Subjects

Philosophy

"Life is like Stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink"

 -- Suzuki Roshi, Zen master

"May you live in interesting times, and attract the attention of important people."

 -- Full version of famous chinese curse

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

 -- Bertrand Russell

"Some would sooner die than think.  In fact, they often do."

 -- Bertrand Russell

"you are what you don't shit"

 -- Wavy Gravy

"And life itself confided this secret to me:  'Behold, it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.  Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold...."

 -- Thus Spake Zarathustra II 12

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

-- Aristotle

"If you don't like the emotional experience you're having, change your mind"

-- Peter Russel peterrussell.com

Politics

 -- George Bush I

 -- George Bush I

"Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

 -- George Bush I discussing a Walter Mondale comment that he didn't have the manhood to apologize for an incorrect assertion

"My calander is a little crowded." 

"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."

 -- Frederic Bastiat

"Anarchy means having to put up with things that really piss you off."

 -- Unknown

"psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them"

 -- Dr. Timothy Leary

"Democracy is the worst system possible except for any other."

 -- Winston Churchal

-- Winston Churchill

 -- Winston Churchill

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

 -- G. B. Shaw

"Cyanide is a scare word."

 -- Director of the Texas Water Quality Board

"It just makes good sense to put all your eggs in one basket."

 -- Texas Rep. Joe Salem speaking on an amendment requiring all revenues to go into the state treasury

"Ain't nothin' in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

 -- Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower

"And now, will y'all stand and be recognized?"

 -- Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis to a group of handicapped people in wheelchairs

"No thanks, once was enough."

 -- Texas Governor Bill Clements, asked if he had been born again

"I am filled with humidity."

 -- Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis

"You can teach 'em to type, but you can't teach 'em to grow tits."

 -- Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson, speaking on secretaries

 -- Ronald Reagan

-- Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower discussing President George Bush's policies

"There's a lot of uncertainty that's not clear in my mind."

 -- Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis

"This bill, if passed, will derail the ship of state."

 -- Speaker of the New York Assembly Stanley Steingut

"What is scattered to the wind here is just a drop in the bucket."

 -- member of New York City Council

"As we debate this bill, the sword of Damocles is hanging over Pandora's box."

 -- member of New York City Council

Technology

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

--Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Never mistake a clear view for a short distance"

 -- Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future

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

--Donald Knuth

"We cannot predict where, ultimately, the Computer Revolution will take us. All we know for certain is that, when we finally get there, we won't have enough RAM."

 -- Dave Barry

"I admit that when I was in school I wrote COBOL. But I didn't compile."

 -- bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

 -- Bill Gates 1981

"A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library."

  -- F. H. Westheimer

"Computers are useless. All they can do is give you answers."

 -- Pablo Picasso

"Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine

1. didn't work,
2. didn't do what the expensive advertisement said,
3. electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood,
4. and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it,

this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches."

 --Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

"Do not go gentle into that long, dark night but rage, rage against the dying of the light."

 -- Dylan Thomas

"Zero defects: The result of shutting down a production line."

 -- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary"

"There are bugs and then there are bugs.  And then there are bugs."

 -- Karl Lehenbauer

"A Consultant is a guy who knows 125 different ways to make love, but who doesn't know any women."

 -- Mark Russell

"I took the battle against the BASIC language. I did this because I felt that the kids using BASIC on the Apple II and IBM's new PC were being taught archaic mind tools to solve problems.  A new alternative had appeared on the scene, a computer language called Logo. I wrote Digital Research Logo, or Dr. Logo, as it came to be called.  Logo taught kids how to think about solving complex problems.

Logo became popular among a largish cult group of teachers that were computer literate, and I believe their students gained significant mind tools.  But, in reality, most teachers found
themselves racing to catch up with their brightest students and found solace in using BASIC.
This is not a comment about inadequacies in our educational system.  It is a comment about the times.  I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language.

It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds."

 -- Gary Kildal

"When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb."

 -- Steve Haflich (smh@Franz.COM)

"We're going to have tentacles into the PC-buying community that are going to get us closer and closer to the right answers,"

 -- Andrew Grove, Intel's CEO speaking on the Pentium math errors

"Each time you toss out a "singing" greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950."

 -- Paul Saffo, futurist

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

 -- Charles Babbage

Humor

"A witty saying proves nothing."

-- Voltaire

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

 -- Woody Allen

"As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons."

 -- Dave Barry

"When you're swimming in the creek
And an eel bites your cheek,
That's a moray!"

 -- Fabulous Furry Freak Bros.

"A day without sunshine is like night."

 -- Unknown

"Fruitcake is like semen, there's a lot of it about but no one wants to swallow it".

 -- Oscar Wilde

"The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club.  Once tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding."

 -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"

"NASA should not be allowed to operate in a vacuum".

 -- Editorial, Aviation Week & Space Technology, 2/2/87

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All these memories will be lost in time,
like tears in rain."

 -- Roy Baty, Blade Runner

"I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you."

 -- Unknown.

"There are still places where people think that the function of the media is to provide information."

 -- Don Rottenberg

"Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it.  Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased."

 --Samuel Johnson

"I'm Buh-ish, which is a cross between Buhdist and Jewish. That's where you sit and wait for things to go on sale."

 --Robin Williams

"Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of social intercourse."

 -- Unknown

"The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than in theory."

 -- Unknown

 
"In theory, theory and practice are the same thing, but in practice they're not."

-- Unknown

"Definition of a hermaphrodite: a bisexual built for two."

 -- Jeff Daiell

"All I ask of my body is that it carry around my head."

 -- Thomas Alva Edison

"It is up to us to produce better-quality movies."

 -- Lloyd Kaufman, producer of _Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator_

"Gosh, math is hard!"

 -- Talking Barbie

"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

 -- Unknown

"Style distinguishes excellence from accomplishment"

 -- J. Coplien

"You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine."

 --Willy Brandt

"Never let your schooling interfere with your education"

 -- Mark Twain

"But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who as a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey.  Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented.  But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit:  the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases."

 -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

"Fornicate and take drugs against the terrible strain of idiots who govern the world."

 -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology

"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving a baby's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base."

 -- Dave Barry

"You can fool too many people too much of the time."

 -- James Thurber

"Anarchy may not be the best form of government but it's better than no government at all."

-- Unknown

"God made pot.  Man made beer.  Whom do you trust?"

 -- The Irish Times, Washington, D.C.

"If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either."

 --Dick Cavett

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

 -- Jules Renard

"If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting."

 -- Wally "Famous" Amos [Also paraphrased as "If we don't change where we're headed, we'll eventually wind up where we're going..." as found here.]

"Adventure is a sign of incompetence."

    -- Vilhjalmar Stefansson.


Life is a disease, sexually transmitted and fatal.

- Neil Gaiman