gardner, Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131
Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with respect to theories about how the process operates.
-- Martin Gardner, Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131
Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last.
-- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
-- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Our white brothers must be made to understand that nonviolence is a weapon fabricated of love. It is a sword that heals.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy Interview - January 1965
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
-- Martin Mull
It's hard to decide if TV makes morons out of everyone or if it mirrors Americans who really are morons to begin with.
-- Martin Mull
Show business is just like high school, except you get paid.
-- Martin Mull
POLITICIAN: From the Greek 'poly' (many) and the French 'tete' (head or face, as in 'tete-a-tete': head to head or face to face). Hence 'polytetien', a person of two or more faces.
-- Martin Pitt
Remember, Jesus was on Eighth Avenue with the prostitutes. He wasn't uptown or in Washington, D.C.
-- Martin Scorsese, Playboy Interview - April 1991
Half of analysis is anal.
-- Marty Indik
If the designers of X-Windows 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.
-- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
I bet the human brain is a kludge.
-- Marvin Minsky
I've seen it. It's rubbish.
-- Marvin the Paranoid Android
That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.
-- Marvin, _Life, the Universe, and Everything_ by Douglas Adams
Did you know that there is a million bucks hidden in the house next door? But there is no house next door. No? Then let's go build one!
-- MARX
The bourgeoisie, in its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjugation of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground . . .
-- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.
-- Mary Astell; 1668-1731; English writer, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696)
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
-- Mary Ellen Kelly
There are very few people who don't become more interesting when they stop talking.
-- Mary Lowry in the Pacific Sun, November 15, 1985
Close your mouth, Michael; we are not a codfish.
-- Mary Poppins
I'm an experienced woman; I've been around . . . well, alright, I might not've been around, but I've been . . . nearby.
-- Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore Show)
Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
They know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: They have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.
-- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
-- Mary Wortley Montagu
Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
-- Maryon Pearson
Warning signs that lover is bored: 1. Passionless kisses 2. Frequent sighing 3. Moved, left no forwarding address
-- Matt Groening
I plead alignment to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow, and to the Republicans for which they scam, one nacho, underpants, invisible, with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.
-- Matt Groening's version, reproduced from School Is Hell
a man's worst enemies will be right in his own home! If you love your father and mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine.
-- Matthew 10:36-38
Avarice is the sphincter of the heart.
-- Matthew Green (c. 1737)
As if you could TELL time without injuring eternity.
-- Matthew Ryan
Everybody should be able to make some music . . .That's the cosmic dance!
-- Maude - (Ruth Gordon) from the movie Harold & Maude
The police . . ...always wanting to play games.
-- Maude - (Ruth Gordon) from the movie Harold & Maude
Vice . . .Virtue . . .It's not good to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality.
-- Maude - (Ruth Gordon) from the movie Harold & Maude
Maude - Well, I suppose I did.
-- Maude - (Ruth Gordon) Harold - (Bud Cort) from the movie Harold & Maude
I believe that much of the world's sorrow is caused by people who are this, but allow themselves to be treated like that.
-- Maude (Ruth Gordon), from the movie “Harold & Maude”
The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
-- Maurice Chapelain
Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
-- Maurice Chevalier
Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives.
-- Maurice Chevalier
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
-- Max Frisch, Homo Faber
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
-- Max Weinreich (1894-1969)
In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
-- Maxim Gorkey
Honest Officer, had I known my health stood in jeopardy I would never had lit one.
-- Maxim of the Hells Angels
We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna And a Sun Myung Moon!
-- Maxwell Smart
Baby, can't you hear my heart? You've got it drowning out the radio. I've been waiting so long for you to come along and have some fun. And I gotta let you know, know you're never gonna regret it. So open up your eyes, I got a big surprise, it will feel all right, And I wanna make your motor run.
-- Meatloaf, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light.
-- Meatloaf, “Paradise By The Dashboard Light”
Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around alot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quite, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.
-- Mel Brooks
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
-- Mel Brooks
I love gentiles. In fact, on of my favorite activities is Protestant spotting.
-- Mel Brooks, Playboy Interview - October 1966
The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
-- Mell Lazzarus
I'm not an ambulance chaser. I'm usually there before the ambulance.
-- Melvin Belli
Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association is like getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month-Club.
-- Melvin Belli on the occasion of his getting kicked out of the American Bar Association
Well, you see, it's such a transitional creature. It's a piss-poor reptile and not very much of a bird.
-- Melvin Konner, from The Tangled Wing, quoting a zoologist who has studied the archeopteryz and found it very much like people
The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.
-- Menander (342? - 292? BC)
We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.
-- Menander (342? - 292? BC)
You are worth your weight in popcorn husks stuck between my teeth, and nobody needs you like I do.
-- Meryn Cadell
The enemy came. He was beaten. I am tired. Goodnight.
-- Message sent by Vicomte Turenne, after the battle of Dunen, 1658
If you want to know, I'm really tired of feminists, sick of them. They've really dug themselves into their own grave. Any man would be a fool who didn't agree with equal rights and pay but some women, now, juggling career, lover, children [childbirth], wifehood, have spread themselves too thin and are very unhappy. It's time they looked at *themselves* and stopped attacking men. Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women's unreasonable demands.
-- Michael Douglas, male lead in “Fatal Attraction”
A few days after the embattled President delivered his State of the Union message, a little-known member of the opposition party appeared on prime-time television to decry almost everything the Commander in Chief had said. The nation faces this year, just as it did last year, a tremendous deficit in the federal budget, the Congressman intoned. But in the President's message there was no sense of sacrifice on the part of the government, no assignment of priorities, no hint of the need to put first things first.
The year was 1968. The President was a Democrat named Lyndon Johnson. The Republican backbencher was Texas Congressman George Bush. And the tremendous deficit was $25 billion. Twenty-four years later, the deficit has climbed to $399 billion, and every complaint Bush lodged against LBJ's speech could be applied to his State of the Union address . . .
-- Michael Duffy, intro to an article in Time (2/10/92, p25) about President Bush's State of the Union address:
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
-- Michael Faraday
We're not a security guard company. We sell a *concept* of security.
-- Michael Kaye, president of Westec, a residential security company.
An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
-- Michael Korda
There are situations in which torture is not merely permissible but morally mandatory.
-- Michael Levin
Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.
-- Michael O'Donohugh
People may like what third-party candidates say, because often they are the only ones saying anything, but they usually won't vote for someone who doesn't have a chance. Since third-party candidates are not in the news, they are considered to be not really in the race; and since they are not in the race, this justifies treating them as if they are not news.
-- Michael Parenti
And if You exist, why do you let your Evil churches exist????
Maybe because He is a libertarian?
-- Michael S. Schechter
Mike Van Pelt
This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks -- to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls.
-- Michael Swanwick, Vacuum Flowers
You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.
-- Michael Wilding
A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.
-- Michael Winner, British film director
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553-1592)
Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553-1592)
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553-1592)
There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553-1592)
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553-1592)
Making music should not be left to the professionals.
-- Michelle Shocked
A doctor can bury his mistakes but a supplier based engineer can only advise the product designer to specify a heavier texture.
-- Mick Lloyd Kerman (MT 1055-9+)
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.
-- Mickey Mouse
Get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
-- Mickey Rooney (also attributed to Paul Hornung)
The users took much longer than we anticipated to adapt to the intuitive user interface
-- Microsoft Consulting project manager
I do not say a proverb is amiss when aptly and reasonably applied, but to be forever discharging them, right or wrong, hit or miss, renders conversation insipid and vulgar.
-- Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616)
I love you for your beauty; love me although I am ugly.
-- Miguel Cervantes, Don_Quixote
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 God Himself.
-- Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish philosopher and writer
As part of it's 'Astro' program LAPD helicopters maintain an average nineteen-hours-per-day vigil over 'high crime areas', tactically coordinated to patrol car forces, and exceeding even the British Army's aerial surveillance of Belfast.
-- Mike Davis City of Quartz
As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time.
-- Mike Dennison
Here is an Appalachian version of management's answer to those who are concerned with the fate of the project: Don't worry about the mule. Just load the wagon.
-- Mike Dennison's hillbilly uncle
Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate.
-- Mike Hermann (Hermann@cs.ubc.ca)
ETYMOLOGY: Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations that were hard for the public to believe. The term 'etymology' was formed from the Latin 'etus' (eaten), the root 'mal' (bad), and 'logy' (study of). It meant the study of things that are hard to swallow.
-- Mike Kellen, Oakdale, Minnesota
Nothing is guaranteed, except 3-D porn.
-- Mike Kuniavsky, President, Ann Arbor Film Cooperative on the difficulties of running a successful film series., (Village Voice, 5/25/93)
Last night I watched the news and the end of the broadcast showed numerous changes favorable for the people (e.g., Rumania, Berlin Wall, etc.). My fiancee and I turned to each other and said ‘No images from the US.’
-- Mike Shaff (shaff@elements.rpal.com)
Oh damn. Another clever plan shot to hell by its transparency.
-- Mike Shappe
Everybody's got plans . . .until they get hit.
-- Mike Tyson, heavyweight champ on plans released by Tyrell Biggs' camp on how they would defeat the champ.
The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev (June 8, 1990)
Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.
-- Miles Davis, Playboy Interview - September 1962
The first sign of a nervous breakdown is when you start thinking your work is terribly important.
-- Milo Bloom
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
-- Milton Friedman
There is no free lunch.
-- Milton Friedman
Miniscribe's troubles are daunting. The company has floundered in its attempt to settle 13 shareholder lawsuits, filed after a panel found that previous managers circumvented financial controls and resorted to shipping bricks and unfinished drives to shore up sagging revenue figures.
-- Miniscribe Prognosis Is Hopeful, E. E. Times, Jan 15, 1990, pg 67
Laundry increases exponentially in the number of children.
-- Miriam Robbins
It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
We are all born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.
-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressad by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.
-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
You are sunlight and I, moon Joined by the gods of fortune Midnight and high noon Sharing the sky We have been blessed, you and I
-- MISS SAIGON
Rebellion is like witchcraft. That's what it is, it's like witchcraft.
-- Missouri State Rep. Jean Dixon, on labeling offensive music. USA Today, March 20, 1990
Hello again, Peabody here . . .
-- Mister Peabody
To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy
-- MIT Assasination Club slogan
Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.
-- Miyamoto Musashi, 1645
Religion is a candle inside a multi-colored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there.
-- Modammed Neguib
Moving forward . . .using all my breath . . ..making love to you was never second best . . .I saw the world crashing all around your face . . .never really knowing it was always . . .mesh and lace . . .
-- Modern English - I'll Stop The World
Never buy a sweater that don't match your cat.
-- Modine Gunch
A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
I think it would be a good idea.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) when asked what he thought of Western civilization
I ain't gonna piss in no jar!
-- Mojo Nixon
Yeah man, Y'know people from outer space, people from outer space they come up to me, they don't look like Doctor Spock. They don't look like Klingons, all that Star Trek jive. They look like ELVIS! ELVIS! Everybody in outer space looks like Elvis cause Elvis is the perfect being. We're all moving in all peace and harmony towards Elvis-ness. Soon all will become Elvis. Everything everywhere will be Elvis.
-- Mojo Nixon
It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.
-- Moliere
Where else but in America can a poor, black boy like Michael Jackson grow up to be a rich, white woman?
-- Molly Ivins
War is the biggest ego trip of all time.
-- Molly Wiest
If I could live my life again That'll be the thing to be A man who put stumbling blocks In the lives of the likes of me
-- Momus I was a Maoist intellectual in the music industry.
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
-- Monty Python
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
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Our main advantage is fear and surprise. Our two main advantages are fear, surprise, and ruthlessness. Our three main advantages are fear, surprise, ruthlessness and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
There . . . I've run rings 'round you logically
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
Red is grey and yellow white We decide which is right and which is an illusion.
-- Moody Blues, Tuesday Afternoon--
To err is human, to compute divine. Trust your computer but not its programmer
-- Morris Kingston
Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn . . .endeavoring to eat up this too rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any character to impart. On the other hand, the place has the manners, culture and general outlook of a huge country village.
-- Morrow Mayo
Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.
-- Morrow Mayo
When he got through with science and religion, they were so wrapped up in each other that a Philadelphia lawyer could never untangle them. The closest this great scientist ever came to a definite stand was a full gallop on a supernatural race-track running from Fundamentalism to theism, but his powers of occult observation would have done credit to any crystal-gazer in Los Angeles . . ..The whole thing was a conglomeration of metaphysical aphorisms and theological sophistry, suffused in a weird and ghostly atmosphere of obscurantism, with occasional and literal references to Santa Claus.
-- Morrow Mayo, talking of physicist and then-president of Cal Tech, Robert Millikan and his transformation into a 'Christian-Scientist'
We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.
-- Mort Sahl
We gladly feast on those who would subdue us . . . not just pretty words, Fester.
-- Morticia Addams - from the Addams Family movie
Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.
-- Mortimer Adler
There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist- the taxidermist leaves the hide.
-- Mortimer Caplin
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
-- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a letter
This book fills a much-needed gap.
-- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review
Our business is people killing people; business is good.
-- Motto of NOPD Homicide unit
Most conventional soldiers think of the jungle as being full of lurking enemies. Under our system, we will do the lurking.
-- Motto of the Australian SAS in Vietnam
Even Bach comes down to the basic suck, blow, suck, suck, blow.
-- Mouth organist Larry Adler
Henry James chews more than he bites off.
-- Mrs Henry Adams (c. 1880)
My toughest fight was with my first wife.
-- Muhammad Ali
The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
-- Muhammad Ali
There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.
-- Muhammad Ali on the occasion of one of his retirements
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
It's not that I don't enjoy it, but it's kind of like a trip to Disneyland. You get so excited about a ride on the Matterhorn, and then when it's over, you realize you wasted all that time in line for a minute and a half upside down and the chance to throw up.
-- Murphy Brown, on The Sex Thing
Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.
-- Murray Edelman, _Politics as Symbolic Action_, p. 1
Nowhere is now here.
-- Nakagawa Soen Roshi
I married beneath me - all women do.
-- Nancy Astor
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
-- Nancy Mitford
To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.
-- Nancy Mitford
I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
-- Nancy Reagan
Just Say No.
No.
-- Nancy Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Behind almost every woman you ever heard of stands a man who let her down.
-- Naomi Bliven
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
What a beautiful fix we are in now; peace has been declared.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) after the Treaty of Amiens, 1802
Open Channel D . . .
-- Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is.
-- Narciso Yepes
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
Freedom is still the most radical idea of all.
-- Nathaniel Branden
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man confines himself within ancient limits.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones.
-- Nathaniel Howe
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
-- Nathaniel Lee, 17th century playwright. His comment when committed to an insane asylum.
Practice freedom of religion. Set fire to the church of your choice.
-- National Lampoon, _Radio Dinner_, 1972
I'm sick of being trodden on! The Elder Gods say they can make me a man! All it costs is my soul! I'll do it, cuz NOW I'M MAD!!!
-- Necronomicomics #1, Jack Herman & Jeff Dee
(To Walter Cronkite): Well Walter, I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street
-- Neil Armstrong
I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
-- Neil Armstrong
Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
-- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #20: Façade
Quick to judge, quick to anger . . .. slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice, and fear, walk hand in hand.
-- Neil Peart
Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more Malinowski the more compelling the book. No Malinowski, and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.
-- Neil Postman
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.
-- Neil Postman
The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.
-- Neil Postman
There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight in Los Angeles.
-- Neil Simon, in Playboy, Feb. 1979
There are trivial truths & there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
-- Neils Bohr
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, Nicaragua, Quoted in The New York Times, 1984
Never forget that the most powerful force on earth is love.
-- Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979) to Henry Kissinger
I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
-- New York City Detective
Michael H. Kenyon, 30, the suspected enema bandit who terrorized coeds at the University of Illinois for 10 years, has pleaded guilty in Urbana, Ill., to six counts of armed robbery. He has admitted administering enemas to woman victims in at least three of the six robberies.
-- Newspaper facsimile from Zappa in New York liner notes.
You show me an American who can keep his mouth shut and I'll eat him.
-- Newspaperman from Frank Capra's _Meet_John_Doe_
. . . postmodernity, once the plaything of smarty-pants French guys, in truth belongs to the engagingly stupid.
-- Newsweek
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared abruptly.
-- Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), The Prince
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 The Prince 1532
An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
-- Nicholas Chamfort (1741-1794)
The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
-- Nicholas Chamfort (1741-1794)
It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.
-- Nicholas Johnson
Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.
-- Nicholas Ling
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
-- Nicholas Murray Butler
Where did you put it? Put what? You know? Where do you think? Oh.
-- Nicholas Negroponte Director of the MIT Media Lab stating his ideal model of human-computer interaction
The long term is really just a bunch of short terms taped together.
-- Nick Lappos
You may call me by my name, Wirth, or by my value, Worth.
-- Nicklaus Wirth
The dreadful burden of having nothing to do.
-- Nicolas Boileau
Sometimes a fool makes a good suggestion.
-- Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711)
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
But this one goes to eleven.
-- Nigel Tufnel
Politicians are the same the world over: they promise to build a bridge even when there is no river.
-- Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)
What scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying.
-- Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)
We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.
-- Nikos Kazantzakis
The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.
-- Noam Chomsky on the One World web site
People are wrong when they say that the opera isn't what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That's what's wrong with it.
-- Noel Coward (1899-1973)
Television is for appearing on - not for looking at.
-- Noel Coward (1899-1973)
The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
-- Noel Coward (1899-1973)
Your motivation? Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it.
-- Noel Coward (1899-1973) to an actor.
The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
-- Noelie Altito
The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.
-- Nora Ephron
Women are being considered as candidates for Vice President of the United States because it is the worst job in America. It's amazing that men will take it. A job with real power is First Lady. I'd be willing to run for that. As far as the men who are running for President are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.
-- Nora Ephron, from her San Francisco lecture, November 4, 1983
Why don't you write books people can read?
-- Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
Women! Can't live with them . . .pass the beer nuts.
-- Norm (Cheers)
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
-- Norm Schryer
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear.
-- Norm, from _Cheers_
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-- Norman Cousins
I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.
-- Norman Cousins
Why explore the Universe? It is almost ironic that we should have to ask this question because it is almost as though we have to apologize for our highest attributes . . . we went to Mars, not because of our technology, but because of our imagination.
-- Norman Cousins
We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the center of their spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major prohpet, nor Christians that Shinto best expresses their spiritual concerns, to say nothing of the fact that we may not be able to get Christians to agree among themselves about their relationship to God. But all will agree on a proposition that they possess profound spiritual resources. If, in addition, we can get them to accept the further proposition that whatever form the Deity may have in their own theology, the Deity is not only external, but internal and acts through them, and they themselves give proof or disproof of the Deity in what they do and think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that much closer to a truly religious situation on earth.
-- Norman Cousins, from his book Human Options
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
-- Norman Mailer
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
-- Norman Mailer
Giving Head to your woman is dangerous because it gives the Devil introduction into the vagina.
-- Norman Mailer, Playboy Interview - January 1968
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
-- Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), American minister, motivational writer
Prayer begins where human capacity ends.
-- Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), American minister, motivational writer
I am not a number, I'm a man, a free man!
-- Number 6
Kill everyone! Are you with me?
-- Nyarlbo the Recursive, Pizza Hut Putsch, 12/19/86
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
-- O. C. Ogilvie
A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth.
-- O.G. Sutton
My eyes discover you naked and cover you with a warm rain of glances
-- Octavio Paz
The pig, if I am not mistaken
Supplies us sausage, ham and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big.
I call it stupid of the pig.
-- Ogden Nash
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.
-- Ogden Nash
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
Reflections on Ice-Breaking
Candy Is dandy
But liquor Is quicker.
-- Ogden Nash
The Pig
The Pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and Bacon.
Let others say his heart is big,
I think it stupid of the Pig.
-- Ogden Nash
The Preacher, the Politician, the Teacher,
Were each of them once a kiddie.
A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature.
Do I want one? God Forbiddie!
-- Ogden Nash
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
-- Ogden Nash
Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's very funny-- Did you ever try buying them without money?
-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
Children aren't happy without something to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.
-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
He without benefit of scruples
His fun and money soon quadruples.
-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
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 (1902-1971)
Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long.
-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
The ant has made itself illustrious
By constant industry industrious.
What? Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?
-- Ogden Nash, ca. 1935
Confucius say too much.
-- Old (recent) Chinese Proverb
When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey
-- Old Arab proverb
Any road followed to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
-- Old Bene Gesserit proverb
Rain does not fall on one roof alone.
-- Old Cameroon proverb
Never try to catch two frogs with one hand.
-- Old Chinese proverb
The diamond cannot be polished without friction, or the man perfected without trials.
-- Old Chinese proverb
Before engaging in a battle of wits, make sure your opponent is armed.
-- Old East Texas proverb
If the husband is without learning, the wife is without pride.
-- Old Hindu proverb
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
-- Old Indian proverb
So far from God, so close to the United States
-- Old Mexican proverb
A man about to speak the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup.
-- Old Mongolian proverb
The man who would tell the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup.
-- Old Mongolian Proverb
When in Doubt, Fuck it. When not in Doubt . . . Get in Doubt!
-- Old POEE slogan
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.
-- Old proverb
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
-- Old Proverb
Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.
-- Old Russian proverb
The hammer shatters glass but forges steel.
-- Old Russian proverb
If you wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes. If you don’t wait for tomorrow, tomorrow comes.
-- Old Senegalese proverb
Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars.
-- Old Serbian proverb
He who shits on the road will meet flies on his return.
-- Old South African proverb
He who marries a widow will often have a dead man's head thrown in his dish.
-- Old Spanish proverb
It is better to be a mouse in a cat's mouth than to be a man in a lawyer's hands.
-- Old Spanish proverb
If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.
-- Old Turkish proverb
No matter how far you have gone down the wrong road, turn around.
-- Old Turkish Proverb
If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows.
-- Old Yiddish proverb
If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.
-- Old Yiddish proverb
If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.
-- Old Yiddish proverb
The innkeeper loves the drunkard, but not for a son-in-law.
-- Old Yiddish Proverb
Tell the truth and run.
-- Old Yugoslav proverb
Before enlightenment, one carries water and chops wood. After enlightenment, one carries water and chops wood.
-- Old Zen proverb
When the ordinary man attains wisdom, he becomes a sage. When the sage attains wisdom, he becomes an ordinary man.
-- Old Zen proverb
Actor: I'm a smash hit. Why, yesterday during the last act, I had everyone glued in their seats!
Oliver Herford: Wonderful! Wonderful! Clever of you to think of it!
-- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
Actresses will happen in the best regulated families.
-- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
Darling: the popular form of address used in speaking to a person of the opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment recall
-- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
-- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme.
-- Oliver North (1942- )
Science is good furniture for one's upper chamber, if there is common sense below.
-- Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
Bisonburger from the herd that appeared in 'Dances With Wolves.'
-- On the menu at Al's Oasis in Oacama, South Dakota
No, I haven't read the New Testament, but I read the Old Testament and liked it very, very much.
-- One shepherd to another in a New Yorker cartoon
Do it big or stay in bed.
-- Opera producer Larry Kelly
Swat my hind with a mellon rind, That's my penguin state of mind.
-- Opus
Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charled DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't . . ..out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.
-- Oriana Fallaci
If I were courageous, I would have killed Qaddafi when I interviewed him
-- Oriana Fallaci, Playboy Interview - November 1981
Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.
-- Orrin Hatch, Republican senator
If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
-- Orson Scott Card
Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly.
-- Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction author, Mormon, weenie
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
-- Orson Welles
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Orson Welles
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
-- Orson Welles
There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.
-- Orson Welles
I passionately hate the idea of being with it. I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
-- Orson Welles, 1966
All we are given is possibilities -- to make ourselves one thing or another.
-- Ortega y Gasset
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
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris . . . [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.
-- Orville Wright (1871-1948), c. 1908
There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Happiness is not something you experience, it's something you remember
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I don't drink; I don't like it - it makes me feel good
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I knew her before she was a virgin.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I once said cynically of a politician, He'll doublecross that bridge when he comes to it
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I'm a controversial figure: my friends either dislike me or hate me.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Marriage is a triumph of habit over hate.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Once I make up my mind, I'm full of indecision.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
So little time, so little to do.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.
-- Oscar Levant (1906-1972)
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Action: the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Divorces are made in heaven.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I am not young enough to know everything.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Men always want to be a woman's first love --Women like to be a man's last romance.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Popularity is the one insult I have never suffered.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Whenever people agree with me, I always think I must be wrong.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Women spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The English country gentleman galloping after a fox--the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright, author; Lord Illingworth, in A Woman of No Importance, act 3.
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Whenever you fall, pick up something
-- Oswald Theodore Avery
In life, 'changing' is like being in a ship on the sea: you must build a new boat with material from the old one you're travelling in; you can't go on shore to destroy the old one first and then build a new one - but you have to re-construct while sailing.
-- otto neurath [The German is used as a epigraph for the book _Word and Object_, by Willard Van Orman Quine: Wie Schiffer sind wir, die ihr Schiff auf offener See umbauen muessen, ohne es jemals in einem Dock zerlegen und aus besten Bestandteilen neu errichten zu koennen.]
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)
When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice.
-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)
Life is good, if you like that sort of thing.
-- overheard in Palo Alto . . .
How little you know about the age you live in if you think that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.
-- Ovid (43? BC - 18 AD)
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these
-- Ovid (43? BC - 18 AD)
Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase being born is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while dying means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
-- Ovid (43? BC - 18 AD), Metamorphoses
Wagner drives the nail into your head with swinging hammer blows.
-- P.A. Fiorentino (1806-1864)
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
-- P.D. James
Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
-- P.G. Wodehouse
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
-- P.G. Wodehouse
To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time.
-- P.G. Wodehouse, quoted in Pepper's , p.199, #14
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
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
How much fame, money, and power does a woman have to achieve on her own before you can punch her in the face?
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
People ask me if I've ever been called a Nazi. I answer that no one has ever had dreams of being tied down and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Remember the generational battles twenty years ago? Remember all the screaming at the dinner table about haircuts, getting jobs and the American dream? Well, our parents won. They're out living the American dream on some damned golf course in Vero Beach, and we're stuck with the jobs and haircuts.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
The question nowadays is not what makes government work. The question is how do we make it stop.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Public display of mourning is no longer made by people of fashion, although some flashier kinds of widows may insist on sleeping with only black men during the first year after the death.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.
-- P.J. O'Rourke (commenting on _Moby Dick_)
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
-- P.J. Plauger
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Good taste is the enemy of creativity
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
The only aesthetic question that working artists discuss is where to buy decent turpentine.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Television is democracy at its ugliest.
-- Paddy Chayefsky (1923-1982)
Things are always at their best in the beginning.
-- Pascal
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up becaues I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up becaue I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me –
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller
If the human mind were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
-- Pat Bahn
I don't want to be charged with child abuse.
-- Pat Buchanan, saying he did not want to get into a war of words with Vice President Dan Quayle
The popular view of Eisenhower among educated Eastern people was that he was a boob.
-- Pat Moynihan, Playboy Interview – March 1977
Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles
-- Pat Paulsen
It sure does, Ben, it definitely does . . .this is definite . . .it specifically clearly, unequivocally says that Russia and other countries will enter into war and God will destroy Russia through earthquakes, volcanoes . . .
-- Pat Robertson when asked the question Does the Bible specifically tell us what is going to happen in the future 700 Club December 2, 1981
You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him.
-- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy
May the Lord open your eyes and heart so that you may understand him more clearer.
-- Patrick Harubin
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third may profit by their example!
-- Patrick Henry
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.
-- Patrick Henry (Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775)
I smell a rat.
-- Patrick Henry, upon hearing about the Constitutional Convention, which eventually overthrew the first Federal Government of the United States
She just came in, pounced around this thing with me for a few years, enjoyed herself, gave it a sort of beautiful quality and left. Excited a few men in the meantime.
-- Patrick Macnee, reminiscing on Diana Rigg's involvement in The Avengers (interview, Washington Post, Sept. 6, 1987)
When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.
-- Patrick Overton
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.
-- Patti Smith
We need a new cosmology. New Gods. New Sacraments. Another drink.
-- Patti Smith
I saw the same dynamic in our family - a dysfunctional family - mirrored in the country in the 1980's. If you take this family, and you put them up there as the First Family - if you look at what the dynamic is in the family - you might have a pretty good sense of how it's going to trickle down.
-- Patty Davis
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
-- Paul Beatty
We live in a rainbow of chaos.
-- Paul Cezanne
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-- Paul Dirac (1902-1984)
Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
-- Paul Eldridge
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-- Paul Erdos
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
-- Paul Erlich
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.
-- Paul Feyerabend
Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.
-- Paul Fussell
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
-- Paul Fussell
If you are an author and give one of your books to a member of the upper class, you must never expect him to read it.
-- Paul Fussell
The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower your class.
-- Paul Fussell
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
-- Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
-- Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
-- Paul Goodman (1911-1972)
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-- Paul Goodman (1911-1972)
Because if it didn't work out I didn't want to blow the whole day.
-- Paul Hornung - Green Bay Packers when asked why he got married before noon (also attributed to Mickey Rooney)
When you read the history of the human family, it slowly comes to you that all the world's oceans once fell as tears.
-- Paul Lutus
We always use models. It's difficult to find real women who fit what we're trying to say. Real women, they aren't as cooperative as real men.
-- Paul Marciano, on why no real women are used in Guess advertisements
My field is day-to-day street life. I don't want to create fake pictures.
-- Paul Marciano, on why only real men are used in Guess advertisements
Somebody said to me, `But the Beatles were antimaterialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say `Now, let's write a swimming pool'.
-- Paul McCartney
I am not an Economist. I am an honest man!
-- Paul McCracken
Look at it this way: MSDOS is an overgrown program loader; the MacOS is an overgrown user interface. Neither is an operating system, but the second is better for running applications.
-- Paul Placeway
I only drink fortified wines during bad weather. Snowstorm, hurricane, tornado--I'm not particular, as long as it's bad. After all, any storm for a Port.
-- Paul S. Winalski
The wine seems to be very closed-in and seems to have entered a dumb stage. Sort of a Marcel Meursault.
-- Paul S. Winalski
A careless speech writer includes the word paradigm in President Reagan's speech on superconductivity. Yes, he pronounces it paradijum.
-- Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
-- Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian
If you were in a room with Kadaffi, Saddam Hussien, and John Sununu, and you only had two bullets, what would you do. Shoot John Sununu twice.
-- Paul Tsongas
I came from a disadvantaged home. They were Republicans.
-- Paul Tsongas, campaigning in New Hampshire
A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
-- Paul Valery (1871-1945) in 1895
[T]here are people who want a different political order, who are not necessarily Marxists. Symbolized by the women's liberation movement, they believe that the future for their political power lies in the restructuring of the traditional family, and particularly in the downgrading of the male or father role in the traditional family.
-- Paul Weyrich
If dogs move in two dimensions and birds move in three dimensions, then cats must be fractal.
-- Paula
I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as Presidential eligibility.
-- Paula Poundstone
I'll probably never have children because I don't believe in touching people for any reason.
-- Paula Poundstone
Hoping to goodness is not theologically sound.
-- Peanuts
Why does a small tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and s substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?
-- Peg Bracken
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it.
-- Peggy Joyce
I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little . . .frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.
-- Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for the Reagan administration
Pseudo-Judeo-Christian horror was no match for genuinely hypoglycemic hunger.
-- Peni R. Griffin, The Goat Man (IASFM, 5/89)
Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind . . .
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-- Perelman
There's an old saying: He who plays with fire sometimes throws light on the situation.
-- Perry Mason - Raymond Burr
I'm no different from anybody else with two arms, two legs and forty-two-hundred hits.
-- Pete Rose
Not everybody has to sing the melody.
-- Pete Seeger
The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.
-- Peter Brimelow, National Review (2/1/93)
. . .I don't care for the term 'mechanistic'. The word 'cybernetic' is a lot more apropos. The mechanistic world-view is falling further and further behind the real world where even simple systems can produce the most marvellous chaos.
-- Peter da Silva
As for the basic assumptions about individuality and self, this is the core of what I like about cyberpunk. And it's the core of what I like about certain pre-gibson neophile techie SF writers that certain folks here like to put down. Not everyone makes the same assumptions. I haven't lost my mind . . . it's backed up on tape.
-- Peter da Silva
Who are the artists in the Computer Graphics Show? Wavefront's latest box, or the people who programmed it? Should Mandelbrot get all the credit for the output of programs like MandelVroom?
-- Peter da Silva
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you realise that?
-- Peter Da Silva
Optimisation is not free. Gratuitous optimisation can be translated directly into missing features or later release dates.
-- Peter da Silva (peter@ficc.ferranti.com)
But cyberpunks *are* a bunch of pimple-faced geeks who sit around trying to break into bank computers or whatever. Re-read _Neuromancer_ and apply the inverse James Bond transformation to Case and his cohorts. They're all supposed to be totally out of shape, with their disdain for the meat.
-- Peter da Silva (peter@sugar.hackercorp.com)
That was Zen, this is Tao.
-- Peter da Silva, April 24, 1993
Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself.
-- Peter da Silva, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
-- Peter De Vries
Life is a zoo in a jungle.
-- Peter De Vries
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.
-- Peter De Vries
The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.
-- Peter De Vries
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.
-- Peter De Vries
There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
-- Peter De Vries
We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school.
-- Peter De Vries
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 De Vries
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
-- Peter Drucker
It's ten o'clock . . . Do you know where your AI programs are?
-- Peter Oakley
LA needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune.
-- Peter Plagens
What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn?
-- Peter S. Beagle
Many books today suggest that the mass of women lead lives of noisy desperation.
-- Peter S. Prescott
Gentleman! What do you think you are doing? You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
-- Peter Sellers as President Mervin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove
My tears stuck in their little ducts, refusing to be jerked.
-- Peter Stack in a movie review, in the San Francisco Chronicle-Jan 2, 1983
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
-- Peter Ustinov
I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
-- Peter Ustinov
In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
-- Peter Ustinov
When solving a panic you must first ask yourself what you were doing that could possibly frighten an operating system
-- Peter van der Linden
. . .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.
We trained hard . . ..but every time we formed up teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn that we 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 bc
Everyone should support the ERA. Without Earned Run Average, we won't know which pitchers are the best. :)
-- Phil Stromer
Personally, I think a fetus is about as much a life as a fish on a hook. Maybe less. The fish doesn't need to feed off an umbrellical cord. It's cordless, like my telephone.
-- Phil Stromer
So be careful out there folx, Sun is watching. If you say anything that even remotely resembles political incorrectness, you are taking a chance with your livelihood. I'd recommend that any employees of Sun do NOT use the USENET for anything other than informational purposes, such as to mention a conference or something along the lines.
-- Phil Stromer
Dictatorship is without a doubt the most satisfying form of government . . .as long as I'm the dictator.
-- Phil Stromer 11/9/90-
Gas chambers are neat. They make the guy's bodily functions all let go simultaneously. Just think, he'll whizz, doodoo, and hurl all at the same time. It'll be like a Symphony in Gross, D-minor. It'll be like a 600-pound person sitting on his face and farting until he suffocates.
-- Phil Stromer on the Harris execution
Love: two minds without a single thought.
-- Philip Barry
Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.
-- Philip Guedalla (1889-1944)
The Nazis have no sense of humor, so why should they want television?
-- Philip K. Dick
Those cave paintings are wonderful, but like everything we know, they are not too wonderful to be true. It is their reality that gives them wonder, and while there will never come a time when some of us will not wish for more than we can have, the happiest of us will wait confidently for other tangible finds. We treasure the cave at Altamira where a century ago a little girl first saw the great painted bison. New caves will be found, year after year, in lab or clinic or sky or ocean depth, or even in ancient markings. That is the promise of real science, which cannot allow wish to rule mind, but nonetheless finds unendingly wonderful things.
-- Philip Morrison
If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
-- General Philip Sheridan
A person in a uniform is merely an extension of another person's will.
-- Philip Slater
God must hate common people, because he made them so common.
-- Philip Wylie
Without a thorough understanding of tactics, there can be no effective strategy; therefore, any general must have a good foundation in the tactical aspects of warfare. However, it is not necessary for a general to be an excellent swordsman, musketeer, or tank gunner. It is sufficient to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and proper use of the forces available, and to know the strengths and weaknesses of your enemy.
-- Phillip Harbison (alvitar@xavax.com)
Reality is what won't go away when you stop believing in it.
-- Phillip K Dick
We seem to have achieved the remarkable situation where nearly half the population is telling the other half what it should be doing and thinking, and checking up that it is doing it.
-- Phillip, The Duke of Edinburgh, [1982]: 5. Community Health, p.99
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
-- Phyllis Diller
The most popular labour-saving device is still money.
-- Phyllis George
It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain damaged baby (even ten years later when she may be happily married).
-- Phyllis Schafly
Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.
-- Phyllis Schlafly
Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God.
-- Phyllis Schlafly
Women's liberationists operate as Typhoid Marys carrying a germ.
-- Phyllis Schlafly
We are starting a movement in the state legislatures . . .to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives.
-- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum
With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately. Sadly, such happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies. They are manifestations of a well-established anti-science tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately, could threaten the country's position as a technological power. . . . The manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its industrial equals. To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching truth. . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically, with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society.
-- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in New Scientist, May 19, 1988
It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.
-- Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
-- Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.
The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.
-- Pierre Trudeau - Prime Minister of Canada 1968-1979
Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.
-- Pierre Trudeau - Prime Minister of Canada 1968-1979
Stay out of the road, if you want to grow old.
-- Pink Floyd
The first and the best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.
-- Plato (427?-347 BC)
The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.
-- Plato (427?-347 BC)
The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their poems, or of parents for their children . . . and hence they are very bad company, for they talk of nothing but the praises of wealth.
-- Plato (427?-347 BC)
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 (427?-347 BC)
Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
-- Plato (427?-347 BC)
Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
-- Plato (427?-347 BC)
He was a wise man who invented God.
-- Plato (427?-348? B.C.)
He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.
-- Plato (427?-348? BC)
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
-- Plato (427?-348? BC)
Philosophy is the highest music.
-- Plato (427?-348? BC)
But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.
-- Plato (427?-348? BC), in Symposium
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.)
. . .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, Phaedrus
Aliter catuli longe olent, aliter sues. (Puppies and pigs have a very different smell.)
-- Plautus
To conclude, all other living creatures live orderly and well, after their own kind: we see them flock and gather together, and ready to make head and stand against all others of a contrary kind: the lions as fell and savage as they be, fight not with one another: serpents sting not serpents, nor bite one another with their venomous teeth: nay the very monsters and huge fishes of the sea, war not amongst themselves in their own kind: but believe me, man at man's hand receiveth most harm and mischief.
-- Pliny The Elder
Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?
-- Pliny the Elder
Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by or rather, things that are!
-- Plutarch
Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds . . .he said: `Do you not think it lamentable that with such a vast multitude of worlds, we have not yet conquerrd one?'
-- Plutarch c. AD 46 – 120, On the Tranquility of the Mind
I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
-- Poet Louise Bogan (1898-1970) on her love affair with poet Theodore Roethke
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
-- Pogo
Don't take life too serious. It ain't no ways permanent.
-- Pogo, by Walt Kelly
'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true.
-- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's _Hamlet, Prince of Darkness_
How do you like that guy? Can't run six balls and he's President of the United States.
-- Pool hustler Johnny Irish on Nixon
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
-- Poor Richard's Almanac
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
-- Pope John Paul I
You must have an IQ of at least half a million.
-- Popeye
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons.
-- Popular Mechanics, March 1949
The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little.
-- Porterfield
Bad cop. No donut! Bad cop. No donut!
-- Portland Protest Chant
You can't fight in here . . ..this is the War Room!!
-- President Muffley (Peter Sellers) to Gen. Buck Turgidson (Geroge C. Scott) while wrestling with Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove
Right behind sex, commerce on the Internet seems to excite people the most.
-- President, RSA Data Security
As an anti-American, I thank you for your rotten article devoted to my person.
-- Prince Sihanouk in a letter to Time magazine
I don't really trust a sane person.
-- Pro football lineman Lyle Alzado
The Peter Principle: People are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.
-- Prof. Laurence Peter
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (that is, excessive gratuities) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith.
2. From spiritual faith to great courage.
3. From courage to liberty.
4. From liberty to abundance.
5. From abundance to selfishness.
6. From selfishness to complacency.
7. From complacency to apathy.
8. From apathy to dependency.
9. From dependency back again into bondage.
-- Professor Alexander Tyler; The previous was written over 200 years ago while our original 13 colonies were still a part of Great Britain. At the time, the author was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic over 2000 years earlier.
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
-- Professor Edger Dijkstra at the ACN South Central Regional Conference Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 November 1984
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
-- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
-- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
-- Professor Edsger Dijkstra
Does that mean that Calculus with Sets & mappings is Calculus S&M?
-- Professor Hrusa (CMU)
Marriage is like a bank account. You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.
-- Professor Irwin Corey
It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
-- Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell
One may be able to quibble about the quality of a single experiment, or about the veracity of a given experimenter, but, taking all the supportive experiments together, the weight of evidence is so strong as readily to merit a wise man's reflection.
-- Professor William Tiller, parapsychologist, Standford University, commenting on psi research
Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.
-- Proverbs 24:17
I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.
-- Proverbs 7:17-18
A wise man has great power; and a man of knowledge increases strength.
-- Proverbs: 24:5
Bear, do not blame, what cannot be changed.
-- Publilius Syrus (c. 42 BC)
It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.
-- Publilius Syrus (c. 42 BC)
Practice is the best of all instructors.
-- Publilius Syrus (c. 42 BC)
I believe that religion can make a well-rounded person, or it can make an idiot. What we've go going on here is an idiot.
-- Purchasing agent for Baylor Baptist University, Waco, Texas, commenting on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.
Decency . . .must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
-- Quentin Crisp
Even hooligans marry, though they know that marriage is but for a little while. It is alimony that is forever.
-- Quentin Crisp
For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
-- Quentin Crisp
Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?
-- Quentin Crisp
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
-- Quentin Crisp
Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
-- Quentin Crisp
One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.
-- Quentin Crisp
The continued propinquity of another human being cramps the style after a time unless that person is somebody you think you love. Then the burden becomes intolerable at once.
-- Quentin Crisp
The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.
-- Quentin Crisp
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
-- Quentin Crisp
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
-- Quentin Crisp
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
-- Quentin Crisp
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
-- Quentin Crisp
*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues.
-- Quentin Johnson (quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu)
We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.
-- Quintilian (35-90 A.D.)
Reality's failure rate is similar to [that of] other barrier contraceptives.
-- Quote from Science News
Experience consists of experiencing that which one does not wish to experience
-- quoted by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscience?
We must avoid here two complementary errors: on the one hand that the world has a unique, intrinsic, pre-existing structure awaiting our grasp; and on the other hand that the world is in utter chaos. The first error is that of the student who marvelled at how the astronomers could find out the true names of distant constellations. The second error is that of the Lewis Carroll's Walrus who grouped shoes with ships and sealing wax, and cabbages with kings . . .
-- R. Abel, Man is the Measure, New York: Free Press, 1976
A self-balancing, 28-jointed adaptor-based biped; an electro-chemical reduction plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries . . ..
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
Everything you've learned in school as obvious becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
I think I am a verb.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
Real wealth can only increase.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
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.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller, Playboy Interview - February 1972
Just as lexically words are put into sentences, conceptually concepts are put into what we call conceptualizations.
-- R. C. Schank, Conceptual Dependency Theory, p. 40
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
-- R. Emerson
Women's liberationists spread the work that . . .the only peaceful family is one in which either the wife is enslaved or the husband in androgynous.
-- R. Emmett Tyell, [1984], p.127
It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling
-- R. Frost
Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
-- R. Geis
Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
-- R. Geis
We have luck only with women -- not spacecraft!
-- R. Kremnev, builder of failed Soviet FOBOS probes
Ignorance simplifies ANY problem.
-- R. Lucke
Children often have been likened to scientists. Both ask fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. Both also ask innumerable questions that seems utterly trivial to others. Finally, both are granted by society the time to pursue their musings.
-- R. Seigler
When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him.
-- R.A. Lafferty
Insanity: aperfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.
-- R.D. Laing
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.
-- R.D. Laing
Do we need more laws? God forbid! We need more righteousness, more freedom, and more godly men -- and fewer laws.
-- R.J. Rushdoony
. . . and I realized, we did not live in a scientific society.
-- R.P. Feynman, Cargo cult science
It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business.
-- R.U. Sirius
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
-- R.Z. Sheppard, book critic
The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead -- all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated.
-- Rabbi Meir Kahane
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
My specific goal is to revolutionize the future of the species. Mathematics is just another way of predicting the future.
-- Ralph Abraham
I . . . reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the universe in which we live. Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist.
-- Ralph Alpher, physicist, “Theology of the Big Bang,” Religious Humanism, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12
R&D is not something that can be useful alone . . . R&D is part of a product-making process.
-- Ralph E. Gomory, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York City
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
-- Ralph Emerson
This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out.
-- Ralph Nader, Playboy Interview - June 1992
Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.
-- Ralph Nader, The Pacific Sun, March 21, 1981
I honestly believe that in my lifetime we will see a country once again governed by Christians . . .and Christian values. What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.
-- Ralph Reed, Executive Director, the Christian Coalition
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
-- Ralph W. Sockman
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and make a trail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
There is no knowledge that is not power.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
By neccessity, by proclivity, -- and by delight, we all quote.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The less government we have the better.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The more he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The people are to be taken in very small doses.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
We become what we think about all day long.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
What you are shouts so loud in my ears I cannot hear what you say.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), quoting a friend
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
Radical feminism gave birth to child killing. They were the ones out in the streets demanding their rights - NARAL, NOW, with their lies and their false propaganda that the media lapped up obediently and spewed back out to the American people. Lies.
-- Randall Terry
I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies.
-- Randall Terry, Executive Director, Operation Rescue
I was conceived out of wedlock. I could've been aborted. I hope and think that my parents wouldn't have, but I'm just real glad they didn't even have the choice.
-- Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue
There is no statute of limitations on stupidity.
-- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.
That's a hell of an ambition, to be mellow. It's like wanting to be senile.
-- Randy Newman on middle of the road music
The world of the commodity is a world updside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.
-- Raoul Vaneigem
There's an unfortunate obsession in this country with mammary glands. No matter how fantastic a girl's breasts are, if that's all she's got, they just hang there like two worthless tits.
-- Raquel Welch, Playboy Interview - January 1970
. . .The Universe is thronged with fire and light, And we but smaller suns, which, skinned, trapped and kept Enshrined in blood and precious bones, hold back the night.
-- Ray Bradbury
I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people's dreams for their lives.
-- Ray Bradbury
California, the department store state.
-- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
-- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.
-- Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
We are the protagonists and authors of our own drama. It is up to us; there is no one left to blame. Neither the system, not our leaders, nor our parents. We can't go out and hang the first amoeba.
-- Rebecca McClen Novick
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
-- Rebecca West
Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.
-- Rebecca West
Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
-- Rebecca West
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
-- Rebecca West
It's tacky, very, very tacky. But maybe I should be grateful. People tell me it used to be worse.
-- Recently arrived Fontana resident
They made us many promises, more than I can remember. They never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it!
-- Red Cloud, Lakota, 1891
Who said you could do what you do?
-- Red Hot Chili Peppers
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
-- Redd Foxx
Live or die, I'll make a million.
-- Reebus Kneebus, before his jump to the center of the earth, Firesign Theater
During the race
We may eat your dust
But when you graduate
You'll work for us.
-- Reed College cheer
The will to win is worthless if you don't get paid for it.
-- Reggie Jackson
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
-- Reginald Buller
God, give me grace to accept with Serenity the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.
-- Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915)
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
-- Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discours de la Methode
An object never serves the same function as its image- or its name.
-- Rene Magritte
Kissing is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other.
-- Rene' Yasenek
The Green Party is like a watermelon -- green on the outside and red on the inside.
-- Rep. Bill Dannemeyer, R-Fullerton
Quayle was very enthusiastic about signing author Tom Clancy to the National Space Council as an unpaid consultant (see his quote re: Red Storm Rising). Clancy, however, was not Quayle's first choice; that honor went to famed aviator Clutch Cargo. A plan to approach him and offer him the position was scuttled when it was discovered that Mr. Cargo is a fictional character.
-- reported in The New Republic, 7/3/89
If the weather is extremely bad, church attendance will be down. If the weather is extremely good, church attendance will be down. If the bulletin covers are in short supply, however, church attendance will exceed all expectations.
-- Reverend Chichester
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.
-- Reverend Ivan Stang - High Weirdness By Mail
These patriots don't mince words . . . Okay, sure, they *are* dangerous, hopelessly ignorant, inbred, retarded borderline lunatics with an insatiable lust for the blood of sinners -- but at least they're *honest* about it.
-- Reverend Ivan Stang, cofounder of the Church of the Subgenius, about a group known as Free Love Ministries, in his book High Weirdness By Mail
Our educational systems may very well be on the threshold of a new and even gloomier Dark Age of the 20th and 21st centuries, unless the anti- intellectualism and confused thinking creationists produce is overcome.
-- Reverend James Skehan
I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men -- that's their problem.
-- Reverend Jerry Falwell
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. . . . Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
-- Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, The Pre-Adamic Creation and Evolution
Obviously something slipped through here.
-- Reverend John Vaughan, Financial administrator for the Archdiocese of Miami (when asked why they held stock in companies that manufacture contraceptives)
The choice before us is plain: Christ or chaos, conviction or compromise, discipline or disintegration. I am rather tired of hearing about our rights and privileges as American citizens. The time is come - it now is - when we ought to hear about the duties and responsibilities of our citizenship. America's future depends upon her accepting and demonstrating God's government.
-- Reverend Peter Marshall, on being elected Chaplain of the U. S. Senate in January 1947
If the telephone rings today . . ... Water it!
-- Reverend Thomas, Gnostic N.Y.C. Cabal
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
-- Rich Cook
Lactomangulation, n.: Manhandling the open here spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the illegal side.
-- Rich Hall, Sniglets
Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?
-- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc
A thing can be true and still be desperate folly.
-- Richard Adams, _Watership Down_
Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours.
-- Richard Bach
Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.
-- Richard Bach
The bonds that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each others life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
-- Richard Bach
Canada is a country so square that even the female impersonators are women.
-- Richard Benner
I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink.
-- Richard Burton
I am a mass of contradictions
-- Richard Burton, Playboy Interview - September 1963
The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
-- Richard Cecil
Setting loose on the battlefield weapons that are able to learn may be one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made. It could also be one of the last.
-- Richard Forsyth - Machine Learning for Expert Systems
We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement.
-- Richard J. Daley
It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant.
-- Richard J. Ferris, president, United Airlines
. . .I would go so far as to suggest that, were it not for our ego and concern to be different, the African apes would be included in our family, the Hominidae.
-- Richard Leakey
When you're in love it's the most glorious two and a half days of your life.
-- Richard Lewis
I would have made a good Pope.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost . . . the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), 10/27/65
Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will -- that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things . . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), 6/23/72
I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), discussing Watergate (1913-1994)
I don't give a shit about the Italian lira.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), on being asked by on the decline of the Italian lira
You want a wife who is intelligent, but not too intelligent.
-- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), on the best wife for a president
If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?
-- Richard Nixon (1913-1994)
No president in history has been more vilified or was more vilified during the time he was President than Lincoln. Those who knew him, his secretaries, have written that he was deeply hurt by what was said about him and drawn about him, but on the other hand, Lincoln had the great strength of character never to display it, always able to stand tall and strong and firm no matter how harsh or unfair the criticism might be. These elements of greatness, of course, inspire us all today.
-- Richard Nixon (1913-1994)
When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
-- Richard Nixon (1913-1994)
The [Interstate Commerce] commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the public clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal.
-- Richard Olney - a lawyer for the Boston & Maine and Attorney General under Grover Cleveland, advising a railroad president
US out of North America, NOW!!
-- Richard O'Rourke
From a long view of the history of mankind -- seen from, say, ten thousand years from now -- there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.
-- Richard P. Feynman
A philosopher once said 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results'. Well, they do not. You set up the circumstances, with the same conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole you will see the electron.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
I have no idea what White House statement was was issued, but I stand by it 100 percent.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth. I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is mere. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation . . . It is precise mathematically, but the mathematics is far too difficult for the individuals that are doing it, and they don't draw their conclusions with any rigour. So they just guess.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), on superstring theory
But then a new problem came up: the Jupiter probe, Galileo, was going to use a power supply that runs on heat generated by radioactivity. If the shuttle carrying Galileo failed, radioactivity could be spread over a large area.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), What Do You Care What Other People Think?
If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap.
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), What Do You Care What Other People Think?
There is no doubt I should be tarred and feathered.
-- Richard Sexton
Trailing Edge Technologies is pleased to announce the following TETflame programme:
1) For a negotiated price (no quatloos accepted) one of our flaming representatives will flame the living shit out of the poster of your choice. The price is inversly proportional to how much of an asshole the target it. We cannot be convinced to flame Dennis Ritchie. Matt Crawford flames are free.
2) For a negotiated price (same arrangement) the TETflame programme is offering ``flame insurence''. Under this arrangement, if one of our policy holders is flamed, we will cancel the offending article and flame the flamer, to a crisp.
3) The TETflame flaming representatives include: Richard Sexton, Oleg Kisalev, Diane Holt, Trish O'Tauma, Dave Hill, Greg Nowak and our most recent aquisition, Keith Doyle. But all he will do is put you in his kill file. Weemba by special arrangement.
-- Richard Sexton
The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
-- Richard Sheridan (1751-1816) (Speech in reply to Mr. Dundas T. Moore)
Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
-- Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin
Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it, and conquering it.
-- Richter (1763-1825)
The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.
-- Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled
. . .and before I knew what I was doing, I had kicked the typewriter and threw it around the room and made it beg for mercy. At this point the typewriter pleaded for me to dress him in feminine attire but instead I pressed his margin release over and over again until the typewriter lost consciousness. Presently, I regained consciousness and realized with shame what I had done. My shame is gone and now I am looking for a submissive typewriter, any color, or model. No electric typewriters please!
-- Rick Kleiner
It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes.
-- Rick Obidiah
The biggest growth industry in UNIX is promoting standards.
-- Rikki Kirzner, Dataquest.
The difference between man and animals is that we don't use our tongue to clean our genitals.
-- Rimmer - Red Dwarf
Shut up he explained.
-- Ring Lardner (1885-1933), The Young Immigrants, 1920
If you know that fundamentally there is nothing to seek, you have settled your affairs.
-- Rinzai
If the world were a logical place, men would ride sidesaddle.
-- Rita Mae Brown
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.
-- Rita Mae Brown
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
-- Rita Mae Brown
The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.
-- Rita Mae Brown
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-- Rita Mae Brown
My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.
-- Rita Rudner
My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
-- Rita Rudner
The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes, it's just a tired feeling:
-- Rita Rudner
Correct morals arise from knowing what man IS - not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.
-- Robert A Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Every year a few research results pay the freight for all the rest.
-- Robert A. Frosch, General Motors
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.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again too. Who decides?
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Never try to outstubborn a cat.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: Come back with your shield, or on it. Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy and half slug who must tighten his belt.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: Of course it is 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.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
The phrase we (I) (you) 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.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what the stars fortell, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable verdict of history - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Yield to Temptation . . .it may not pass your way again.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
You live and learn. Or you don't live long.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate -- and quickly.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors – and miss.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
All Marxists, basically, are reactionaries, yearning for the Oriental despotisms of pre-Hellenic times, the neolithic culture that preceded the rise of self-consciousness and egoism.
-- Robert Anton Wilson, writing as Justin Case.
Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad but not ill
-- Robert Anton Wison, Werewolf Bridge
Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.
-- Robert Ardrey
The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
-- Robert Benchley
A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at that moment.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
I can't seem to bring myself to say, Well, I guess I'll be toddling along. It isn't that I can't toddle. It's that I can't guess I'll toddle.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
Tell us your phobias, and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945) American humorous writer
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
-- Robert Bly
I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake.
-- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life as an officer resigns a commission.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
A fig for those by law protected, Liberty's a glorious feast; 'Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.
-- Robert Burns 1759-1796
For a' that and a' that It's comin' yet -for a' that That man to man, the warld o'er Shall brithers be for a' that!
-- Robert Burns 1759-1796
Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.
-- Robert Byrne
Cogito ergo dim sum. (Therefore I think these are pork buns.)
-- Robert Byrne
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
-- Robert Byrne
In order to preserve your self-respect, it is sometimes necessary to lie and cheat.
-- Robert Byrne
Love will find a lay.
-- Robert Byrne
Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.
-- Robert Byrne
A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
-- Robert Chapman
I've been called an evil genius by cities of assholes . . . but I know who these people are! And they're on my list!
-- Robert Crumb
Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.
-- Robert D. Sprecht (Rand Corp)
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 F. Kennedy
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawer.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
As it is more blessed to give than receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Isn't it funny that anything the Supreme Court says is right?
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.
-- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Art history is the nightmare from which art is struggling to awake.
-- Robert Fulford
I have seen the future and it doesn't work.
-- Robert Fulford
Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts . . .
-- Robert Fulghum
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are consequences.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written.
-- Robert Gould Shaw, abolitionist
Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers And a living flame will start.
-- Robert Graves
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry is money.
-- Robert Graves
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
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.
-- Robert Graves
Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit. Surely it is worth while to be one, and to feel that the census of the universe would be incomplete without counting you. Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls or fences, or prohibited places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you hold all in fee, and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatsoever; that in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from the ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigorty can devise no prison, no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, The Free Soul
Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.
-- Robert Heilbroner
Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers.
-- Robert Hummel
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
-- Robert Hutchins
How much is that telescope worth?
I don't know. At least ten grand.
Yeah? How much is the comet worth?
It's priceless.
No. Really. How much?
[Pause] How much do you have?
-- Robert J. Nemiroff; Appeared in Astronomy Magazine in 1987, Volume 15, Section 2, Page 30
I am become death, shatterer of worlds.
-- Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion)
How do I explain to clients that society believes buying a rock (of cocaine) is three or four times as bad as raping a woman?
-- Robert Jakovitch, Broward [FL] Assistant Public Defender [from AP story 12 July 1990]
An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master craftsman employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise requires sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real applications, and only practice with these tools will build skill in their use.
-- Robert L. Kruse, Data Structures and Program Design
. . .for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
Marriage; a long conversation chequered by disputes.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might; to eat with apple tart.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them.
-- Robert Lucky
A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.
-- Robert M. Hamilton
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
-- Robert M. Heinlein
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
-- Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I don't believe in leaving anything to be inherited.
-- Robert Maxwell, Playboy Interview - October 1991
Show me a man who has enjoyed his school days and I'll show you a bully and a bore.
-- Robert Morely
Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.
-- Robert Orben
H.R. Haldeman if he wanted to hear a report in the United States. Ask any Indian.
-- Robert Orben
Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
-- Robert Orben
Summit meetings tend to be like panda matings. The expectations are always high, and the results usually disappointing.
-- Robert Orben
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.
-- Robert Quillen
There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.
-- Robert Ranke Graves (b. 1895)
If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes.
-- Robert Redford
In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.
-- Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor
Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an ism in the sense of a belief or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate street smarts in the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one'w own allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim.
-- Robert S. DeBear, An Agenda for Reason, Realism, and Responsibility, New York Skeptic (newsletter of the New York Area Skeptics, Inc.), Spring 1988
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condenced, the deeper they burn.
-- Robert Southey (1774-1843)
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.
-- Robert Townsend, in Up the Organization (paraphrased)
Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears.
-- Robert W. Sarnoff
Perhaps the reader may ask, of what consequence is it whether the author's exact language is preserved or not, provided we have his thought? The answer is, that inaccurate quotation is a sin against truth. It may appear in any particular instance to be a trifle, but perfection consists in small things, and perfection is no trifle.
-- Robert W. Shaunon
If the automobile had followed the same development cyclee as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
-- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
The Lisa had problems, but it was a terrific piece of engineering that still puts the Macintosh to shame.
-- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
-- Robertson Davies
Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They`s have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
-- Robertson Davies
Real boring.
-- Robin Norwood, author of Women Who Love Too Much: When you Keep Wishing and Hoping He'll Change, describing her third husband
I never claimed those were case studies. Some are really fictional. The point is not which parts are me and which aren't.
-- Robin Norwood, explaining that many of the patients described in Women Who Love Too Much are in fact herself.
Ah yes, divorce, from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man's genitals through his wallet.
-- Robin Williams
When in doubt, go for the dick joke.
-- Robin Williams, Playboy Interview - January 1992
If they were faked, you would see me in more of them.
-- Rod Gilbert - New York Rangers when asked if hockey fights were faked
The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins. Leonard Bernstein and living bras are incompatible. And you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper.
-- Rod Serling
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices -- to be found in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
-- Rod Serling
I went to a fight the other day and a hockey game broke out.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
Last time I tried to make love to my wife nothing happened, so I said to her, 'What's the matter, you can't think of anybody either?
-- Rodney Dangerfield
We were so poor in my neighborhood, the rainbow was in black and white.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
I have a cat named Trash. In the current political climate it would seem that if I were trying to sell him (at least to a Computer Scientist), I would not stress that he is gentle to humans and is self-sufficient, living mostly on field mice. Rather, I would argue that he is object-oriented.
-- Roger King
The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-- Roger Levian
. . .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
I enjoy being a highly overpaid actor.
-- Roger Moore
So ya thought ya might like to go to the show? To feel that warm thrill of confusion, that space-cadet glow? Tell me, is something eluding you sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see? . . . Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice appears under your feet You slip out of your depth and out of your mind With your fear flowing out behind you As you claw the thin ice
-- Roger Waters/The Wall
God requireth not a uniformity of religion.
-- Roger Williams
I'm a self-made man, but I think if I had to do it over again, I'd call in someone else.
-- Roland Young
I had a patent on masturbation when I was 12. I thought I invented it.
-- Roman Polanski, Playboy Interview - December 1971
I'm a meglomaniac.
-- Roman Polanski, Playboy Interview - December 1971
The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
-- Ronald Firbank
We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of no confusion.
-- Ronald Graham, Rudiments of Ramsey Theory
If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.
-- Ronald Reagan
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
-- Ronald Reagan
I just didn't say it.
-- Ronald Reagan - Governor of California, Associated Press, 10/5/66
I'm a fellow who bleeds every time a tree is cut down.
-- Ronald Reagan - Governor of California, Fresno Bee, 4/28/66
A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
-- Ronald Reagan - Governor of California, Sacramento Bee, 3/12/66
. . .115,000 acres of trees in the state park system is a lot to look at. How long can you look?
-- Ronald Reagan - Governor of California, Sacramento Bee, 4/28/66
I don't believe a tree is a tree and if you've seen one you've seen them all.
-- Ronald Reagan - Governor of California, Sacramento Bee, 9/14/66
The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.
-- Ronald Reagan in 1973
Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.
-- Ronald Reagan to Stuart Spencer, 1966, from There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error by Mark Green and Gail MacColl
America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land.
-- Ronald Reagan to the National Association of Evangelicals Columbus, Ohio
Well, I would - if they realized that we - again if - if we led them back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
-- Ronald Reagan when asked if nuclear war could be limited to tactical weapons. Verbatim transcript from a press conference.
Facts are stupid things.
-- Ronald Reagan, 1988 (slight misquote of John Adams, “Facts are stubborn things.”)
We had parties that Nero would have been ashamed to attend
-- Ronnie Hawkins
I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?
-- Ronnie Shakes
Women are cursed, and men are the proof.
-- Rosanne Barr
Who's Virginia?
-- Rose Kennedy when asked why her daughter-in-law Joan lived in Boston while her son Ted lived in Virginia.
There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
-- Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)
There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.
-- Ross Perot, The Dallas Morning News, March 11, 1984
If voters don't have a stomach for me, they can get one of those blow-dried guys.
-- Ross Perot, Time, April 6, 1992
I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
-- Roy Baty, Nexus6, N6MAA10816, Combat
Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.
-- Roy Blount, Jr.
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
-- Roy Blount, Jr.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
-- Roy Santoro
Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.
-- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
-- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
-- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London
I love the women's movement . . .especially when I'm walking behind it.
-- Rush Limbaugh
I am made from the dust of the stars, the oceans flow in my veins.
-- Rush, Presto
All dimensions are critical dimensions, otherwise why are they there?
-- Russ Zandbergen
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
-- Russell Baker
New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
-- Russell Baker
When compelled to cook, I produce a meal that would make a sword swallower gag.
-- Russell Baker
When helping with this problem, please flame me good so that others will learn from my brazen irresponsibility.
-- Russell Earnest (re4@prism.gatech.edu)
Tax reform means Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.
-- Russell Long
In our family we don't divorce our men - we bury them.
-- Ruth Gordon (1897-1985)
You have to have a talent for having talent.
-- Ruth Gordon (1897-1985)
How do we come to think of things, rather than of processes in this absolute flux? By shutting our eyes to the successive events. It is an artificial attitude that makes sections in the stream change, and calls them things . . . When we shall know the truth of things, we shall realise how absurd it is for us to worship isolated products of the incessant series of transformations as though they were eternal and real. Life is no thing or state of a thing, but a continuous movement or change.
-- S. Radhakrishnan
It's a control freak thing. I wouldn't let you understand.
-- S.H. Underwood
A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.
-- S.J. Perelman
I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartettes, chamber music, and cantatas.
-- S.J. Perelman (1904-1979)
I don't get it really. Sometimes I like to sneak into the theater in the last twenty minutes of the movie. All these men are screaming, Beat that bitch! Kill her off now! The women, you never hear them say anything. They are all just sitting there, real quiet.
-- Sabrina Hughes, teenage movie-theatre usher, on audience reactions to Fatal Attraction
A man must marry only a very pretty woman in case he should ever want some other man to take her off his hands.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren't.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
There are women whose infidelities are the only link they still have with their husbands.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
-- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
Prayer is the wing wherewith the soul flies to heaven, and meditation the eye wherewith we see God.
-- Saint Ambrose (340-397 A.D.)
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)
Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430)
For the preservation of chastity, an empty and rumbling stomach and fevered lungs are indispensable.
-- Saint Jerome (340?-420)
Children are guilty of unpardonable rudeness when they spit in the face of a companion; neither are they excusable who spit from windows or on walls or furniture.
-- Saint John Baptist de La Salle, The Rules of Christian Manners and Civility (c. 1695)
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
-- Saint Luke 2:1
Establish yourself in God and then you will be helpful to others.
-- Saint Seraphim of Sarov
The human spirit is open to God alone, for it is a fathomless depth.
-- Saint Seraphim of Sarov
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
Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas
Soft soap often has a high percentage of lye in it.
-- Salada Tea
If I ask a woman if she has suffered sexual harassment, could this be considered sexual harassment?
-- Sally Forth, Jan. 28, 1991
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
For me eroticism must be ugly, the aesthetic always divine, and death beautiful.
-- Salvador Dali
Happiness is Planet Earth in your rear-view mirror.
-- Sam Hurt
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
-- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
-- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks she is above average.
-- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
The closest I've ever come to saying "no" is "Not now, we're landing."
-- Sam Malone , character played by Ted Danson on Cheers, U.S. television show, in respsonse to Diane telling him to say "no" to her friend's alleged sexual advances.
An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful if there is none in the forest to admire her. He hid in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his premise but made him happy. Moral: Empiricism is more fun than speculation.
-- Sam Weber
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands of those who feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you. May posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
-- Samuel Adams
If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
-- Samuel Adams
The major sin is the sin of being born.
-- Samuel Beckett
POZZO: He used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that's the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it?
ESTRAGON: The Scapegoat's Agony.
VLADIMIR: The Hard Stool.
POZZO: The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net.
-- Samuel Beckett, _Waiting for Godot_
An apology for the devil:it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
If life must not be taken too seriously -- then so neither must death.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virue.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Life is one long process of getting tired.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Life is playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Logic is like the sword: those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
The history of art is the history of revivals.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
When I was [in Canada] I found their jokes like their roads -- not very long and not very good, leading to a little tin point of a spire which has been remorselessly obvious for miles without seeming to get any nearer.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902) _Note Books_
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902), said in 1885
If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of a circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.
-- Samuel F. B. Morse
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. What! no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
-- Samuel Foote
A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
-- Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
-- Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
-- Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)
Television has raised writing to a new low.
-- Samuel Goldwyn (1882-1974)
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
-- Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), said in 1908
A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and viniger, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
A fishing rod is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Anybody who thinks of going to bed before 12 o'clock is a scoundrel.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Golf is a game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Grief is a species of idleness.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
I have found you an argument: but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
It is better to live rich than to die rich.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance; yonder palace was raised by single stones, yet you see its height and spaciousness. He that shall walk with vigor three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): Rasselas [Imlac]
Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.
-- Samuel Palmer (1805-80)
Music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.
-- Samuel Pepys [1666]
No Voice; but oh! the silence sank like music on my heart.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
To doubt has more of faith . . . than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
-- Sandra Boynton
Not to be cheered by praise,
Not to be grieved by blame,
But to know thoroughly ones own virtues or powers
Are the characteristics of an excellent man.
-- Saskya Pandita (1182-1251)
Avoid running at all times.
-- Satchel Paige (1906?-1982)
Never look back. Somethin’ might be gainin’ on you.
-- Satchel Paige (1906?-1982)
Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful. Avoid running at all times. Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you
-- Satchel Paige (1906?-1982), "How to Stay Young" (1953)
In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.
-- Saul Bellow
I think, therefore Descartes exists.
-- Saul Steinberg
Moral victories don't count.
-- Savielly Grigorievitcyh Tartakower (1887-1956)
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
-- Savielly Grigorievitcyh Tartakower (1887-1956)
Bischoff, one of the leading anatomists of Europe, some 70 years ago, carefully measured brain weights, and after many years of accumulation of much data he observed that the average weight of a man's brain was 1350 grams, that of a woman only 1250 grams. This at once, he argued, was infallible proof of the superiority of men over women . . . Being the true scientist, he specified in his will that his own brain be added to his impressive collection. The postmortem examination elicited the interesting fact that his own brain weighed only 1245 grams.
-- Scientific American (1942)
In an evolving man-machine system, the man will get dumber faster than the machine gets smarter.
-- Scott Guthery, SEN Jan 87, p. 20
It's not every workplace that allows you to have an autographed picture of Christ on the wall.
-- Scott Lieberman
COSE is a verb not a noun.
-- Scott McNealy
Things are so bad in Massachusetts now they don't even bother to plough Route 128 when it snows.
-- Scott McNealy in the wake of Wang's going Chapter 11
Who cares who's captain after the wings have fallen off.
-- Scott McNealy on IBM Corp's new chief executive officer Louis Gerstner
The illusion of progress can be achieved by simply rearranging the terms of description so that new acronyms are created.
-- Scott Smith , Sikorsky Test Pilot
National Health Insurance: The compassion of the IRS The efficiency of the Postal Service All at Pentagon prices!!!!
-- Seen on a bumper sticker
I am into parallel monogamy.
-- Seen on a button
Indecision is the basis of flexibility
-- Seen on a button at a Science Fiction convention.
Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force. 1990-1951.
-- Seen on a button at an SF Convention:
Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time.
-- Seen on a coffee cup
'To the Workers of the world, I am sorry.' -- Karl Marx
-- Seen on the side of an East German factory
Welcome to Occupied Mexico
-- seen spray painted on underpass in Salinas, California
You'll NEED someone to love while you're looking for someone TO love.
-- Selagh Delaney
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-- Senator Soaper
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.
-- Seneca (3 BC -65 AD)
Nothing is more common than for great thieves to ride in triumph when small ones are punished.
-- Seneca (3 BC -65 AD)
Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.
-- Seneca (3 BC -65 AD)
The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies.
-- Seneca (3 BC -65 AD)
If you want to get the plain truth, Be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.
-- Seng-Ts'an
Many a man's tongue broke his nose.
-- Seumas MacManus
The politics of despair in America has typically been the politics of backlash.
-- Seymour Martin and Earl Raab
Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances.
-- Seymoure Cray
#3 pencils and quadrille pads.
-- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he used to design the Cray I; he also recommended using the back side of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant.
I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
-- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.
I don't believe man is woman's natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.
-- Shana Alexander
The Diabolonian position is new to the London playgoer of today, but not to lovers of serious literature. From Prometheus to the Wagnerian Siegfried, some enemy of the gods, unterrified champion of those oppressed by them, has always towered among the heroes of the loftiest poetry.
-- Shaw, On Diabolonian Ethics
I'm being eaten by a quick-digesting Sneet
And now I'm restin'
In his lower intestine
And now I'm back out in the street
-- Shel Silverstein
If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him!
-- Sheldon Kopp
(Of Jesus): A parish demogogue.
-- Shelley (Queen Mab)
This is quite a three-pipe problem.
-- Sherlock Holmes quote
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
-- Shirley Temple
I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.
-- Sidney Greenstreet, The Maltese Falcon
. . .it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
-- Sidney Hook
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
-- Sidney J. Harris
There is a country in Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal.
-- Sigfried Hulzer
The great question - which I have not been able to answer - is, "What does a woman want?"
-- Sigmund Freud
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable . . . The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Men are proud of [their technological] achievements . . .. But they seem to have observed that this newly won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The world is no nursery.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
-- Simeon Strunsky
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
-- Simon Newcomb (declared in 1901)
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.
-- Simone Weil
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
-- Simone Weil
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, especially if the goods are worthless.
-- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead.
-- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is . . ..
-- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
-- Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.
-- Sir Arnold Bax
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
You see but you do not observe.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.
-- Sir Arthur Eddington
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we have still to make of a study of 'and.'
-- Sir Arthur Eddington
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
-- Sir Barnett Cocks (ca. 1907)
The challenge of space exploration and particularly of landing men on the moon represents the greatest challenge which has ever faced the human race. Even if there were no clear scientific or other arguments for proceeding with this task, the whole history of our civilization would still impel men toward the goal. In fact, the assembly of the scientific and military with these human arguments creates such an overwhelming case that in can be ignored only by those who are blind to the teachings of history, or who wish to suspend the development of civilization at its moment of greatest opportunity and drama.
-- Sir Bernard Lovell, 1962, in The History of Manned Space Flight
The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domesticated animal
-- Sir Compton MacKenzie
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
-- Sir Frederick G. Banting
To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher.
-- Sir George Porter, New Scientist, 9/4 (1986) p16.
An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.
-- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction, and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and other suchlike considerations, always have, and always will prevail with mankind, to believe that there is a Being who made all things, who has all things in his power, and who is therefore to be feared.
-- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
-- Sir J. Lubbock
In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds. After the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard for its value, was spared. However, to expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers, it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way of symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St. Bartholomew. But when the governer sent in the bill for the bell to the parish authorities, they declined to settle it, alleging that the bell, as a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take advantage of the law lately passed by the king, which allowed all new converts a delay of three years in paying their debts.
-- Sir James G. Frazer, Folklore In The Old Testament
The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases.
-- Sir Josiah Stamp
Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
-- Sir Max Beerbohm
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledegook than the rest of the world put together.
-- Sir Peter Medawar
If a person (a) is poorly, (b) receives treatment intended to make him better, and (c) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.
-- Sir Peter Medawar, The Art of the Soluble
With ignorance wage eternal war, to know thyself forever strain, Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane.
-- Sir Richard Burton
Omne solum forti patria (For every region is a strong man's home.)
-- Sir Richard Burton's motto
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself
-- Sir Richard F. Burton
Vegetarianism is harmless enough, although it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
-- Sir Robert Hutchison
Our view. . . is that it is an essential characteristic of experimentation that it is carried out with limited resources, and an essential part of the subject of experimental design to ascertain how these should be best applied; or, in particular, to which causes of disturbance care should be given, and which ought to be deliberately ignored.
-- Sir Ronald A. Fisher
Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.
-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum.
-- Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), _Count Robert of Paris_
Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.
-- Sir William Symonds -- British Royal Navy, 1837
Without slack, life is like a bowl of shit with the handle on the inside
-- Sister Susie the Floozie
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
-- Sledge Hammer
Make money, not war.
-- slogan popular in libertarian circles in the early 70s
By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates (470-399 BC)
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
-- Socrates (470-399 BC)
The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.
-- Socrates (470-399 BC)
Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.
-- Socrates, in the Apology
If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always remember that you often find outstanding people among those you don't particularly like.
-- Soichiro Honda
Jesus only told half the story. The truth *will* set you free. But, first it's going to piss you off.
-- Solomon Short
The most important question when any new computer architecture is introduced is `So what?'
-- someone in comp.arch
Is it really you, Fuzz, or is it Memorex, or is it radiation sickness?
-- Sonic Disruptors comics
The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats *and* dogs!
-- Sonjay Anand
Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
-- Sophia Loren
I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is better.
-- Sophie Tucker
None love the bearer of bad news.
-- Sophocles
God created the world out of nothing, but the nothingness still shows through.
-- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
-- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards.
-- Soren F. Petersen
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
-- Southern California Oracle
And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb.
-- Spaceballs
When I was in therapy about two years ago, one day I noticed that I hadn't had any children. And I like children at a distance. I wondered if I'd like them up close. I wondered why I didn't have any. I wondered if it was a mistake, or if I'd done it on purpose, or what. And I noticed my therapist didn't have any children either. He had pictures of his cats on the wall. Framed.
-- Spalding Gray from Swimming to Cambodia: The collected works of Spalding Gray
‘Jack, Jack, I said, you don't want to do it. Remember what happened to the guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima? He went crazy! That asshole? He was not properly brainwashed. I, he said with great pride, have been properly brainwashed.
-- Spalding Gray, from Swimming to Cambodia: The collected works of Spalding Gray
A preacher named Gaskin once said, Between ego and entropy, there is no need for a Devil.
-- Spider Robinson _Time Pressure_
I have to give it to my Jewish brothers and sisters; There may be only 7 million of them here in America, but they can lobby like motherfuckers. Say something they feel is anti-Semitic or against the state of Israel and you know about it right away.
-- Spike Lee
I've never seen black men with fine white women. They be ugly. Mugly, dogs. And you always see white men with good-looking black women.
-- Spike Lee, Playboy Interview - July 1991
I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.
-- Spinoza, Dutch Philosopher
If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.
-- Spiro Agnew
Make your illness into a weapon!
-- SPK
There is an old Vulcan saying: only Nixon could go to China.
-- Spock (Leanord Nimoy), Star Trek VI
A man who claims to know what's good for others is dangerous.
-- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Exit, pursued by a bear.
-- Stage direction in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1611)
Some people imagine that nuclear war will mean instant and painless death. But for millions this will not be the case. The accounts of the injured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the doctors who tried to tend them, witness to the horrors and torments which would be magnified thousands of times over in the kinds of attack we analyse here. . .
-- Stan Openshaw - Doomsday
The true Sub accepts into his heart, as his own /personal/ savior, anyone or anything with which he happens to be impressed /at the moment/.
-- Stang
Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
Never lie when the truth is more profitable.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
People find life entirely too time-consuming.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's; and unto human beings, what?
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.
-- Stanislaw Lem
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine . . .
-- Stanislaw Lem
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade . . .
-- Stanislaw Lem
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
-- Stanley Garn
Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side.
-- Stanley Ralph Ross
Times are hard, you're afraid to pay the fee So you find yourself somebody who can do the job for free When you need a little lovin' cause you man is out of town That's the time you get me runnin, and you'll know I'll be around. I'm a fool to do your dirty work . . .
-- Steely Dan - Dirty Work
Babs and Clean Willy were in love they said So, in love, the preacher's face turned red Soon everybody knew the thing was dead He shouts, She bites, They wrangle through the night She go crazy, got to make'm get away Papa say, oh . . .oh, no hesitation, No tears and no hearts breaking, no remorse. Oh . . ..oh Congratulations, this is your Hatian Divorce.
-- Steely Dan - Hatian Divorce
While the music played, you worked by candelight Those San Francisco nights, you were the best in town. Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl you turned it on the world, that's when you turned the world around Did you feel like Jesus? Did you realize you were a champion in their eyes? On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene But your's was kitchen clean Everyone stopped to stare at your technical ability Every A friend had your number on the wall You must have had it all, You go to LA on a dare and you go it alone. Could you live forever? Could you see the day, could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
-- Steely Dan - Kid Charlemagne
Without coffee he could not work, or at least he could not have worked in the way he did. In addition to paper and pens, he took with him everywhere as an indispensable article of equipment the coffee machine, which was no less important to him than his table or his white robe.
-- Stefan Zweigs, Biography of Balzac
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
-- Stendhal
The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.
-- Stendhal
It is important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
-- Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.
[D]eal with your own personal crisis. What might *you* be doing to make intimacy with a man impossible? What attitudes are keeping *you* unavailable for marriage? . . ..The desire to avoid a submissive status in relationship to men can lead you into a loveless life.
-- Stephen and Susan Price, therapists, in their book Loneley Nights
A man said to the Universe: Sir, I exist! However, replied the Universe, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.
-- Stephen Crane
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
. . .we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent observations and inferences by the thousands. The earth is billions of years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary descent. Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither flat nor at the center of the universe? Science *has* taught us some things with confidence! Evolution on an ancient earth is as well established as our planet's shape and position. Our continuing struggle to understand how evolution happens (the theory of evolution) does not cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the fact of evolution -- into doubt.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, The Verdict on Creationism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol XII No. 2
What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.
-- Stephen King
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
-- Stephen King, Roland from The Last Gunslinger
A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
-- Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) in The Mariposa Bank Mystery, 1912
Fix this sentence: He put the horse before the cart.
-- Stephen Price
An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.
-- Stephen R. Covey - Principle-centered Leadership
Music is sound's cognitive apologist.
-- Stephen Smoliar
God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
-- Stephen Williams Hawking (1942- ), Nature 1975 257.
It's scary to think that the infrastructure of the industrialized world is increasingly based on software like this.
-- Stephen Wolfe quoted on page 11 of the August 1992 CAD report referring to AutoCAD rev. 12
Every institution I've ever been associated with has tried to screw me.
-- Stephen Wolfram
I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound.
-- Stephen Wolfram
Hey there, Mister, how's your sister, and does she still go Schmock Schmock?
-- Steve Allen Show
. . .And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.
-- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book The Courage of Conviction, edited by Philip Berman
As I argued in Beloved Son, a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions -- to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.
-- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book The Courage of Conviction, edited by Philip Berman
Eat as much as you like - just don't swallow it.
-- Steve Burns
I believe in eight of the ten commandments; and I believe in going to church every Sunday unless there's a game on.
-- Steve Martin
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was . . . an arctic wilderness.
-- Steve Martin
There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that.
-- Steve Martin
Be there. Aloha.
-- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_
I knew then (in 1970) that a 4-kbyte minicomputer would cost as much as a house. So I reasoned that after college, I'd have to live cheaply in an apartment and put all my money into owning a computer.
-- Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45
I just want to be a good engineer.
-- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech at the 1988 AppleFest
I'll always stay connected with Apple.
-- Steven Jobs, Playboy Interview - February 1985
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
-- Steven Weinberg
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
-- Steven Weinberg
Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.
-- Steven Wright
I came home the other night and tried to open the door with my car keys . . .and the building started up. So I took it out for a drive. A cop pulled me over for speeding. He asked me where I live . . . Right here.
-- Steven Wright
I have an existential map. It has You are here written all over it.
-- Steven Wright
I have two very rare photographs: one is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car; the other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child.
-- Steven Wright
I was playing poker the other night . . . with Tarot cards. I got a full house and 4 people died.
-- Steven Wright
I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked if I had any questions. I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen? He said he couldn't answer that. I told him sorry, but I couldn't work for him then.
-- Steven Wright
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
-- Steven Wright
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?
-- Steven Wright
My brother sent me a postcard the other day with this big sattelite photo of the entire earth on it. On the back it said: Wish you were here.
-- Steven Wright
People think my friend George is weird because he wears sideburns . . .behind his ears. I think he's weird because he wears false teeth . . .with braces on them.
-- Steven Wright
There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
-- Steven Wright
You can't have everything . . . where would you put it?
-- Steven Wright
You know how it is when you go to be the subject of a psychology experiment, and nobody else shows up, and you think maybe that's part of the experiment? I'm like that all the time.
-- Steven Wright
You know that feeling when you're leaning back on a stool and it starts to tip over? Well, that's how I feel all the time.
-- Steven Wright
This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance.
-- Steven Wright, comedian
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-- Stewart Brand
The real test of an artist, of course, is not whether you can see each blade of grass, but whether the eyes follow you across the room.
-- Stewart Evans
Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer.
-- stolen from Brian Gollum
Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.
-- Storm Jameson
Kitten: small homicidal muffin on legs; affects human sensibilities to the point of endowing the most wanton and ruthless acts of destruction with near-mythical overtones of cuteness. Not recommended for beginners. Get at least two.
-- strata@psyche.mit.edu
Creditable arguments by respected scientists have led to the unfortunate conclusion that we cannot exist.
-- Stuart Kaufmann, in The Origins of Order
Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister
-- Su Tung-p'o
Hurting people is my business.
-- Sugar Ray Robinson
My work is done, why wait?
-- Suicide note left by Kodak founder George Eastman (1854-1932)
To date, the firm conclusions of Project Blue Book are:
1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security;
2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and
3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles.
-- Summary of Project Blue Book, an Air Force study of UFOs from 1950 to 1965, as quoted by James Randi in Flim-Flam!
. . . it is important to realize that any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer.
-- Sun System & Network Admin manual
To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.
-- Sun Tze, Ancient Chinese Warlord
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
-- Sun Tzu
Oh God . . . I'm *shot* . . . Hey . . . *wait* a second . . . I'm *okay* . . . Wow! This is *cool! Bullets don't hurt me!
-- Superboy, #2 of SUPERBOY THE COMIC BOOK (based on the TV series)
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!
-- Superman (TV Show)
May you live in interesting times
-- supposedly an ancient Chinese curse
May you live in interesting times and have important men notice you
-- supposedly an ancient Chinese curse
May you live in interesting times and have important men notice you and may you be granted all your wishes
-- supposedly an ancient Chinese curse
. . .Tucker v. Texas, 326 U.S. 517 (1946), in which a statute punishing door-to-door distribution of literature was held invalid as an abridgement of freedom of the press.
-- Supreme Court decision
Attention span is defined as . . . oooo pretty.
-- Susan Dernyar
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- Susan Ertz
The demand that women return to femininity is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful. The feminine woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
-- Susan Faludi, Backlash
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. 'Yes' is the answer.
-- Swami X
There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.
-- Swift
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like machines.
-- Sydney G. Harris
I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.
-- Sydney Smith (1771-1845)