Randy's quotations page

Q U O T A T I O N S

New entries are added to the top these days.

Not catagorized, won't be in the future;
It's a lazy journey, not a reference work.

Back home

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
Jules Henri Poincare

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
Jim Rohn

Just as eating against ones will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
Leonardo Da Vinci

The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealistic attitude.
Robert Persig

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus

He was one of the few people who invoked the First Amendment in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Everyone else had said the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination, and then they were dismissed. What Pete did, and what some other very powerful people who had the guts and the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the committee and say, "I'm gonna invoke the First Amendment, the right of freedom of association...."
Jim Musselman, on Pete Seeger

A Conservative believes nothing should be done for the first time.
Lynwood L. Giacomini

News is what somebody somewhere doesn't want you to know. All the rest is advertising.
Lord Northcliffe (Founder, The London Daily Mail)

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'Rourke

It is immaturity that keeps one young.
Lissa Hattersley

When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it -- don't back down and don't give up -- then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.
Bob Dylan

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
Whitney Young

If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.
William Blake

Don't follow leaders; watch your parking meters.
Bob Dylan

Love is the key we must turn
Truth is the flame we must burn
Freedom the lesson we must learn
Do you know what I mean?
Have your eyes really seen?
Leslie Duncan (Performance: Elton John)

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions-as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named `Bush', `Dick', and `Colon.'
Chris Rock

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde

Breathe deep and say as little as possible. Almost everything is better left unsaid.
Eddie Wilson

It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task.
Sydney J. Harris

Market reasoning becomes the algorithm of infinite regress as the point/counter-point of all the players indicates the determined attempt, in perfect Sadean fashion, to line up behind the last term in the series. In this backward willing of the will, the frantic panic of prediction reverses Nietzsche's "time's it was." Not any longer Nietzsche's passive or suicidal nihilism, but now, chip nihilism at the beginning of the panic market world.
Arthur Kroker & Marilouise Kroker

I can feel the hand of a stranger, and it's tightening around my throat
Heaven help me, heaven help me, take this stranger from my boat.
Grand Funk Railroad

You don't stop laughing when you get old. You get old when you stop laughing.
Lois Conaway

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
Wilhelm Stekel

It's just sex and violence, melody and silence.
The Verve

I'm not giving in an inch to fear
I promised myself this year
I feel like it owe it to someone
David Crosby

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.
Leonard Lipton/Peter Yarrow

Laughing through tears is the very best of all.
Me. To my son. At his mom's funeral.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.
Nancy Banks Smith

That's the problem with the Socratic method. The slow kid fucks up the class.
Matt the Bartender

Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred.

We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.
UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer, Basra, July 2007

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson

My future starts when I wake up every morning; every day I find something creative to do with my life.
Miles Davis

Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose.
Evan Esar

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
Harry S. Truman

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H. G. Wells

Never judge a book by its movie.
J. W. Eagan

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Charles De Secondat

What I am actually saying is that we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly.
Shakti Gawain

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong

He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.
Trent Reznor

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain

When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.
The Tao Of Pooh

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.
Unknown

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.
George Carlin

There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you are on the wrong wall.
Joseph Campbell

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'
Kurt Vonnegut

I love creative dry spells, because it means I am subconsciously preparing to write something. I relax, do things, see friends, have dinners. It's like being pregnant: one day, pop.
Steve Martin

Perfectly crafted popular hit songs never use the wrong rhyme;
You'd think that waitress could get my order right the first time.
John Prine, "Ain't Hurtin' Nobody"

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.
Frank A. Clark

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Irish Proverb

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didnt have you by the throat.
Charles Bukowski

There is no box to think outside of.
Gunnar Hansen

Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Goethe

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
Jack Kerouac

I've had it to here, bein' where love's a small word
Neil Diamond

If I have seen less far than others, it is because I have dwarves standing on my shoulders.
Vickery & Kirchhof, paraphrasing Newton

If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic.
Barry Jones

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
Honore DeBalzac

I'm actually thinking of making Rambo IV a musical, and for the big finale every evening he blows up the entire audience.
Sylvester Stallone

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
James Feibleman

Do what you fear and fear disappears.
David Schwartz

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke

It really doesn't matter if the person who hurt you deserves to be forgiven. Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. You have things to do and you want to move on.
Real Live Preacher

Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
Italian Proverb

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas A. Edison

If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Moshe Dayan

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it's primal. Wanting to change the world is not a noble calling, it's a primal calling.
Hugh Macleod

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken

It is not true that life is one damn thing after another -- it's one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

They grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn out old people they played together like dogs.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.
Steven Jobs

Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A.E. Houseman

I am not an Economist. I am an honest man!
Paul McCracken

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
Alfred Adler

To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.
B. Duggan

They notice fast. And some mistakes were built to last.
George Michael

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
Mort Sahl

There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream - whatever that dream might be.
Pearl Buck

Castro asked, 'Tell me friends, which of you is an economist?' I thought he had said 'Which of you is a communist?' so I immediately said 'I am.' At which he said, 'OK, you handle the economy.'
Che Guevara (on how he became the head of the National Bank of Cuba in 1959, as recounted by Andrei Gromyko)

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.
Nat King Cole

Don't worry about your heart, it will last you as long as you live.
W. C. Fields

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have always imagined.
Henry David Thoreau

Pay no attention to those you make fun of you. But always pay attention to those who make fun of your genre. They tell you of your habits.

The two oldest professions in the world have been ruined by amateurs.
G.B. Shaw

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?
Bob Marley

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton

Surely a king who loves pleasure is less dangerous than one who loves glory.
Nancy Mitford

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
E. B. White

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
Wernher von Braun

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
Henry James

People who know how to employ themselves, always find leisure moments, while those who do nothing are forever in a hurry.
Jeanne-Marie Roland

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
Simone Weil

A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.
Rudyard Kipling

Patriotism is the last refuge of the sculptor.
William Plomer

The desire to write grows with writing.
Desiderius Erasmus

He started out at the bottom, and sort of likes it there.
Tennessee Ernie Ford

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
Claude Debussy

The only cure for grief is action.
George Henry Lewes

There is a trade off — as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.
Kenny Rogers

Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.
George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde

No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.
Charles Steinmetz

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
Letitia Landon

It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish.
J. R. R. Tolkien

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

I find I journalize too tediously. Let me try to abbreviate.
James Boswell

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.
Richard Hughes

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.
William Osler

Name the greatest of all the inventors? Accident.
Mark Twain

Far, far too many people confuse conservatism with self-discipline. And vice-versa.

Beware of geeks bearing gifs.
Gunnar Hansen

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.
Zachary Scott

Nemo me impune lacessit.
[No one provokes me with impunity]
Motto of the Crown of Scotland

In the most solid rocks, veins of unsound substance are often discovered.
Boswell

A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Doug Linder

Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.

Shortly after WWII, an American went to visit Picasso in his Paris studio and asked, "How does it feel to be Picasso, the master of the art?" The artist replied, "Give me a dollar bill." The American complied, and Picasso signed his name on it. "There, that dollar is now worth $500. That's how it feels to be Picasso."

If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.
John Lubbock

We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Native American Proverb

In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence.
Henry Van Dyke

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do?
Friedrich Nietzsche

I am too lonely, too helpless, too orphaned to be deserted by you, my brother.
Julia Ward Howe

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man. Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.
Jim Hightower

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Norman Cousins

Don't confuse having a career with having a life. They are not the same.
Hillary Rodham Clinton

In buying horses and taking a wife, shut your eyes tight and commend yourself to God.
Tuscan Proverb

You're only as sick as your secrets.

Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of.
D.M. Thomas

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
Eric Berne

Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
Leo Rosten

One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.
Alexander Jodorowsky

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.
Roger Miller

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?
Chuang Tzu

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth

It is meaningless to say you have an infinite supply of nothing.
Scott Adams, God's Debris

A change of perception is worth 80 IQ points.
Alan Kay

...as if we could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau

I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher...I would retaliate
Bruce Cockburn

Whatever you are sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people.
James Russell Lowell

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words . . . the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Mark Twain

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain straight liar . You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation.
Charlie Parker

Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyperverbosity and prolixity.
Roedy Green

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Winston Churchill

A memorandum isn't written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer.
Dean Acheson

Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. And don't start a sentence with a conjugation.
William Safire

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
Albert Einstein

Slous' Contention: If you do a job too well, you'll get stuck with it.
Kirchhof's Corollary: This quarter's "extra mile" is next quarter's job description.

You know the great thing about TV? If something important happens anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night, you can always change the channel.
Jim Ignatowski

Never moon a werewolf.
James Eric Francis

He who swims against the current gets fresh water.
German Proverb

Science can validate experience, but not deny it.
Ralph H. Abraham

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
James Joyce

It is only necessary to make war with five things: with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families.
Pythagoras

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
Scott Adams

No wind blows in favor of the ship that has no port of destination.
Montaigne

You can only become lost if you have a place to go and a time to be there.
Stalking Wolf

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Kahlil Gibran

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.
Michael Scriven

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.
Buddha

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self-control.
Abraham Lincoln

When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on for a long time. And then one day, you just learn to dance, and it is so different.
Bill Austin

For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three -- the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings.
Peter McWilliams

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'
Bob Newhart

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.
Robin Morgan

The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain.
G. Fitch

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms, and they'll call you crazy.
Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give me control over a nation's currency, and I care not who makes its laws.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743 - 1812)

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
Henrik Ibsen

I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind!
The answer is twelve?
I think I'm in the wrong building.
Charles Schulz (Linus)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell

I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man.
John Ruskin

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Voltaire

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
Clive James

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Groucho Marx

Enverbing beweirds the language.
Gunnar Hansen

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
Geoffrey Chaucer

I use not only all the brains I have, but all those I can borrow as well.
Woodrow Wilson

Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them.
Jean Kerr

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
Frank Zappa

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Ernest Hemingway

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell

I do benefits for all religions -- I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.
Bob Hope

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.
Bob Dylan

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
Archibald Leach (a.k.a. Cary Grant)

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin

When the solution is simple, God is answering.
Albert Einstein

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.
Al McGuire

I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
Albert Camus

Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.
Abraham Lincoln

You've got to come to the table with more than just your appetite.
John Lewis

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
Arturo Toscanini, to a trumpet player

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
Mel Brooks

The amount of money one needs is terrifying.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.
Jean Sibelius

I would rather play "Chiquita Banana" and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.
Xavier Cugat

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.
Jerry Garcia

Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius traps in its way.
Samuel Butler

Finally, I will not become any dumber.
Paul Erdos, epitaph (Hungarian mathematician, 1913-1996)

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

One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much.
Richard Feynman

If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost,
forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken, epitaph

18 straight whiskies - I think that's a record.
Dylan Thomas, final words

God will pardon me. It is his trade.
Heinrich Heine, final words

Now comes the mystery.
Henry Ward Beecher, final words

Give back everything to....
Peter the Great, Russian Tsar, final words

I'm not against god, I'm against the misuse of god.
Marilyn Manson

The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny known to the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
Henry Ford

To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
Tom Duff, Bell Labs

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
Fred Allen

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.
F. Brooks

There is a division in the student population between those who go to college to learn and those who go to college to earn a diploma.
J. Blau

Microsoft. Where quality is job 1.1

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know'.
W. Somerset Maugham

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
Francis H. C. Crick

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Kahlil Gibran

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
Sydney Harris

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
Steven Wright

The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzbyski

If hyperspace did not already exist, science fiction writers would have had to invent it.
Peter Oakley

All that you see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allen Poe

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.
Michio Kaku

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla)

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Stephen W. Hawking

In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
Edward P. Tryon

I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family. When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives. Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.
Albert Einstein

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
André Gide

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.
Norman Cousins

The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires.
Seneca

Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.
Blore's Razor

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.
Omar N. Bradley

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aristotle

Today is yesterday's pupil.
Benjamin Franklin

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who refuses to walk forward.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Peter Ustinov

If you have no feelings about worldly things, they are all Buddhism; if you have feelings about Buddhism, it is a worldly thing.
Buddha

A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception.
George Bernard Shaw

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
Albert Einstein

God sells us all things at the price of labor.
Leonardo da Vinci

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
Charles Wagner

The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.
Dorothy Thompson

The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert

If you can't annoy someone, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

Even a little dog can piss on a big building.
Jim Hightower

Don't worry if they're Democrats or Republicans. Give them service and they'll become Democrats.
Richard Daley

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.
Governor Mario Cuomo

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
Bill Clinton

There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.
Alan Clark, british politician

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
Winston Churchill

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservative.
John Stuart Mill

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, prepare to die.
Klingon Proverb

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
H. H. Munro

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.
J Michael McClary

If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it, it would have been much better.
Henriette Marx

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Franklin P. Jones

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
Everett Dirksen

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
Richard Hofstadter

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.
Theodore Roosevelt

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
Maya Angelou

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
John Maynard Keynes

Remember, a chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood higher up.
Brigham Young

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

At the age of six years I wanted to be a chef. At the age of seven I wanted to be Napoleon.
My ambitions have continued to grow at the same rate ever since.
Salvador Dali

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Cato the Elder

I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.
Michael Caine

Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.
Andre Gide

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: `It seemed a good idea at the time.'
Dame Rebecca West

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
A. Whitney Brown

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words `phenomenology' or `structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.
Edward Abbey

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
("Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.")

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
David Friedman

Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that's not true. I have the heart of a young boy. In a jar on my desk.
Steven King

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Mark Twain

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian W. Kernighan

What evil times are these, when passing ruffians can say "Nee" at will to old women. There is a pestilence in this land. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Robert the Shrubber

It's a, I say it's a joke son. Don't cha get it? You're built too short, the good ones go over yer head. Ya got a hole in yer glove, boy, I keep pitching them and you keep missing them. Ya gotta keep yer eye on the ball, son. Eye. Ball. Eyeball. I almost had a funny there. Joke, that is.
Fogforn Leghorn

I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.
Heinrich Heine

The Vatican is against surrogate mothers. Good thing they didn't have that rule when Jesus was born.
Elayne Boosler

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
Friedrich Nietzsche

It's hard to be a misanthrope and be in customer service at the same time.
Sam Patton

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
Wernher von Braun

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
Scott Adams

You fix this thing, you're the next greatest generation, people ... And even if you don't, you're not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don't give the thumbs up, you've outdid us.
Jon Stewart

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Television has raised writing to a new low.
Samuel Goldwyn

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say "elevator", we say "lift" ... they say "President", we say "stupid psychopathic git."
Alexai Sayle

You'll notice that Nancy Reagan never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
Robin Williams

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Tom Stoppard

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
Charles R. Darwin

For God's sake, please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life.
Wolfgang Bolyai's father urging him to give up work on non-Euclidian geometry.

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronc which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
Eric Temple Bell

Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.
G. O. Ashley

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
Percy Williams Bridgman

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Garn

...it does pretty much what you expect it to do. It's just hard to explain what you expect it to do.
Larry Wall

No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time -- but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.
Charles E. Wilson

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
W. C. Fields

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell

to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings

From any cross-section of ads, the general advertiser's attitude would seem to be: if you are a lousy, smelly, idle, underprivileged and oversexed status-seeking neurotic moron, give me your money.
Kenneth Bromfield

No one [in Navajo culture] who actively seeks power is to be trusted. Leaders arise out of example and emulation. If someone is successful at growing corn, he is emulated and to that extent is a leader. If someone knows many verses to a curing chant, he is respected for that accomplishment and his high status as a singer is considerable. Politicking, handshaking ... have no place in traditional Navajo society.
Daniel G. Freedman, Cross-Cultural Notes on Status Hierarchies

Another damned, thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?
- William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (quoted by Boswell, upon receipt of Vol. II of The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.)

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain

668: The Neighbor of the Beast

I don't care... it could be bricklayin'. If a guy knows what it is he's doin' and why; and can make it come off, that's greatness.
E. Felsen (As protrayed by Paul Newman)

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
Dan Quayle

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
Herman Melville

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us.
Dan Quayle

I am acutely aware of being involved in something that ought to be making more of a difference than it is.
Brian Eno

Kill them all, God will know his own!
Arnold of Citeaux, Papal Legate, 1209, in the Albigensian Crusade

One of the wisest things my daddy ever told me was that so-and-so is a damned smart man, but the fool's got no sense.
Lyndon Baines Johnson

Q. How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Two--one to change the bulb and the other to hold my penis, I mean my mother, I mean the *ladder*.

To learn fast, study slowly.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Mark Twain

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken

Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of power.
Bulwer-Lytton

Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise.
Sam Pascoe

One good turn gets most of the blankets.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.
Jean Sibelius

We live very close together. So, our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.
Dalai Lama

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Al Rogers

Behaviorist psychology: pulling habits out of rats.

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.
Kin Hubbard

I can't say I've ever been lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Daniel Boone

...the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Harper Lee

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell

There are two kinds of worries; those you can do something about and those you can't. Don't spend any time on the latter.
Duke Ellington

You can't test courage cautiously.
Annie Dillard

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of motherwit, either in science or in practical life.
Thomas Huxley

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
Albert Camus

The ability truly not to understand what is taken for granted is the beginning of scientific or philosophical sagacity.
R. D. Laing

What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be of no importance.
Oscar Wilde

The fundamental particle of morality is called the moron.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken -- there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
Maxwell Bodenheim

I've never heard anything Wynton [Marsalis] played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high school trumpet player to me. He's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.
Keith Jarrett

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Inesco

Do you like the musical scale that we use in the west? Then toast to 1.0594630943593...; that's the number that it's based upon.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: these three alone lead to sovereign power.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The final mystery is oneself.
Oscar Wilde

Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.
De Musset

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Elliot

Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps.
David Lloyd George

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.
Paul Valiry

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.
Jawaharlal Nehru

The world is one percent good, one percent bad, and ninety-eight percent neutral. It can go one way or the other, depending on which side is pushing. This is why what individuals do is important.
Hans Habe

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Edward Gibbon

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein

To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.
Albert Einstein

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
Albert Einstein

Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.
Salvador Dali

To be sure, Languages are not to be despised or neglected. But Things are still to be preferred.
William Penn

Go as far as you can see; when you get there you'll be able to see farther.
Thomas Carlyle

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it only when he is alone that he is really free.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

The late worm never sees the early bird.

The second mouse gets the cheese.

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.
Austin Farrar

Never apologize, never explain.
Benjamin Disraeli

Everything to excess! In moderation.

Simply pushing harder within the old boundaries will not do.
Karl Weick

I don't drink because I have problems or I want to escape. I just love drinking and being drunk.
Richard Harris

How did the great rivers and seas gain dominion over the hundred lesser streams? By being lower than they.
Lao Tzu

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
Diane Ackerman

*All* television is children's television.
Richard P. Adler

Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.
Aristotle

Some things need to be believed to be seen.
Guy Kawasaki

In order to punish me for my lack of respect for authority, God made me an authority myself.
Albert Einstein

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
Max Frisch

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
Alan Ashley-Pitt

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

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell has already rung.
Henry Ward Beecher

Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
Andrew Brown

Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.
Lois McMaster Bujold

If you don't run your own life, somebody else will.
John Atkinson

A man is known by the company he avoids.

A person who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.

Hyperpolysyllabicomania is a fondness for big words.

They who know how to employ opportunities will often find that they can create them; and what we can achieve depends less on the amount of time we possess than on the use we make of our time.
John Stuart Mill

I would rather live in a world where life is surrounded by mystery, than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
Miles Davis

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
George Bernard Shaw

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.
John F. Kennedy

I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.
Raoul Dufy

The day isn't far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by real problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
John Maynard Keynes

The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
Robert M. Pirsig

The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
H. L. Mencken

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
E. W. Dijkstra

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughn

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
George Bernard Shaw

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand

Programs are not written. They are grown.
Donald E. Knuth

During my 87 years I have witnessed a whole succession of technolgical revolutions; but none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual, or the ability to think.
Bernard Baruch

The bar ... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint.
Luis Buquel

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
William Burroughs

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel

The drug user drowns in the same pool mystics swim in.
Joseph Campbell

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.
Cole Porter

It just never got fast enough for me.
Hunter S. Thompson (proposed epitaph)

The First and Great Commandment: You get (and only get) what you're willing to settle for.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
Albert Einstein

If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.
Albert Einstein

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
Albert Einstein

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
Albert Einstein

Ever notice that the brand name on those $2.00 quarts of water in the stores is the word `naive' spelled backwards?

Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est. (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killers hands.)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4bc-65ad

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Will Rogers

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends...that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
Adlai Stevenson

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
Rod Serling

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby

I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
Samuel Goldwyn

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
Nathaniel Borenstein

Well, it seems that the world keeps on turnin', well so what; I don't doubt it, it just keeps on the move.
Paul Barrere/Little Feat

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
Joseph Campbell

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.
Elbert Hubbard

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.
Elbert Hubbard

Character consists in what you do on the third and fourth tries.
James Michener

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Voltaire

The two significant things to come out of UC Berkeley are LSD and BSD. This is not a coincidence.
PC Week

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of faeries.
James Matthew Barrie

The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Emerson

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.
David Ogilvy

The object isn't to make art; it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri

Some men come by the name of genius in the same way as an insect comes by the name of centipede - not because it has a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
G. C. Lichtenberg

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau

Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.
Jean Cocteau

God created evolution. Now SHUT UP!
proposed bumper sticker

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greater before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke

One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil. To think is to do.
Victor Hugo

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
J. B. Priestley

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw

Football combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will

The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
Ernest Hemingway

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
Peter Drucker

I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.
Calvin (to Hobbes)

Talk the simple smile, such platonic eye, how they drown in incomplete capacity
Strangest of them all, when the feeling calls, how we drown in stylistic audacity...
Charge the common ground!
Yes (Rabin/Anderson/Squire) "Hold On"

True, you have done nothing wrong. But you sit in the back of the room and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect which a teacher needs from a class.
teacher expelling Einstein, Leitpold Gymnasium, 1894

When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.
Maria Mitchell

Just as the results of inebriety are most painful to the habitually sober, and just as the greatest saints have often been the greatest sinners, so, when the first class brain does something stupid, the stupidity of that occasion is colossal.
Stanley Baldwin

There is nobody as enslaved as the fanatic, the person in whom one impulse, one value, has assumed ascendancy over all others.
Milton R. Sapirstein

The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center is the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.

The ideal of beauty is simplicity and tranquility.
Goethe

I think not, said Descartes, and promptly disappeared.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers

Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
Walter Lippmann

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley

Those who give too much attention to trifling things become generally incapable of great things.
La Rochefoucauld

Readers really serious about mastering the game should drop out of school, quit their jobs, and get a divorce.
Robert Byrne, The Standard Book of Pool and Billiards

The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.
Edith Hamilton

It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln

Once is a mistake; twice is Jazz.
Les Paul

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratliffe

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you anything.

A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.

...just think about the fool who, by his virtue, can be found in a most unusual situation, playing jester to the clown.
G. Lightfoot

...each is given a bag of tools, a shapeless mass, and a book of rules.
The Heptones

Friday October 14 1994 was World Standards Day. Or, at least, it was World Standards Day in *some* countries. However, in America, the celebrations were held on October 11th. In Finland, it was marked on October 13th. Italy held a separate conference on standards for October 18th.
Shakib Otaqui

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
James Reston

Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.
Thucydides

When congressman Newt Gingrich was a graduate student at Tulane University I baptized him by immersion into the membership of the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church. Perhaps I didn't hold him under long enough.
(The Rev.) G. Avery Lee

For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.
Henry Louis Mencken

I never knew another man / who could inspire such love or hate / if you were in the park / and it was 1968.
Steve Goodman, `Daley's Gone'

A question well-asked is half answered.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
Goethe

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Goethe

I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have.
Harry S. Truman

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Allen Ginsburg

Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore to this Day.
Sanskrit proverb

Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith

How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't worry about opposition. Remember, a kite rises against the wind, not with it.
Hamilton Wright Mabie

'Cause when a Texan fancies he'll take his chances, chances will be taken, that's for sure..
Gary P. Nunn, `London Homesick Blues'

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha

Let them that don't want none have memories of not gettin' any.

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Greeks, the drinkers Australian and it's all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the cooks are British, the mechanics French, the drinkers Swiss, the police German, the lovers Australian and it's all organized by the Greeks.

Intelligent people make many blunders because they never believe the world is as stupid as it is.
Nicolas Chamfort

There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.
Russian proverb

When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell

In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.
Hugo Rossi, Notices of the AMS, October 1996.

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
Mark Twain

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

De uppforde sig som vilda djur, de varken rokte eller drack. (They lived like wild beasts; they neither drank nor smoked.)
Aksel Sandemose

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Blake

If once a man indulges himself in Murder, very soon he comes to think little of Robbing, and from Robbing he comes next to Drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to Incivility and Procrastination.
De Quincy

If your new theorem can be stated with great simplicity, then there will exist a pathological exception.
Adrian Mathesis

"Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
Samuel Johnson

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
Manfred Eigen

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Ernst Rutherford

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.
J. E. Littlewood

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Sydney J. Harris

The Pledge of Allegiance ends with the words 'with liberty and justice for all.' Which part of 'all' do you not understand?
Rep. Pat Schroder

If you can't win, make the fellow ahead of you break the record.

Whatever you are, be a good one.
Abraham Lincoln

Decide promptly, but never give your reasons. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.
Lord Mansfield

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
Joseph Pulitzer

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The fundamental rule is, 'Don't cause pain.'
Sylvia Boorstein

Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right.
Henry Ford

If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.

Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Henry Van Dyke

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLiesh

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Ernst F. Schumacher

Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that's in you.
Nietzsche

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Dick Armey, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm, George Will, Pat Buchanan, Britt Hume, Morton Kondrake, Chris Matthews, Michael Reagan, Don Evans, Harvey Pitt, Asa Hutchinson, Richard Perle, David Stockman, Paul Wolfowitz, John Ashcroft, Ted Olson, Kenneth Starr, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Bob Barr, Gary Bauer, Jeb Bush, Tom Delay, Dennis Hastert, Jack Kemp, Trent Lott, Don Nickles, Mark Racicot, Steve Forbes, William Kristol, Marvin Olasky, Tony Snow, Bill Bennett, Alan Keyes. What do they all have in common? None of them went to Viet Nam. Three of them got cushy National Guard positions, the rest didn't serve at all.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
Bill Gates

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.
Heine

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.
H. G. Wells

Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.
Philip Dormer Chesterfield

The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else was to be indifferent to that difference.
Al Capp

Religions change, beer and wine remain.
Harvey Allen

Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment; and nothing more corrupting.
Alan John Percivale Taylor

I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through - then follow through.
Edward Rickenbacker

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.

Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; Teach a man to fish and he'll steal your spot.

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.
Spanish Proverb

Superstition brings bad luck.

All things considered, the most civilizing and useful technological innovation of the last few thousand years remains the hot bath.

Ask the experienced rather than the learned.
Arabic proverb

The sheepskin conferred on a student by a college hardly compensates for the human hide that will be knocked off him later in the school of experience.
Charley Jones

There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
Niels Bohr

Noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall of Niels Bohr's cottage, a visitor asked, 'Can it be that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?' 'Of course not,' replied Bohr, 'but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.'

Let the old world make believe it's blind and deaf and dumb,
but Nothing can change the shape of things to come.
Max Frost & The Troopers

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Thought, I love thought. But not the jaggling and twisting of already existent ideas, I despise that self-important game.
D. H. Lawrence

The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.
John Foster

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we've discovered a new sort of genius: those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.
G. C. Lichten

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
Robert Burton

Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.
Konrad Lorenz

Galbraith's Law: Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
Henry David Thoreau

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am older, I admire kind people.
Rabbi Milton Steinberg

What rascal has been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?
W. C. Fields

Our best thoughts come from others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eagle doesn't hunt flies.

He only profits from praise who values criticism.
Heinrich Heine

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.
Heinrich Heine

Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.
William Simon

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about ancient history, 19th-century mathematics, manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea.
Carl Ally

If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.
Ford Prefect

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch

Heisenberg may have slept here.

People do not lack strength. They lack will.
Victor Hugo

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Mark Twain

It is well for the heart to be naive and for the mind not to be.
Anatole France

Doubting everything or believing everything are two equally convenient solutions, both of which save us from thinking.
Henri Poincare

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
T. E. Lawrence

When I die, I want to be buried in Chicago so I can still be active in politics.
Rep. Charlie Rangel, NY

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach

A moment's thinking is an hour in words.
Thomas Hood

It doesn't matter whom you are paired against; your opponent is always yourself.
Nakamura

...but getting drunk, and picking up bar ladies, and doing metaphysics are a part of life.
Robert Pirsig, "Lila"

The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.
Bruce Barton

`Government' is a complex device that, when left alone, assists the powerful in gaining additional power, helps the wealthy in amassing greater amounts of money. The common majority has a duty to oversee and to regulate this tendency.

Have you considered that if you 'don't make waves' nobody including yourself will know that you are alive?
Theodore Isaac Rubin

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain

Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.
Ralph N. Gerard

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.
Marya Mannes

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in a manner so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.
Native American Proverb

All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us. They can't get away this time!
Gen. Chesty Puller

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
Woody Allen

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
Thomas Carlyle

Art should simplify. That is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.
Willa Cather

I define failure as being here right now, when I could be home watching the Rams on television.
Woody Allen

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain

A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
Grace Murray Hopper

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.
P.D. James

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
Winston Churchill

Applaud friends, the comedy is over.
Beethoven, last words

Drink to me.
Picasso, last words

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet

Lead us not into temptation. Just a pointer will do fine.

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or get rich in business by being a conformist.
J. Paul Getty

A man may fail many times but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
J. Paul Getty

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Douglas R. Hofstadter

...it may take me forever, if it's only a puzzle...
Joe Walsh

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Muhammad Ali

The only thing more frightening than a programmer with a screwdriver or a hardware engineer with a program is a user with a pair of wire cutters and the root password.
Elizabeth Zwicky

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G. H. Hardy

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (489bc)

Westheimer's discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
Booker T. Washington

User: My x-terminal crashed. It says `bad magic cookie, panic.'
Admin: Well if you had a bad magic cookie wouldn't you panic?

The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant use of four simple words: 'I do not know.'
Andre Maurois

We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.
Thomas Jefferson

The great man, with vigor, should demand the rightness of things, timeliness of action, and propriety of method. In this way, power does not degenerate into sheer force.
I Ching

My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.
Clarence Budinton Kelland

The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol.
Larry Wall

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was much pleasanter at home, thought poor Alice, When one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.

No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.
Voltaire

If an infinite number of rednecks in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of stop signs, they will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare in Braille.

May you die in bed at ninety-four years, shot by a jealous husband/wife.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington

The wonderful thing about Tiggers / Is Tiggers are wonderful things / Their tops are made out of rubber / Their bottoms are made out of springs / They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy / Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun / But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is / I'm the only one.

Some of the truly creative minds in the world are very poor management people, and some of the best management people somehow have little patience or sympathy with the creative function.
Robert Eskridge

There are only two rules of life; Rule 1: Never tell all you know.

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
Blair Houghton

The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
Lew Mammel, Jr.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
FDR

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A Heinlein

The reason so many people miss their opportunity is that it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison

`How do you know so much about everything?' was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was `By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.'
John Abbott

We shall not cease from exploration;
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started;
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!
Dostoevsky

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

What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened.
How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson.
Richard Stallman

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say. And then say it with the utmost levity.
G.B. Shaw

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford

The 'majority of the stupid' is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.
Albert Einstein

He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
Oscar Wilde

Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion.
Harlan Ellison

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Flaubert

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

When we jumped into Sicily, the units became separated, and I couldn't find anyone. Eventually I stumbled across two colonels, a major, three captains, two lieutenants, and one rifleman, and we secured the bridge. Never in the history of war have so few been led by so many.
General James Gavin

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.

Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
Robert Green Ingersoll

A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.
Winning sentence, 1986 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.

When I'm goin', when I'm really goin', I feel like a, like a jockey must feel when he's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him, he's coming into the stretch, the pressure's on him - and he knows. He just feels, when to let it go and how much. 'Cause he's got everything workin' for him - timing, touch. It's a great feeling, boy - it's a real great feeling - when you're right and you know you're right. Like all of a sudden, I got oil in my arm. Pool cue's part of me. You know, it's a - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood; it's got nerves in it. You can feel the roll of those balls. You don't have to look. You just know. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. And you play that game the way nobody's ever played it before.
'Eddie Felsen', as played by Paul Newman

What do I consider a reasonable person to be? I'd say a reasonable person is one who accepts that we are all human and therefore fallible, and takes that into account when dealing with others. Implicit in this definition is the belief that it is the right and the responsibility of each person to live his or her own life as he or she sees fit, to respect this right in others, and to demand the assumption of this responsibility by others.
anon

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ...
Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

There comes a time in every man's life when he must take stock and review.
For example, when he can no longer afford to buy a bottle of whiskey that is older than he is.

I remember once being on a station platform in Cleveland at four in the morning. A black porter was carrying my bags, and as we were waiting for the train to come in, he said to me: "Excuse me, Mr. Cooke, I don't want to invade your privacy, but I have a bet with a friend of mine. Who composed the opening theme music of 'Omnibus'? My friend said Virgil Thomson." I asked him, "What do you say?" He replied, "I say Aaron Copeland." I said, "You're right." The porter said, "I knew Thomson doesn't write counterpoint that way." I told that to a network president, and he was deeply unimpressed.
Alistair Cooke

One of these days I'm gonna climb that mountain;
Walk up there among them clouds,
Where the cotton's high and the corn's a-growin',
And there ain't no fields to plow.
"Old Rivers" as performed by Walter Brennan

And now, my beauties! Something with poison in it, I think. With poison in it,
but attractive to the eye -- and soothing to the smell!
The Wicked Witch of the West

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
Rabindranath Tagore

If there is a place for righteous anger in your religion, you have a false religion.

Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really consulted are the big men who have the biggest stakes -- the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce.... Every time it has come to a critical question, these gentlemen have been yielded to, and their demands treated as the demands that should be followed as a matter of course. The government of the United States is a foster child of the special interests.
Woodrow Wilson, 1912

The job of the teacher is not to impart knowledge. It it first to teach one how to recognize ignorance, and second to teach one the techniques for removing ignorance for one's own ends.

Don't expend a lot of energy trying to change the negatives of your life. It's more efficient (and ultimately easier) to allow the positives of your life to change you.

Life's a bitch -- and then it has puppies.

A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.
Louis Pasteur

Discover your own discontent, and be grateful, for without divine discontent there would be no creative force.
Deepak Chopra

The political conservative believes that resources are scarce and must be secured to acheive wellbeing. These vulgar creatures believe that life is a zero-sum game; that in order for them to have enough, someone else must have less. How sad for them.

Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Herman Melville

Don't judge people. Accept what is. That goes for yourself, too.

Mine's a tale that can't be told, my freedom I hold dear
How years ago in days of old when magic filled the air...
Plant/Page

"There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations."
James Naylor, final speech, as quoted by Emerson

There is a being; wonderful, perfect;
It existed before heaven and earth.
How quiet it is!
How Spiritual it is!
It stands alone and it does not change.
It moves around and around,
but does not on this account suffer.
All life comes from it.
It wraps everything with its love, as in a garment,
and yet it claims no honor, for it does not demand to be Lord.
I do not know its name, so I call it Tao, the Way,
and I rejoice in its power.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Halbertson's Law says that "Making the assumption that everyone else shares your model of reality can lead to tragic mistakes."

The Law of Rational Expectations (foundational to scientific inquiry) states that "Making the assumption that everyone else shares your model of reality is a methodological necessity."
Arnold King (paraphrased)

The above are both true, and this is why the term "Political Science" is an oxymoron.

Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That's an easy thing to say, but if your hopes should pass away
simply pretend that you can build them again.
Paul Simon

Those who don't read have no advantage over those who can't.
Mark Twain

The Constitution, a noble piece of paper, with free society, struggled but they died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner, hoping for some rain, hoping for some rain
And I see the robins perched in barren treetops, watching last ditch racists marching across the floor
Just like the Peace Sign that vanished in our dreams, never had a chance to grow, never had a chance to grow
Gil Scott-Heron, "Winter in America"

You can't have an ocean except at sea level.

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

A free society is one where it's safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy, and dead.
James Thurber

If you make people think they are thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.
Don Marquis

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
George Carlin

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.
Wayne Dyer

If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart

This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism! How intensely I despise them.
Albert Einstein

And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It is the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln

The creationists have this creator who is evil, who is small-minded, who is malevolent, and who is not very bright and can't even get his science right. Creationists have made their creator in their own image...
Ian Plimer

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have it's fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I would that the last king were strangled with the guts of the last priest.
Jean Meslier

How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!
Anatole France

Why reach for the musket when the custard pie will do?
Lebovitz Button Catalog

Man is always ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
Paul Eldridge

People who are smart get into MENSA. People who are really smart look around and leave.
James Randi

You may be called a drunken dog by some of the high collar and silk stocking gentry, but the real roughnecks will style you a jovial fellow.
Davy Crockett

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Crying in your beer is bad enough, but crying in a hot fudge sundae is just disgusting.
Satan, according to Robert Heinlein in "Job"

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
Harry S. Truman

You go to the Rockies and you stand there and you're looking up, saying, "Yep, that's impressive." And then you go to the Himalayas and you're like, "Oh, shit!"
Alex Trebek

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Ernest Hemingway

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

The doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright

One and one is two, two and two are four, and five'll get you ten if you know how to work it.
Mae West

I don't like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.
Joe Louis

Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
Somerset Maugham

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder...the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
Eugene V. Debs, who received 10 years in prison for saying these words in 1918. He received one million votes in 1920 as candidate for US President while serving that term.

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Jacques Barzun

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists.
Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck

A teacher's day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony and one-eighth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic.
Susan Ohanian

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun

He who has never failed somewhere, the man can never be great.
Herman Melville

The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk they're sober.
William Butler Yeats

In a heaven full of people only some want to fly; ain't that crazy...
Seal

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
Frank Zappa

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.
G. K. Chesterton

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
Voltaire

Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the world.
Kaiser Wilhelm

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them.
John Fowles

If you read Shakespeare, you realize it was ever thus.
Rip Torn

Your response to the disturbance is the disturbance.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
Herman Hesse

Thinking of other people takes you away from constantly thinking of yourself.
Kirk Douglas

Take your job seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously.
Alex Trebek

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
John Dryden

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana

It's very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.
Alex Trebek

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.
Herman Melville

We learn from history that we never learn anything from history.
Hegel

Time is what is indicated by a clock.
Albert Einstein

Beware of the 'fatal de-centering and disconnection of putative observers from epistemic links to space-time points.'
Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"

Nothing is more interesting to the true theorist than a fact which directly contradicts a theory generally accepted up to that time, for this is his particular work.
Max Planck

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
Mark Russell

A man decides after seventy years That what he goes there for Is to unlock the door While those around him criticize and sleep
Seal, "Crazy"

I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is used.
Dominique Bouhours (1628-1702), French grammarian, last words

He who has defeated his enemy has vanquished only half of his foe.

You know that gentleness is stronger than severity, that water is stronger than rock, that love is stronger than force.
Herman Hesse

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ability to doubt is rare, emerging only among cultivated educated persons.
Aristotle

Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams

Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
Herman Hesse

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Kurt Vonnegut

Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create anything. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the spirit.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Soldiers find wars -- and lawyers find out still litigious men, who quarrels move.
John Donne (1562-1626)

So, if you compare, you will seem to be inferior or superior, neither of which have anything to do with reality, and only serve to create tension and divert the student from real progress.
Cheng Man Ching, Tai Chi Master

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.
Drew Carey

Think lucky. If you fall in a pond, check your pockets for fish.
Darrell Royal

Democracy should not be used as a pretext to attack other countries.
Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

Cop: Do you know how fast you were going???
Heisenberg: No, but I know exactly where I am!

When the sacred needs politicians to defend it, the sacred is in big trouble.
Richard J. Rosendall

Each passing moment is another chance to completely turn things around.
Cameron Crowe, "Vanilla Sky"

This paper gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error, however, is not new.
Clifford Truesdale, Mathematical Reviews 12, p561

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Blaise Pascal

Computers are composed of nothing more than logic gates stretched out to the horizon in a vast numerical irrigation system.
Stan Augarten

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
Neils Bohr

It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
Thomas Carlyle

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
G. K. Chesterton

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. ("To the devil with those who published before us.")
Aelius Donatus (4th Century)

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
Albert Einstein

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
Saint Augustine

Assassins!
Arturo Toscanini to his orchestra

Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
George Burns

If you are going through hell, keep going.
Sir Winston Churchill

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan

A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Goethe

I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks

In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
W.B. Prescott

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Sir Winston Churchill

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
Buckminster Fuller

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
Albert Einstein

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
Thomas Alva Edison

Most people ignore most poetry
because
most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln

When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese Proverb

Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.
Slovenian Proverb

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Please make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
Voltaire

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell

If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.
Voltaire

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
G.K. Chesterton

I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
Dogbert

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
Gore Vidal

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan

In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter.
Chinese proverb

The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty.
Casanova

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.
Jacques Cousteau

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
Thomas J. Watson, Sr.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamot

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
From a Marin County newspaper's TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz"

Strange women laying in ponds and distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Ayn Rand

Big whorls have little whorls
that feed on their vorticity,
and little whorls have lesser whorls
and so on to viscosity.
L.F. Richardson

Never try to extort more than it would cost to have you killed.
"dcavanaugh" on Slashdot

Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away.
Rob Malda

In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give it to the other.
Voltaire

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Benjamin Franklin

The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
Thomas Jefferson

Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
William Allen White

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Adam Smith

A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady.
Voltaire

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.
Josef Stalin

Hell! There ain't no rules around here! We are trying to accomplish something!
Thomas Alva Edison

I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a 'deserter.' What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar and a functional illiterate. And he poops his pants.
Michael Moore

As President, I have no eyes but constitutional eyes; I cannot see you.
Abraham Lincoln

What is the good of having a nice house without a decent planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
Mark Twain

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.
Nancy Astor

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.
R. D. Laing

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon

Battle not with monsters lest you become one. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you
Friedrich Nietzsche

Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart, in its cunning, quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.
Henri-Frederic Amiel

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others,without being crippled by your own judgment.
Ralph Marston

When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
Otto Von Bismark

Take me back now, take me back now, to the port of my birth.
Grand Funk Railroad

The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Paul Erdos

I had a dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
Igor Stravinsky

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