Quotes

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These are a much larger bunch of quotes, from which the business quotes were excerpted. So, there are some duplicates here, but there are also lots of new quotes. Enjoy.

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From: Martha Luehrmann (1/22/96)

From: Cynthia Powers (1/20/96)

 

La legge e' come una ragnatela dove vi si impigliano solo le piccole

mosche. (The Law is like a spider web where only the small flies get

entangled.)

-- Balzac

 

Quotes

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain,

involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The

hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": 1. fighting; 2. fleeing;

3. feeding; and 4. mating.

-- Psychology professor in

neuropsychology intro course

 

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely

rearranging their prejudices.

-- William James

 

Don't worry about temptation--as you grow older, it starts

avoiding you.

-- Old Farmer's Almanac

 

The graduate with a Science degree asks, "Why does it work?"

The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does it work?"

The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it

cost?"

The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with

that?"

 

Once at a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I

predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile

disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends, sir, upon whether

I embrace your principles or your mistress."

 

The most important thing in the programming language is the name.

A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently

invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable

language.

-- D. E. Knuth, 1967

 

A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when

you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in

what's left of your unit.

-- In the August 1993 issue, page 9, of PS magazine, the

Army's magazine of preventive maintenance

 

On one occasion a student burst into his office. "Professor Stigler, I

don't believe I deserve this F you've given me." To which Stigler

replied, "I agree, but unfortunately it is the lowest grade the University

will allow me to award."

 

Slogan of 105.9, the classic rock radio station in Chicago: "Of all the

radio stations in Chicago ... we're one of them."

 

With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand

miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and

still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such

thing as progress.

-- Ransom K. Ferm

 

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

 

Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to

pound in the correct screw.

 

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years

and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some

of the worst movies in the history of the world.

-- Dave Barry

 

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because

I hate plants.

-- A. Whitney Brown

 

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that

is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot

stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is

well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

-- Mark Twain

 

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the

streets?

-- Dick Cavett,

mocking the TV-violence debate

 

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

 

Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your

triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion

Chinese couldn't care less.

 

668: The Neighbor of the Beast

 

Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather

straps.

-- Emo Phillips

 

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

 

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a

mistake when you make it again.

-- F. P. Jones

 

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn

from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent

disinclination to do so.

-- Douglas Adams,

Last Chance to See

 

As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important

that you understand what I'm doing or why you're paying me so much

money. What's important is that you continue to do so.

-- Hunter S. Thompson's Samoan Attorney

 

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two

nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary

rights of another.

-- Ambrose Bierce,

The Devil's Dictionary

 

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent

revolution inevitable.

-- John F. Kennedy

 

Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of

which I disapprove.

-- Ashleigh Brilliant

 

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

-- Ashleigh Brilliant

 

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

 

Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that

way.

 

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but

phone calls taper off.

-- Johnny Carson

 

G: "If we do happen to step on a mine, Sir, what do we do?"

EB: "Normal procedure, Lieutenant, is to jump 200 feet in the air and

scatter oneself over a wide area."

-- Somewhere in No Man's Land, BA4

 

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a

disgrace,that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a

congress.

-- John Adams, in "1776"

 

Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are busy

doing it.

-- Chinese proverb

 

May you live in interesting times.

-- Chinese curse

 

I'm a peripheral visionary.

-- Steven Wright

 

Ballerinas are always on their toes. Why don't they just get taller

ballerinas?

-- Steven Wright

 

It doesn't matter what temperature a room is, it's always room

temperature."

-- Steven Wright

 

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories...

-- Steven Wright

------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: GKD (5/30/96)

Subject: Fwd: Predictions

From: DWS at fwpa-mac (5/24/96)

From: Gene@siu.net (Gene Rogers) (5/24/96)

 

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

-- JPopular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march

of science, 1949

 

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

 

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with

the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that

won't last out the year.

-- The editor in charge of bus'n books for Prentice Hall,

1957

 

But what ... is it good for?

-- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems

Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the

microchip.

 

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

-- J Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of

Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

 

This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered

as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to

us.

-- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

 

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who

would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

-- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings

for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

 

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better

than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible.

-- A Yale University management professor in

response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable

overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to

found Federal Express Corp.)

 

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

-- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

 

I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not

Gary Cooper.

-- Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading

role in "Gone With The Wind."

 

A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say

America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.

-- Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs.

Fields' Cookies.

 

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

 

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

-- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

 

If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The

literature was full of examples that said you can't do this.

-- Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique

adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.

 

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even

built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding

us? Or we' ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll

come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-

Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got

through college yet.'

-- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on

attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and

Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

 

Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and

reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against

which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily

in high schools.

-- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert

Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

 

You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across

all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just

have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable

condition of weight training.

-- Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the

"unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.

 

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?

You're crazy.

-- Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his

project to drill for oil in 1859.

 

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

-- Irving Fisher, Prof. of Economics, Yale University,

1929.

 

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy,

Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

 

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of

Patents, 1899.

 

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.

-- Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse,

1872

 

The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the

intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.

-- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed

Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

 

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

-- Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, 1981

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Susan Weintraub ()

From: Martha Luehrmann (10/20/95)

From: nessie@sfbayguardian.com (nessie):

Subject: Quotes from our national leaders. God Bless America!

 

 

I want to make sure everybody who has a job wants a job

-- George Bush, during his first Presidential campaign

 

This is a great day for France!

-- Richard Nixon, while attending Charles De Gaulle's

funeral

 

Now, like, I'm President. It would be pretty hard for some drug guy to

come into the White House and start offering it up, you know? ... I bet

if they did, I hope I would say, 'Hey, get lost. We don't want any of

that.'

-- George Bush, talking about drug abuse to a group of

students

 

For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan.

We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex ...

uh...setbacks.

-- George Bush

 

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and

democracy. But that could change.

-- Dan Quayle

 

Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the

Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right

here.

-- Dan Quayle during a visit to Hawaii in 1989

 

What a waste it is to lose one's mind-or not to have a mind. How true

that is."

-- Dan Quayle addressing the United Negro College

Fund

 

I am honored today to begin my first term as the Governor of

Baltimore- that is Maryland.

-- William Donald Schaefer, first inaugural address

 

The caribou love it. They rub against it and they have babies. There are

more caribou in Alaska than you can shake a stick at.

-- George Bush, on the Alaska pipeline

 

I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, anti-racism. This is what

drives me.

-- George Bush

 

If I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough I would be convinced that

we're in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going

without food and medical attention and that we've got to do

something about the unemployed.

-- Ronald Reagan

 

My fellow Americans, I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia

forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

-- Ronald Reagan, about to go on the air for a radio

broadcast, unaware that the microphone was already

on

 

Mars is essentially in the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same

distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures

where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that

means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

-- Dan Quayle

 

Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up and I think we're

going tosucceed.

-- Ronald Reagan

 

Walter Mondale: George Bush doesn't have the manhood to

apologize.

George Bush: Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against

his any time.

 

It's like Deja Vu all over again.

-- Y.Berra

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

7/3/96 from Eleanor Musick

(Found in the book "Naturally Intelligent Systems" by

Caudill and Butler)

 

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank

cartridges.

-- Mark Twain

 

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an

ignorant one.

-- Benjamin Franklin

 

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand

it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

-- Emerson

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

7/29/96 from Shulamit Widawsky

 

*DESTINY*

 

Watch your thoughts carefully;

they become words.

 

Consider your words carefully;

they become actions.

 

Choose your actions carefully;

they become habits.

 

Study your habits carefully;

they become character.

 

Know your character well;

it becomes your destiny.

-------------------------------

Self fulfilling destiny

 

I think therefore I am.

 

Be careful what you wish for you might get it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

8/7/96 from Pepi Ross

 

What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit,

to do the unnecessary.

-- Richard Harkness,

The New York Times, 1960

 

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give

the wrong answers.

-- A Bit of Fry and Laurie

 

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.

 

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an

infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even

considering if there are men on base.

-- Dave Barry

 

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a

woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the

Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"

-- Quentin Crisp

 

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house!

-- George Carlin

 

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you

think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?

1. Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2. Advising the President.

3. Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.

-- David Letterman

 

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

-- Lily Tomlin

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Laugh of the Day

 

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do

not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them

like a vice, lest they spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric

system.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

 

One always dies too soon -- or too late. And yet one's whole life is

complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for

the summing up. You are -- your life, and nothing else.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Huis Clos [No Exit]"

 

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it

ceases to exist.

-- Salman Rushdie

 

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should

therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country

could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have

only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny ... In

war, then, as in peace, assert the freedom of speech and of the press.

Cling to this as the bulwark of all our rights and privileges.

-- William Ellery Channing

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

the below came from Greg S. MacGowan, Univ. of Cincinnati College of Law 8/27/96

 

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

-- John Wooden

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From George Ruben (9/18/96)

From "Robert A. Bloodgood"

 

Subject: The Facts of Life

 

The 2 most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity

 

If at first you don't suceed, skydiving is not for you

 

Money can't buy happiness...But it sure makes misery easier to live

with..

 

Deja Moo: The feeling that you've heard this bullshit before.

 

Psychiatrists say that 1 of 4 people are mentally ill. Check 3

friends. If they're OK, you're it.

 

Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check.

 

A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.

 

It has recently been discovered that research causes cancer in

rats.

 

Always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn.

 

If you are given on open-book exam, you will forget your book.

 

COROLLARY: If you are given a take-home test, you will forget

where you live.

 

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that

nobody appreciates how difficult it was.

 

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a

warning to others.

 

Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.

 

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because

the average man can see better than he can think.

 

Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's

easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid,

too.

 

Help, Help! The paranoids are after me!

 

A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell and make

you feel happy to be on your way.

 

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence

on society.

 

Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving from

where you left them to where you can't find them.

 

Law of Probability Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan

will not be evenly distributed.

 

It has long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment

rarely sat back and let things happen to them --- They went out and

happened to things!

-- Elinor Smith

 

From Susan Weintraub 10/25/96

 

The past was erased. The erasure was forgotten. The lie became

truth.

-- George Orwell, 1984

 

They X-Rayed my head and found nothing.

-- Jerome "Dizzy" Dean

 

A word to the wise ain't neccessary; it's the stupid ones who need the

advice.

-- Bill Cosby

 

1935 will go down in history! For the first time a civilized country has

full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient,

and the world will follow our lead in the future.

-- Aldolf Hitler, April 1935

 

As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my aunt Hortense,

To be smut, it must be utterly without redeeming social importance.

-- Tom Lehrer

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

11/22/96 from Dean Anderson

Well, here are some jokes from my "joke database". Even though I

didn't write any of the jokes, and I actually didn't put this list of one

liners together, I still have a "joke database", and of course if the

database copyright is enacted, everyone will have to pay me when they

use the contents of my "joke database" So, in the spirit of

magnaniminity(?), you can read these for free just this once. But you

have to forget them immediately. ;-)

-- Dean Anderson, dean@aV8.com, dean@lpf.org

President, Plain Aviation,Inc

President, League for Programming Freedom

 

The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the

second day, you're off it.

-- Jackie Gleason

 

I have a great diet. You're allowed to eat anything you want, but

you must eat it with naked fat people.

-- Ed Bluestone

 

Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin

unprotected.

-- Red Buttons

 

I have a daughter who goes to SMU. She could've gone to UCLA here

in California, but it is one more letter she'd have to remember.

-- Shecky Greene

 

A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Pass.

Motorists are asked to be on the lookup for sixteen hardened

criminals.

-- Ronnie Corbett

 

I date this girl for two years - and then the nagging starts:

"I wanna know your name"

-- Mike Binder

 

Advertising: The science of arresting the human intelligence long

enough to get money from it.

-- Stephen Leacock

 

Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at

you? But when you take him in the car, he sticks his head out the

window.

-- Steve Bluestone

 

Everything is drive-through. In California, they even have a burial

service called Jump-In-The-Box.

-- Wil Shriner

 

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot

and anyone going faster than you is a moron.

-- George Carlin

 

You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five

miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where

the hell she is.

-- Ellen DeGeneris

 

I'm not working out. My philosophy: no pain, no pain.

-- Carol Leifer

 

The reason most people play golf is to wear clothes they would not be

caught dead in otherwise.

-- Roger Simon

 

A hotel is a place that keeps manufacturers of 25-watt bulbs in

business.

-- Shelley Berman

 

I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore

helmets.

-- Dave Edison

 

If law school is so hard to get through, how come there are so many

lawyers?

-- Calvin Trillin

 

Guys are lucky because they get to grow mustaches. I wish I could.

It's like having a little pet for your face.

-- Anita Wise

 

I went to McDonald's yesterday and said, "I'd like some fries." The

girl at the counter said, "Would you like some fries with that?"

-- Jay Leno

 

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a

bank robbery has just taken place.

-- Johnny Carson

 

Never moon a werewolf.

-- Mike Binder

 

If it weren't for electricity, we'd all be watching television by

candlelight.

-- George Gobel

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

11/17/96 from George Ruben (duplicates have been zapped)

 

13. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes

hurtling down the highway.

-- Andrew Tannenbaum

 

17. I am sick unto death of obscure English towns that exist seemingly

for the sole accommodation of these so-called limerick writers -- and

even sicker of their residents, all of whom suffer from physical

deformities and spend their time dismembering relatives at fancy dress

balls.

-- Editor of the Limerick Times (Limerick, Ireland)

 

28. I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and

tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this

country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not! But I'm sick and

tired of being told that I am!

-- Monty Python

 

34. Her kisses left something to be desired -- the rest of her.

 

40. I think that the team that wins game five will win the series. Unless

we lose game five.

-- Charles Barkley

 

41. My initial response was to sue her for defamation of character, but

then I realized that I had no character.

-- Charles Barkley, on hearing Tonya Harding

proclaim herself "the Charles Barkley of figure

skating"

 

44. An Animated Cartoon Theology:

1. People are animals.

2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain.

3. Life is antagonistic to the living.

4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed,

and plucked for music.

5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their

own cunning.

6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their

own momentum.

7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports

us.

-- E. L. Doctorow, "The Book of Daniel"

 

45. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of

Congress. But I repeat myself.

-- Mark Twain

 

46. Calvin: People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they

don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

Hobbes: Isn't your pants' zipper supposed to be in the front?

 

48. The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average

(mean) number of legs.

-- E. Grebenik

 

49. "If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides."

-- Old Yiddish proverb

 

55. What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence

of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

-- Sigmund Freud

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

12/11/96 from George Ruben

 

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage.

They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

-- Rita Rudner

 

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot,

and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.

-- George Carlin

 

I would love to speak a foreign language but I can't. So I grew

hair under my arms instead.

-- Sue Kolinsky

 

You have a cough? Go home tonight, eat a whole box of Ex-Lax,

tomorrow you'll be afraid to cough.

-- Pearl Williams

 

Don't spend two dollars to dry clean a shirt. Donate it to the

Salvation Army instead. They'll clean it and put it on a hanger.

Next morning buy it back for seventy-five cents.

-- Billiam Coronel

 

It's not hard to tell we was poor -- when you saw the toilet paper

dryin' on the clothesline.

-- George Lindsey

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

12/14/96 from George Ruben

 

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the

world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not

with all those flies and death and stuff.

-- Mariah Carey

 

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?

Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live

forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would

live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not

live forever.

-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest

 

Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same

reactions in the brain as marijuana...The researchers also discovered

other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are.

-- Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, August 22

 

I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the

law.

-- David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering

accusations that he failed to pay his taxes.

 

Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part

of your life.

-- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become

spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign

 

I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.

-- Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball

forward

 

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime

rates in the country.

-- Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C.

 

Beginning in February 1976 your assistance benefits will be

discontinued. Reason: it has been reported to our office that you

expired on January 1, 1976.

-- Letter from the Illinois Department of Public Aid

 

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history...this

century's history...We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this

century.

-- Dan Quayle, then Indiana senator and Republican

vice-presidential candidate during a news

conference in which he was asked his opinion of

the Holocaust

 

Rotarians, be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself.

-- Chicago Rotary Club journal, "Gyrator"

 

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make

them unsafe.

-- Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of

Philadelphia

 

I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly

underpolluted.

-- Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World

Bank, explaining why we should export toxic wastes

to Third World countries

 

After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the

school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of

David Steele to the post.

-- Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools,

Barrington, Rhode Island

 

The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.

-- Dizzy Dean explaining how he felt after being hit on

the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Martin B. Schneiderman (12/30/96)

 

Great people talk about ideas.

Average people talk about things.

Small people talk about other people.

-- Sign above the coffee machine in the Grand Cayman

airport waiting room

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1/3/97 from Steve Hunter

 

If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?

-- Carl Hiassen, "Tourist Season"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The prospect of the gallows concentrates the mind.

-- Samuel Johnson

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: MRLuehrmann@LBL.gov (1/15/97)

From: Mari Shine (1/15/97)

 

Today is the kind of day you want to curl up in bed with a good book --

Or with a man who's read one

And who's fluent in Braille.

-- Carol Campbell

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1/18/97 from Ed Tuttle

 

Nil Illegatti Carborundum! (Don't let the bastards wear you down.)

-- anonymous

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Martha Luehrmann (4/17/96)

From: Cynthia Powers <cyn@metronet.com (4/16/96)

 

A few thoughts for the day...

 

ON METAPHYSICS

Deja Fu: The feeling that somehow, somewhere, you've been kicked in

the head like this before.

 

ON DEEP THOUGHTS

A day without sunshine is like night.

 

ON HIGHER EDUCATION

College is a fountain of knowledge...and the students are there

to drink.

 

ON MATHEMATICAL TRANSFORMS

A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.

 

ON YOUTH

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, 3/8/90

 

ON PROBLEM SOLVING

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to

resemble a nail.

-- Abraham Maslow

 

ON MATERIALISM

He who dies with the most toys, is, nonetheless, still dead.

 

ON ECONOMICS

The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.

 

ON PUBLISHING OR PERISHING

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because

someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

-- English Professor, Ohio University

 

ON REVISIONIST HISTORY

What was sliced bread the greatest thing since?

 

ON DATING

When aiming for the common denominator, be prepared for the

occasional division by zero.

 

ON LAMENTATION

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.

 

ON POETIC LOVE

When you're swimmin' in the creek

And an eel bites your cheek

That's a moray!

-- Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

 

ON MODERNISM

Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the

bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

 

ON MATERIAL SCIENCE

Character density: The number of very weird people in the office.

 

ON EXTINCTION

Save the whales. Collect the whole set.

 

ON HUMILITY

To err is human, to moo bovine.

 

ON EXPLANATION OF THE END

"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was

that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination

of their C programs."

-- Robert Firth

 

ON PROPHECY

The meek shall inherit the earth---they are too weak to refuse.

 

ON NUMBERS

Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3---not even for very large

values of 2.

 

ON WORLD POLITICS

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.

 

AND FINALLY, ON DRUGS AND DEVELOPMENT

There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.

We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

=================================================

From George Ruben (4/22/96)

More bumper sticker possibilities

 

Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.

 

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

 

We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.

 

Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.

 

He who laughs last thinks slowest!

 

Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

 

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

 

Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.

 

"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."

 

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be

happy.

 

Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.

 

I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.

 

The gene pool could use a little chlorine.

 

Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs.

 

All generalizations are false.

 

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

 

"Criminal Lawyer" is a redundancy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/4/97 from http://www.starlingtech.com/quotes/

 

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

-- Paddy Chayefsky

 

 

Television - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.

-- Ernie Kovacs

 

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

-- T. S. Eliot

 

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

-- Ann Landers

 

Television has raised writing to a new low.

-- Samuel Goldwyn

 

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

 

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

-- Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed (1900)

 

I am not young enough to know everything.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

The basis for optimism is sheer terror.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Only the shallow know themselves.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Biography lends to death a new terror."

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

 

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/6/97 from Christine Ho via George Ruben

 

Experience is the name people give to their mistakes.

-- Oscar Wilde

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/6/97 from Ted Labuza

 

no one welcomes change except a wet baby!!

-- Ted Labuza

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/5/97 from Steven Jamar

 

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

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/11/97 from Brian Lewis

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better

than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible.

-- Yale business management professor responding to

student Fred Smith's paper on a reliable overnight

delivery service. Fred Smith became the founder

and CEO of FederalExpress

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/24/97 from Harold Federow

From: kfholt@seanet.com (Karen and Steve Holt)

 

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million

typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.

Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

-- Professor Robert Wilensky of the University of California

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

2/26/97 from Mari Shine

 

From birth to age 18 a girl needs good parents, from 18 to 35 she needs good looks, from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality, and from 55 on she needs cash.

-- Sophie Tucker

 

I have all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 o'clock.

-- Henny Youngman

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

3/4/97 from George Ruben

 

- Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyways.

 

- If vegetable oil is made of vegetables, what is baby oil made of?

 

- No guts, no glory, no brain, same story.

 

- Cocaine is gods way of telling you that you make too much money.

 

- If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool?

who said "Quit while you're ahead"?

 

- If you don't die from it - - it is healthy.

 

- If everything is going well, you don't know what the hell is going on.

 

- One good turn gets most of the blankets.

 

- It is better to be looked over than overlooked.

 

- There are three kinds of people - - those who can count and those

who can't.

 

- It is not what a teenager knows that bothers his parents, it is

how he found out.

 

- My homework is like a juicy steak - - rarely done.

 

- There are two kinds of pedestrians - - the quick and the dead.

 

- Life is a sexually transmitted, terminal illness.

 

- Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

 

- An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.

 

- If at first you don't succeed -- give up! No use being a damn fool.

 

- Falling in love is awfully simple. Falling out of love is simply awful.

 

- No job is so simple that it can't be done wrong.

 

- You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

 

- Only adults have difficulty with childproof bottles.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Susan Weinberg (3/6/97)

From: nessie@sfbayguardian.com (nessie) (3/6/97)

From: michael lyons (3/6/97)

From: Wm Leler (mailto:wm@concentric.net http://www.concentric.net/~wm)

Dijon vu -- the same mustard as before.

 

Subject: Fwd: words for the wise

 

Technology is simply a means of manipulating the world so you don't

have to experience it

 

I still miss my ex-husband, but my aim is improving.

 

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.

 

Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand

 

Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out?

 

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours

are lost.

 

Love is grand; divorce is a hundred grand.

 

Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit

there.

 

Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should

both be changed regularly and for the same reason.

 

An optimist thinks that this is the best possible world. A pessimist

hears that this is true.

 

There is always death and taxes; however death doesn't get worse

every year.

 

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them

that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

 

It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

 

I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path.

 

Anything free is worth what you pay for it.

 

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

 

Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.

 

It hurts to be on the cutting edge.

 

If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

 

I don't get even, I get odder.

 

In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday.

 

I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays.

 

I am an escapee of a political correction facility.

 

I always wanted to be a procrastinator, never got around to it.

 

Dijon vu -- the same mustard as before.

 

I am a nutritional overachiever

 

I believe in youthenasia

 

My inferiority complex is not as good as yours.

 

I am having an out of money experience

 

I plan on living forever. So far, so good.

 

I am in shape. Round is a shape.

 

Not afraid of heights -- afraid of widths.

 

Practice safe eating -- always use condiments.

 

A day without sunshine is like night.

 

I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take something for it.

 

If marriage were outlawed, only outlaws would have inlaws.

 

If it weren't for me, there'd just be a pile of my clothes on the

floor.

 

I am not a perfectionist. My parents were though.

 

-------

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

3/10/97 from Bill Davis

 

Learn as if you would live forever; live as if you would die tomorrow.

-- (Author Unknown)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Parade Magazine, December 29, 1996

From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

 

Never give up, because it ain't over 'til it's over.

-- Yogi Berra, NY Yankees

 

When you come to the fork in the road, take it.

-- Yogi Berra, NY Yankees

 

Don't always follow the crowd. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too

crowded.

-- Yogi Berra, NY Yankees

 

You can observe a lot by watching.

-- Yogi Berra, NY Yankees

 

Remember that whatever you do in your life, 90% of it is half mental.

-- Yogi Berra, NY Yankees

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Susan Weinbert (3/13/97)

 

You should be reading the Wall Street Journal before you read Mother

Jones. The enemy puts out a paper every day to tell you what they are

up to. That's incredible. Imagine the Nazis doing that every day,

sending out a sheet that says, "Here's what we're up to." Corporate

America does that on a daily basis.

-- Michael Moore, creator of Roger and Me & TV, from

an interview with Nation in the December '96 issue

of Shift magasine.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: George Ruben (9/21/95)

From: Theresa Harpster (1995)

 

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a

resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics

and chemistry."

-- H. L. Mencken

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Sunday Parade, SF Chronicle (2/97)

 

To fly we must have resistance.

-- Maya Lin, quoted by Jim Sexton in USA Weekend

 

You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.

-- Stephen W. Comiskey

 

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or

hope.

-- Bern Williams

 

Careers, like rockets, don't always take off on schedule. The key is to

keep working on the engines.

-- Gary Sinise quoted by Jefferey Zaslow in USA

Weekend

 

It's a rash man who reaches a conclusion before he gets to it.

-- Jacob Levin

 

In the U.S. today, you are considered innocent until appointed to a

public position by the President.

-- Ambassador William Crowe

 

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.

-- Bill Palance, Hip Book of Nifty Moves

 

The world is extremely interesting to a joyful soul.

-- Alexandra Stoddard, Gracious Living in a New

World

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Mari Shine (3/18/97)

 

Getting out of bed in the morning is a sign of false confidence.

-- Jules Feiffer

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: asamson@zenith.att.com (4/8/97)

 

Human conception typically involves a chaotic dash by tens of millions

of sperm seeking a path to a single egg. Some researchers believe that

so many sperm are required because not one of them will stop to ask

for directions.

-- Peter H. Lewis, in "How to Get From Here to

There", New York Times, 10/8/1996

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Ralph Slepecky (4/9/97)

From: Rod Stokes (4/9/97)

 

Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with something bigger and

heavier.

-- Anonymous

 

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

-- Erma Bombeck

 

Never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't want your

mother to hear at your trial.

-- Sydney Biddle Barrows, the "Mayflower Madam"

 

Never say "Oops" in the operating room.

-- Dr. Leo Troy

 

Never comment on a woman's rear end. Never use the words "large"

or "size" with "rear end". Never. Avoid the area altogether. Trust me.

-- Tim Allen

 

Never wear a backward baseball cap to an interview unless applying for

the job of umpire.

-- Dan Zevin

 

Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day.

-- Harry S. Truman

 

Never thrust your sickle into another's corn.

-- Publius Syrus

 

Never drive through a small Southern town at 100mph with the local

sheriff's drunken 16-year-old daughter on your lap

-- Anonymous member of a chain gang

 

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It

annoys them very much.

-- G.K. Chesterton

 

Never use while sleeping.

-- Instruction on Conair hair dryer

 

Never play peekaboo with a child on a long plane trip. There's no end

to the game. Finally I grabbed him by the bib and said, "Look, it's always

gonna be me!"

-- Rita Rudner

 

Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.

-- Woodrow Wilson

 

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in

the room.

-- Winston Churchill

 

Never stand between a dog and the hydrant.

-- John Peers

 

Never take a job where winter winds can blow up your pants.

-- Geraldo Rivera

 

Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, face the facts.

-- Ruth Gordon

 

Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

-- American adage about antagonizing newspaper

editors. You got a problem with that?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/14/97 from Arik Samson

 

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

 

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

 

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

 

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

 

He who hesitates is probably right.

 

Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.

 

No one is listening until you make a mistake.

 

Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.

 

The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.

 

The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

 

The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach.

 

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is

research.

 

To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.

 

Two wrongs are only the beginning.

 

You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

 

The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

 

Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.

 

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/16/97 from Ralph Slepecky

 

My model is correct. Do not be fooled by your observations.

-- dr. Phil B. Smith, Professor of Nuclear Physics, State

University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/17/97 from Ajai Jagtiani

 

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

-- George Bernard Shaw

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/17/97 from Arik Samson

 

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our

children's children, because I don't think children should be having

sex.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/25/97 from John Hardiman

 

Basic questions are in the eyes of the beholder. I can remember back to

my first grade catechism class where the answer to the question "Who

is God?" was easily memorized and very easily understood but now in

later life this question opens up unlimited possible answers.

-- John F. Hardiman

Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/26/97 from Quote of the Day

 

Many of the requirements of graduate education ...are "dragons."

Dragons have no purpose except to be slain; that is, they are tests of

motivation to prove how difficult it is to get knighthood (or the

valuable doctorate) and, therefore, how valuable those people must be

who already have it (the faculty).

-- Mills (1953) cited by Karon, 1995 in "Becoming a

First-Rate Professional Psychologist Despite Graduate

Education."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/28/97 from George Ruben

 

Women need a reason to have sex--men just need a place.

-- Billy Crystal.

 

I love the lines the men use to get us into bed. 'Please, I'll only

put it in for a minute.' What am I, a microwave?

-- Beverly Mickins (American comedienne)

 

Do you know why God withheld the sense of humor from

women? So that we may love you instead of laugh at you.

-- Mrs. Patrick Campbell (English actress)

 

There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men don't

think there's a lot they don't know. Women do. Women want to

learn. Men think, 'I know what i'm doing, just show me somebody

naked.

-- Jerry Seinfeld

 

March isn't the only thing that's in like a lion, out like a lamb.

-- Anonymous

 

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses

hers after four kisses

-- H.L. Mencken (American writer, 1888-1956)

 

When women hold off from marrying men, we call it independence.

When men hold off from marrying women, we call it fear of

commitment

-- Warren Farrell (American Psychologist)

 

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let

her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

-- Lyndon B. Johnson

 

Why get married and make one man miserable when I can stay single

and make thousands miserable?

-- Carrie Snow

 

God made man before woman to give him time to think of an answer for her first question

-- Anonymous

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/29/97 from Quote of the Day

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an

election.

-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-98)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

4/29/97 from Jerry Seinfeld's SeinLanguage

Frankly, I don't believe people think of their office as a workplace anyway. I think they think of it as a stationery store with Danish. You want to get your pastry, your envelopes, your supplies, your toilet paper, six cups of coffee, and go home.

-- Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage, Bantam Books (1993)

 

Seems to me the basic conflict between men and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To us, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we're doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They're very exciting, but the conditions have to be just right for it to occur.

-- Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage, Bantam Books (1993)

 

Men and women, all in all, behave just like our basic sexual elements. If you watch single men on a weekend night they really act very much like sperm -- all disorganized, bumping into their friends, swimming in the wrong directtion. "I was first." "Let me through." "You're on my tail." "That's my spot." We're like the Three Billion Stooges. But the egg is very cool: "Well, who's it going to be? I can divide. I can wait a month. I'm not swimming anywhere."

-- Jerry Seinfeld, SeinLanguage, Bantam Books (1993)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

1/97 from Susan Weintraub (and Quote of the Day)

 

If we knew what it was we were doing it would not be called research, would it?

-- Alfred Einstein

 

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

-- John Andrew Holme

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Quote of the Day (5/2/97)

From: Mark Hahn <mhahn@fir.fbc.com>

 

Every time you turn on your new car, you're turning on 20

microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you're using a

computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I'm using a

computer. The only computer you don't know how to work is your

Microsoft computer, right?

-- Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc., from

an April 1997 interview in Upside Magazine

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Mari Shine (5/2/97)

 

I figured out a great way to solve the problem of visiting relatives.

I borrow money from the rich ones, I give it to the poor ones, and

none of them ever come back!

-- Milton Berle

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Quote of the Day (5/3/97)

 

I can only pray that your personal magnetism won't erase my hard

drive.

-- Alice to Wally in the comic strip "Dilbert" 11/20/96

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Quote of the Day (5/5/97)

 

The thunder is trying to take pictures.

-- James Francis, age 4, during a July 1996 thunder and

hail storm in south west Calgary.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Quote of the day (5/8/97)

From: Susan Weintraub <SBWeintraub@LBL.gov (6/6/96)

 

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because

I hate plants."

-- A. Whitney Brown

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Mani Iyer, LSU (oriyer@unix1.sncc.lsu.edu) (5/8/97)

 

He who talks by the YARD and works by the INCH deserves to be kicked by the FOOT.

-- anonymous proverb

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/9/97 from Harold Federow

 

1. The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and

stupidity.

 

2. If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

 

3. Money can't buy happiness. But it sure makes misery easier to live

with.

 

4. It has recently been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

 

5. Always remember to pillage before you burn.

 

6. The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody

appreciates how difficult it was.

 

7. It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a

warning to others.

 

8. If "clothes maketh the man" then it follows that naked people have

little or no influence on society.

 

9. Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you

can't find them.

 

10. The law of Probability Dispersal decrees that whatever it is

that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

 

11. Indecision is the key to flexibility.

 

12. There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.

 

13. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

 

14. The facts, although interesting, are usually irrelevant.

 

15. The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

 

16. Things are more like they are today than they ever have been

before.

 

17. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

 

18. Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

 

19. All things being equal, fat people use more soap.

 

20. If you can smile when things go wrong then you have someone in

mind to blame.

 

21. One-seventh of life is spent on Monday.

 

22. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.

 

23. This is as bad as it can get -- but don't bet on it.

 

24. Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty but only the pig enjoys

it.

 

25. The trouble with life is that you are halfway through it before you

realize it's a "do it yourself" thing.

 

26. Drink varnish and you'll have a lovely finish.

 

27. We can sympathize with a child who is afraid of the dark, but the

tragedy of life is that most people are afraid of the light.

 

28. If only the good die young then what does that say about senior

citizens?

 

29. Employ teenagers - while they know everything.

 

30. The best antiques are old friends.

 

31. Down with gravity!

 

32. Nobody's perfect and since I'm nobody...!

 

33. People who eat natural foods die from natural causes.

 

34. Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?

 

35. Some day my ship will come in, but with my luck, I'll be at the

airport.

 

36. Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind then it really

doesn't matter.

 

37. A friend in need may turn out to be a nuisance.

 

38. When the cat's away there are fewer hairs on the armchair.

 

39. An expert is nothing more than an ordinary person away from

home.

 

40. If you can't be kind, be vague.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/10/97 from Quote of the Day

 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. We give them a nice Jewish boy

to worship, five books -- no charge. And what do we get in return?

Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust. And now they

want us to join them in heaven? I'll take hell any day!"

-- Harriet Levenbaum Kean shares reactions to the

Southern Baptists' resolution to convert the Jews in

a letter to the editor of the New York Times

Magazine 1997-May-04 .

 

5/11/97 from Quote of the Day

From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>

 

Newton's proof of the "law of ellipses" marked the culmination of the

Scientific Revolution. Feynman's own version of it -- he claims he

couldn't quite follow Newton's -- is "elementary" in that it requires

only high-school geometry and an infinite amount of intelligence.

-- WSJ, 6/19/96, a review of "Feynman's Lost Lecture"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/12/97 from Harold Federow

 

They're multipurpose. Not only do they put the clips on, but

they take them off.

-- Pratt & Whitney spokesperson explaining why the

company charged the Air Force nearly $1000 for an

ordinary pair of pliers.

 

The President has kept all of the promises he intended to

keep.

-- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on

Larry King Live

 

I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our

papers. We are the president.

-- Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of

subpoenaed documents

 

We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.

-- Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks

 

When more and more people are thrown out of work,

unemployment results,

-- Former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge

 

It's like deja vu all over again.

-- Yogi Berra

 

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese

-- Former French President Charles De Gaulle

 

That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a

jack*ss, and I'm just the one to do it.

-- A congressional candidate in Texas

 

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I

have to beat somebody.

-- Richard M. Nixon

 

A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real

money.

-- Everett Dirksen

 

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.

-- Samuel Goldwyn

 

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away

from them. There were great numbers of people who needed

new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for

themselves.

-- John Wayne

 

Half this game is ninety percent mental.

-- Philadelphia Phillies manager Danny Ozark

 

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the

public mind.

-- General William Westmoreland

 

If you let that sort of thing go on, your bread and butter will be

cut right out from under your feet.

-- Former British foreign minister Ernest Bevin

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/14/97 from Quote of the Day

 

OBJECT is derived from the Latin neuter of "obicere", meaning to throw in the way, to hinder.

 

ORIENT is derived from the Latin "oriri", to rise, thus [archaic] LUSTROUS, SPARKLING

 

Thus, OBJECT-ORIENTED must mean "A glitzy thing that hinders and gets in the way".

-- Andrew Appel <appel@CS.Princeton.EDU> on the

object-oriented programming fad.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Heather Pinto (5/14/97)

From: Allen and Jeannie Brown (5/14/97)

 

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is

to buy a replacement.

 

Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

 

One good turn gets most of the blankets.

 

There are two kinds of pedestrians -- the quick and the dead.

 

Life is sexually transmitted.

 

An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.

 

If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool

who said "Quit while you're ahead"?

 

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

 

Willie was a Chemist, But Willie is no more, What Willie thought was

H20 Was H2SO4.

 

A closed mouth gathers no feet.

 

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

 

It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere.

 

Jury -- Twelve people who determine which client has the better

lawyer.

 

Never lick a gift horse in the mouth.

 

The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

 

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

 

Before marriage, a man yearns for the woman he loves.

After marriage, the 'Y' becomes silent.

 

If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every

word you say, talk in your sleep.

 

No good deed goes unpunished.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/14/97 from Russ Curry

 

How can satire enlighten when reality keeps outrunning it?

-- Stan Freburg

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/15/97 from Quote of the Day

 

If you take the highest view of marriage, as a Divine relation, which love alone can constitute and sanctify, then of course human legislation can only recognize it.--Man can neither bind or loose its ties, for that prerogative belongs to God alone, who makes man and woman, and the laws of attraction by which they are united. But if you regard marriage as a civil contract, then let it be subject to the same laws which control all other contracts. Do not make it a kind of half-human, half-divine institution which you may build up but cannot regulate. Do not, by your special legislation for this kind of contract, involve yourselves in the grossest absurdities and contradictions.

-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1854

 

Everytime you meet a situation, though you think at the time it is an

impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you

have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are

freer than you were before.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Honesty may not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in

a while.

-- former U.S. President and exceptionally dishonest

person Richard Nixon, as reported by Herbert Stein,

Chairman of the President's Council of Economic

Advisors under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/15/97 from Mari Shine

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

-- Confucius

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/15/97 from Ralph Slepecky

 

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not

reached their level of incompetence.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/22/97 from Ron Riley

 

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

-- George Santayana (1863), U.S. philosopher and poet

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/27/97 from Arik Samson

A penny saved may be a penny earned, but it's a waste of a deposit slip and really pisses off the teller.

 

Is sex dirty? Only if done correctly.

 

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.

 

If you can't say something nice about someone, you're probably not alone.

 

Just when you think you're alone, the phone rings.

 

I may be schizophrenic, but at least I'll always have each other.

 

I'm not opinionated. I'm just always right.

 

Never buy a pitbull from a one-armed man.

 

Sex is not the answer...Sex is the question. YES is the answer!!!

 

Lady Astor: If I were your wife, I'd poison your tea.

Winston Churchill: If I were your husband, I'd drink it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Chris Walker (5/29/97)

Quotes by no one in particular

Basic Truisms

 

Dickson's Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure

you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it

comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

 

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a

replacement.

 

Sex is like air; it's not important unless you aren't getting any.

 

Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.

 

One good turn gets most of the blankets.

 

There are two kinds of pedestrians -- the quick and the dead.

 

Life is sexually transmitted.

 

An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.

 

If quitters never win, and winners never cheat, then who is the fool

who said "Quit while you're ahead"?

 

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

 

Willie was a Chemist, But Willie is no more, What Willie thought was

H20 Was H2SO4.

 

A closed mouth gathers no feet.

 

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

 

It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere.

 

Jury -- Twelve people who determine which client has the better

lawyer.

 

Never lick a gift horse in the mouth.

 

The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

 

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second

marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.

 

Before marriage, a man yearns for the woman he loves. After

marriage, the 'Y' becomes silent.

 

If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word

you say, talk in your sleep.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/2/97 from http://www.georgetown.edu/grad/CCT/505/platosel.html

 

..this discovery.. will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories, but, trusting in external, [images] they will not bring things to remembrance from within themselves.

-- [Did you guess this was about TV? Nope. Socrates

was complaining about writing as being a

pernicious invention that would ruin the people.]

 

[This invention] offer[s] your students the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

-- Socrates: Selected passages on writing. Based on

the Jowett translation of Plato's, Phaedrus;

updated by Martin Irvine, 1996

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Bill Kaghan (kaghan@u.washington.edu) (6/2/97)

 

[An abstract term] both widens the scope of thought and clouds it. An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, arguing that democrats have

a special taste for abstract terms.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/3/97 from R chadwick (:rjchadwi@olympic.ctc.edu)

 

If Con is the opposite of Pro, Is Congress the Opposite of Progress?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/3/97 from Chris Walker

 

One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with in the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.

-- Jean Louis Gassee (was CEO of Apple, Inc.) on the

Apple Logo

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/3/97 from Quote of the Day

 

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it."

-- Ellen Goodman

 

Remember, we're not supporting the Cuban economy, merely burning their fields.

-- Kinky Friedman at the White House on Jan 9, 1997

on presenting a Cuban cigar to President Clinton.

 

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

-- Goethe

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/14/97 QOTD Submitted by: Rick Sayre (whorfin@pixar.com)

 

It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that `hesitating at the angles of stairs' the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

-- Maurice Wilkes, programmer for the first

stored-program computer, the EDSAC (first

operational in 1949), from Computer: A History of

the Information Machine

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/10/97 from Gregg Kyle

 

Men! You can't live with them and you can't (1) dip them in batter for

tempura, (2) use them for collateral on a loan, (3) put in new batteries.

-- "Sylvia" (comic strip by Nicole Hollander)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/12/97 from Russ Curry

 

Res ipsa loquitor

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/18/97 from Quote of the Day

Submitted by: clawson@jungle.achilles.net (Chris Lawson)

 

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864, in a

letter to Col. William F. Elkins [Ref: "The Lincoln

Encyclopedia", Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950,

NY)]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/20/97 from Quote of the Day

 

We used to take acid. Now we take antacid."

-- Jerry Jeff Walker laments how the aging process

changes one's recreational drug of choice, 1991

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Mari Shine (6/27/97)

 

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

-- Edward Gibbon

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Quote of the Day (6/27/97)

It`s a centrist government, a government that thinks the sun rises in

Quebec and sets in Ontario.

-- Gordon Wilson,leader of the British Columbia

Progressive Democratic Alliance and Member of

the Legislature, on Canada's present federal

government. [for non-Canadians, there are four

provinces east of Quebec and four west of Ontario.]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Cynthia Powers (6/27/97)

 

Liberty is better served by presenting a clear target to one's opponents

than by joining with them in an insincere and useless brotherliness.

-- Benedetto Croce

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

6/27/97 from Arik Samson

 

The WRITING ON THE WALL means the kids have found the crayons

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From QOTD (7/1/97)

Submitted by: Ralph Adam Fine <raf@solaria.sol.net> (4/27/97)

 

How long will it be before ... the man sitting in London will see all things passing in Asia, or whenever it pleases him or an agent to turn a mirror on a view? It will be. Or how long before the discovery of cheap and perfect aerial navigation will change society and annihilate national distinctions? That, too, will be. These and a thousand stranger discoveries will during the ensuing century burst upon the world, changing it utterly.

-- Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune

Telling (1891)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Eleanor Musick (5/22/96)

From: DHUYNH@marasconewton.com (5/22/96)

 

1 - Indecision is the key to flexibility.

 

2 - You cannot tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

 

3 - There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.

 

4 - Happiness is merely the remission of pain.

 

5 - Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

 

6 - Sometimes too much drink is not enough.

 

7 - The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.

 

8 - The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

 

9 - Someone who thinks logically is a nice contrast to the real world.

 

10 - Things are more like they are today than they ever have been before.

 

11 - Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for.

 

12 - Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

 

13 - Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

 

14 - I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.

 

15 - Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.

 

16 - All things being equal, fat people use more soap.

 

17 - If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.

 

18 - One-seventh of your life is spent on Monday.

 

19 - By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.

 

20 - Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.

 

21 - The more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.

 

22 - There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.

 

23 - This is as bad as it can get, but don't bet on it.

 

24 - Never wrestle with a pig: You both get all dirty, and the pig likes it.

 

25 - The trouble with life is, you're halfway through it before you realize it's a 'do it yourself' thing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: QOTD (7/2/97)

 

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly."

-- Oscar Wilde

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From QOTD (7/10/97)

From Glenn Miles (12/22/96)

 

An ounce of pretention is worth a pound of fact.

-- Glenn Miles (gmiles@yknet.yk.ca)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From George Ruben (7/10/97)

 

The test of leadership is not whether you have problems; it's

whether you have the same problems you had last year.

-- Winston Churchill

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Martha Luehrmann (7/14/97)

From Quote of the Day (7/12/97)

From Terry Labach (terry@ensu.ucalgary.ca) (7/10/97)

 

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer

had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems

to to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

-- computer science legend Donald E. Knuth on why

he no longer uses email

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/14/97 from QOTD

 

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability

to know, but as the essence of knowing.

-- James Gliek describing Feynman in "The Life and

Science of RichardFeynman"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From Trice Bryan (7/16/97)

 

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

-- Dorothy Parker, when asked to use the word

"horticulture" in a sentence.

 

I always keep a supply of stimulant on hand in case I see a snake,

which I also keep handy.

-- WC Fields

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: QOTD (7/20/97)

From: Ofer Inbar <cos@cs.brandeis.edu> (5/13/97)

 

It is all bad ... They are making it a breeding place for future war.

-- Edward Mandell House, adviser to President

Wilson, upon seeing secret French and British

plans for partition of the Middle East after World

War I. [May, 1917. Quoted in "A Peace to End All

Peace", Fromkin]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/21/97 from Bartletts On-Line (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett)

 

What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

-- Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, chap. x.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Froms: Ken's Favourite Quotes (http://www.dstc.qut.edu.au/~baker/www/home/quotes.html) (7/21/97)

 

Here are a few of the quotes that I have picked up from around the place, some humourous, some serious, some half and half, .... Anyhow these are some quotes that I liked when I saw them.

 

In the long run there can be no high politics unless all parties have a sense of direction. We need to return to politics as a clash of principles, and to get away from the notion that it is a clash only of warring personalities.

-- Sir Robert Menzies, 1946

 

Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're ok, you're it.

-- Anonymous

 

Freedom is not going out and doing what you want to do. Anyone can do that, and lots of people are doing it. Freedom is to have the power to do what you know you ought to. Most people know what they ought to do, but they don't have the power to do it.

-- Josh McDowell (P363: Evidence that demands a

Verdict)

 

Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, 'Where did I go wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

-- Charlie Brown

 

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

-- Abraham Lincoln

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: MRLuehrmann@LBL.gov (8/7/97) to Techno-L

From Jeff Weiner (7/25/97)

 

We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

-- Petronius Arbiter 210 B.C.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From http://materials.ecn.purdue.edu/~falatic/quotes-main.html

When a thing has been said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

-- Anatole France (1844-1924)

 

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature....Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.

-- Helen Keller

 

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

-- seen on IRC

 

How glorious it is -- and also how painful -- to be an exception.

-- Alfred de Musset

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: QOTD (7/22/97)

From: Alex Harvey <harvey@seymour.acf.nyu.edu> (11/25/96)

From: Richard Ellman's "James Joyce"

 

No, I'm a Jesuit.

-- James Joyce on being asked if he was a Catholic

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

5/16/97 from David G. Post

 

It is time we take our ignorance more seriously.

-- F. Hayek

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/28/97 from QOTD

 

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep

him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/29/97 from Arik Samson

 

I put my suitcase down, looked up at the Sears Tower and said: 'Chicago, here I am, and I'm gonna conquer you.' Then I looked down, and my suitcase was gone.

-- Scottie Pippen

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/30/97 from QOTD

 

Some people feel that life is not challenging enough all by itself, and feel that they should make life more difficult for themselves since they have it so easy. The best way to do this, of course, is to major in physics.

-- physics major at Wesleyan University responding

to a question posed at the end of her first semester

of Quantum Mechanics, "Why would anyone

major in physics"?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/29/97 from Michael Carter

(I think there is a profound lesson here, but it eludes me.)

 

If we gave tickets to everybody who broke the law, we'd have no time to fight crime.

-- said 7/26/97 by the Chief of Police of the city of San

Francisco, a propos the rioting Critical Mass

bicyclists of that fair city:

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

7/31/97 from

 

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

-- Sir Joshua Reynolds---

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: QOTD (8/2/97)

From: Matthew Sloan" <sloanm@nassau.navy.mil> (4/11/97)

 

Young people should be out complicating their lives. It will give them something to talk to their therapist about.

-- Suzanne Zamora

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Ted Nellen (tnellen@mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us) (7/28/97)

 

We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history.

-- anonymous

 

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

-- Shakespeare

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: QOTD (8/7/97)

From: feren@ctron.com (Andrew C. Feren) (5/14/97)

 

Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory.

-- Warren Buffett on how the academic community

regards his investment approach.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

8/8/97 from Mari Shine

 

'Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails

-- Mark Twain

 

Go out and live life - otherwise you won't have anything to talk about in the locker room."

-- Ruth Gordon in "Harold and Maude"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Overby (3/20/97)

 

God does not play dice with the universe.

-- Albert Einstein

 

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

-- Albert Einstein

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

-- Albert Einstein

 

There are people with no more brains than you, but they have

one thing you don't have . . . they have a diploma!

-- The Wizard to the scarecrow in the "Wizard

of Oz"

 

Mathematics: That branch of Human Thought which takes a finite set of trivial axioms and maps them to a countably infinite set of unintuitive theorems.

 

Computer Science is nothing more than the study of patterns of 0s and 1s

-- Donald Knuth

 

The difference between art and science is that science is what we

understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.

-- D. E. Knuth

 

The use of COBOL criples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

-- E. W. Dijkstra

 

No manager would want a first generation vacuum tube computer, yet few are willing to part with the first generation programming languages such as FORTRAN

-- M. T. Devlin Introducing Ada: Problems and

Potentials

 

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

 

The steady state of disks is full.

-- Ken Thompson

 

The right half the brain controls the left half of the body.

This means that only left handed people are in their right mind.

 

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

 

If at first you don't succeed, try reading the directions.

-- Anonymous

 

"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.

-- Mark Twain

 

Nuclear war doesn't prove who's Right, just who's Left

-- ABC news 10/13/87

 

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

-- Albert Einstein.

 

There is always a better way.

-- Thomas Edison

 

We have met the enemy and he is us.

-- Pogo

 

Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth.

Socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.

 

You're lying on your back...thirty- five stories in the air...on top of six million pounds of parts and fuel... all submitted by the lowest bidder.

-- John Young when asked what it felt like

before an Apollo launch

 

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

-- Jeremy S. Anderson

 

Beware: free advice is often overpriced!

 

Don't tell anyone, but duct tape is The Force. It has a dark side, and a light side, and it binds the Universe together.

 

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

-- Aldous Huxley

 

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

-- Winston Churchill's Commentary on Man

 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

-- Edmund Burke, in a letter to William

Smith.

 

Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.

-- Russian Proverb

 

No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.

-- C. Schulz

 

Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously;

and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work

seriously.

-- Booth Tarkington

 

When in doubt, tell the truth.

-- Mark Twain

 

SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!"

-- Ken Thompson

 

"People these days are reluctant to read the canonical texts, but they love fiction. Not all fiction, mind you, for they are sick of exemplary themes and far prefer the obscene and fantastic. How low contemporary morals have sunk! Anyone concerned about public morality will want to retrieve the situation."

-- Li Yu, in The Carnal Prayer Mat, c. 1657 A.D.

 

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.

-- Joseph Weizenbaum

 

He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.

-- George Bernard Shaw.

 

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it will force those who fear it to imitate it."

-- Hitler

 

The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of

tyrants and patriots alike. It is its natural manure."

-- Thomas Jefferson

 

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

-- George Will in an interview on WSB Radio

 

I do not have signature authority. I am not authorized to sign anything. I am not authorized to commit the BRL, the DA, the DOD, or the US Government to anything, not even by implication. They do not tell me what their policy is. They may not have one.

-- Irving L. Chidsey

 

"If you have not done these things, you should.

These things are fun, and fun is good."

-- Dr. Seuss

 

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

 

More things are explained by incompetence than by conspiracy.

-- Arthur Luehrmann

 

Last time I tried to eat a Dodge Omni, it damn near ran me over!

-- Josh Fielek, when told that most people are

omnivores

 

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

-- Galileo Galilei

 

Information Superhighway is really an acronym for "Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing, And Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebelious Human Intellegence, Gratifying Hackers, Wisacres, And Yahoos."

-- Keven Kwaku, published in PC Magazine,

July 1994, Vol 13.

 

Change is the price of survival

-- Gary Player (refering to South Africa)

 

Aibohphobia (n.): the fear of palindromes.

-- A. Bierce

 

for all we know, this is just an elaborite simulation running in a cube on someone's desk.

-- Captain Jean-Luke Picard (ST:ng)

 

Take a lesson from the whale: the only time he gets speared is when he raises to spout.

-- Recent fortune cookie:

 

In ten years, computers will just be bumps in cables.

-- Gordon Bell (noted 11 Feb 1990)

 

A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.

-- S. C. Johnson

 

You know your really somebody in the software world when Richard Stallman complains about you having a gratuitous patent.

-- Matthew Jones (jonesm@cerf.net)

 

Dumme Gedanken hat jeder, doch der Weise verschweight sie.

-- Wilhelm Busch

 

In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late.

-- Bruce Sterling, on computers replacing drugs

 

Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.

-- Gary Fowler

 

there's a fine line between participation and mockery

-- Dilbert 1/27/95

 

Hardware is ephemeral; software is massively inertial.

-- David Wallace

 

We have them right where they want us

-- Captain Kirk in Star Trek: the movie

 

Let us begin by approximating a Cow as a hollow sphere completely filled with milk.

-- Physicist giving a lecture to the Dairy Assn.

 

It's been said that the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes, but you can file for an extension on taxes :-)

 

There is very little grownup in a child, but a lot of child in a grownup

-- Walt Disney

 

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.'

-- "Mostly Harmless" (5th book in the "Hitch

Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy) by

Douglas Adams, Heinemann, London, 1992,

ISBN 0434 00926 1

 

Oh, well, I guess this is just going to be one of those lifetimes.

 

Have you ever noticed that the people who are always trying to tell you, "There's a time for work and a time for play," never find the time for play?

 

"I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."

 

The reasonable man conforms himself to his environment. The unreasonable man conforms his environment to himself. Therefore all change depends on the unreasonable man.

 

If you steal from 1 you are plagarizing If you steal from 10 you are doing research If you steal from 100 you are an expert.

-- B Delaney

 

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may

steal the whole railroad.

-- Theodore Roosevelt

 

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.

-- Isaac Newton

 

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

-- Hal Abelson

 

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.

-- Brian K. Reed

 

It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress.

-- Samuel Langhorne Clemens

 

I have become death, shatterer of worlds

-- Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bahatbah at

-- the first testing of the atom bomb

 

And if someone breaks into my computer again? Oh, I doubt I'll bother. The first time it's research. The second time is just engineering.

-- Clifford Stoll in Byte

 

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

-- Thomas Edison

 

The Circus Theory of Project Management: If you have too many balls in the air, throw one to some other clown...

 

When a venture capitalist looks at a new company, the first thing they look at is management. The second thing they look at is finance. The third thing they look at is technology. If the management isn't there, they don't go any further. And that kills more new ideas than anything else.

-- Chris Willard,Manager High-Performance

Technologies, International Data Corp.

 

A momentary lapse of stupidity.

-- Dean Roehrich

 

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

-- Lewis Carrol

 

Software is like Entropy: it's hard to grasp, weighs nothing and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e. it always increases.

-- Norman Augustine

 

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From: LaughWeb (8/11/97)

 

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.

-- Dave Olson

 

[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

-- Joseph Campbell

 

So much work to do, so few adults to do it.

-- Paul Pomes

 

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his

own facts.

-- Patrick Moynihan

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8/12/97 from QOTD

From: SFSal@aol.com (7/8/97)

From: Charles H. Steen <steen@netcom.com>

 

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon

constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes;

believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men

and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can

save it ...

-- Learned Hand

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I never hold a grudge -- as soon as I get even with the S.O.B., I forget it.

-- W.C. Field

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8/12/97 from Arik Samson

 

PLEASE ENGAGE BRAIN BEFORE SPEAKING

 

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.

-- Mariah Carey

 

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?

Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.

-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest

 

Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana.... The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are.

-- Matt Lauer on NBC's Today show, August 22

 

I haven't committed a crime.

What I did was fail to comply with the law.

-- David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering

accusations that he failed to pay his taxes.

 

Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.

-- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become

spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign.

 

I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.

-- Winston Bennett, U. of Kentucky basketball star

 

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

-- Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC

 

Beginning in February 1976 your assistance benefits will be discontinued .... Reason: it has been reported to our office that you expired on January 1, 1976.

-- Letter from the Illinois Department of Public Aid

 

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history... this century's history.... We all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

-- Dan Quayle, then Indiana senator and Republican

VP candidate during a news conference

 

Rotarians, be patriotic! Learn to shoot yourself.

-- Chicago Rotary Club journal, "Gyrator"

 

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them less safe.

-- Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Phila. PA

 

I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.

-- Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World

Bank, explaining why we should export toxic

wastes to Third World countries.

 

After finding no qualified candidates for the position of principal, the school board is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of David Steele to the post.

-- Philip Streifer, Superintendent of Schools,

Barrington, Rhode Island.

 

The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.

-- Dizzy Dean explaining how he felt after being hit

on the head by a ball in the 1934 World Series.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

8/12/97 from Arik Samson

 

Outside the dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside the dog, it's to dark to read.

-- Groucho Marx

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

8/12/97 all from http://www.bmacleod.com/groucho.html

They are all Groucho Marx quotes

 

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

 

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

 

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

 

You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it.

 

A man's only as old as the woman he feels.

 

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

 

Why, I'd horse-whip you if I had a horse.

 

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

 

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

 

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

 

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

 

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.

 

Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honour; which is probably more than she ever did.

 

Women should be obscene and not heard.

 

Time wounds all heels.

 

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

 

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From WatchfulEye Quotations () (8/12/97)

 

All Quotes from Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

 

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

 

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

 

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach.

 

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

 

Nature abhors a moron.

 

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

 

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.

 

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

 

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

 

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

 

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

 

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

 

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

 

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

 

...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...

 

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

 

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

 

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

 

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

 

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

 

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

 

Remorse--Regret that one waited so long to do it.

 

...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

 

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

 

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

 

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

 

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

 

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.

 

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

 

A man may be a fool and not know it -- but not if he is married.

 

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

 

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

 

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

 

Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

 

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

 

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

 

A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know.

 

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

 

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

 

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

 

Lawyer: One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

 

Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.

 

Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

 

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

 

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

 

Tis more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.

 

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

 

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

 

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

 

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

 

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

 

Jealousy: The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

 

Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

 

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

 

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

 

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

 

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

 

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

 

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

 

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

 

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

 

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

 

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

 

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

 

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

 

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

 

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

 

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

 

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

 

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

 

The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

 

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

 

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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The ones below have been put into Quotable Quotes:

 

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch

 

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.

-- Salvador Dali

 

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've

always worked for me.

-- Hunter S. Thompson

 

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

-- Mark Twain

 

"Time's fun when you're having flies."

-- Kermit the Frog

 

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then

a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."

-- Charlie Brown, "Peanuts" Charles Schulz

 

Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.

 

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent

revolution inevitable.

-- John F. Kennedy

 

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective

as their stringent execution."

-- Ulysses S Grant, Inaugural Address, 1869

 

If You Don't Want it Printed, Don't Let it Happen

-- Aspen, Colo., Daily News

 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

 

 

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