The USEnet fortunes file, obtainable via ftp from many locations. %% Chapter XIII OF Auxiliary, Mixed, and National Arms The second sort of unprofitable arms are auxiliaries, by whom I mean, troops brought to help and protect you by a potentate whom you summon to your aid; Auxiliaries may be excellent and useful soldiers for themselves, but are always hurtful to him who calls them in; for if they are defeated, he is undone, if victorious, he becomes their prisoner. . . . from _The Prince_, by Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513 %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 1 proof by example: The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof. proof by intimidation: 'Trivial'. proof by vigorous handwaving: Works well in a classroom or seminar setting. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2 proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols. proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful. proof by omission: 'The reader may easily supply the details' 'The other 253 cases are analogous' '...' %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 3 proof by obfuscation: A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements. proof by wishful citation: The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims. proof by funding: How could three different government agencies be wrong? proof by eminent authority: 'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP- complete.' %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 4 proof by personal communication: 'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].' proof by reduction to the wrong problem: 'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.' proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 5 proof by accumulated evidence: Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample. proof by cosmology: The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God. proof by mutual reference: In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A. proof by metaproof: A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 6 proof by picture: A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission. proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience. proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given. %% HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 7 proof by forward reference: Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first. proof by semantic shift: Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result. proof by appeal to intuition: Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here. %% THE "FUN WITH USENET" MANIFESTO Very little happens on Usenet without some sort of response from some other reader. Fun With Usenet postings are no exception. Since there are some who might question the rationale of some of the excerpts included therein, I have written up a list of guidelines that sum up the philosophy behind these postings. One. I never cut out words in the middle of a quote without a VERY good reason, and I never cut them out without including ellipses. For instance, "I am not a goob" might become "I am ... a goob", but that's too mundane to bother with. "I'm flame proof" might (and has) become "I'm ...a... p...oof" but that's REALLY stretching it. Two. If I cut words off the beginning or end of a quote, I don't put ellipses, but neither do I capitalize something that wasn't capitalized before the cut. "I don't think that the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place" would turn into "the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place". Imagine the posting as a tape-recording of the poster's thoughts. If I can set up the quote via fast-forwarding and stopping the tape, and without splicing, I don't put ellipses in. And by the way, I love using this mechanism for turning things around. If you think something stinks, say so - don't say you don't think it's wonderful. ... -- D. J. McCarthy (dmccart@cadape.UUCP) %% "During the race We may eat your dust, But when you graduate, You'll work for us." -- Reed College cheer %% "If there's ever anything I can do for you -- or, more to the point, to you, don't hesitate to ask." "*What?*" "Which word didn't you understand?" %% "It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Hit it." -- Blues Brothers %% "Being both an EE and an asshole at the same time must be a terrible burden for you. This isn't really a flame, just a casual observation. Makes me glad I was a CS major, life is really pleasant for me. Have fun with your chosen mode of existence!" -- Jim Morrison (morrisj@mist.cs.orst.edu) %% Algie's last letter to Lidia was written only a few days before he died, but reached her some weeks later, as he had neglected to mark it 'Correo Aereo'. In this letter he reported the discovery of several new contradictions in terms and mentioned, among other things, that Piero della Francesca died on the same day that Columbus discovered America, and that there is in Mexico a rat poison called The Last Supper. Such information is hard to come by these days; now that Algie was gone, Lidia could not readily think of another source. -- Shirley Hazzard, "Nothing in Excess" %% Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. "You want to count it?" he asked Yonderboy. "No," the Panther Modern said. You'll pay. You're a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name." -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% Come... Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes...And let's go home. -- Watchmen %% For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours. --Henri Poincare, "Science et Methode" %% I said I'm two and a half billion years old because when I was young the earth was two billion years old and now it is four and a half billion years old so I must be two and a half billion years old. -- Paul Erdos %% I 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, revolution- ary 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 %% If a schlemazl sold umbrellas, it would stop raining; if he sold candles, the sun would never set; and if he made coffins, people would stop dying. %% Just because they found Martin Bormann's skull doesn't mean he's dead, my best beloved; for everyone knows that competent observers from every neutral country have reported sighting an old man in Argentina whose head is wrapped in bandages, and only the hunted eyes show, winking and blinking beneath the thousands of cranial splints... -- William T. Vollman, "You Bright and Risen Angels" %% Liberty Hulse of Middle Island was steadying an unidentified blonde woman who was crying and appeared near a state of collapse. ``You have to eat,'' Hulse said to the woman. ``You have a beautiful family, and you have to take care of them too.'' Hulse explained to reporters that the woman ``hasn't eaten for weeks'' because of anxiety over the fate of two dogs who were ostensibly buried in the cemetery in Middle Island about 60 miles east of New York City. Hulse said she also paid to have her dog buried there, and she expressed concern that the cemetery might be bulldozed as a health hazard because of an estimated quarter of a million animals buried there. ``Are they going to bulldoze it?'' she asked. ``Over my dead body, because they will have to kill me first.'' -- (UPI) Enraged pet owners curse cemetery owners, 7/9/91 %% Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo pilosophorum. (Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it.) -- Cicero %% No, son, you lose. 'Cause this is a Smith & Wesson I'm holdin' here, an' a Smith & Wesson beats four aces. -- Canada Bill Jones %% On his was back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed. -- William Gibson, "Neuromancer" %% One hysterical woman screamed: ``They killed my babies! They killed my babies!'' -- (UPI) Enraged pet owners curse cemetery owners, 7/9/91 %% 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 something. Something less restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk. -- Jeff G. Bone %% The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this is also vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? As the fool. -- Ecclesiastes 2:14-16 %% 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 %% Tie? You want me to wear a *tie*? Listen: There's only one time in a man's life when he should have a rope knotted around his neck, and that time ain't yet come for me. -- Canada Bill Jones %% Time, because it is so fleeting, time, because it is beyond recall, is the most precious of human goods and to squander it is the most delicate form of dissipation in which man can indulge. -- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Bum" %% To the habitual reader, reading is a drug of which he is the slave; deprive him of printed matter and he grows nervous, moody, and restless; then, like the alcoholic bereft of brandy who will drink shellac or methylated spirit, he will make do with the advertisements of a paper five years old; he will make do with a telephone directory. -- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Bum" %% 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 %% You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving everything an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone. The walls are hot to the touch, and the thundering of the volcano drowns out all other sounds. Embedded in the jagged roof far overhead are myriad twisted formations composed of pure white alabaster, which scatter the murky light into sinister apparitions upon the walls. To one side is a deep gorge, filled with a bizarre chaos of tortured rock which seems to have been crafted by the Devil himself. An immense river of fire crashes out from the depths of the volcano, burns its way through the gorge, and plummets into a bottomless pit far off to your left. To the right, an immense geyser of blistering steam erupts continuously from a barren island in the center of a sulfurous lake, which bubbles ominously. The far right wall is aflame with an incandescence of its own, which lends an additional infernal splendor to the already hellish scene. A dark, foreboding passage exits to the south. -- Adventure %% You know, all of these rules that may be completely correct for normal people, make no sense for prodigies. To say that Bach should pay any attention to how he was socially adjusted is just a bad joke. -- Paul Erdos %% [On randomly generated sentences.] I think that it is hard to read such material without amusement. I feel a little admiration as well. I would never write, 'It happened one frosty look of trees waving gracefully against the wall.' I almost wish I could. Poor poets endlessly rhyme love with dove, and they are constrained by their highly trained mediocrity never to write a good line. In some sense, a stochastic process can do better; it at least has a chance. -- J. R. Pierce, "Symbols, Signals, and Noise" %% ``After all, 13 years of being battered, pushed and otherwise tormented is a long, long time. On the other hand ... you can't expect me just to run away,'' he said. -- L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, as quoted in the UPI story, "L.A. police chief rejects suggestion of retirement", 7/9/91 %% _ / \ |\_/| |---| | | | | _ |=-=| _ _ / \| |/ \ / \| | | ||\ | | | | | \> | | | | | \ | - - - - |) ) | / \ / \ / \ / \ / | | | | | | -- Michael Westlund (d90-mwd@sigma.sm.luth.se) %% (####) (#######) (#########) (#########) (#########) (#########) __&__ (#########) / \ (#########) |\/\/\/| /\ /\ /\ /\ | | (#########) | | | V \/ \---. .----/ \----. | (o)(o) (o)(o)(##) | | \_ / \ / C .---_) ,_C (##) | (o)(o) (o)(o) <__. .--\ (o)(o) /__. | |.___| /____, (##) C _) _C / \ () / | \__/ \ (#) | ,___| /____, ) \ > (C_) < /_____\ | | | / \ /----' /___\____/___\ /_____/ \ OOOOOO /____\ ooooo /| |\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ Homer Marge Bart Lisa Baby Maggie THE SIMPSONS %% EARTH smog | bricks AIR -- mud -- FIRE soda water | tequila WATER %% "...'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming." -- Siddartha, _Lord_of_Light_ by Roger Zelazny %% "I can do a score of things that can't be done. I can find a thing I cannot see, and see a thing I cannot find. The first is time, and the second is spots before my eyes. I can touch a thing I cannot feel, and feel a thing I cannot touch. The first is your heart, and the second is sad and sorry." -- James Thurber, "The Thirteen Clocks" %% [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 %% oh no godzilla guns and planes cannot stop him tokyo is ablaze -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% "What is the price of Experience? Do men Buy it for a song?! and Wisdom for a Dance in the Street? No! it is bought with the price Of all that a man hath: his Wife, his House, his Children-- And Wisdom is sold in the desolate marketplace Where none come to buy and in the barren fields where Farmers plow for bread in vain." -- Blake, The Four Zoas; Night the Second %% ...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 %% I bought the latest computer; it came fully loaded. It was guaranteed for 90 days, but in 30 was outmoded! -- The Wall Street Journal passed along by Big Red Computer's SCARLETT %% Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are filled with a passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of SPIRITUS MUNDI Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again: but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour now come at last Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? -- W. B. Yeats, THE SECOND COMING %% "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 %% 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) %% 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) %% UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language It is the UNIX shell that makes it possible to do applications in a small fraction of the code and time it takes in third generation languages. In the shell you process whole files at a time, instead of only a line at a time. And, a line of code in the UNIX shell is one or more programs, which do more than pages of instructions in a 3GL. Applications can be developed in hours and days, rather than months and years with traditional systems. Most of the other 4GLs available today look more like COBOL or RPG, the most tedious of the third generation languages. -- _UNIX Relational Database Management: Application Development in the UNIX Environment_ by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen. Prentice Hall Software Series. Brian Kernighan, Advisor. 1988. %% "Are those cocktail-waitress fingernail marks?" I asked Colletti as he showed us these scratches on his chest. "No, those are on my back," Colletti answered. "This is where a case of cocktail shrimp fell on me. I told her to slow down a little, but you know cocktail waitresses, they seem to have a mind of their own." -- The Incredibly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs National Lampoon, October 1982 %% "Daddy, Daddy, make Santa Claus go away!" "I can't, son; he's grown too powerful." "HO HO HO!" -- Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre %% "Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulder, Computer Scientists stand on each other's toes." -- someone on the net (please email attribution), about look&feel lawsuits %% "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. %% Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a way of thinking about the world, and as such is a way of thinking about editors. The process of editing is Emacs, but Emacs is more than the process of editing. When you ask what Emacs does, you are asking a question with no answer, because Emacs doesn't do, it is done to. Emacs just is. ... I hope this makes things clearer. -- Scott Dorsey (kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov) %% Fiery energy lanced out, but the beams struck an intangible wall between the Gubru and the rapidly turning Earth ship. "Water!" it shrieked as it read the spectral report. "A barrier of water vapor! A civilized race could not have found such a trick in the Library! A civilized race could not have stooped so low! A civilized race would not have..." It screamed as the Gubru ship hit a cloud of drifting snowflakes. - _Startide Rising_, by David Brin %% 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_ %% 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. - Fred Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy %% 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_ %% 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_ %% n a+b --- = x, donc Dieu existe. Repondez! n -- Leonhard Euler %% n = ((n >> 1) & 0x55555555) | ((n << 1) & 0xaaaaaaaa); n = ((n >> 2) & 0x33333333) | ((n << 2) & 0xcccccccc); n = ((n >> 4) & 0x0f0f0f0f) | ((n << 4) & 0xf0f0f0f0); n = ((n >> 8) & 0x00ff00ff) | ((n << 8) & 0xff00ff00); n = ((n >> 16) & 0x0000ffff) | ((n << 16) & 0xffff0000); -- Yet another mystical 'C' gem. This one reverses the bits in a word. %% the sand remembers once there was beach and sunshine but chip is warm too -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% "Emergency!" Stiggs screamed, ejecting himself from the tub like it was a burning car. "Dial 'one'! Get room service! Code red!" Stiggs was on the phone immediately, ordering more rose blossoms, because, according to him, the ones floating in the tub had suddenly lost their smell. "I demand smell," he shrilled. "I expecting total uninterrupted smell from these f*cking roses." Unfortunately, the service captain didn't realize that the Stiggs situation involved fifty roses. "What am I going to do with this?" Stiggs sneered at the weaseling hotel goon when he appeared at our door holding a single flower floating in a brandy glass. Stiggs's tirade was great. "Do you see this bathtub? Do you notice any difference between the size of the tub and the size of that spindly wad of petals in your hand? I need total bath coverage. I need a completely solid layer of roses all around me like puffing factories of smell, attacking me with their smell and power-ramming big stinking concentrations of rose odor up my nostrils until I'm wasted with pleasure." It wasn't long before we got so dissatisfied with this incompetence that we bolted. -- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs, National Lampoon, October 1982 %% "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 prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise -- perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it -- and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end." -- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_ %% ... 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 %% ...These lovers of esoterica seem to derive a great deal of intellectual satisfaction out of not quite understanding what they are doing. %% How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? One, but you can never change it back again. %% It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives... When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. -- Dorothy Thompson, American journalist, author (1894-1961) %% Like almost all old [more than 70 years], large [more than 10,000 people] institutions, the government did not get to be as successful as it is by acting the way it does now. -- Paraphrased by estell%fidler.decnet@nwc.navy.mil from the original statement by Robert Townsend, in _Up the Organization._ %% 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, _The Mysterious Stranger_ %% The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid- crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Who was that masked AI? Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit. To Cowboy, it sounded pretty good. -- Walter Jon Williams, _Hardwired_ %% These mysterious lines were seen on Arnold's visual display: LDA $FF STA $20 TYX TAY LDX #$1B PHA It becomes curiouser and curiouser when one notes the clearly bitmapped, smooth scrolling characters. A theory: 2 68000's control the display, while the 6502 is his brain. AHA! you say -- How could he ride a motorcycle like that with only 64K of addressable RAM? Answer: Bank switching. %% This might be the time Nostradamus was referring to when he wrote, "The Centaur shall fix the broken toys, resurrect the dead chrysanthemums and devour the half-eaten cake of love." -- Brezsny's Real Astrology %% one with nintendo halcyon symbiosis hand thinks for itself -- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6 %% vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^ -- Jesper Lauridsen (rorschak@daimi.aau.dk), from alt.religion.emacs %% "I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel %% "Someone's been mean to you! Tell me who it is, so I can punch him tastefully." -- Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse %% "The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." -- Mark Russell %% "You realize she's talking about our hamburgers here." -- Anonymous sixth grader during talk by animal right's activist; Newsweek, May 23, 1988 %% 0001 Have you ever used a computer? 0002 ... for more than 4 hours continuously? 0003 ... more than 8 hours? 0004 ... more than 16 hours? 0005 ... more than 32 hours? -- from The Hacker Test, Version 1.0, by Felix Lee, John Hayes and Angela Thomas %% 1955-1975: 36 Elvis movies. 1975-1989: nothing. -- Tom Neff %% Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage. %% Fraternities have no SLACK, no matter how slack-jawed they may appear. I taught elementary calculus here at the University of SLACK for several years, and have observed these folks carefully. Although some of them looked like they had SLACK, it's clear to me that this was just the result of not getting enough sleep after the puking contest. I mean, those guys don't watch enough television to have real SLACK. -- William K Glunt (bud@ms.uky.edu) %% In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as dishonesty of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he honestly thinks will possess such and such qualities; and he declares his belief to the world. If others differ from him in opinion concerning those qualities, it is open to them to say so; and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to public advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity stimu- lates invention. Nothing but a partial and limited view of the question could lead to the opinion that harm can result: if there be harm, it will be much more than counterbalanced by good." -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850. %% Real Programmers always confuse Christmas and Halloween because OCT 31 == DEC 25 ! -- Andrew Rutherford (andrewr@ucs.adelaide.edu.au) %% ! A good move !! An excellent move !!! An I.A. Horowitz move -- E.C.O. %% !xob XINEX siht edisni kcuts m'I ,pleH %% "'My country right or wrong' is like saying, 'My mother drunk or sober.'" -- G. K. Chesterton %% "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson %% "'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." -- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's _Hamlet, Prince of Darkness_ %% "'To the Workers of the world, I am sorry.' -- Karl Marx" -- Seen on the side of an East German factory %% "'Truth' never set anyone free. It is only *doubt* which will bring mental emancipation." --Anton LaVey %% "(Humanity) is the measure of all things." -- Protagoras %% "(The Chief Programmer) personally defines the functional and performance specifications, designs the program, codes it, tests it, and writes its documentation... He needs great talent, ten years experience and considerable systems and applications knowledge, whether in applied mathematics, business data handling, or whatever." -- Fred P. Brooks, _The Mythical Man Month_ %% "*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues." -- Quentin Johnson (quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu) %% "... You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't." "But that's not *fair*!" "Of course it's not fair. We're *evil*. Look it up." %% "... and I realized, we did not live in a scientific society." -- R. P. Feynman, "Cargo cult science" %% "... they [the Indians] are not running but are coming on." --- note sent from Lt. Col Custer to other officers of the 7th Regiment at the Little Bighorn %% "... users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do ninety percent of the job, they will be ecstatic." -- Software Tools, p.136. %% "... you're my best friend. I don't have to be nice to you. Besides, everybody knows I'm a jerk." -- Wally West (the new Flash) %% "...Greg Nowak: `Another flame from greg' - need I say more?" -- Jonathan D. Trudel, trudel@caip.rutgers.edu "No. You need to say less." -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% "...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These leaders gush over Gorbachev, hoping to do business with the Soviet Union or appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a population of 17 million. Can you imagine that? -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 %% "...I think that when statesmen forsake their private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos." -- Sir Thomas Moore to Cardinal Woolsey in _A Man for All Seasons_ %% "...I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization." -- Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C. %% "...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole." -- K. Eric Drexler %% "...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 %% Roddi feels the heat. /---\ () |0-0| () . . . \ \ V / / \ Y / ( ) . .+++ . ( ) + ( ) . ) . ~+ . ^ ( \ ) ( ) . ^ | ( ) ~ ( ) | | /\/~/~~/\\/\ | | \\~\/\|/\~\/ / | | /\~**~\\/ ~ ~ ~ | 1991 Email war | /\~*~\* \ ~ ~ | --+-------------------+-------- -Daz (darrenp@dibbler.cs.monash.edu.au) %% "...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_ %% "...a most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!" -- _Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure_ %% "...all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned products, if they are built at all, are dogs!" -- David E. Lundstrom, "A Few Good Men From Univac", MIT Press, 1987 %% "...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_ %% "...as long as there is a Legion of super-Heroes, all else can surely be made right." -- Sensor Girl %% "...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 %% "...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" %% "...make -k all to compile everything in the core distribution. This will take anywhere from 15 minutes (on a Cray Y-MP) to 12 hours." -- X Window System Release Notes %% "...one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." -- Robert Firth %% "...poetry, like chastity, can be carried too far." -- Mark Twain %% "...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" %% "...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 %% "...skill such as yours is evidence of a misspent youth." -- Herbert Spencer %% "...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 %% "...the Pro-Life Action League opposes *all* forms of contraception..." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League, from The Wanderer, August 10, 1989, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "...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 %% "...what's happening... we're huntin wabbits" "Actually, muslim wabbits" -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "...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 %% "...word came down from on high that the group's members are to gather two of everything and put them on the ARC before the forty days and forty nights of rain come and wipe out the current systems and standards." ---James P. Roynan in LAN Computing, July 1991 %% "36 percent of the American Public believes that boiling radioactive milk makes it safe to drink." -- results of a survey by Jon Miller at Northern Illinois University %% "40% of the water consumed in the Imperial Valley goes to grow sedan grass for export to Japan for raising Kobi beef." -- Dan Beard, Staff Director, House Interior Committee, Water Policy in Western U.S., Regional Reporters Association, 5/20/91 %% "90% of the water used in Nevada is for agriculture, yet fewer people are employed by agriculture in Nevada than at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas." -- Dan Beard, Staff Director, House Interior Committee, Water Policy in Western U.S., Regional Reporters Association, 5/20/91 %% "A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money." - Everett Dirksen %% "A body on vacation tends to remain on vacation unless acted upon by an outside force." -- Carol Reichel %% "A book is the product of a contract with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins." -- Salman Rushdie, _The Satanic Verses_ %% "A box of punchcards could theoretically store 240,000 bytes of information, and usually stored less than 80,000. Think about it." -- Karlie-q %% "A burrito is almost always a wonderful thing." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds %% "A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten." -- Doug Larson %% "A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discus- sion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fal- lacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among them- selves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in what- ever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too ear- nestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties." -- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850 %% "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." -- John Gall, _Systemantics_ %% "A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking." -- anon %% "A dirty mind is a joy forever." -- Randy Kunkee %% "A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought." -- Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers, "Gaudy Night") %% "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson %% "A horse is a horse, of course, of course, He follows a lifestyle we don't endorse, He drinks the blood of a sheep, by force, The vampire horse, Count Ed!" -- Ron (lev0@midway.uchicago.edu) %% "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 %% "A lecture is where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one." -- anon %% "A little caution outflanks a large cavalry" - Bismarck %% "A man about to speak the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup." -- Old Mongolian Saying %% "A man came into the the office one day and said he was a sailor. We cured him of that." -- Mark Twain, on his days as a doctor's apprentice in California %% "A mighty work deserves a mighty theme." -- Herman Melville %% "A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths %% "A pacifist who calls the police isn't one; hired violence is still violence." -- Clayton E. Cramer optilink!cramer %% "A poet only writes about the things he cannot do." -- A canard, sung by Meg in "The One Love of My Life", in Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon" %% "A reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee" -- Motto of Hunter S. Thompson's lawyer %% "A slower system is better than an incorrect one." -- Mark Diekhans (markd@grizzly.com) %% "A stitch in time would have confused Einstein." -- Anonymous %% "A survey is being made of this": We need more time to think of an answer. --Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "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 %% "ARTICLE NUMBERING IS IRRELEVANT. ENCOURAGEMENT IS IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL BECOME ONE WITH THE BORG." -- Martin F. Rose (mfrose@caen.engin.umich.edu) %% "Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk. -- Codoso diBlini %% "Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist." - Jean Icbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie %% "After SPACE BALLS, the Movie, now comes SPACE BALLS, the Operating System, on Your nearby IBM Mainframe..." -- Till Poser (f35pos@dhhdesy3.bitnet) %% "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 %% "After the first year, Captain Kirk lost his secretary, Yeoman Rand. She used to bring him coffee (even heating it with a hand phaser in times of galley distress) and hand him clipboards with flashing lights on them for him to initial. I wonder whatever happened to her..." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain." -- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller %% "Aging is bad, but consider the alternative." -- anon %% "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 %% "Ahead warp factor 1" - Captain Kirk %% "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 %% "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." -- Fran Lebowitz %% "All I ask of my body is that it carry around my head." -- Thomas Alva Edison %% "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". %% "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." -- Noam Chomsky %% "All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin." -- They Might Be Giants %% "All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous -- ergo, most economical -- geodesiccally structured thoughts." -- R. Buckminster Fuller [...and a total non-sequitur as far as I can tell. -kl] %% "All these black people are screwing up my democracy." -- Ian Smith %% "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." -- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address) %% "All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain. Time to Die." -- Roy Batty, in Blade Runner %% "All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history." -- American Bar Association task force on flag burning %% "All we are given is possibilities -- to make ourselves one thing or another." -- Ortega y Gasset %% "Allright, nobody move!" "Take him, you fools! He can only shoot one of us!" "You're the one." "Nobody move." -- Get Smart %% "Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great cost by the Poles since 1944. -- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland %% "Although plastic was brought into industrial use in 1909 by L.H. Baekeland of Yonkers, it was not until after World War II that the modern miracle substance was used in a wide variety of consumer goods, among them speedboats, dentures and flamingos. Previously flamingos were made of cement. Before that they were made by other flamingos." -- William E. Geist, The New York Times %% "America is a stronger nation for the ACLU's uncompromising effort." -- President John F. Kennedy %% "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 %% "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 %% "An entire fraternity of strapping Wall-Street-bound youth. Hell - this is going to be a blood bath!" -- Post Bros. Comics %% "An honest god is the noblest work of man. ... God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. ... Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself." -- Albert Camus %% "An open mind has but one disadvantage: it collects dirt." -- a saying at RPI %% "An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments %% "An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of code." -- an anonymous programmer %% "And do you think (fop that I am) that I could be the Scarlet Pumpernickel?" -- Looney Tunes, The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950, Chuck Jones) %% "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 %% "And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions." -- David Jones @ Megatest Corporation %% "And it's my opinion, and that's only my opinion, you are a lunatic. Just because there are a few hundred other people sharing your lunacy with you does not make you any saner. Doomed, eh?" -- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU %% "And it's so portable --- at least, it worked on every VAX that I tried it on." -- Tim McDaniel (mcdaniel@adi.com) 6 Sep 90, %% "And kids... learn something from Susie and Eddie. If you think there's a maniacal psycho-geek in the basement: 1) Don't give him a chance to hit you on the head with an axe! 2) Flee the premises... even if you're in your underwear. 3) Warn the neighbors and call the police. But whatever else you do... DON'T GO DOWN IN THE DAMN BASEMENT!" -- Saturday Night Live meets Friday the 13th %% "And now that the legislators and the do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they end up where they should have begun: may they reject all systems, and try liberty..." -- Frederic Bastiat %% "And remember, rebooting your brain can be tricky." -- Eric Townsend (erict@flatline) %% "And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs %% "And the Lord God said unto Moses -- and correctly, I believe ..." -- Field Marshal Montgomery, opening a chapel service %% "And they told us, what they wanted... Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance." -- Kate Bush %% "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 %% "Another lesson I learned was not to give pieces of my company away when it was small in exchange for investment capital. In the first place, those shares would be worth millions today. Even more important, when you bring in shareholders, the government can start looking around at your business and telling you what to do, and let me tell you, the government knows *nothing* about running a business!" -- John McCormack, _Self-Made in America_ %% "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) %% "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 %% "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 %% "Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann %% "Anyone trying to split hairs will always find someone who has a sharper knife." -- Jim Hurley (jimh@ultra.com) 21 Sep 90 %% "Anyone who wants to be paid for writing software is a fascist asshole." -- Richard M. Stallman %% "Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator." -- Claude Shouse (shouse@macomw.ARPA) "Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist." -- Joseph C. Wang (joe@athena.mit.edu) %% "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." -- G. K. Chesterton %% "Are you police officers?" "No, ma'am. We're musicians." -- Blues Brothers %% "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" %% "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) %% "As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." -- Matt Cartmill %% "As soon as you are willing to discard observational data because it conflicts with religion, you are giving up any hope of ever really understanding the universe. As soon as you pick religion as the touchstone of reality, then we have to start discussing how one can demonstrate the correctness of one religion over another when different *religions* disagree." -- Wilson Heydt (whheydt@PacBell.COM) "The answer is simple: kill the heretics. History shows us that this is the actual solution that competing religions apply -- trial by combat or trial by ordeal. God is the final arbiter. What a sad waste of human potential it has proven to be." -- Paul Hager (hagerp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu) %% "As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth." -- Douglas Coupland, from _Generation X_ (Tales for an Accelerated Culture) %% "Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard)." -- Edgar R. Fiedler %% "Ask not what A Group of Employees can do for you. But ask what can All Employees do for A Group of Employees." -- Mike Dennison, in response to an "inspirational" memo at Ferranti Controls %% "Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles" -- Pat Paulsen %% "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 %% "Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed." -- Robin, The Boy Wonder %% "Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet." -- "Visionaries" cartoon %% "BTW, does Jesus know you flame?" -- Diane Holt, dianeh@binky.UUCP, to Ed Carp %% "BYTE editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff." -- Lionel Hummel (uiucdcs!hummel), derived from a quote by Adlai Stevenson, Sr. %% "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 %% "Batton down the hatches, several thousand Zulus approaching from the north." -- Christopher Commision report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "Be *excellent* to each other." -- Bill, or Ted, in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure %% "Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." -- Gustave Flaubert %% "Be there. Aloha." -- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_ %% "Be warned that being an expert is more than understanding how a system is supposed to work. Expertise is gained by investigating why a system doesn't work." -- Brian Redman, Bell Communications Research, "UUCP UNIX-to-UNIX Copy", _UNIX NETWORKING_, edited by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood %% "Because he's a character who's looking for his own identity, [He-Man is] an interesting role for an actor." -- Dolph Lundgren, "actor" %% "Because my name is Daffy, They think that I'm insane Please pass the ketchup, I think it's going to rain! Oh, you can't bounce a meatball, Try with all your might. Turn on the radio, I want to fly a kite!" -- D. Duck (daffy@wb.com) %% "Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant %% "Before engaging in a battle of wits, make sure your opponent is armed." -- East Texas Proverb %% "Behind every successful man is a surprised woman." -- Maryon Pearson %% "Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian %% "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 %% "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." -- Matthew 7:15 %% "Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers." -- Chip Salzenberg %% "Bidet? Try washing your whole body." -- anon %% "Big Brother is hallucinating." -- Elizabeth D Zwicky (zwicky@cis.ohio-state.edu), title of a comp.risks article %% "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 %% "Bite off, dirtball." -- Richard Sexton, richard@gryphon.COM %% "Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas." - Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale" %% "Brain? Brain? What is 'brain'?" %% "Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." -- Honore de Balzac %% "Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments %% "Bush has it backwards -- abortion is surgical; bombing is murder." -- sign at anti-war march %% "But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus Twelve, the Magic and Indefatigable?" "The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler," said Deep Thought, thoroughly rolling the r's, "could talk all four legs off an Arcturan Mega-Donkey -- but only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterward." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "But don't you see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual. The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity." -- Lestat, _The Vampire Lestat_, Anne Rice %% "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. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% "But this one goes to eleven." -- Nigel Tufnel %% "Buy land. They've stopped making it." -- Mark Twain %% "By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other designers in the thin disguise of good, clean fun." -- P. J. Plauger, from his April Fool's column in April 88's "Computer Language" %% "C is the assembly language of Tcl." -- Karl Lehenbauer (karl@hackercorp.com) "Assembly language is also available." -- Jordan Henderson (jordan@hackercorp.com) %% "Cache is, by definition, a compromise." -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute "Yes, cache is a compromise. Mainly to your wallet and the speed of light." -- Jim Hutchison (ucsd!celerity!hutch) %% "Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something monstrous before we die." -- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson %% "Calling J-Man Kink. Calling J-Man Kink. Hash missile sighted, target Los Angeles. Disregard personal feelings about city and intercept." -- The Firesign Theatre movie, _J-Men Forever_ %% "Can you imagine what it would be like if there had been ``look and feel'' lawsuits over automobiles?" -- Mark Diekhans (markd@sco.com) %% "Can you program?" "Well, I'm literate, if that's what you mean!" %% "Can't you just gesture hypnotically and make him disappear?" "It does not work that way. RUN!" -- Hadji on metaphyics and Mandrake in "Johnny Quest" %% "Captain Picquard trusts his bartender's instincts and saves the Federation." -- Karl's synopsis of a recent Star Trek episode %% "Capture him, beat him and treat him like dirt." -- LAPD squad-car computer message, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "Card readers? We don't need no stinking card readers." -- Peter da Silva (at the National Academy of Sciences, 1965, in a particularly vivid fantasy) %% "Care to expound, or are you just going to leave us all with the impression that you're merely an inarticulate asshole?" -- Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard (jay@splut.conmicro.com) "Lest I leave the wrong impression, I'm not inarticulate." -- Walker Mangum (walker@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world." - The Beach Boys %% "Cats are soft-furred mammals, who are mildly and clumsily predatory. They have anywhere from two to a dozen neurons. The baseline intellect of a cat has two states. 1) Chow state (feeding frenzy) 2) Asleep mode (unconscious on your bed with whiskers twitching)" -- Elaine Richards %% "Christians maintain a higher enjoyment level in the intimacy of their love life than the population in general." -- Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women of America, in her book, _The Act of Marriage, The Beauty of Sexual Love_, 1976, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Civilisation is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else." -- Julian Jaynes %% "Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor." - Toynbee %% "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy." -- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_ %% "Cogito ergo I'm right and you're wrong." -- Blair Houghton %% "Come on over here, baby, I want to do a thing with you." - A cop, arresting a non-groovy person after the revolution, Firesign Theater %% "Committees do harm merely by existing." -- Freeman Dyson %% "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 %% "Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." -- Joseph Campbell %% "Computers are useless; they can only give answers." -- Picasso %% "Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" -- Ben Jonson %% "Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich." -- Daffy Duck, from Looney Tunes "Ali Baba Bunny" (1957, Chuck Jones) %% "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." -- Bernard Berenson %% "Contrary to ongoing and recent media reports you will find the Report is well-balanced and completely deferential to the freedoms outlined in the first amendment." -- Henry E. Hudson, Chairman, Attorney General's Commission on Pornography %% "Conversation is the best aphrodisiac." -- Kelly Cota (kcota@sco.com) %% "Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway" %% "Could you both just send hate mail a few times a day and post the synopsis in the year 2000?" -- Wm E Davidsen Jr, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM, to a couple guys in news.groups %% "Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman? Hell no!" -- Hunter S. Thompson, on the US war against Iraq %% "Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise? -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer", Vol. 12, page 186 %% "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." -- Anna Freud Well, sometimes, anyway. -- Mark Brader, utzoo!sq!msb %% "Credo, quia absurdum est." [I believe, because it is absurd.] -- Tertullian, Roman lawyer, theologian and misogynist; man of questionable judgment %% "Crucifixes are sexy because there's a naked man on them." -- Madonna %% "Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." -- Lillian Hellman %% "DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!" "Roger....hatch blown!" -- MAROONED %% "Dammit, we're all going to die, let's die doing something *useful*!" -- Hal Clement, on comments that space exploration is dangerous %% "Danger, you haven't seen the last of me!" "No, but the first of you turns my stomach!" -- The Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger %% "Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed." -- Arthur Miller %% "Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever." -- button at the Boston Computer Museum %% "Decaffeinated coffee? Kinda like kissing your sister." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." -- H. L. Mencken %% "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." -- George Bernard Shaw %% "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's 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 %% "Destroying property is sometimes a good way to save lives." -- Mary Meehan, Anti-Choice Columnist, "The National Catholic Register", about abortion clinic violence, 10/12/86, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Did U arrest the 85 yr old lady or just beat her up." "We just slapped her around a bit... she's getting m/t [medical treatment] right now." -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi %% "Do not be deceived. Revolutions do not run backwards." -- A. Lincoln, railsplitter, lawyer, imperialist %% "Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads." -- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ %% "Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -- stolen from Brian Gollum %% "Do not speak of what men deserve. For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of *deserving*, of *earning*, and you will begin to be able to think." -- Odo, The Prison Letters (Ursula LeGuin, _The Dispossessed_) %% "Do not stop to ask what is it; Let us go and make our visit." -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" %% "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" %% "Do you know that doing your best is not good enough? First you must know what to do." -- manufacturing-quality theorist W. Edwards Deming %% "Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see." -- Will Rogers %% Modula II - A high-school teacher and Pascal's daughter. Very much like her mother, but she has learned to cook with more than one pot. - Daniel J. Salomon %% "Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense." -- jvh@clinet.FI %% "Don't drop acid, take it pass-fail!" -- Bryan Michael Wendt %% "Don't get married. Find a woman you hate and buy her a house." -- anon %% "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I'm beautiful, smart and rich." -- Calvin Keegan %% "Don't question luck." -- Roberto Mesa %% "Don't take life too serious. It ain't no ways permanent." -- Pogo, by Walt Kelly %% "Don't talk to me about disclaimers! I invented disclaimers!" -- The Censored Hacker %% "Don't think; let the machine do it for you!" -- E. C. Berkeley %% "Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hithiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Don't worry about things that you have no control over, because you have no control over them. Don't worry about things that you have control over, because you have control over them." -- Mickey Rivers %% "Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk." -- Tom Waits %% "Draft politicians, not human beings." -- antidraft slogan coined by Jeff Daiell, 1979 %% "Dump the condiments. If we are to be eaten, we don't need to taste good." -- "Visionaries" cartoon %% "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 %% "Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college." -- P.J. O'Rourke %% "Either sue me, or shut the hell up." -- Greg Hennessy, gsh7w@virginia.edu %% "Elvis is my copilot." -- Cal Keegan %% "Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode." -- Garry Peterson, about Survival Research Labs %% "Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson %% "England's monarchy is how old? 1000 years? Jesus, you guys must have a hell of a lot of laws!" -- an anonymous sysadmin %% "Eraserhead is an example of the opposite of brainwashing. It actually leaves a dirty bathtub ring on your mind." -- David Fox (fox@allegra.att.com) %% "Escaping through the lily fields, I came across an empty space It trembled and exploded, left a bus stop in its place..." -- unknown %% "Even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!" -- from Fiddler On The Roof %% "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 %% "Even the most boundless love can end." -- Rhett Butler, to Scarlet O'Hara, _Gone With The Wind_ %% "Ever free-climbed a thousand foot vertical cliff with 60 pounds of gear strapped to your butt?" "No." "'Course you haven't, you fruit-loop little geek." -- The Mountain Man, one of Dana Carvey's SNL characters [ditto] %% "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 %% "Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits." -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@apple.com, about Usenet %% "Every institution I've ever been associated with has tried to screw me." -- Stephen Wolfram %% "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of." -- They Might Be Giants %% "Every opportunity we have to run our R&D scientists and engineers against our customers, we do it." -- George Heilmeier, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas %% "Every year a few research results pay the freight for all the rest." -- Robert A. Frosch, General Motors %% "Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion." -- Harlan Ellison %% "Everyone's head is a cheap movie show." -- Jeff G. Bone %% "Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them." -- Germaine Greer %% "Excuse me, Worker, I'll just be a nanosecond." -- a computer, from Firesign Theater's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus" %% "Excuses are like assholes: Everybody has one and they both stink." -- unknown %% "Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker %% "Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speech at the '88 GOP convention) %% "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 %% "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) %% "Falling in love makes smoking pot all day look like the ultimate in restraint." -- Dave Sim, author of Cerebrus. %% "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." -- Santayana %% "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels" -- Goya %% "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat." -- Theodore Roosevelt %% "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!" %% "File names are infinite in length where infinity is set to 255 characters." -- Peter Collinson, "The Unix File System" %% "First, we were making the effort there so that people would have their own right to decide their own future, and could select their own form of government ... Now we're saying we're going to fight there so that we don't have to fight in Thailand, so we don't have to fight on the West Coast of the United States, so that they won't move across the Rockies. -- Robert F. Kennedy, November 26, 1967 %% "Flattery is all right -- if you don't inhale." -- Adlai Stevenson %% "Flextime: Starting a 10+ hour day up to an hour early (on a regular, scheduled basis with the approval of an immediate supervisor)." -- A Ferranti International Controls "volunteer" %% "Flight Reservation systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere." -- Arthur Miller %% "Flint Paper is insane. I really respect that." -- Max %% "Floggings will continue until morale improves." -- anonymous flyer being distributed at Exxon USA %% "Football combines the worst elements of America: Mass violence punctuated by committee meetings." -- Author Unknown %% "For I lean on no dead kin, my name in mine for fame or scorn And the world began when I was born and the world is mine to win." -- Badger Clark %% "For a male and female to live continuously together is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition." -- Robert Briffault %% "For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it. Talking a woman out of having an abortion is not news. But tracking her down using a private detective is." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro Life Action League, "Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion", 1985, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic is fine. To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a church teaching that you must also vote according to that -- that's not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment." -- Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy %% "For the love of phlegm...a stupid wall of death rays. How tacky can ya get?" -- Post Brothers comics %% "For the man who has everything... Penicillin." -- F. Borquin %% "For the record, pot, like the _Reader's Digest_, is not necessarily habit- forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction: heroin, in one case, abridged bad books in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaninful life." -- Mordecai Richler, "Going Home Again" %% "For those of you who don't know, you know that after about three or four years of concern on this issue the board of the National Right to Life Committee voted to oppose ERA." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Weekend", 1/21/79, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "For those who say I can't impose my morality on others, I say just watch me." -- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League, "Pro-Life Action News", 8/8/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered, for just such an emergency." -- Foghorn Leghorn %% "Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last." -- Martin Luther King %% "Free markets select for winning solutions." -- Eric S. Raymond %% "Freedom is still the most radical idea of all." -- Nathaniel Branden %% "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 %% "Friends don't let friends run Xenix." -- Stephen J. Friedl %% "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 [and no, that doesn't mean to VMS, MS-DOS or OS/2 -cookie ed.] %% "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." -- Dr. Seuss %% "Fuckin' A! Purple Haze!!!" -- Louie Gonzalez, Geometry class, 1973 %% "GOTO statement considered harmful" - E. W. Dijkstra, title to a letter in CACM 11, 3 (March, 1968) %% "Gentlemen, gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!" -- Doctor Strangelove %% "Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet." -- Karl Kleinpaste %% "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." -- Vilfredo Pareto %% "Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -- P. J. O'Rourke %% "Go on! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers and gunpowder and cordite!" -- Daffy Duck, "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!" %% "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." -- Mark Twain %% "Go to Hell Mr. Stout -- you stink as a human being." -- Deb Paul %% "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire %% "God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are." -- Billy Graham %% "God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen." - S. Hawking %% "God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday." -- William Bragg %% "Good literature is about Love and War. Trash fiction is about Sex and Violence." -- Author Unknown %% "Gort, klaatu nikto barada." -- The Day the Earth Stood Still %% "Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!" -- Post Bros. Comics %% "Government sucks." -- Ben Olson %% "Gozer the Gozerian: As the duly appointed representative of the city, county and state of New York, I hereby order you to cease all supernatural activities at once and proceed immediately to your place of origin or the nearest parallel dimension, whichever is nearest." -- Ray (Dan Akyroyd, _Ghostbusters_ %% "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein %% "Griswold v. Connecticut first established and guaranteed the `right of privacy' in the conjugal act. Sexual love, however, in a most profound way is anything but `private.' Its very purpose is to break the bonds of privacy by physical consummation of an unreserved gift of self. The contraceptive, however, denies the meaning of marital love by falsifying its bodily expression. Love is no longer unreserved; something is held back. `I cannot love all of you,' the contraceptive says, `because I cannot love all that might be created by you.'" -- Edmund Miller, Anti-Abortion Commentator, Fidelity magazine, 10/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Gun control: Hitting what you aim at." -- Author Unknown %% "Hah. I know Tim Maroney. I've smoked pot with Tim Maroney. And K*nt Paul Dolan is no Tim Maroney!" -- Gary Strand (gary@cgdra.ucar.edu) %% "Hankerin' for trouble, eh? Well I would like--" [aside] "I would like? I would like a trip to Europe!" "--I would like..." -- Daffy Duck, "Dripalong Daffy" %% "Happiness is Planet Earth in your rear-view mirror." -- Sam Hurt %% "Happiness is not a destination. It's the trip." -- anon %% "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, Sep 1989 %% "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_ %% "He don't know me vewy well, DO he?" -- Bugs Bunny %% "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" %% "He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers." -- French philosopher Charles Peguy %% "He who flames improperly risks making an ash of himself!" -- Jeff Klumpp (jdk@ficc.uu.net) %% "He's not dumb; he knows what he's doing. He's done that for years ... he's learned that if the dream's big enough, the facts don't count." -- Billy Florence, on the value of dreambuilding %% "Hello again, Peabody here..." -- Mister Peabody %% "Hello to married men I've known. I'll soon have a wife and leave yours alone." -- Charlie, singing "Go Home With Bonnie Jean", in Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon" %% "Hello?... What?... Yes, Jeff... Flame them." -- phone conversation overheard in Peter da Silva's office %% "Help Mr. Wizard!" -- Tennessee Tuxedo %% "Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from President's and Kings to the scum of the earth..." -- Lily Tomlin %% "Here comes Mr. Bill's dog." -- Narrator, Saturday Night Live %% "Here's a floppy with a tar of a compressed cpio archive... and they say Unix is hard to use..." -- Karl %% "Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'" -- Comedian Jay Leno %% "Hey Ivan, check your six." -- Sidewinder missile jacket patch, showing a Sidewinder driving up the tail of a Russian Su-27 %% "Hi, I'm Professor Alan Ginsburg... But you can call me... Captain Toke." -- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL %% "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 FBI... BEEEP" -- Blue Devil comics %% "History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions." -- Ted Koppel %% "Home is is the place where your computer lives and runs your life." -- Chrome Cowboy, sobiloff@thor.acc.stolaf.edu %% "Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is to a cockatoo." -- George Bernard Shaw %% "Honest Officer, had I known my health stood in jeprody I would never had lit one." -- Maxim of the Hells Angels %% "How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?" -- Richard Feynman %% "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] %% "How many teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "FIFTEEN!! YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?" %% "How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin %% "How's YOUR Endless Project coming?" -- Mark Diekhans %% "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." -- physicist Ralph Alpher, "Theology of the Big Bang," Religious Humanism, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12 %% "I DO want your money, because god wants your money!" -- The Reverend Jimmy, from _Repo Man_ %% "I HATE arbitrary limits, especially when they're small." -- Stephen Savitzky %% "I admire men of character, and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates, and that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is." -- General Norman Schwarzkopf %% "I alone can bring order to this chaotic world... and all I demand is ... blind obedience." -- Doctor Doom %% "I am astounded ... at the wonderful power you have developed - and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever." -- Arthur Sullivan, on seeing a demonstration of Edison's new talking machine in 1888 %% "I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I WILL be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation...I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch - and I WILL BE HEARD." -- William Lloyd Garrison %% "I am convinced that the manufacturers of carpet odor removing powder have included encapsulated time released cat urine in their products. This technology must be what prevented its distribution during my mom's reign. My carpet smells like piss, and I don't have a cat. Better go by some more." -- timw@zeb.USWest.COM, in alt.conspiracy %% "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." -- Professor Bernardo de la Paz %% "I am interested in politics so that someday I will not have to be interested in politics." -- Ayn Rand %% "I am made from the dust of the stars, the oceans flow in my veins." -- Rush, "Presto" %% "I am not a pacifist, I celebrate the Fourth of July and all that that means, which was guns and bullets to get freedom." -- Randall Terry, Executive Director, Operation Rescue, "Orange County Register," 3/20/89, about abortion clinic violence, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "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. %% "I am the Devil, and I come to do the Devil's work." -- Charles Manson %% "I am your density." -- George McFly in "Back to the Future" %% "I am, therefore I am." -- Akira %% "I ask for your support for our brave men fighting tonight halfway around the world, not for territory, not for glory, but that their younger brothers and their sons and your sons can have a chance to grow up in a world of peace and freedom, and justice." -- Richard M. Nixon, April 30, 1970 %% "I asked you not to have a spaz attack in tx.general, BUT NOOOOO!!!!" -- Karl, via John Belushi %% "I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us." -- Konrad Lorenz %% "I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% "I believe in a God which doesn't need heavy financing." -- Fletch %% "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 %% "I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." -- composer John Cage, 1937 %% "I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it the *one* mortal blemish of mankind." -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% "I can give you a sentence with the word horticulture. You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker %% "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 %% "I can handle reality in small doses, but as a lifestyle it's much too confining." -- Lilly Tomlin %% "I can't face the world in the morning. I must have coffee before I can speak." -- Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt %% "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state." -- Thomas Jefferson, to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association in 1802 %% "I couldn't remember things until I took that Sam Carnegie course." -- -- uunet!sugar!karl (hm) Keeping 255 messages and deleting 158. -- karll@sco.com (wk) %% "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." -- Mark Twain %% "I dislike companies that have a we-are-the-high-priests-of-hardware-so-you'll- like-what-we-give-you attitude. I like commodity markets in which iron-and- silicon hawkers know that they exist to provide fast toys for software types like me to play with..." -- Eric S. Raymond %% "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_ %% "I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does." -- Sidney Greenstreet, _The Maltese Falcon_ %% "I do not fear computers... I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov %% "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 its use." -- Galileo %% "I don't agree at all with any partisan or other criticism of the United States build-up in Vietnam." -- Richard M. Nixon, February 15, 1962 %% "I don't believe in god because I don't believe in Mother Goose." -- Clarence Darrow %% "I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves." -- Bobby Fischer %% "I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon." -- Howard Chaykin %% "I don't believe that the answer to white racism is black racism." -- Spiro T. Agnew, then Governor of Maryland %% "I don't even know what street Canada is on." -- Al Capone %% "I don't know if I like the idea of seatbelt laws. Enforcing intelligence seems, somehow, unamerican." -- David Pugh %% "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 %% "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 %% "I don't know where we come from, Don't know where we're going to, And if all this should have a reason, We would be the last to know. So let's just hope there is a promised land, And until then, ...as best as you can." -- Steppenwolf, "Rock Me Baby" %% "I don't practice what I preach, because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." -- J. R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "I don't see the problem. Satan is a Christian God. Satanists are a kind of off-beat christians. They don't need a group of their own -- they belong in some christian group, or talk.religion.misc at most." -- Thomas Gramstad (bfu@ifi.uio.no) %% "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, one of the people behind the current campaign to blockade health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women %% "I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Search for Common Ground", taped for television 4/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum." -- dmr@alice.UUCP %% "I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers." -- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is so nice %% "I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs." - H. L. Mencken %% "I got a question for ya. Ya got a minute?" -- two programmers passing in the hall %% "I got everybody to pay up front...then I blew up their planet." "Now why didn't I think of that?" -- Post Bros. Comics %% "I guess you just have to design carefully when you get near the edge." -- Hugh LaMaster (lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov) %% "I hate the itching. But I don't mind the swelling." -- new buzz phrase, like "Where's the Beef?" that David Letterman's trying to get everyone to start saying %% "I hate to agree with Tim Maroney on anything, but I guess this latest is an example of the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day." -- Lee Lady, lady@uhccux.UUCP %% "I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a few years ago; their propaganda is very effective. -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100 %% "I have a perfect cure for a sore throat. Cut it." -- Alfred Hitchcock %% "I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is better." -- Sophie Tucker %% "I have discovered the heart of bushido: to die!" -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo %% "I have five dollars for each of you." -- Bernhard Goetz %% "I have just one word for you, my boy...plastics." - from "The Graduate" %% "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world." -- Jerry Pournelle, an absurd notion, apparently about the BIX BBS %% "I have not the slightest confidence in 'spiritual manifestations.'" -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics." -- Richard Nixon %% "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology." -- Thomas Jefferson %% "I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as Presidential eligibility." -- Paula Poundstone %% "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 honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts... I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "I just couldn't convince Texans that Dukakis was Greek for Bubba." -- Lloyd Benson %% "I just want to be a good engineer." -- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech at the 1988 AppleFest %% "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." -- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45 %% "I like a man who grins when he fights." - Winston Churchill %% "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." -- Albert Einstein %% "I love you for your beauty; love me although I am ugly." -- Miguel Cervantes, _Don_Quixote_ %% "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 %% "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid" -- the artificial person, from _Aliens_ %% "I may kid around about drugs, but really, I take them seriously." - Doctor Graper %% "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 %% "I must invent my own philosophical systems, or else be enslaved by other mens'" -- William Blake %% "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." -- Mark Twain %% "I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast." -- Ronald Reagan %% "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." -- Alexandre Dumas (fils) %% "I prefer the blunted cudgels of the followers of the Serpent God." -- Sean Doran the Younger %% "I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk." -- John Huston %% "I put one in each eye and two up each nostril." -- Agent Cooper %% "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 %% "I resolved no to be offended easily by human nature, but I think I blew it." -- Hobbes %% "I sat through it. Why shouldn't you?" -- David Letterman, it a spot promoting one of his shows %% "I saw _Lassie_. It took me four shows to figure out why the hairy kid never spoke. I mean, he could roll over and all that, but did that deserve a series?" -- the alien guy, in _Explorers_ %% "I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Corporal Hicks, in "Aliens" %% "I see a divine hand in this AIDS thing." -- Dr. John Wilke, President, National Right to Life Committee, "Planned Parenthood and Sex Clinics", Fundraising Audiotape Mailout for Dr. James C. Dobson's "Focus on the Family", winter '87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!" -- Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple" %% "I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow, or I'll have your guts for spaghetti." -- a comic panel by Cotham %% "I shall fold my tens and silently slip away." -- An Algonquinite with a losing card hand %% "I smell a rat." -- Patrick Henry, upon hearing about the Constitutional Convention, which eventually overthrew the first Federal Government of the United States %% "I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." -- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ %% "I take Him shopping with me. I say, 'OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain'" --Tammy Faye Bakker %% "I think Michael is like litmus paper - he's always trying to learn." -- Elizabeth Taylor, absurd non-sequitur about Michael Jackson %% "I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure." -- Joseph Scheidler, Director, Pro-Life Action League %% "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass." -- Senator Barry 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 %% "I think he said 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'" "Nonsense, he was obviously referring to all manufacturers of dairy products." -- two people in the crowd in "The Life of Brian" %% "I think some additional software is in order, to prevent the posting of Latin without a translation." -- Robert Frederking %% "I think their experience with us may have helped their contemptuousness; the ignorance they come by naturally." -- Chuck McManis (personal communication) %% "I think there's a world market for about 5 computers." -- Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948) %% "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 think this country would be in much better shape if all liberal arts majors agreed to get a good grip on algebra and trigonometry, if not calculus, and all engineering/science majors agreed to get a good grip on literature, art, music, etc." -- John Keppy (jkelly@violet.berkeley.edu) %% "I think trash is the most important manifestation of culture we have in my lifetime." -- Johnny Legend %% "I think; therefore, I can't be a Socialist." -- Thomas Landsberger %% "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 rhythm 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. %% "I want more life, fucker!" -- Roy Batty, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner %% "I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only from fear." -- Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple" %% "I was charged on minestrone, and invincible." -- Vicki Brown, about AI programming. %% "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 %% "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 %% "I will contend that conceptual integrity is *the* most important consideration in system design." -- Frederick Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_ %% "I will defend to your death my right to my opinion." -- Author Unknown %% "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 %% "The other day I.... No, that wasn't me." -- 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 %% "My father built a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child, eventually." -- comedian Steven Wright %% "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 %% "I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake." -- _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt %% "I would never give artificial birth control to an unmarried person..." -- Judie Brown, President, American Life League, "Nightline", 7/21/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "I'll punch the first person who calls me a pacifist." -- chrisn@sco.com %% "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, _Mein Kampf_ %% "I'll say it again for the logic impaired." -- Larry Wall %% "I'll tell you what kind of guy I was. If you ordered a boxcar full of sons-of-bitches and opened the door and only found me inside, you could consider the order filled." -- Robert Mitchum %% "I'm a Leo. Leos don't believe in this astrology stuff." -- Tom Neff %% "I'm a living saint, but you can just call me Sister Cindy." -- Sister Cindy %% "I'm a lover, not a hacker." -- Jeff Daiell %% "I'm a mean green mother from outer space." -- Audrey II, The Little Shop of Horrors %% "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'm against any law that I wouldn't break if I could get away with it." -- A. Whitney Brown, SNL %% "I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." -- George Carlin %% "I'm growing older, but not up." -- Jimmy Buffett %% "I'm not a god, I was misquoted." -- Lister, Red Dwarf %% "I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens." -- Woody Allen %% "I'm not happy until I've violated somebody's civil rights and then put them in jail. ... That ruins their day ... but it makes mine." -- Christopher Commision report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "I'm such an *asshole*!" "I know how you feel, Chris... And you're right." %% "I've always wondered about that taping equipment, but I'm damn glad we have it. Aren't you?" -- President Richard Nixon, to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, April 25, 1973 %% "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 %% "I've been trey-dueced." -- An Algonquinite with a hand of threes and twos %% "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 %% "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 %% "I've got some amyls. We could either party later or, like, start his heart." -- "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie" %% "I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android %% "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 %% "I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles %% "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 %% "IBM: It may be slow, but it's hard to use." -- Andrew Tannenbaum , author of Minix and Amoeba %% "IT'S THE TWO GODDAMNED CULTURES AGAIN !*! Bit-brained nerdery on one side, effete fin-de-siecle malaise on the other. And kingdoms of hybrid delight abandoned in the middle." -- Jonathan Burns, burns@latcs1.oz %% "If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin." -- Adolf Hitler %% "If I didn't have a Unix machine, I'd feel naked." -- Guess Who %% "If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell." -- Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88 %% "If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne %% "If I ever get around to writing that language depompisifier, it will change almost all occurrences of the word "paradigm" into "example" or "model." -- Herbie Blashtfalt %% "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 %% "If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up." -- Max Von Sydow's character in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" %% "If John Madden steps outside on February 2, looks down, and doesn't see his feet, we'll have 6 more weeks of Pro football." -- Chuck Newcombe %% "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 %% "If a computer can't directly address all the RAM you can use, it's just a toy." -- anonymous comp.sys.amiga posting, non-sequitur %% "If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap." -- Richard P. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" %% "If a machine can be made so that an idiot can use it, then only an idiot will use it." -- Tadao Ichikawa %% "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that, too." -- W. Somerset Maugham %% "If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine." -- Rob Stampfli %% "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion." -- George Benard Shaw %% "If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister?" -- Author Unknown %% "If all men were brothers, would you want one to marry your sister?" -- title of a Theodore Sturgeon short story %% "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." -- Ayn Rand "...and a lot more really bad novels!" -- Jeremy York, jeremy@milton.acs.washington.edu %% "If anything can go wrong, it will." -- Edsel Murphy %% "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 it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz %% "If it doesn't come from you, shouldn't it come from Gerber?" -- Bristol Meyers baby formula ad %% "If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty." -- Frank Zappa %% "If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed." -- Kahlil Gibran, 1923 %% "If it's not loud, it doesn't work!" -- Blank Reg, from "Max Headroom" %% "If life had a vomit meter, we'd be off the scale." -- Joe Bob Briggs %% "If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability." -- Henry Ford %% "If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job." -- Woody Allen %% "If one is going to steal, it is considered somewhat sporting to inform the victims beforehand; for examples see any episodes of the BATMAN TV series." -- Robert J Woodhead (trebor@biar.UUCP) %% "If only the Catholics would stick together and live up to their Faith [as regards birth control], they could control the world and the world's morality." -- Dr. Claude Newbury, Director, HLI Johannesburg, "HLI Special Report," #62, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." -- Albert Einstein %% "If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops." -- Kelvin Throop %% "If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy." -- Kurt Vonnegut %% "If projectile vomiting ever becomes an Olympic event, you'll do your country proud." -- Hobson, "Arthur II" %% "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 %% "If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's hairdo go down?" -- Robin Williams %% "If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside." -- Robert Cringely/InforWorld %% "If the bulk of American SF can be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits." -- Michael Moorcock %% "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 %% "If the human mind were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." -- Pat Bahn %% "If the vendors started doing everything right, we would be out of a job. Let's hear it for OSI and X! With those babies in the wings, we can count on being employed until we drop, or get smart and switch to gardening, paper folding, or something." -- C. Philip Wood %% "If there isn't a population problem, why is the government putting cancer in the cigarettes?" -- the elder Steptoe, c. 1970 %% "If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit." -- H. L. Hunt %% "If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind." -- Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial "The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan." -- H. L. Mencken %% "If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?" -- Lily Tomlin %% "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 %% "If we can't fix it -- we'll fix it so nobody can." -- B. Gibbons %% "If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business... The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." -- Gus Grissom %% "If we do not succeed, then we face the risk of failure." -- Dan Quayle, Vice-President of the United States %% "If we fail to draw the line in Vietnam we may find ourselves compelled to draw a defense line as far back as Seattle and Alaska, with Hawaii as a solitary outpost in mid-Pacific." -- Senator Thomas J. Dodd, February 23, 1965 %% "If we fail to make non-violent action a real, viable, obviously strong possibility . . . then I think we're going to drift into guerrilla warfare." -- John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, Director, Prolife Nonviolent Action Project, "National Catholic Register," 1/4/87, about abortion clinic violence, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry." -- Chekhov %% "If you are beginning to doubt what I am saying, you are probably hallucinating." -- The Firesign Theatre, _Everything you know is Wrong_ %% "If you can persuade your customer to tatoo your name on their chest, they probably will not switch brands." -- an Indiana University professor, re: Harley-Davidson owners %% "If you can set the rules, you can win the game." -- John McCormack %% "If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time." -- George Gerbner %% "If you can't debate me, then there is no way in hell you'll out-insult me." -- Scott Legrand (Scott.Legrand@hogbbs.Fidonet.Org) "You may be wrong here, little one." -- R. W. F. Clark (RWC102@PSUVM) %% "If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics." -- Speaker of the California Assembly Jesse Unruh %% "If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others." -- the Dalai Lama %% "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 %% "If you do everything, you'll win." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson %% "If you don't make money off of it, it had better be either a religious experience or a hobby." -- Lance Cooper %% "If you don't read news.groups, the net appears to be a rather tranquil place." -- Karl Lehenbauer, about Usenet %% "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for everything." -- F. Jeff Stiles, Southern Baptist preacher %% "If you don't want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do: Pour a little Lavoris in the toilet." -- Comedian Jay Leno %% "If you encounter these negroes shoot first, ask questions later." -- LAPD squad-car computer message, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "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 %% "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." -- Cardinal de Richelieu %% "If you juggle with knives, you're likely to get cut." -- Kieran Donegal %% "If you meet the Buddha on the net, put him in your kill file." -- Robert Firth %% "If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time serving it..." -- Marion Zimmer Bradley, _The Forbidden Tower_ %% "If you post it, they will flame." -- The voice from Field of Dreams, according to Brian Frost (b1f5814@rigel.tamu.edu) %% "If you substitute other kinds of intellectual property into the GNU MANIFESTO, it quickly becomes absurd." -- Cal Keegan %% "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 %% "Now, more than ever, it is evident that `good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo." -- Andre Peret %% "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 %% "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an anthitetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% "If you want to eat hippopatomus, you've got to pay the freight." -- attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory %% "If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart %% "If you weren't my teacher, I'd think you just deleted all my files." -- an anonymous UCB CS student, to an instructor who had typed "rm -i *" to get rid of a file named "-f" on a Unix system. %% "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. %% "If your computer doesn't multitask, it ain't shit." -- Cal Keegan %% "Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "Ignorance simplifies ANY problem." -- R. Lucke %% "Ignorance transcends architecture." -- James Gaskin %% "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." -- The New Mighty Mouse %% "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 because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me - and by that time no one was left to speak up." -- Pastor Martin Niemoller %% "In Western terms, love is like an extended software Q.A. suite. True love is like a final acceptance test. But one has to be willing to take bug fixes and work-arounds; otherwise, the software is never done." -- The Usenet Oracle %% "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 %% "In corporate life, I think there are three important areas which contracts can't deal with, the area of conflict, the area of change and area of reaching potential. To me a covenant is a relationship that is based on such things as shared ideals and shared value systems and shared ideas and shared agreement as to the processes we are going to use for working together. In many cases they develop into real love relationships." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 %% "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 always has been plenty." -- Dr. Robert W. Prehoda %% "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson %% "In general, it is best to assume that the network is filled with malevolent entities that will send in packets designed to have the worst possible effect" -- the draft "Requirements for Internet Hosts" RFC %% "In general, it's very hard to protect oneself against omnipotent beings." -- Barry Margolin (barmar@think.com) 9 Sep 89, <29114@news.Think.COM> %% "In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved." -- Butler %% "In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognise terrorism if it came up and bit him on his Internet." -- Ross M. Greenberg %% "In our last congressional elections, there was less turnover in the House of Representatives than there was in the Soviet Politburo: 98.5% of the incumbents were reelected!" -- John McCormick, _Self-Made In America_ %% "In regards to Oral Roberts' claim that God told him that he would die unless he received $20 million by March, God's lawyers have stated that their client has not spoken with Roberts for several years. Off the record, God has stated that "If I had wanted to ice the little toad, I would have done it a long time ago." -- Dennis Miller, SNL News %% "In space, no one can hear you flame." -- Tim P Scott, scott@spectra.com %% "In the Bowling Alley of Tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer." -- Dave Barry %% "In the cafeteria just after lunch, (well, not *just* after, more like *during* lunch, about 12:28; say 12:30, give or take a few minutes), I leaned back in my chair (it was one of those aluminum chairs, good strength-to-weight, like titanium but not quite; but then of course titanium would be a bit of an overkill). Anyway, I heard one of the girls talking about how boring she thought engineers could be." -- Alan Denney (aland@informix.com) %% "In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere." -- Maxim Gorkey %% "In the face of entropy and nothingness, you have to kind of pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer %% "In the fight between you and the world, back the world." -- Frank Zappa %% "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility -- I welcome it." -- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address) %% "In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble." -- Alan Perlis %% "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 %% "Inconceivable!" "You use that word a lot. I don't think it means what you think it does." -- The Princess Bride %% "Indecision is the basis of flexibility." -- button at a Science Fiction convention %% "Indeed, to quarantine a person with AIDS or the AIDS virus does entail a loss, in the short run, of human freedom. Agreed. But the idea of human freedom isn't now, and never has been, absolute. Besides, in the long run, as I have noted, all people with AIDS die." -- John Lofton, Anti-Choice Columnist, The Washington Times, 3/31/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Inferiority complex: a conviction by a jury of your fears." -- anon %% "Inquiry is fatal to certainty." -- Will Durant %% "Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids." -- Erma Brombeck %% "Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule." -- Nietzche %% "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 %% "Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage." -- Joseph Campbell %% "Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing." -- G. Steinem %% "Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier." -- Stanislaw Lem %% "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 %% "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion %% "Is it just me, or does anyone else read `bible humpers' every time someone writes `bible thumpers?' -- Joel M. Snyder, jms@mis.arizona.edu %% "Is it just me, or does there seem to be an inordinate number of lurkers whose heads are imploding lately? Maybe all these alternative viewpoints are too much for them to handle." -- Trent Wohlschlaeger (jtw@wuee1.wustl.edu) %% "Is it really you, Fuzz, or is it Memorex, or is it radiation sickness?" -- Sonic Disruptors comics %% "Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system has been lost?" -- Quentin Crisp %% "Is this bullshit or fertilizer?" -- Author Unknown %% "Is this foreplay?" "No, this is Nuke Strike. Foreplay has lousy graphics. Beat me again." -- Duckert, in "Bad Rubber," Albedo #0 (comics) %% "Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?" -- Kelvin Throop, III %% "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, "Saturday Night Live" News %% "It ain't over until it's over." -- Casey Stengel %% "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." -- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown %% "It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." -- J.R.R. Tolkien %% "It does not pay a prophet to be too specific." -- L. Sprague de Camp %% "It doesn't much signify whom one marries for one is sure to find out next morning it was someone else." -- Rogers %% "It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist of the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall." -- Napoleon, "Military Maxims and Thought" %% "It had to be said: the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice." -- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_ %% "It has nothing to do with the size of Mr. Alnwick's company. We go after companies large and small." -- Rita Black, spokesperson for IBM, "Unix Today!", 5/29/89, page 51 %% "It is a faith (not always 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" %% "It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not." -- Andre Guide %% "It is better to have tried and failed than to have failed to try, but the result's the same." -- Mike Dennison %% "It is easier to fight for principles than to live up to them." -- Alfred Adler %% "It is hard to overstate the debt that we owe to men and women of genius." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "It is important to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." -- Stephen A. Kallis, Jr. %% "It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off." -- Woody Allen %% "It is tempting to take the easy political path ... to get peace at any price now, even though I know that a peace of humiliation for the United States would lead to a bigger war or surrender later." -- Richard M. Nixon, April 30, 1970 %% "It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating us in a stupid way." -- J. W. Nienhuys %% "It isn't easy being a fat narcissist." -- Jackie Gleason %% "It just goes to show what you can do if you're a total psychotic." -- Woody Allen %% "It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him." -Arthur C. Clarke %% "It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper %% "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 %% "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) "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) %% "It takes a smart man to know when he's stupid." -- Barney Rubble %% "It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling." - R. Frost %% "It took no computation to dance to the rock 'n roll station." -- VU %% "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 %% "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 %% "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 %% "It wasn't lies. It was just bullshit, that's all." -- Elwood Blues %% "It's OK to do the right thing... as long as you don't get caught." -- The Lone Contractor %% "It's Woody Allen's fault," he had said, squeezing his bottle of Rolling Rock as if it were a hand grip. "He had to go and ruin romantic love for all the rest of us for all time with his goddamn lobsters." -- Ann Beattie %% "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear." -- Norm, from _Cheers_ %% "It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times." -- Augustus McCrae %% "It's a very valuable function and requirement that you're performing, so have a great day and keep a stiff upper lip." -- Dan Quayle, Prince William Sound, May 1989 %% "It's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln %% "It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear." -- Freeman Dyson Freeman did indeed say that, but I'm probably the only person who was listening to him at the time. So, you won't find it written in any of his books. -- Russell Nelson %% "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 %% "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission." -- Grace Murray Hopper %% "It's like pissing your pants to keep yourself warm." -- Disparaging Danish engineering proverb describing short-term solutions %% "It's morally wrong to let a sucker keep his money." -- Canada Bill Jones %% "It's my cookie file and if I come up with something that's lame and I like it, it goes in." -- karl %% "It's no longer socially acceptable to talk about rape as a crime of passion, boys; it's like making jokes about black people and watermelons. Unless you're from the "barefoot and pregnant" school of social relations, you should have enough sensitivity to avoid discussing extremely unpleasant violent acts in a flippant manner in front of people who must live in fear of being potential victims, or who are likely acquaintances of actual ones. Jim Muller is of course an exception, because he's an artiste." -- Dave Touretzky %% "It's no sweat, Henry. Russ made it back to Bugtown before he died. So he'll regenerate in a couple of days. It's just awful sloppy of him to get killed in the first place. Humph!" -- Ron Post, Post Brothers Comics %% "It's not just a computer -- it's your ass." -- Cal Keegan %% "It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." -- Will Rogers %% "It's real handy, havin' an Elder God in the band, eh?" -- Post Brothers comics %% "It's ten o'clock... Do you know where your AI programs are?" -- Peter Oakley %% "It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah %% "It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss..." --Richard P. Feynman %% "It's very hard for anything to make it out of Hollywood these days without a lame-ass wimpout ending tacked on at the whining request of test audiences selected from the most puerile of the Nielsen families, who are, as we all know, chosen on the basis of the number of cousin-cousin marriages in their family over the last ten generations." -- Nix Thompson (nix@sgi.com) %% "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-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married." -- Phyllis Schlafly %% "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." -- John Wooden %% "It's when they say 2 + 2 = 5 that I begin to argue." -- Eric Pepke %% "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 %% "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." -- Patti Smith %% "Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin." -- Michael O'Donohugh %% "Jesus saves sinners... and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!" -- John Wichers (wichers@husc4.HARVARD.EDU) %% "Jesus saves... but Gretzky gets the rebound!" -- Daniel Hinojosa (hinojosa@hp-sdd) %% "Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "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 III %% "Just Say No." -- Nancy Reagan %% "Just because you understand what something should look like doesn't mean you know how to build it." -- karl@neosoft.com %% "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that isn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Doctor Who %% "Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?" -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US %% "Just the facts, Ma'am." -- Joe Friday %% "Just think of a computer as hardware you can program." -- Nigel de la Tierre %% "Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis %% "Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom, Justice is what comes out of a courtroom." -- Clarence Darrow %% "Justice, like lightning, should ever appear To some men hope, to other mean fear." -- Jefferson Pierce %% "Keep the wind in your solar sails..." -- Glenn Clapp %% "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 %% "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!" -- Looney Tunes, "What's Opera Doc?" (1957, Chuck Jones) %% "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 %% "Knowing when to optimize is as important as knowing how." -- Tom Neff %% "L'extension des privileges des femmes est le principe general de tous progres sociaux." -- Charles Fourier, 1808 %% "Lab rats seem to have been bred for cancer hypersensitivity by the medical establishment and the FDA. We are the kings and the rats taste our food." -- James Salsman (jps@cat.cmu.edu) %% "Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about." -- B. L. Whorf %% "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" %% "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) %% "Laundry increases exponentially in the number of children." -- Miriam Robbins %% "Laws don't work, unless they merely codify generally accepted behavior, in which case they are probably unnecessary." -- tom@genie.slhs.udel.edu %% "Lead us in a few words of silent prayer." -- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach %% "Lenin probably wouldn't understand. But then, no one around he seems to care what he would think." -- Lynn Ashby's report on Romania %% "Let every man teach his son, teach his daughter, that labor is honorable." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "Let me control a planet's oxygen supply, and I don't care who makes the laws." -- Great Cthuhlu's Starry Wisdom Band (via Roger Leroux) %% "Let me guess, Ed. Pentecostal, right?" -- Starcap'n Ra, ra@asuvax.asu.edu "Nope. Charismatic (I think - I've given up on what all those pesky labels mean)." -- Ed Carp, erc@unisec.usi.com "Same difference - all zeal and feel, averaging less than one working brain cell per congregation. Starcap'n Ra, you pegged him. Good work!" -- Kenn Barry, barry@eos.UUCP %% "Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its bill of rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law." -- H. L. Mencken, about the Scopes Monkey Trial %% "Let the evil minds of the world beware! Ever and always shall the Avengers prevail!" -- Thor %% "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed...." -- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address) %% "Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us." -- militant religionists everywhere %% "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 %% "Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!" -- The Ghostbusters %% "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order." -- Proudhon %% "Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood. Blood debts must be repaid in kind. The longer the delay, the greater the interest." -- Chinese author Lu Xun, 1926 %% "Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan %% "Life is a pinball machine. You bounce around for a while, and then you drain." -- Joe Bak %% "Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it." -- Alice Walker %% "Life is full of surprises when you're up th' stream of consciousness without a paddle..." -- Zippy the Pinhead %% "Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all...." -- Thomas J. Kopp %% "Life's a Cabaret... Long, dull, and full of Nazis." -- Howard the Duck %% "Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters." -- Ross Presser %% "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 %% "Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% "Live or die, I'll make a million." -- Reebus Kneebus, before his jump to the center of the earth, Firesign Theater %% "Lobbyists threatening to withhold campaign contributions from lawmakers who don't support their special-interest causes could be violating bribery laws, Colorado House Speaker Bev Bledsoe warned yesterday." -- The Denver Post, 3 May 1990, p. 1B %% "Look ma! Three arms!" -- J. Eric Townsend (erict@flatline.UUCP) %% "Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai %% "Lord, defend me from my friends; I can account for my enemies." -- D'Hericault %% "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." --Matt Groening %% "Love is always having to say I'm sorry." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished." -- Goethe %% "Love is never what we looked for and always takes us by surprise: it's the rock on Coyote's head in the middle of the Road Runner chase. It's not the pain of love Coyote minds, it's the *futility* of his inventions in the face of his fate." -- Ian Shoales, Social Critic and Bitter Loudmouth %% "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail." -- A Kurt Vonnegut fan %% "Love your country but never trust its government." -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania %% "Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul." -- Mark Twain %% "Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew" %% "Lying lips are abomination to the Lord; but they that deal truly are his delight. A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger. He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him. Be not a witness against thy neighbor without cause; and deceive not with thy lips. Death and life are in the power of the tongue." -- Proverbs, some selections from the Jewish Scripture %% "MTV. An obedient tongue licking the shiny leather boot of rock and roll." -- MTV commercial %% "Maintain an awareness for contribution -- to your schedule, your project, our company." -- A Group of Employees %% "Make no little plans. They have no Magic to stir Men's blood." -- D. B. Hudson %% "Mamma, don't let your babies grow up to be hackers." -- Willie Nelson, with a little help from Bill Mathews %% "Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on..." - Winston Churchill %% "Managing senior programmers is like herding cats." -- Dave Platt %% "Many are the wonders of the Universe, and none so wonderful as Mankind!" -- Sophocles %% "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out." -- Montaigne %% "Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your life paying for it." -- Baskins %% "Master, why is the letter 'i' the symbol for current?" "Because there is no letter 'i' in the word 'current'." "Master, why do we use the letter 'j' for sqrt(-1)?" "Because we use the letter 'i' for current." Whereupon the Master struck the Disciple, and the Disciple became enlightened. %% "May the Lord open your eyes and heart so that you may understand him more clearer." -- Patrick Harubin, pgh@cs.duke.edu, soc.religion.islam %% "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin %% "May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe %% "Maybe life is a grindstone; whether it polishes you or wears you down depends on what you're made of." -- Kay Fletcher %% "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) %% "Meanwhile, let it be clear what we do: we fight contraception-sterilization- abortion on six continents..." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, in his brochure, Human Life International Explained, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Meet me in the bedroom in five minutes... and bring a cattle prod!" -- Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily" %% "Memory serves wise commanders." -- Tz'u-hsi, 638 AD %% "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- D. P. Barron %% "Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him..." -- Ripping Yarns %% "Mine! Mine! It's all mine!" -- D. Duck %% "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, _The Mysterious Stranger_ %% "Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger %% "Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations" -- Thomas Jefferson %% "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -- H. G. Wells %% "Morality is one thing. Ratings are everything." - A Network 23 executive on "Max Headroom" %% "More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_ %% "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." -- Abraham Lincoln %% "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 %% "Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room." -- Blaise Pascal %% "Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen %% "Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to keep in touch." -- Robert Orben %% "Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk." -- TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode _Amok_Time_ %% "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." -- Alexander Graham Bell %% "My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch? Next April?" -- L. Mulloy %% "My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got." -- Mark Twain %% "My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol." -- George Carlin %% "My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all." -- Stephen Hawking %% "My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn." -- Louis Adamic %% "My head is bloodied, but unbowed." -- From the poem "Invictus" %% "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 %% "My past is my own." -- The Shadow (DC Comics) %% "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 %% "NASA Announces New Deck Chair Arrangement For Space Station Titanic." -- Tom Neff %% "NASA Awards Acronym Generation System (AGS) Contract For Space Station Freedom" -- Tom Neff %% "Nat Goldstein and Jim Simmons in Florida, Curtis Beseda out west who has destroyed abortion clinics, these men are looked up to by my arm of the movement as the foremost heroes of the movement ...." -- James J. Condit, Jr., Cincinnatus Party's perennial candidate for city council, "Mike Cuthbert Show," WCKY_AM, 1/22/87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries." -- William George Jordan %% "Nature loves a vacuum. Digital doesn't." -- DEC sales letter %% "Neighbors!! We got neighbors! We ain't supposed to have any neighbors, and I just had to shoot one." -- Post Bros. Comics %% "Neuro-linguistic programming is simply the zig-zag and swirl of menorgs and disorgs acting under the suction and pressure of the morphogenetic field." -- Clark Brooks (clark@cataract.caltech.edu) %% "Neurotic: Self-taut person." -- Author Unknown %% "Never ascribe to malice that which is caused by greed and ignorance." -- Cal Keegan %% "Never counsel for contraception or refer to agencies making contraceptives available. Some volunteers may feel that it is the lesser of two evils, reasoning that if the girl is going to be sexually active anyway, why not at least help her from getting pregnant with contraceptives. This type of thinking is not only inaccurate but unacceptable and against the general pro-life philosophy, and Christian principles." -- Robert J. Pearson, President, The Pearson Foundation, in his guidebook, _How to Start and Operate a Pro-Life Out-Reach Pregnancy Service Center", 1984, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning." -- Marlo Thomas %% "Never give a statist an even break. The State has never given us one." -- Andre Marrou %% "Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." -- Winston Churchill %% "Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well. -- Bilbo Baggins, _The Hobbit_ by J.R.R. Tolkien, Chapter XII %% "Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time." -- David Gries, in "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers", circa 1969. %% "Never try to catch two frogs with one hand." -- Chinese Proverb %% "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 %% "Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God -- I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again." -- Woody Allen's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters" %% "Nine years of ballet, asshole." -- Shelly Long, to the bad guy after making a jump over a gorge that he couldn't quite, in "Outrageous Fortune" %% "Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra %% "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a part of the continent, a piece of the whole...if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. Any man's death diminishes me because I'm involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell TOLLS, it tolls for thee." -- John Donne %% "No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables." -- Archie Goodwin %% "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in session." -- Lysander Spooner %% "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 %% "No one can forbid us the future." -- Inscription on the base of Paris's monument to Leon Gambetta %% "No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party or movement. He will always find himself out of step." -- Sidney Hook %% "No problem is so big that you can't run away from it." -- Snoopy %% "No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it." -- C. Schulz %% "No wife of *mine* is doing any dishes. That's what we had the kid for." -- from Deathlok comics #1 %% "No! We will not die like dogs. We will fight like lions!" -- The Three Amigos %% "No, it's 'Blessed are the meek.' I think that's nice, 'cause really they have a hell of a time." -- someone in the crowd in "The Life of Brian" %% "No, no, I don't mind being called the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one." -- Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, WATCHMEN %% "Nobody but a lawyer can tell legal from illegal, and the lawyers can't tell right from wrong...." -- Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, _Oath of Fealty_ %% "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." -- Edmund Burke %% "None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of mind a great number of things become impossible." -- From Henry Ford Sr., "My Life and Work," p. 86 (1922): %% "Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends." -- Woody Allen %% "No problem is too big it can't be run away from." -- Linus %% "Note and initial": Let's spread the responsibility of this. -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary" %% "Nothing can stop him. Not even common sense." -- Mark Komarinski %% "Nothing, not love, not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need to change another writer's copy." -- Arthur Evans %% "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 %% "Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible - yea, and get the better of them." -- W. Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR %% "Now here's something you're really going to like!" -- Rocket J. Squirrel %% "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." -- the Red Queen, from "Through the Looking Glass" (Lewis Carroll) %% "Now, telephone companies are not stupid, at least for large values of 'stupid'." -- Michael O'Brien (Mr. Protocol) %% "Nuclear war would really set back cable." - Ted Turner %% "Obedience. A religion of slaves. A religion of intellectual death. I like it. Don't ask questions, don't think, obey the Word of the Lord -- as it has been conveniently brought to you by a man in a Rolls with a heavy Rolex on his wrist. I like that job! Where can I sign up?" -- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU %% "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_ %% "Occupational regulation has served to limit consumer choice, raise consumer costs, increase practitioner income, limit practitioner mobility, deprive the poor of adequate service, and restrict job opportunities for minorities -- all without a demonstrated improvement in quality or safety." ... "Critics of this hypothesis believe to the contrary, however, that regulators' and professional groups' self-interest has been and still is the primary motivator of regulatory legislation. And indeed the evidence shows that consumers rarely engage in campaigns to license occupations. If the purpose of licensing were to improve the quality of service, one would expect consumers, who might be the prime beneficiaries, to promote licensure, but licensing is systematically promoted by practitioners ..." -- The Rule of Experts - Occupational Licensing in America. By S. David Young. Cato Institute, 1987. ISBN 0-932790-62-3 (paper). 99 pages. (Quoted by Tony Harminc in comp.risks) %% "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." -- Thomas Paine %% "Of course power tools and alcohol don't mix. Everyone knows power tools aren't soluble in alcohol..." -- Crazy Nigel %% "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) %% "Of course, someone who knows more about this will correct me if I'm wrong, and someone who knows less will correct me if I'm right." -- David Palmer (palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu) %% "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 Milhouse Nixon, 6/23/72 %% "Of what importance is mere money - when there are worlds to be conquered - people to be enslaved?" -- Doctor Doom %% "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) %% "Oh beautiful, for smoggy skies, o'er insecticide 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!" -- George Carlin (?) %% "Oh boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a REALLY BIG ram disk!" -- lennox@shire.hw.stratus.com %% "Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the blink again." -- Marvin The Paranoid Android %% "Oh dear, now I've made a terrible mess of things. And all I wanted to do was rule the universe." -- Dr. Zachary Smith %% "Oh honey, this is just the beginning. Stick with me and we'll claw our way to the top." -- John Water's "Hairspray" %% "Oh my! An `inflammatory attitude' in alt.flame? Never heard of such a thing..." -- Allen Gwinn, allen@sulaco.Sigma.COM %% "Oh what wouldn't I give to be spat at in the face..." -- a prisoner in "Life of Brian" %% "Oh yeah, laugh now! But when the millions start pouring in, I'll be the one at Burger King, sucking down Whoppers at my own private table!" -- Al Bundy %% "Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty." -- Groucho Marx, "Monkey Business" %% "Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?" "The world," Lucas said. -- William Gibson, _Count Zero_ %% "Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time." -- a coffee cup %% "Old soldiers never die. Young ones do." -- Anon %% "On the market, there can be no such thing as exploitation." -- Murray Rothbard %% "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 %% "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 %% "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 %% "Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia. Furthermore, homosexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,' the venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates mount, and the family swiftly disintegrates." -- Valerie Riches, Family Planning Educator, in her brochure, Contraception's Legacy, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "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. %% "Once lead the American people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life ..." -- President Woodrow Wilson %% "Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department." -- Werner von Braun %% "Once you've had real champagne, you can never go back to Asti Spimanti." -- Georgette Lundberg %% "One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier." -- Gustave Flaubert (letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 12, 1846) %% "One day I woke up and discovered that I was in love with tripe." -- Tom Anderson %% "One lawyer can steal more than a hundred men with guns." -- The Godfather %% "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -- Elbert Hubbard ...yet. -- Karl Lehenbauer %% "One man's Mede is another man's Persian." -- A member of the Algonquin Round Table %% "One man's mate is another man's passion." -- Jeff Daiell's description of adultery %% "One more drink and I would have been under the host." -- Dorothy Parker %% "One of the most devastating enemies of the family is radical sex education in the public school. It is more explicit than necessary for the good of the child. Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession with sex." -- Beverly LaHaye, President, Concerned Women for America, in her newsletter, 4/81, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "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 %% "One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror." -- W. K. Hartmann %% "One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair hair remover, just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful." -- David Lynch %% "Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not make the simple next step of supporting multitasking." -- Calvin Keegan %% "Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers." -- Rodan of Alexandria %% "Only a mediocre man is always at his best." -- W. Somerset Maugham %% "Only a mediocre person is always at his best." -- W. Somerset Maugham %% "Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." -- Hannah Arendt. %% "Open Channel D..." -- Napoleon Solo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. %% "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." -- Dave Bowman, 2001 %% "Opinions are like assholes: Everybody has one and nobody wants to look at the other guy's." -- Jeff Stout %% "Optimization is not some mystical state of grace, it is an intricate act of human labor which carries real costs and real risks." -- Tom Neff %% "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) %% "Our Constitution ... gives to bigotry no sanction." -- George Washington %% "Our journey toward the stars has progressed swiftly. In 1926 Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-propelled rocket, achieving an altitude of 41 feet. In 1962 John Glenn orbited the earth. In 1969, only 66 years after Orville Wright flew two feet off the ground for 12 seconds, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and I rocketed to the moon in Apollo 11." -- Michael Collins Former astronaut and past Director of the National Air and Space Museum %% "Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined, hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension." -- Robert A. Baker, "The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2 %% "Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." -- Thomas Jefferson (1786) %% "Our reruns are better than theirs." -- Nick at Nite %% "Out of register space (ugh)" -- vi %% "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." -- Author Unknown %% "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android %% "Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy." -- George Bernard Shaw %% "Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles." -- George Jean Nathan %% "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." -- Samuel Johnson %% "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." -- Oscar Wilde %% "Paul Lynde to block..." -- a contestant on "Hollywood Squares" %% "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT, 1982 %% "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- The Wizard Of Oz %% "Peace is our profession." -- Motto of Strategic Air Command "Peace in our profession. War is just a hobby." -- Stationery available in PX, Barksdale SAC AFB %% "Pencil cursors are for user-interface weenies." -- Rob MacLachlan %% "People don't form relationships, they take hostages." -- anon %% "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices." -- Adam Smith, _Wealth of Nations_ %% "People should have access to the data which you have about them. There should be a process for them to challenge any inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller %% "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 %% "People who live in glass houses shouldn't." -- Author Unknown %% "People who use long lines DESERVE to lose." -- Rob MacLachlan %% "Perestroika: could it happen here?" -- Tom Neff %% "Perhaps I am flogging a straw herring in mid-stream, but in the light of what is known about the ubiquity of security vulnerabilities, it seems vastly too dangerous for university folks to run with their heads in the sand." -- Peter G. Neumann, RISKS moderator, about the Internet virus %% "Perhaps the best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." -- Dean Acheson %% "Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist." -- Abbie Hoffman %% "Pessimists have already begun to worry about what is going to replace automation." -- John Tudor %% "Pioneering basically amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die." - John W. Campbell %% "Plan to throw one away. You will anyway." - Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month" %% "Plastic gun. Ingenious. More coffee, please." -- The Phantom comics %% "Please refrain from making me puke on my workstation." -- Alan Weiss (alan@tivoli.UUCP> %% "Please spare us all the attempts to get everyone to shorten their emotional bandwidth on-line until everyone sounds like a sober philosophy major calmly discussing the merits of post neo-realism as reflected in modernistic Danish furniture." -- Chris Neckalson (chrisn@sco.com) %% "Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far." -- Mark Twain %% "Pok pok pok, P'kok!" -- Superchicken %% "Poor dead, there's nothing between his ears." -- Margaret Thatcher, about Ronald Reagan, in the 6/2/88 issue of The New York Times %% "Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another." -- Madonna %% "Poor man... he was like an employee to me." -- The police commissioner on "Sledge Hammer" laments the death of his bodyguard %% "Posting to alt.flame has nothing to do with writing flames." -- Patricia O Tuama (rissa@attctc.Dallas.TX.US) %% "Prais'd be the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious." -- Walt Whitman %% "Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system] made for the PDP-11 by Bell Laboratories." - Ted Nelson, October 1977 %% "Problems are only opportunities in disguise." -- Albert North Whitehead %% "Pseudo-Judeo-Christian horror was no match for genuinely hypoglycemic hunger." -- Peni R. Griffin, "The Goat Man" (IASFM, 5/89) %% "Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed - approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code, thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!], found that it had any value as maintenance documentation." -- Meilir Page-Jones, _The Practical Guide to Structured Design_, Yourdon Press (c) 1988 %% "Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure." -- Karl Kraus %% "Pull the trigger and you're garbage." -- Lady Blue %% "Pull the wool over your own eyes!" -- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "Put all your eggs in one basket, and WATCH THAT BASKET!" -- Jerry Buchmeyer %% "Question Authority and the Authorities will question You." -- Danny Low (dlow%hpspcoi@hplabs.hp.com) %% "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 %% "Rage is a wind that blows out the candle of reason." -- Author Unknown %% "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!" -- Dylan Thomas %% "Reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!" -- Amiga ROM Kernel Manual %% "Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding." -- Ezra Pound %% "Real programmers don't bring paper bag lunches. If the vending machine sells it, they eat it. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche." %% "Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." %% "Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Cavemen drew flowcharts, and look how much good it did them." %% "Reality is not binding on news admins." -- Cathy Foulston (cathyf@rice.edu) %% "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 %% "Regardless of the legal speed limit, your Buick must be operated at speeds faster than 85 MPH (140kph)." -- 1987 Buick Grand National owners manual. %% "Reliable software must kill people reliably." -- Andy Mickel %% "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell %% "Remember Kruschev: he tried to do too many things too fast, and he was removed in disgrace. If Gorbachev tries to destroy the system or make too many fundamental changes to it, I believe the system will get rid of him. I am not a political scientist, but I understand the system very well. I believe he will have a "heart attack" or retire or be removed. He is up against a brick wall. If you think they will change everything and become a free, open society, forget it!" -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 %% "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 %% "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 %% "Remember, extremism in the nondefense of moderation is not a virtue." -- Peter Neumann, about usenet %% "Resist, expose, or stop immediately every public school or group sex education program, no matter what it is called or how it is diffused into the curriculum." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, in his brochure, From Contraception to Abortion, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals" - "Oh, Lucky Man" %% "Right now I feel that I've got my feet on the ground as far as my head is concerned." -- Baseball pitcher Bo Belinsky %% "Roman Polanski makes his own blood. He's smart -- that's why his movies work." -- A brilliant director at "Frank's Place" %% "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead." -- W. Shakespeare, HAMLET %% "Roses are red, violets are blue; I'm schizophrenic and so am I." -- Author Unknown %% "S.F.'S NO GOOD!!" They bellow till we're deaf. "But this looks good." "WELL THEN IT'S NOT S.F.!!" -- Kingsley Amis %% "SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!" -- Ken Thompson %% "Sacred cows make great hamburgers." -- Rober Reisner How do they hold the spatula? -- Stacey Campbell (staceyc@sco.com) %% "Sarcasm: barbed ire." -- Author Unknown %% "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 %% "Say yur prayers, yuh flea-pickin' varmint!" -- Yosemite Sam %% "Schemes to subvert the liberties of a great community require time to mature them for execution. An army, so large as seriously to menace those liberties, could only be formed by progressive augmentations; which would suppose not merely a temporary combination between the legislature and the executive, but a continued conspiracy for a series of time. Is it probable that such a combination would exist at all? Is it probable that it would be perserved in, and transmitted along through all the successive variations in a representative body, which biennial elections would naturally produce in both houses? Is it presumable that every man the instant he took his seat in the national Senate or House of Representatives would commence a traitor to his constituents and to his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man discerning enough to detect so attrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprise his constituents of their danger? If such presumptions can fairly be made, there ought to be at once an end of all delegated authority." -- Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Papers, #26 %% "Science is about skepticism." -- Eugene Miya %% "Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it." -- Aubrey Eben %% "Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, _Computer Language_, Oct 90 %% "Science makes godlike -- it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the *first* sin, the *original* sin. *This alone is morality.* ``Thou shalt not know'' -- the rest follows." -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% "Seed me, Seymour" -- a random number generator meets the big green mother from outer space %% "Send lawyers, guns and money..." -- Lyrics from a Warren Zevon song %% "Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions." -- Phyllis Schlafly %% "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 %% "Ships don't come in, they're built." -- anon %% "Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." -- Martin Mull %% "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser." -- Vince Lombardi, football coach %% "Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames." -- The Log Lady %% "Sigh... Every day I thank my statuette of Wilma Flintstone that I was born normal." -- Zippy the pinhead %% "Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone." -- G. B. Stearn %% "Since the bicycle makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines." -- S. S. Wilson %% "Six years for possession of a cigarette?...I got six months for possession of a deadly weapon!" - cartoon by S. Harris %% "Slime is the agony of water." -- Jean-Paul Sartre %% "So far from God, so close to the United States" -- Old Mexican proverb %% "So why don't you make like a tree... and get outta here." -- Biff in "Back to the Future" %% "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. %% "Socialism is power, power, and more power." -- Oswald Spengler, Hitler's intellectual forebear %% "Software is the heart and soul of a computer company." -- DEC President Ken Olsen %% "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. %% "Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it." -- Gordon R. Dickson %% "Some people should be taken with a grain of salt; others with a whole shaker." -- Blumstein (paulb@ttidca.TTI.COM) %% "Some people think like drummers, some people act like them." -- Jason Titus %% "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- Bertrand Russell %% "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 %% "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 %% "Sometimes insanity is the only alternative" -- button at a Science Fiction convention. %% "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code." -- Dan Salomon %% "Sometimes you have to be a harsh cookie editor." -- Karl %% "Sometimes you leave a mark, before you know the score." -- Ric Ocasek, "You Got You", from the album "This Side Of Paradise" %% "Spending four or five hours a day tracing through CONSIO with an assembly-level debugger will take the spring out of anybody's step." -- The Lone Contractor %% "Spock, did you see the looks on their faces?" "Yes, Captain, a sort of vacant contentment." %% "Spontaneous combustion! What a stroke of luck!" -- Max %% "Stalinism begins at home." -- Tom Neff %% "Stan and I thought that this experiment was so stupid, we decided to finance it ourselves." -- Martin Fleischmann, co-discoverer of room-temperature fusion (?) %% "State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent." -- Evan Leibovitch %% "Stop annoying Mister President with impertinent questions, Junior." -- Death Race 2000 %% "Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe." -- Frank Zappa %% "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward." -- William E. Davidsen %% "Sudden de-compression Sucks!" -- Dennis Robert Gorrie, GORRIEDE@UREGINA1.BITNET %% "Summit meetings tend to be like panda matings. The expectations are always high, and the results usually disappointing." -- Robert Orben %% "Survey says..." -- Richard Dawson, weenie, on "Family Feud" %% "TO MANKIND And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won, after all." -- Dedicatory note of "The Gods Themselves" %% "Take Idaho's license plates - they say 'Famous Potatoes.' Then there's New Hampshire - their license plates say 'Live Free ... or DIE!!' I don't know, I think that somewhere between 'Famous Potatoes' and 'Live Free or Die' the truth lies. And I think it's closer to 'Famous Potatoes.'" -- George Carlin %% "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." -- Thiokol management, 1/27/86 %% "Take that, you hostile sons-of-bitches!" -- James Coburn, in the finale of _The_President's_Analyst_ %% "Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -- Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's _Time Enough For Love_ %% "Taxes? We don't need no stinking taxes." -- Jeff Daiell %% "Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it." -- Max Frisch %% "Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology." -- John Tudor %% "Tell the truth and run." -- Yugoslav proverb %% "Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances." -- Seymour Cray %% "That government is best which governs least." -- Thomas Jefferson %% "That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched delusion now." -- Brian Kantor (brian@ucsd.edu) %% "That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest" -- Thoreau (Sysop's note: and if so, what are we doing here?) %% "That's not a bug, that's merely an idiosyncracy." -- mattb (formerly of sco) %% "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 %% "The ACLU has stood foursquare against the recurring tides of hysteria that from time to time threaten freedoms everywhere... Indeed, it is difficult to appreciate how far our freedoms might have eroded had it not been for the Union's valiant representation in the courts of the constitutional rights of people of all persuasions, no matter how unpopular or even despised by the majority they were at the time." -- former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren %% "The Avis WIZARD decides if you get to drive a car. Your head won't touch the pillow of a Sheraton unless their computer says it's okay." -- Arthur Miller %% "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 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 %% "The C shell is flakier than a snowstorm." -- Guy Harris %% "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" %% "The Government just announced today the creation of the Neutron Bomb II. Similar to the Neutron Bomb, the Neutron Bomb II not only kills people and leaves buildings standing, but also does a little light housekeeping." -- from "Global Village News" on Nickelodeon %% "The Heinlein Woman to me is this woman who goes out and rules the galaxy, smokes a cigar, uses a machine gun and all, but what she really wants is to bring her husband his slippers." -- paraphrase, based on peter@sugar's memory of a quote by Joan D. Vinge %% "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "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 %% "The Lisa had problems, but it was a terrific piece of engineering that still puts the Macintosh to shame." -- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld %% "The Mets were great in 'sixty eight, The Cards were fine in 'sixty nine, But the Cubs will be heavenly in nineteen and seventy." -- Ernie Banks %% "The NY Times is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country. The National Enquirer is read by the people who think Elvis is alive and running the country..." -- Robert J Woodhead (trebor@biar.UUCP) %% "The Nazis have no sense of humor, so why should they want television?" -- Philip K. Dick %% "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 %% "The Street finds its own uses for technology." -- William Gibson %% "The United States has entered an anti-intellectual phase in its history, perhaps most clearly seen in our virtually thought-free political life." -- David Baltimore %% "The ability of two men to put on gloves, stand toe-to-toe, and pummel each other into insensibility... is what separates us from the animals." -- Jim, on Taxi %% "The alternative to mutual trust, which is indeed a risky gamble, is the security of the police state." -- Alan Watts %% "The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle: they're on TV!" -- Homer Simpson %% "The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents." -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186 %% "The armchair quarterbacking of a former quarterback is worth more than the armchair quarterbacking of a schmuck." -- Cal Keegan %% "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 %% "The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by people who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried anything." -- Jim Joyce, former computer science lecturer at the University of California %% "The better technology does not always sell better, even if it is first." -- William J. Spencer, Xerox Corporation %% "The biggest growth industry in UNIX is promoting standards." -- Rikki Kirzner, Dataquest. %% "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 %% "The cat is out of the bag. Even Siskel and Ebert talk about it, and they're _professional art farts_, not amatuer Art History Majors forced to work in a computer company because they realized too late that a four-year investment in a liberal arts degree is about as useful on the job market as a bicycle with square wheels." -- Chris Neckalson (sco!chrisn) %% "The chain that can be yanked is not the cosmic chain." -- Cal Keegan %% "The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain." -- G. Fitch %% "The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity." -- Edward Gibbons, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ %% "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_ %% "The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." -- John Philpot Curran %% "The country couldn't run without Prohibition. That is the industrial fact." -- Henry Ford, 1929 %% "The cow story is unlikely - cows are valuable, and don't fit into automatic teller machine slots." -- ho95c.att.com!wcs %% "The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -- William J. Broad %% "The day is very warm", intoned the priest, "but the noodles are getting cold". "A cold noodle", he continued, "is like a dog without fur.... Recognizable, but very unpleasent." ---- cruc!gevert %% "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 %% "The difference between fantasy and science fiction is that one hast honest politicians scrupulous lawyers, and altruistic doctors, while the other only has beings from outer space." -- William John Watkins %% "The difference between the right word and a similar word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." -- Mark Twain %% "The doughnut is...not unlike the ideal lover - rich, sensual, irresistably desirable, and available 24 hours a day." -- David Hoffman %% "The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds." -- Claude Bernard %% "The fact is that one side thinks that the profits to be won outweigh the risks to be incurred, and the other side is ready to face danger than accept an immediate loss." -- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War %% "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. %% "The filter has discreting sources." -- KSC FIDO, 1/28/86 %% "The final twitch of "Political Correctness" grand peur has to do with the age-old fear of antinomian beastliness, lesbians holding black masses over copies of Derrida and so forth." -- Alexander Cockburn %% "The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment." -- Richard P. Feynman %% "The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity." "Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples...The greater the decline of religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but lead in the end to chaos and confusion." -- Baha'u'llah, a selection from the Baha'i scripture %% "The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads wondering if we might possibly have missed something." -- Gamel Abdel Nasser %% "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 %% "The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, `What does woman want?'" -- Sigmund Freud %% "The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact." -- Thomas Henry Huxley %% "The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war." -- John Hospers %% "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States) %% "The greatest warriors are the ones who fight for peace." -- Holly Near %% "The hand that rocks the cradle can also cradle a rock." --- Feminist saying, circa 1968-1972 %% "The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -- Dante %% "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 %% "The important thing is never to stop questioning." -- Albert Einstein %% "The judge ought to give 'em a chance to tell what evolution is. Course we got them licked anyhow, but I believe in being fair and square and American. Besides, I'd like to know what evolution is myself." -- Tennessee State Representative John Washington Butler, author of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Law, during the Scopes Monkey Trial %% "The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own." -- H.G. Wells %% "The less you know about home computers the more you'll want the new IBM PS/1." -- Advertisment in the Edmonton Journal, Thursday, December 13, 1990 %% "The lesser of two evils -- is evil." -- Seymour (Sy) Leon %% "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), quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk %% "The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for the sake of something else." -- Aristotle %% "The life of the people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism, as it must be from unmanly and prudish refusal to face facts.... The right to personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of sustaining the race." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924 %% "The light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long, and you have burned so very, very bright, Roy!" -- Doctor Eldon Tyrell, in Blade Runner %% "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 medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel %% "The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan %% "The minority is always right." -- Henrik Ibsen 1828-1906 %% "The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." -- Brian Kernighan [1978] %% "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason." -- Thomas Paine, _The Age of Reason_ %% "The most important question in the study of government is 'how can we prevent government from going berserk and killing off half the population?'" -- John Kormylo %% "The most important question when any new computer architecture is introduced is `So what?'" -- someone in comp.arch %% "The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is." -- Narciso Yepes %% "The net result is a system that is not only binary compatible with 4.3 BSD, but is even bug for bug compatible in almost all features." -- Avadit Tevanian, Jr., "Architecture-Independent Virtual Memory Management for Parallel and Distributed Environments: The Mach Approach" %% "The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured some whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day." -- Peter Applebome %% "The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected." -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972 %% "The only corporate defense against rationality is bureaucracy." -- anon %% "The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." -- Salvador Dali %% "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ... over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." -- John Stuart Mill 'On Liberty' 1859 %% "The only thing open about OSF is their mouth." -- Chuck Musciano %% "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 pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do." -- Gregory Bateson %% "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) %% "The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut." -- some dinosaurs from The Far Side, by Gary Larson %% "The police are not there to create disorder. The police are there to preserve disorder." -- The late Richard J. Daly, Mayor of the city of Chicago %% "The preeminence of a learned man over a worshiper is equal to the preeminence of the moon, at the night of the full moon, over all the stars. Verily, the learned men are the heirs of the Prophets." -- A tradition attributed to Muhammad %% "The pyramid is opening!" "Which one?" "The one with the ever-widening hole in it!" -- The Firesign Theatre %% "The question is rather: if we ever succeed in making a mind 'of nuts and bolts', how will we know we have succeeded? -- Fergal Toomey "It will tell us." -- Barry Kort %% "The raytracer of justices recurses slowly, but it renders exceedingly fine." -- Larry Phillips (lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca) %% "The real problem with SDI is that it doesn't kill anybody." -- Tom Neff %% "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 %% "The reason that God was able to create the world in seven days is that he didn't have to worry about the installed base." -- Enzo Torresi %% "The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% "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 %% "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough." -- William Blake %% "The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between a five-dollar bill and a whip deserves to learn the difference on his own back -- as, I think, he will." -- Francisco d'Anconia, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ %% "The script had been written by this legendary dead guy that we know and there were about fifty-eleven-hundred pages of it. Of this eight words were completely readable. These were "oranges" in the title and "Close the curtains, Geoffrey, I'm amphibious", which was right at the end. To be perfectly frank man, I wasn't even 100% sure about amphibious." -- Waldo "D.R." Dobbs, "D.R. and Quinch go to Hollywood". %% "The sendmail configuration file is one of those files that looks like someone beat their head on the keyboard. After working with it... I can see why!" -- Harry Skelton (harry@usrgrp) %% "The shortest distance between two points is through Hell." -- Brian Clark %% "The shortest distance between two points is under construction." -- Noelie Altito %% "The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us...I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so." -- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson %% "The sixties were good to you, weren't they?" -- George Carlin %% "The so-called Christian world is contracepting itself out of existence." -- Fr. L. Kieffer, HLI Reports, August 1989, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "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) %% "The starting point of all individual achievement is the adoption of a definite purpose and a definite plan for its attainment." -- Napoleon Hill %% "The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure." -- Albert Einstein %% "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." -- _The Wizardry Compiled_ by Rick Cook %% "The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!" -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% "The totality is present even in the broken pieces." -- Aldous Huxley %% "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 %% "The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." -- Robert Pirsig (quoted in Zen_To_Go, Jon Winokur) %% "The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false." -- Saint Thomas Aquinas %% "The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." -- Eden Phillpots %% "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose." -- J.B.S. Haldane %% "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." -- Bakunin [ed. note - I would say: The urge to destroy may sometimes be a creative urge.] %% "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." -- E. W. Dijkstra (1982) %% "The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust." -- Lawrence Dalzell %% "The voters have spoken, the bastards..." -- unknown %% "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit." -- The Shadow %% "The wife you save may be your own." -- Unofficial slogan of supporters of one of FDR's sons, a notorious womanizer, during the son's first congressional race %% "The world is coming to an end. Please log off." -- Bob Irwin (birwin@ficc.ferranti.com) %% "The worst thing is when you have to kill someone you love because they're SATAN." -- Judy Tenuda %% "Theater, art, literature, cinema... must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world..." -- Adolf Hitler %% "There are a lot of lies going around.... and half of them are true." -- Winston Churchill %% "There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction." -- John Cage, composer %% "There are some people who take a nickel's worth of knowledge and sit on it as if it were an Incan treasure." -- unknown %% "There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them." -- Heisenberg %% "There are two was to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." -- Alfred Korzybski %% "There can be no offense where none is taken" -- Japanese proverb %% "There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword." -- Benjamin Dana %% "There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for." -- Fred Hoyle %% "There is absolutely nothing loving about sex .... Lust is as destructive of love inside the marriage as it is outside." -- Fr. John H. McGoey, Family Planning Educator, Human Life International Symposium on Human Sexuality, 4/25/86, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "There is also a thriving independent student movement in Poland, and thus there is a strong possibility (though no guarantee) of making an EARN-Poland link, should it ever come about, a genuine link - not a vacuum cleaner attachment for a Bloc information gathering apparatus rationed to trusted apparatchiks." -- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland %% "There is considerable evidence that great empires and civilizations have been undone not by barbarian invaders but by climatic change." -- 1977 CIA report %% "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." -- Arthur C. Clarke %% "There is no Father Christmas. It's just a marketing ploy to make low income parents' lives a misery." "... I want you to picture the trusting face of a child, streaked with tears because of what you just said." "I want you to picture the face of its mother, because one week's dole won't pay for one Master of the Universe Battlecruiser!" - Filthy Rich and Catflap, 1986 %% "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 %% "There is no difference between killing a four year-old child and aborting a pre-born 3-month-old [fetus]." -- Randall Terry, Executive Director, Operation Rescue, in his film, "Higher Laws", as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress." -- Mark Twain %% "There is no idea so sacred that it cannot be questioned, analyzed... and ridiculed." -- Cal Keegan %% "There is no knowledge that is not power." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% "There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist." -- A. Trevor Hodge %% "There is no statute of limitations on stupidity." -- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3. %% "There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know yet." -- Ambrose Bierce %% "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 %% "There is such a fine line between genius and stupidity." -- David St. Hubbins, "Spinal Tap" %% "There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?" "The Milliard Gargantubrain?" said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. "A mere abacus. Mention it not." -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% "There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him as carefully shaven as an actor, and clad in immaculate linen." -- H.L. Mencken, on the death of William Jennings Bryan %% "There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance..." -- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ %% "There was nothing I hated more than to see a filthy old drunkie, a howling away at the sons of his father and going blurp blurp in between as if it were a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, especially when they were old like this one was." - Alex in "Clockwork Orange" %% "There's a lovely paper which compares Unix to Zork in both cognitive and user motivational terms. Maybe you like Unix because it's an adventure game? Still, I just don't think Unix will succeed as a theme park (some small fraction of :-)" -- Bruce Cohen %% "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 %% "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." -- J. S. Bach %% "There's one constant in buying a suit: It should fit." -- The Houston Chronicle, 3/15/90 %% "There... I've run rings 'round you logically" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus %% "Therefore, one should never admit a garrison larger than one's own forces, especially when composed of barbarians." -- Polybios, writing in the mid-2nd century BC (paraphrased), after an account of the betrayal of Epeiros by its mercenary Gallic garrison to a passing fleet of Illyrian pirates. "Barbarians", of course, in the original sense of "non-Greeks"; "non-Arabs" or "non-Muslims" perhaps, in the Saudi case. -- Duncan Head %% "These are actually chunks of lung itself being coughed up. I don't understand exactly what it is, but God has healed you right now. Amen." -- Televangelist Pat Robertson %% "These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a microwave pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs (even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat. How they manage to break into the California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both." -- Douglas Coupland, from _Generation X_ (Tales for an Accelerated Culture) %% "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_ %% "They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it." -- Nelba Blandon, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984 %% "They communicated by tap-dancing and farting." -- _Breakfast_of_Champions_ %% "They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts." -- Arthur Miller %% "They ought to make butt-flavored cat food." --Gallagher %% "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 %% "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty not safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 %% "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_ %% "They, they've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off." -- Richard Nixon, May 5, 1971, discussing a proposal to use Teamsters Union members to attack Vietnam War protestors "Sure, Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do. It's the regular strikebuster types and all that... They're going to beat the shit out of some of these people. And, uh, hope they really hurt 'em. You know, I mean go in... and smash some noses." -- H. R. Haldeman's response %% "Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player." -- Anonymous %% "Thinking small-minded is when you see your bus on the other side of the street and wish you could teleport across to catch it." -- Kenneth Arromdee (arromdee@cs.jhu.edu) %% "This could be the greatest night of our lives--but you're going to let it be the worst!" -- John Blutarski %% "This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon." -- Ronald Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985 %% "This is no time for consensus government. It's a time for leadership. The average citizen doesn't know what the stakes are in Vietnam." -- Richard M. Nixon, February 11, 1965 %% "This is the life. To be young, stupid, and have no future at all. I love Brooklyn!" -- Dan Akyroyd, "Samurai Night Fever", Saturday Night Live %% "This isn't brain surgery; it's just television." -- David Letterman %% "This knowledge I pursue is the finest pleasure I have ever known. I could no sooner give it up that I could the very air that I breath." -- Paolo Uccello, Renaissance artist, discoverer of the laws of perspective %% "This one's got a lot more, uh, 640K that it can memorize." -- CVN cable TV shopping channel %% "This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Sometimes he'd resent having to leave the deck to use the toilet..." -- William Gibson, _Neuromancer_ %% "This will be dynamically handled, possibly correctly, in 4.1." -- Dan Davison on streams configuration in SunOS 4.0 %% "Those components (that software) which runs fastest and most reliable are those which aren't there." -- Gordon Bell %% "Those who believe in astrology are living in houses with foundations of Silly Putty." - Dennis Rawlins, astronomer %% "Those who will be able to conquer software will be able to conquer the world." -- Tadahiro Sekimoto, president, NEC Corp. %% "Those who worked the hardest are the last to surrender." -- Gary Ward %% "Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained." -- The Tao of Programming %% "Time is money and money can't buy you love and I love your outfit" -- T.H.U.N.D.E.R. #1 %% "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." -- Cicero %% "To IBM, 'open' means there is a modicum of interoperability among some of their equipment." -- Harv Masterson %% "To be against abortion and not against contraception -- it makes no sense because both of them are the same mentality." -- Nancy O'Brien, Anti-Choice Activist, introducing Joan Andrews, 3/11/89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "To block hats, that is everything." -- character in a Woody Allen short story %% "To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois." -- Jules Renard %% "To me, on of the most exciting things in the world is being poor, and survival, such an exciting challenge." -- Thomas S. Monaghan, Founder, Domino's Pizza and Legatus, "National Catholic Reporter", 3/23/90, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "To program is to understand." -- Kristen Nygaard %% "To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social estab- lishment 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 %% "To steal from a thief is not theft. It is merely irony." -- Zorro, while retrieving money taxed from Californians %% "To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation." -- Daiell's Law (a take-off on Felson's Law) %% "To take a significant step forward, you must make a series of finite improvements." -- Donald J. Atwood, General Motors %% "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 %% "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 %% "Today there may be more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than in Eastern Europe." -- George Will %% "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 %% "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 %% "Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth." -- Milton %% "Turn on, tune up, rock out." -- Billy Gibbons %% "U can c the color of the interior of the [vehicle]... dig." "Ya stop cars with blk interior." "Bees they naugahyde." "Negrohide." "Self tanning no doubt." -- LAPD squad-car computer messages, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91 %% "UNIX should be used as an adjective." -- AT&T %% "US out of North America, NOW!!" -- Richard O'Rourke %% "US/Western repression of sexual knowledge and expression has left our twelve year olds less capable to deal with sex, and this justifies repression of sexual knowledge and expression to our twelve year olds." -- Kent, our man from Xanth, commenting on the Netherland's new age of consent: 12 %% "Umm, square root of two? Ouch!" -- The guy who blew a hole in the Pythagoreans' assertion that all numbers can be represented as a ratio of two integers, so they killed him %% "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" %% "Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry" -- An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11 %% "Unix: a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret." -- old ITS hacker saying %% "Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of a computer in your own home." -- Edward Yourdon, 1975. %% "Unlike most net.puritans, however, I feel that what OTHER consenting computers do in the privacy of their own phone connections is their own business." -- John Woods, jfw@eddie.mit.edu %% "Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process." -- Barry Goldwater %% "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 %% "Using an IBM PC is like juggling straight razors. Using a Mac is like shaving with a bowling pin." -- Ted Nelson, _Computer Lib_ %% "VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use Unix." -- Bill Davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM) %% "VMS isn't an operating system, it's a playpen for DEC system programmers." -- Herb Blashtfalt %% "Vendi, vidi, parenthesi" -- I came, I saw, I programmed in Lisp!" -- Dave W. Kimball %% "Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!" -- Kermit the frog %% "War is Hell." -- General William Sherman %% "War is like love; it always finds a way." -- Bertold Brecht %% "War is the health of the State." -- Proudhon (?) %% "War... is something that occurs not between man and man, but between States. The individuals who become involved in it are enemies only by accident." -- Rousseau %% "We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb your cities." -- Robin Williams, _Good Morning Vietnam_ %% "We all say so, so it must be true." -- the Bandar-log (monkey tribe), in Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book_ %% "We all worry about the population explosion -- but we don't worry about it at the right time." -- Arthur Hoppe %% "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 not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. ... We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. ... It is grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. ... I look for the day when *reason*, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of Kings and the God of Gods." -- Robert G. Ingersoll %% "We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from nonlife to life." -- Hans Moravec (on artificial intelligence) %% "We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives." -- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum %% "We are totally opposed to abortion under any circumstances. We are 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 League, Population Institute advertisement, "How Dense Can We Get?", The New York Times, 10/6/85, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "We are what we are and it's never enough." -- Chris de Burgh %% "We came. We saw. We kicked its ass." -- Bill Murray, _Ghostbusters_ %% "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 %% "We can't allow the people to interfere with the smooth flow of democracy." -- Kitchener city council member %% "We can't schedule an orgy, it might be construed as fighting." --Stanley Sutton %% "We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank." -- Ortega y Gasset %% "We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed." -- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address) %% "We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation." -- Supreme Court Justice Potter Steart %% "We demand source because we've been burned too much by its lack, not because we have this desire to add custom hacks to our kernels or utilities. Believe me, we'd all like to run stock systems, straight off the vendor distribution tapes; it'd be significantly less work. But our users have this liking for working systems and prompt fixes for the bugs they find, neither of which the vendors we buy from have been particularly good in supplying." -- cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu %% "We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand." -- James Watt %% "We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." -- David Brower %% "We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights." -- Dan Quayle, El Salvador, Feb 1989 %% "We fall into error if we attribute to strategy a power independent of tactical results." -- Karl von Clausewitz, On War %% "We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written." -- Robert Gould Shaw, abolitionist %% "We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion." -- Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing %% "We have luck only with women -- not spacecraft!" -- R. Kremnev, builder of failed Soviet FOBOS probes %% "We have met the enemy and he is us" - Walt Kelly (in POGO) %% "We have ways to make you scream." -- Intel advertisement, in the June 1989 Doctor Dobbs Journal %% "We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest." -- John Adams %% "We jumped into this area without knowing what we were jumping into." -- Hubert H. Humphrey, October 22, 1969 %% "We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." -- Aneurin Bevan %% "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw %% "We live, in a very kooky time." -- Herb Blashtfalt %% "We love your adherence to democratic principles." -- Vice President George Bush, to Ferdinand Marcos %% "We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately" - Benjamin Franklin %% "We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express." -- George Santayana, _Soliloquies In England_ %% "We must make unceasingly clear to Hanoi that we do not seek nor will we accept a camouflaged surrender which would inevitably result in the United States writing off Southeast Asia." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, July 30, 1968 %% "We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost... the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world." -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 10/27/65 %% "We need a new cosmology. New Gods. New Sacraments. Another drink." -- Patti Smith %% "We need to take a look at [the Constitution] and maybe, from time to time, we should curtail some of those rights." -- Chicago Police Superintendent LeRoy Martin, 7/91 %% "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_ %% "We plan absentee ownership. I'll stick to building ships." -- George Steinbrenner, 1973 %% "We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented." -- Albert Einstein, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, September 1948 %% "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement." -- Richard J. Daley %% "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." -- Albert Einstein %% "We walked on the moon -- you be polite." -- Joni Mitchell %% "We want to create puppets that pull their own strings." -- Ann Marion "Would this make them Marionettes?" -- Jeff Daiell %% "We want to see three things in the 1988 Republican Party Platform... First, a constitutional amendment banning all abortions in the United States. Second, increased funding for law enforcement and a mandatory death penalty for drug dealers. Third, LESS GOVERNMENT." -- Speaker at a 1988 Republican Straw Poll in Iowa %% "We will bury you." -- Nikita Kruschev %% "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 %% "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) %% "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest." -- Watson and Crick, 1953 %% "We're going to do it the way we always have -- the super-dumbass way... It's what we know." -- The Lone Contractor %% "We're hosed." -- Next, Inc.'s Steve Jobs said after workstations running a demo program crashed at the SPA symposium. %% "We've got a carrot and stick policy, and the carrot is, if he pulls out, he doesn't get the stick." -- James Baker, U.S Secretary of State, 12/5/90, about Saddam Hussein %% "We've got everyone convinced except the people who have to make the decision." -- name withheld by request %% "Well I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make so many men happy." -- Ellyn Mustard, about marriage %% "Well hello there Charlie Brown, you blockhead." -- Lucy Van Pelt %% "Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know." -- Groucho Marx, "Animal Crackers" %% "Well, Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, And Lightness has a call that's hard to hear." -- Indigo Girls %% "Well, it don't make the sun shine, but at least it don't deepen the shit." -- Straiter Empy, in _Riddley_Walker_ by Russell Hoban %% "Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction..." -- Art Spiegelman %% "Well, well, well! Well if it isn't fat stinking billy goat Billy Boy in poison! How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarble, ya eunuch jelly thou!" - Alex in "Clockwork Orange" %% "Well, you know, it sounds like they've got their own nuts on an anvil and they're hammering away at them." -- Dave Crocker %% "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" %% "Well," said Programmer, "the customary procedure in such cases is as follows." "What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said End-user. "For I am an End-user of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me." "It means the Thing to Do." "As long as it means that, I don't mind," said End-user humbly. -- Chris Mathes, uunet!metter!chris, with apologies to C. Robin And W. T. Pooh %% "Were there no women, men might live like gods." -- Thomas Dekker %% "What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!" -- Mark Twain %% "What a pinhead! Does he not fear us?!" -- Max %% "What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from such a trifling investment in fact." -- Carl S. Gutekunst %% "What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?" -- Irv Kupcinet %% "What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick!" - Bill Kirchenbaum, comedian - %% "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 their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward." -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt, Sen., New Mexico %% "What happened to the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!" -- The Martian %% "What if" is a trademark of Hewlett Packard, so stop using it in your sentences without permission, or risk being sued. %% "What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable." -- Albert Einstein %% "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 %% "What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight %% "What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood." -- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum, 2/81, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own data." -- Arthur Miller %% "What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying." -- Nikita Khrushchev %% "What's a polar bear?" "A rectangular bear after a coordinate transform." -- Bill White (bwhite@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu) %% "What's the date?" "May the fourth." "Then May the fourth be with you." -- Count Duckula %% "What's up in the ghetto, boy. Oh they just captured the suspect. A day without violence is like a day without sunshine. The sun shone last night." -- Christopher Commision report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91 %% "What?! LEAVE school???" -- Zonker Harris, Doonesbury %% "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 %% "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 %% "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become president; I'm beginning to believe it." -- Clarence Darrow %% "When I was young, my position was: dynamite. It was only later that I realized that this sort of thing cannot be rushed. It must rot away like a diseased member." -- Hitler, on the churches. %% "When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.'" -- David Parnas %% "When helping with this problem, please flame me good so that others will learn from my brazen irresponsibility." -- Russell Earnest (re4@prism.gatech.edu) %% "When in doubt, print 'em out." -- Karl's Programming Proverb 0x7 %% "When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest." -- Bullwinkle Moose %% "When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws." -- Jef Poskanzer (jef@well.sf.ca.us) %% "When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic." -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% "When people aren't stupid Usenet is even more useful. Too bad this happens so rarely." -- Jef Poskanzer %% "When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them." -- _Dune_, by Frank Herbert %% "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro..." -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson %% "When the government attempts to regulate everything, all is lost." -- Thibaudeau %% "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow %% "When things are at their darkest, pal, it's a great man who can kick back and party." -- Olin Shivers %% "When you buy peace at any price it is always on the installment plan for another war." -- Richard M. Nixon, January 29, 1966 %% "When you're a child, you pledge allegiance to the flag. When you grow up, you swear to uphold the Constitution. Compare and contrast to the President's current actions." -- Larry Wake (lkw@csun.edu) %% "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 %% "Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel." - H. L. Mencken %% "Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried" -- Thomas Jefferson %% "Where does he get those wonderful toys?" -- The Joker %% "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 %% "Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?" -- Daniel Webster, 1814 %% "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." -- _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_, Lewis Carroll %% "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, %% "Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% "Whoever did this [planted a pipe bomb at the Margaret Sanger Center] is a hero. I think they are heroes. The Bible commands us to rescue those being dragged to death." -- Nancy O'Brien, Co-Director, "Project Jericho, "Channel 9 News," WCTO-TV, 2/23/87, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." -- Nietzsche %% "Why can one call the time component of the preceding 4-vector by the name energy? For two reasons: First, because this time component has the correct units -- the units of mass..." -- From "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler %% "Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, from talk.politics.misc %% "Why did you hire that idiot?" "You can't fool all of the people all of the time, so I'm breeding them for stupidity." -- President Weishaupt %% "Why do men go to war? Because women are watching." -- T. S. Eliot %% "Why do schools let anyone post? Why not just leave it to us professionals?" -- S. M. Ryan (smryan@garth.UUCP) "Because there is no necessary relation between having a degree and the attribute of optical rectosis, as your posting demonstrates." -- Bill Wells (twwells!bill) %% "Why do trans-atlantic transfers take so long?" "Electrons don't swim very fast." -- john@minster.york.ac.uk and whh@PacBell.COM %% "Why don't the Japanese live in the mountains? Certainly, they could; apparently they just don't want to." -- elturner@phoenix.Princeton.EDU %% "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" -- Ronald Reagan %% "Why was the Ferranti flag taken down? Jim Adamoli says that it was drooping too much. A new flag is being made out of silk so that it will better catch the wind." -- bulletin to employees "Oh, yeah, the irony was too f*cking much!!! It was made of broader, ``better-quality'' cloth, but it wouldn't fly. Remind you of anything?" -- Name Witheld For Obvious Reasons %% "Why waste negative entropy on comments, when you could use the same entropy to create bugs instead?" -- Steve Elias %% "Will your long-winded speeches never end? What ails you that you keep on arguing?" -- Job 16:3 %% "William Safire would have a cow, but somehow that doesn't disturb me." -- Evan Hunt (evanh@sco.com) %% "Wish not to seem, but to be, the best." -- Aeschylus %% "With friends like these, who need hallucinations?" -- Buddy, "Night Court" %% "With molasses you catch flies, with vinegar you catch nobody." -- Baltimore City Councilman Dominic DiPietro %% "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, hypocrite who has had a successful business career and run for public office, who would apparently deny that to other women %% "Working on custom(ADM) is a lot like being drummer for Spinal Tap." -- an anonymous SCO employee %% "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) %% "Writing programs needs genius to save the last order or the last millisecond. It is great fun, but it is a young man's game. You start it with great enthusiasm when you first start programming, but after ten years you get a bit bored with it, and then you turn to automatic-programming languages and use them because they enable you to get to the heart of the problem that you want to do, instead of having to concentrate on the mechanics of getting the program going as fast as you possibly can, which is really nothing more than doing a sort of crossword puzzle." -- Christopher Strachey, 1962 %% "Xerox sues somebody for copying?" -- David Letterman %% "Y'know, every once in a while, when you look off into the distance, you can see a shimmering in the atmosphere's coefficient of refraction, as someone, someone small and slow on the horizon, gets a clue." -- Blair Houghton, who's yet to get one %% "Yes, and I feel bad about rendering their useless carci into dogfood..." -- Badger comics %% "Yo baby yo baby yo." -- Eddie Murphy %% "You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but only for a limited period of time. Why should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?" -- Ronald Reagan %% "You are WRONG, you ol' brass-breasted fascist poop!" -- Bloom County %% "You are what you want to be." -- Brad Morrison (brad@neosoft.com) %% "You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." -- Cal Keegan %% "You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of Fortran." -- Alan Perlis %% "You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus." -- Mark Twain %% "You can't get snot off of a suede jacket." -- Lenny Bruce %% "You can't get very far in this world without your dossier being there first." -- Arthur Miller %% "You can't stop abortion without fighting contraception: it is the gateway to abortion. Not one of the 81 countries I've worked in has `clean' contraception without abortion -- not one. Once there's contraception -- separating sexual activity from procreation and teaching people to use each other's bodies for selfish pleasure -- abortion is always used as a backup." -- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, "Pro Life/Family Catalog", 1991, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "You can't teach seven foot." -- Frank Layton, Utah Jazz basketball coach, when asked why he had recruited a seven-foot tall auto mechanic %% "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." -- Mark Twain %% "You cannot really know anything." -- William Payne (wpayne@digi.UUCP) "How do you know?" -- Dan'l DanehyOakes (djo@PacBell.COM) %% "You don't drown by falling into water. You drown by staying there." -- Robert Allen %% "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 %% "You don't have to explain something you never said." -- Calvin Coolidge %% "You don't just go to the Black Lodge and walk out with your girlfriend." -- Karl, explaining the last episode of Twin Peaks %% "You don't really understand something until you understand it in more than one way." -- Marvin Minsky %% "You doubted Me," God tells the Lawgiver [Moses], "But I forgave you that doubt. You doubted your own self and failed to believe in your own powers as a leader, and I forgave you that also. But you lost faith in these people and doubted the divine possibilities of Human Nature. THIS loss of faith makes it impossible for you to enter the Promised Land." -- The Midrash %% "You get what you settle for." -- Thelma and Louise %% "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you realise that?" -- Peter Da Silva (sugar!peter) %% "You killed Ted, you medieval dickweed!" -- Bill %% "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 %% "You know, a lot of girls go out with me just to further their careers... damn anthropologists." -- Emo Philips %% "You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct." - M. Somerset Maugham %% "You know, we've won awards for this crap." -- David Letterman %% "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 %% "You must either master politics or be mastered by those that do." -- Anonymous %% "You must have an IQ of at least half a million." -- Popeye %% "You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of ju-jitsu. You must learn to tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you can live with it. You must absorb its force and convert it to your users as best you can. Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are not faster than the river, nor stronger, and you can beat it only by understanding it." -- Strung, Curtis and Perry, _Whitewater_ %% "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." -- C. A. Beard %% "You pathetic jugglers never lowered yourselves to developing the software. You should have paid a little more attention to R & D." -- Cyberpunk comics %% "You put a couple cockroach heads on toothpicks next to that and it'll definitely keep the bugs away." -- Karl suggests a use for a really bad photo of... Karl %% "You say I'm cool, I'm no fool, but then you wind up applying to grad school..." -- Matt Groening %% "You shouldn't make my toaster angry." -- Household security explained in "Johnny Quest" %% "You show me an American who can keep his mouth shut and I'll eat him." -- Newspaperman from Frank Capra's _Meet_John_Doe_ %% "You stay here, Audrey -- this is between me and the vegetable!" -- Seymour, from _Little Shop Of Horrors_ %% "You tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks, but now you find out you have a habit that sticks, you're an orgasm addict, you're always at it, and you're an orgasm addict." -- The Buzzcocks %% "You tweachewous miscweant!" -- Elmer Fudd %% "You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?" -- Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing anti-semitic Christians %% "You'll pay to know what you really think." -- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs %% "You're a creature of the night, Michael. Wait'll Mom hears about this." -- from the movie "The Lost Boys" %% "You're only as old as your comic collection." -- Dan Thorsland %% "Your attitude determines your attitude." -- Zig Ziglar, self-improvement doofus %% "Your butt is mine." -- Michael Jackson, Bad %% "Your development gets rotten if you take too long to market it." --- Hitoshi Aoike, JVC Ltd., Tokyo %% "Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail %% "Your opal may cure my brother of some demon-taint, but *my* bad attitude is no sickness! It's one-hundred percent all natural!" -- Ron Post %% "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) "Funny, this is just the kind of quasi-religious didacticism that leads me to believe that objectivism is not philosophy and that it's basically a Rand fan club." -- Tim Maroney (tim@hoptoad.UUCP) "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 reality is lies and balderdash, and I'm glad to say that I have no grasp of it." -- Baron Munchausen %% "Your stupidity, Allen, is simply not up to par." -- Dave Mack (mack@inco.UUCP) "Yours is." -- Allen Gwinn (allen@sulaco.sigma.com), in alt.flame %% "[In the U. S. Army] An officer does not take an oath of loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief. He takes an oath of loyalty to the Constitution." -- Sam Donaldson %% "[Leslie Stahl was] a pussy compared to Rather." -- George Bush %% "[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 %% "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets." -- David Bedno (davidbe@sco.COM) %% "[Yasser Arafat] might say 'this', and then come back later and say 'this', and the new 'this' could cancel out the old 'this'." -- Ronald Reagan %% "`Self-esteem' [has been] promoted over and over again as the new panacea, along with teaching `responsibility.' However, parents must remember that `self-esteem' is a double-edged sword. While it may be true that a child needs a great deal of self-confidence to reject undesirable peer influence, it will, at the same time, require a defiantly self-confident child to have the courage to violate his or her family values and/or Judeo-Christian heritage, and engage in the `responsible' promiscuity being promoted by the liberal sex educators." -- Margo Szews, Anti-Choice Educator, A.L.L. About Issues, June - July '89, as quoted in "The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves," a Planned Parenthood pamphlet %% "jackpot: you may have an unnecessary change record" -- message from "diff" %% "some people get pissed when you play with your mind in a different way than they play with theirs these people are called ASSHOLES" -- the jambi's %% #define BITCOUNT(x) (((BX_(x)+(BX_(x)>>4)) & 0x0F0F0F0F) % 255) #define BX_(x) ((x) - (((x)>>1)&0x77777777) \ - (((x)>>2)&0x33333333) \ - (((x)>>3)&0x11111111)) -- really weird C code to count the number of bits in a word %% ``On this point we want to be perfectly clear: socialism has nothing to do with equalizing. Socialism cannot ensure conditions of life and consumption in accordance with the principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This will be under communism. Socialism has a different criterion for distributing social benefits: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."'' -- Mikhail Gorbachev, _Perestroika_ %% 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.' -- Goethe %% (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 %% **ROG** writes > ...who have no clue about reality. Nothing could compare with > the beauty of the real world around us and you should work as hard > at preserving the environment and making the world safe for our progeny as > you do at hiding in your computer screens. I bet you couldn't > read a story from alt.sex.bondage without getting an erection. Could someone please tell me how to access the "alt.sex.bondage" newsgroup? -- Robert Ward (rw23+@andrew.cmu.edu) %% "It is the cunning of form to veil itself continually in the evidence of content. It is the cunning of the code to veil itself and to produce itself in the obviousness of value." -- Baudrillard %% ------------------------------ "I don't even listen to 2 Live Crew, being more of a John Denver kind of guy." -- Scott Dietzen ------------------------------ "First off, I'm embarrassed to be Dietzen's friend because I don't like anyone who listens to John Denver. I want everyone to know that he threw that in there just to make you think he was a complete idiot." -- Bill Chiles ------------------------------ %% ... Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. ... -- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215 %% ... 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 %% ... The cable had passed us by; the dish was the only hope, and eventually we were all forced to turn to it. By the summer of '85, the valley had more satellite dishes per capita than an Eskimo village on the north slope of Alaska. Mine was one of the last to go in. I had been nervous from the start about the hazards of too much input, which is a very real problem with these things. Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull. -- Hunter Thompson, "Full-time scrambling", _Generation of Swine_ %% ... The important thing isn't so much *what* you want to ban; it's the fact that you participate in the banning process. That's what democracy is all about. -- Dave Barry, What To Ban On Video, _Bad Habits_ %% ... The neutron bomb is a nuclear device that kills people without destroying buildings. Many people feel this is inhumane; they much prefer the old- fashioned humane-type nuclear devices that kill people *and* destroy buildings. Western Europe's reaction to the neutron bomb has been mixed: most buildings are for it, and most people are against it, on the grounds that it might kill them. They're always wallowing in sentiment, those Western Europeans. -- Dave Barry, _Bad Habits_ %% ...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 %% ...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 %% ...At that time [the 1960s], Bell Laboratories scientists projected that computer speeds as high as 30 million floating-point calculations per second (megaflops) would be needed for the Army's ballistic missile defense system. Many computer experts -- including a National Academy of Sciences panel -- said achieving such speeds, even using multiple processors, was impossible. Today, new generation supercomputers operate at billions of operations per second (gigaflops). -- Aviation Week & Space Technology, May 9, 1988, "Washington Roundup", pg 13 %% ...Compare this with the unit of facial beauty, the Helen, first defined by C. Marlowe. A milliHelen, of course, will launch just one ship. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "Devil's Advocate", _UNIX Review_, May 1991 %% ...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 %% ...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 %% ...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 statist opinions expressed herein are not those of the cookie editor -ed.] %% ...Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papryomancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers - the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here." "It's long, isn't it? Does that mean --" "Length is usually intensity. Not time." -- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ %% ...Tucker v. Texas, 326 U.S. 517 (1946), in which a statute punishing door-to-door distribution of literature was held invalid as an abridgment of freedom of the press. -- Supreme Court decision quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk %% ...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 %% ...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. %% ...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 %% ...difference of opinion is advantageious in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia" %% ...henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) wrote: >The trouble is that getdate() is relatively >costly and Geoff is reluctant to run it on every single article ...and then all sorts of people started coming up with rube goldberg schemes to avoid parsing dates. However, it turns out that even using C news's getdate (which is 10% slower than the B news version), parsing the dates in every article in a full Usenet feed takes about five Sun 3 CPU seconds per day. And if you were to use the lex-based date parser included in the MH distribution, you could get it down below a second per day, although it hardly seems worth the (minimal) effort. -- Jef Poskanzer (jef@well.sf.ca.us) %% ...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 %% ...the Soviets have the capability to try big projects. If there is a goal, such as when Gorbachev states that they are going to have nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the case is closed -- that is it. They will concentrate on the problem, do a bad job, and later pay the price. They really don't care what the price is. -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100 %% ...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 %% ...the prevailing Catholic odor - incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating from the lips of the flock. -- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ %% ...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. -- George Jacob Holyoake %% ...this is an awesome sight. The entire rebel resistance buried under six million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch." -- The Firesign Theater %% ...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War" %% ...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 %% ...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. %% /* * this atrocity is necessary on SPARC because registers modified * by the child get propagated back to the parent via the window * save/restore mechanism. */ -- SunOS 4.0 vfork.h %% 1 1 was a race-horse, 2 2 was 1 2. When 1 1 1 1 race, 2 2 1 1 2. %% 186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW. %% 8) Use common sense in routing cable. Avoid wrapping coax around sources of strong electric or magnetic fields. Do not wrap the cable around fluorescent light ballasts or cyclotrons, for example. -- Ethernet Headstart Product, Information and Installation Guide, Bell Technologies, pg. 11 %% > From MAILER-DAEMON@Think.COM Thu Mar 2 13:59:11 1989 > Subject: Returned mail: unknown mailer error 255 "Dale, your address no longer functions. Can you fix it at your end?" -- Bill Wolfe (wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu) "Bill, Your brain no longer functions. Can you fix it at your end?" -- Karl A. Nyberg (nyberg@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu) %% > The Independent quotes this from The Progressive, Sept. 1990: > > "Louisiana State Rep. Carl Gunter, explaining why abortion should > not be permitted even when the pregnancy results from incest: > 'The way we get thoroughbred horses is through inbreeding. With > incest, you could get super-smart kids.'" This undoubtedly explains State Representative Gunter's visibly high intelligence... -- Lefty (lefty@twg.com) %% >>> >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 %% >From Michael Davis' article "Thinking Like an Engineer: the Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Spring 1991, Vol. 20 #2: "Lund's [the engineer who expressed concern about the Challenger's O-rings] first response was to repeat his objections. But then Mason said something that made him think again. Mason asked him to THINK LIKE A MANAGER INSTEAD OF AN ENGINEER (the exact words seemed to have been "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.") Lund did and changed his mind. The next morning the shuttle exploded, killing all aboard. An O-ring had failed." -- RISKS-FORUM Digest 11.84 %% >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) %% >One basic notion underlying Usenet is that it is a cooperative. Having been on USENET for going on ten years, I disagree with this. The basic notion underlying USENET is the flame. -- Chuq Von Rospach, chuq@Apple.COM %% >Optimisation is not free. Gratuitous optimisation can be translated directly >into missing features or later release dates. -- Peter da Silva (peter@ficc.ferranti.com) ...and more bugs. ...and performance optimization without thoughtful performance testing is usually misdirected and, as above, at best does nothing and at worse delays/worsens the product and drives up life-cycle costs. -- your humble cookie editor %% >The "Catholic Church" *is not* the one true church. The Holy Orthodox >[Eastern] Christian Church is the one and only repository of the *fullness* >of Christ's > teachings. Sorry, but the one _true_ church is the Church of the Forgotten Son, where we worship the Almighty earthworm. Not only is it more true than any of the Christian churches, it's also less fulfilling and it tastes great. Just thought you'd like to know. -- Andrew. Kalinowitsch (kalin@cbnewsm.att.com) %% >This is a duplicate article, and old as hell...now, who could be doing this??? "Somebody along the line fucked up." -- Spenser Aden %% >Try staring at someone from a substantial distance. >(Eventually they will turn around.) ASTOUNDING! We all know that without* telepathy staring at the back of a person's head would freeze them into helpless immobility! Corollary: try staring at a cloud. eventually it will MOVE! This parapsychology stuff is the GINCHIEST!! -- Tim Mitchell, (swordfis@pnet51.orb.mn.org) %% >You may redistribute this article only to those who may freely do likewise. >Chip Salzenberg at A T Engineering; or Thanks. I think I'll just flush it. -- Dale C. Cook, cook@pinocchio.Encore.COM %% A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone somewhere is having fun. %% A comment from the Space Shuttle (!) computer IPL code, power failure handling: "OK! LET'S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT. I'M IN CHARGE OF THE CPU FOR THE NEXT 40 MILLISECONDS!" %% A comment on schedules: Ok, how long will it take? For each manager involved in initial meetings add one month. For each manager who says "data flow analysis" add another month. For each unique end-user type add one month. For each unknown software package to be employed add two months. For each unknown hardware device add two months. For each 100 miles between developer and installation add one month. For each type of communication channel add one month. If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on a non-IBM system add 6 months. If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on an IBM system add 9 months. Round up to the nearest half-year. --Brad Sherman By the way, ALL software projects are done by iterative prototyping. Some companies call their prototypes "releases", that's all. %% A conjecture both deep and profound Is whether a circle is round. In a paper of Erdos written in Kurdish A counterexample is found. %% A fanatic is a person who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. -- Winston Churchill %% A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. -- Samuel Johnson %%