Kuchling Quotations
The quotations
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch's _Meglos_
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has
made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad
move.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_
A book of quotations. . . can never be complete.
-- ROBERT M. HAMILTON
-- Preface, _Canadian Quotations and Phrases: Literary
and Historical_ (1952)
Perhaps the reader may ask, of what consequence is it whether the
author's exact language is preserved or not, provided we have his
thought? The answer is, that inaccurate quotation is a sin against
truth. It may appear in any particular instance to be a trifle, but
perfection consists in small things, and perfection is no trifle.
-- ROBERT W. SHAUNON
-- ``Misquotation,'' _The Canadian Magazine_, October
1898
Try to learn something about everything and everything about
something.
-- T.H. HUXLEY
In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should
point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from
revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny
never fails to generate them.
-- PIERRE TRUDEAU
-- ``When the People Are in Power'' (1958)
He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
-- M.C. ESCHER
The most merciful thing in the world. . . is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- H.P. LOVECRAFT
He did not mean to be cruel. If anybody had called him so, he would
have resented it extremely. He would have said that what he did was
done entirely for the good of the country. But he was a man who had
always been accustomed to consider himself first and foremost,
believing that whatever he wanted was sure to be right, and therefore
he ought to have it. So he tried to get it, and got it too, as people
like him very often do. Whether they enjoy it when they have it is
another question.
-- DINAH CRAIK
-- _The Little Lame Prince_
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to
appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your
theory.
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
-- GEORGE WALD
Government, today, is growing too strong to be safe. There are no
longer any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work
day in and day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their
masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less
and less.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
One trouble with being efficient is that it makes everybody hate you
so.
-- BOB EDWARDS
-- The Calgary Eyeopener, March 18, 1916
ABROAD, adj. At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad
is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others
miserable.
-- AMBROSE BIERCE
-- _The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary_
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
-- TALLULAH BANKHEAD
It is easy---terribly easy---to shake a man's faith in himself. To take
advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work. Take care of
what you are doing. Take care.
-- G.B. SHAW
-- _Candida_
It is ordinary for us to poison rivers also; yea and the very elements
whereof the world doth stand, are by us infected: for even the air
itself, wherein and whereby all things should live, we corrupt to their
mischief and destruction.
-- PLINY THE ELDER
-- The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not
to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and
a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit
or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them
together, or tried. That's why programming---or buying software---on
the basis of ``lists of features'' is a doomed and misguided effort.
The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully
laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the
Forth language, or the game of chess.
-- TED NELSON
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
-- EDWARD TELLER
[In their report on _Life of Brian_]: Monty Python's usual schoolboy
humour is here let loose on a period of history appropriately familiar
to every schoolboy in the West, and a faith which could be shaken by
such good-humoured ribaldry would be a very precarious faith indeed.
-- THE BRITISH BOARD OF FILM CENSORS
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics,
for instance; let us ask, ``Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning quantity or number?'' No. ``Does it contain any experimental
reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?'' No. Commit it then
to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
-- DAVID HUME
You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll
be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which
may take me almost until eleven o'clock.
-- S.J. PERELMAN
-- ``Captain Future, Block That Kick!''
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- NIELS BOHR
Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a
book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic
writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who
felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary
to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.
-- FORSYTH and RADA
-- _Machine Learning_
Yes, Agassiz _does_ recommend authors to eat fish, because the
phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help
you to a decision about the amount you need to eat---at least, not with
certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair
usual average, I should judge that a couple of whales would be all you
would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good
middling-sized whales.
-- MARK TWAIN
We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula
secret.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
-- _Dear Boullee_
We have just reached the outer fringes of the Solar System. Can any
sane man possibly argue that we should stop there?
-- HUGH MACLENNAN
-- ``Remembrance Day, 2010 A.D.'', in _Scotchman's
Return and Other Essays_ (1960)
I said I _liked_ being half-educated; you were so much more _surprised_
at everything when you were ignorant.
-- GERALD DURRELL
-- _My Family and Other Animals_
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to
perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it,
when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?
-- KERNIGHAN and PLAUGER
-- _The Elements of Programming Style_
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from
sticking to the matter at hand.
-- LEWIS THOMAS
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God---but to
create him.
-- ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you
will be able to correct them.
-- KIMON NICOLAIDES
Scientia sine arte nihil est; ars sine scientia nihil est.
-- AUTHOR UNKNOWN
No word meaning ``art'' occurs in Aivilik, nor does ``artist'': there
are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and
decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, ``A man should do all
things properly.''
-- EDMUND CARPENTER
-- _Eskimo_ (1959)
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not
discover it.
-- ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till
the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full
and clear light.
-- ISAAC NEWTON
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- OSCAR WILDE
Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before
ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and
her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the
pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on
which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as
ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.
-- G.B. SHAW
-- _Caesar and Cleopatra_
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I
had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
-- HERMANN WEYL
``There is no disputing about tastes,'' says the old saw. In my
experience there is little else.
-- ROBERTSON DAVIES
-- _Marchbanks' Almanac_ (1967)
Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important
knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth
lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops
where she is found.
-- E.A. POE
-- ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
-- WERNHER VON BRAUN
Let your voice be heard, whether or not it is to the taste of every
jack-in-office who may be obstructing the traffic. By all means, render
unto Caesar that which is Caesar's---but this does not necessarily
include everything that he says is his.
-- DENIS JOHNSTON
-- _The Brazen Horn_
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are
malevolently well informed about the United States.
-- J. BARTLETT BREBNER
You could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear
physics, but it would still be a very stupid thing to do!
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In Robert Holmes' _The Two Doctors_
I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, / I understand
equations, both the simple and quadratical, / About binomial theorem
I'm teeming with a lot of news--- / With many cheerful facts about the
square of the hypotenuse.
-- GILBERT and SULLIVAN
-- _The Pirates of Penzance_
Should I not have changed either the day for carrying out my scheme, or
the scheme itself---but preferably only the day?
-- OVID
-- Metamorphoses
The idea of an incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race
think itself so superior to bees, ants, and elephants as to be put in
this unique relation to its maker?. . . Christians are like a council
of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dung-hill croaking and
squeaking ``for our sakes was the world created.''
-- JULIAN THE APOSTATE
Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and
ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not
adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.
-- MURRAY BOOKCHIN
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist
it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing
standard of nonconformity.
-- BILL VAUGHAN
A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
-- WOODROW WILSON
It is great good health to believe, as the Hindus do, that there are 33
million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to
want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the
ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to
believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of
work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea
that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.
-- CLIVE BARKER
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year
ago.
-- BERNARD BERENSON
A person who lacks the means, within himself, to live a good and happy
life will find any period of his existence wearisome.
-- CICERO
-- ``On Old Age''
The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the
constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility
does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its
mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off
the slate.
-- JOHN SIMON
Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back.
-- PIET HEIN
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This
is a very comforting thought---particularly for people who can never
remember where they have left things.
-- WOODY ALLEN
Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe. And if
you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against
the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and
rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic
waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the
detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repetition and time
that has been killed.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see
nothing but sea.
-- FRANCIS BACON
An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not
succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our
miserable social environment.
-- ANTHONY STANDEN
The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the
pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but
that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought
or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no
improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.
-- CHARLES MACKAY
-- _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds_
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be
such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman
inefficiency.
-- ERIC AMBLER
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-- GROUCHO MARX
Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In David Agnew's _The Invasion of Time_
The words _figure_ and _fictitious_ both derive from the same Latin
root _fingere_. Beware!
-- M.J. MORONEY
The average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants
another one which will last forever.
-- ANATOLE FRANCE
A print addict is a man who reads in elevators. People occasionally
look at me curiously when they see me standing there, reading a
paragraph or two as the elevator goes up. To me, it's curious that
there are people who do not read in elevators. What can they be
thinking about?
-- ROBERT FULFORD
-- ``The Pastimes of a Print Addict'' (1966)
You know what misery I went through there, listening to lawyers day and
night. If you'd had experience of them yourself, as brave as you think
you are, you'd have preferred to clean out the Augean stables. . .
-- SENECA
-- The Apocolocyntosis
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective
stories.
-- ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The work of Leslie is particularly confusing. The mischievous muse of
thermodynamics made him inweave his simple statements about heat in a
horrid mess of difficult, irrelevant, and unexplained calculations. His
and other early theories of heat make much of entities as imperceptible
as voids and vortices or, for that matter, angels. They belong not to
physics but to what would now be regarded as speculative philosophy.
-- CLIFFORD TRUESDELL
Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance, / And toss them on the
wheels of Chance.
-- JUVENAL
Methusalem might be half an hour in telling what o'clock it was: but as
for us postdiluvians, we ought to do everything in haste; and in our
speeches, as well as actions, remember that our time is short.
-- SIR RICHARD STEELE
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more
statesmen.
-- BOB EDWARDS
-- Attributed
Stockbroker (John) Well, speaking as member of the Stock Exchange I
would suck their brains out with a straw, sell the widows and orphans
and go into South American Zinc.
-- MONTY PYTHON
-- Sex and Violence
Tetsuo's kind see only the power of Western scientific reductionism.
They wish to combine it with our discipline, our traditional methods of
competitive conformity. With this I fundamentally disagree. What the
West really has to offer---the only thing it has to offer, my
child---is honesty. Somehow, in the midst of their horrid history, the
best among the _gaijin_ learned a wonderful lesson. They learned to
distrust themselves, to doubt even what they were taught to believe or
what their egos make them yearn to see. To know that even truth must be
scrutinized, it was a great discovery, almost as great as the treasure
we of the East have to offer them in return, the gift of harmony.
-- DAVID BRIN
-- ``Dr. Pak's Preschool''
Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to
swallow.
-- ARTHUR STRINGER
-- _The Silver Poppy_
. . . many other means there be, that promise the foreknowledge of
things to come: besides the raising up and conjuring of ghosts
departed, the conference also with familiars and spirits infernal. And
all these were found out in our days, to be no better than vanities and
false illusions. . .
-- PLINY THE ELDER
-- The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
In science, ``fact'' can only mean ``confirmed to such a degree that it
would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'' I suppose that
apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit
equal time in physics classrooms.
-- STEPHEN JAY GOULD
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon
evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not _for_ God in
themselves, but _against_ the devil in others, never succeed in making
the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even
perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking
primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create
occasions for evil to manifest itself.
-- ALDOUS HUXLEY
-- _The Devils of Loudun_
And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, / Whereunder crawling coop'd
we live and die, / Lift not your hand to It for help---for It / As
impotently moves as you or I.
-- OMAR KHAYYAM
All this progress is marvelous. . . now if only it would stop!
-- ALLAN LAMPORT
From the horridness of this crime, I do conclude that, of all others,
it requires the clearest relevancy and most convincing probature; and I
condemn, next to the witches themselves, those cruel and too forward
judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty of this crime.
-- SIR GEORGE MACKENZIE
So then, these are the foundations, as they call them, of all mixt
bodies, and of all wonderful operations: and whatsoever experiments
they proved, the causes hereof rested (as they supposed) and were to be
found in the Elements and their qualities.
-- GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA
-- Natural Magick
Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the
conditions, now what happens next?
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write,
even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
-- ALAN J. PERLIS
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his
fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the
rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human
progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for
beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable
world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
-- HENRY WARD BEECHER
Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition
above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of
competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties.
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the
intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
-- BENOIT MANDELBROT
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still
carries any reward.
-- JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, ``You
should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest
and folk dancing.''
-- SIR ARNOLD BAX
Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is
irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get
along without it for a week.
-- ERIC TEMPLE BELL
My early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for
the treasures of India. . .
-- EDWARD GIBBON
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic
scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our
extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the
heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be
none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in
the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours.
-- STANLEY KUBRICK
. . . nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean
level wouldn't cure.
-- ROSS MACDONALD
-- _The Drowning Pool_
Mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to
the stars.
-- HERBERT WESTREN TURNBULL
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the
Christmas turkey before us. . . a turkey which was no doubt a lively,
intelligent bird. . . a social being. . . capable of actual
affection. . . nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion.
Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to
its family. . .
-- BERKE BREATHED
-- _Bloom Country Babylon_
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in
praise of intelligence.
-- BERTRAND RUSSELL
Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and
got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he
had stood them on their heads.
-- J.M. BARRIE
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
-- DAVE BARRY
I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and
rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I'm
deaf.
-- EDMUND BLACKADDER
-- Blackadder III: _Nob and Nobility_
We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
-- BISHOP BERKELEY
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with
their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle. . . chew
the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the
noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are
many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little,
shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome _insects_ of
the hour.
-- EDMUND BURKE
-- _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. BYRON
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
-- RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and
very dead.
-- SINCLAIR LEWIS
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of
computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own
structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of
death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally.
G"odel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem,
Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem---all have the flavour
of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that ``To seek
self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which. . . will always be
incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be
described.''
-- DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising?
Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical
advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
-- VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
-- _Discovery_ (1964)
There is a difference between art and life and that difference is
readability.
-- MARIAN ENGEL
-- In the Toronto _Globe and Mail_, Dec. 28, 1974
Surely where there's smoke there's fire? No, where there's so much
smoke there's smoke.
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
Our view. . . is that it is an essential characteristic of
experimentation that it is carried out with limited resources, and an
essential part of the subject of experimental design to ascertain how
these should be best applied; or, in particular, to which causes of
disturbance care should be given, and which ought to be deliberately
ignored.
-- SIR RONALD A. FISHER
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one
begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit
facts.
-- SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible
to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too
sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
-- E.A. POE
-- ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''
It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best
thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's
happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that
happens in nature. It's startling every time it occurs. One is
surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realized
in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great,
great joy.
-- LEO KADANOFF
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the
bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
-- FRANK MOORE COLBY
Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.
-- MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper.
-- EDMUND BURKE
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the
full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging
tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when
you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate
tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts,
collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities---potential;
mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry---that was a sublime
experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy
mathematics.
-- GREGORY BENFORD
-- _Timescape_
I could never sleep my way to the top / 'Cause my alarm clock always
wakes me right up.
-- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
-- ``Hey, Mr DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal''
One grows tired of jelly babies, Castellan. One grows tired of almost
everything, Castellan, except power.
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In David Agnew's _The Invasion of Time_
No matter how hard you try, there is always going to be someone more
underground than you.
-- ROBERT FULFORD
-- ``My Life Underground'', in _Marshall Delaney at the
Movies_ (1974)
Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit
Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.
-- PLINY THE ELDER
-- The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.
-- RUDYARD KIPLING
Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things
beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your
trade you want to understand them.
-- MITCHELL FEIGENBAUM
It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of
discoveries, and these are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than
in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the
origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing,
gunpowder and the magnet [i.e. Mariner's Needle]. For these three have
changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.
-- FRANCIS BACON
And if you give us any more trouble I shall visit you in the small
hours and put a bat up your nightdress.
-- BASIL FAWLTY
-- ``Mrs. Richards''
Predicting the future, as we all know, is risky. Predicting the
evolution of new technology is downright hazardous.
-- LEON COOPER
An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master
craftsman employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise
requires sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real
applications, and only practice with these tools will build skill in
their use.
-- ROBERT L. KRUSE
-- _Data Structures and Program Design_
If you want something done properly, kill Baldrick before you start.
-- EDMUND BLACKADDER
-- Blackadder III: _Dish and Dishonesty_, by Richard
Curtis and Ben Elton
1) A strong belief is more important than a few facts.
2) The stronger the belief, the fewer the facts.
3) The fewer the facts, the more people killed.
-- MILTON ROTHMAN
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent,
unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one
wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
-- EDWARD TELLER
Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining,
physically exhausting, and short.
-- PETER C. NEWMAN
-- _The Canadian Establishment_ (1975)
My specific goal is to revolutionize the future of the species.
Mathematics is just another way of predicting the future.
-- RALPH ABRAHAM
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
-- CHARLES DARWIN
-- _The Origin of Species_
All things are difficult before they are easy.
-- THOMAS FULLER
Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost
it.
-- ERIC NICOL
-- _Say Uncle_ (1961)
It is strange that we know so little about the properties of numbers.
They are our handiwork, yet they baffle us; we can fathom only a few of
their intricacies. Having defined their attributes and prescribed their
behaviour, we are hard pressed to perceive the implications of our
formulas.
-- JAMES R. NEWMAN
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks
anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this
uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into
which children are heaved while they are still young and tender;
therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from
head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
-- ALAN TURING
Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us
consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.
-- PIERRE TRUDEAU
-- ``Politique fonctionnelle'' (1950)
The Cross is a gibbet---rather an odd thing to make use of as a
talisman against bad luck, if that is how we regard it. Or is it,
instead, a cynical reminder that Virtue usually gets pilloried whenever
it makes one of its occasional appearances in this world?
-- DENIS JOHNSTON
-- _The Brazen Horn_
Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, / But Genius must be
born; and can never be taught.
-- JOHN CONGREVE
The more efficient computers become at inducing new knowledge, the more
widely that knowledge will be applied, even in matters of life and
death. It is essential that such knowledge be open to inspection. This
means that designers of learning systems have a public duty to use
comprehensible description languages---even if that means sacrificing
performance. Otherwise we run the risk of generating truly ``unknowable
knowledge.''
-- RICHARD FORSYTH
-- ``Machine Learning for Expert Systems''
Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things
vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase ``being born'' is used for
beginning to be something different from what one was before, while
``dying'' means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into
that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
-- OVID
-- Metamorphoses
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
-- CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
It may be that a genius of the so-called universal type---an Aristotle,
for example, or a Leibniz or a Leonardo da Vinci---is one whose mind
has the group property.
-- CASSIUS J. KEYSER
Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.
-- FARLEY MOWAT
``Doctor, we did good, didn't we?''
``Perhaps. Time will tell. Always does.''
-- ACE and THE DOCTOR
-- In Ben Aaronovitch's _Remembrance of the Daleks_
There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those
who hate them.
-- EMILE CHARTIER
The true poet and the true scientist are not estranged. They go forth
into nature like two friends. Behold them strolling through the summer
fields and woods. The younger of the two is much the more active and
inquiring; he is ever and anon stepping aside to examine some object
more minutely, plucking a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird,
watching a butterfly; now he turns over a stone, peers into the
marshes, chips off a fragment of rock, and everywhere seems intent on
some special and particular knowledge of the things about him. The
elder man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and enjoyment, is
less curious about special objects and features, and more desirous of
putting himself in harmony with the spirit of the whole. But when his
younger companion has any fresh and characteristic bit of information
to impart to him, how attentively he listens, how sure and
discriminating is his appreciation! The interests of the two in the
universe are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hos
-- JOHN BURROUGHS
Things are not as bad as they seem. They are worse.
-- BILL PRESS
I am afraid of the worst, but I am not sure what that is.
-- ABRAHAM ROTSTEIN
Ideally, you should be your own hero, just as I am mine.
-- BARGEPOLE
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not
survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought
to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they
affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and
destroy his mind.
-- AYN RAND
I have seen the future and it doesn't work.
-- ROBERT FULFORD
. . . one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is
escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless
dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A
finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the
world of objective perception and thought.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
Accountant (Graham) Oh well, I'm a chartered accountant, and
consequently too boring to be of interest.
-- MONTY PYTHON
-- Sex and Violence
The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last
billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The
power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty
of its crowning achievement, the human brain.
-- DAVID ROGERS
-- ``Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory''
Planet Bog---Pools of toxic chemicals bubble under a choking atmosphere
of poisonous gases. . . but aside from that, it's not much like
Earth.
-- BILL WATTERSON
-- _The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes_
Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-- DALTON CAMP
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought
without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs
is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . .
But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This
simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play,
she is very charming---and a little mad.
-- ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half
as good. . . luckily, it's not difficult.
-- CHARLOTTE WHITTON
. . . no man of genuinely superior intelligence has even been an
actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be
lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into
bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately
destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
-- ``The Allied Arts''
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order
to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
-- SYDNEY SMITH
K is for KENGHIS KHAN. _He_ was a very _nice_ person. History has no
record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
-- ``From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet''
I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound.
-- STEPHEN WOLFRAM
It is unnecessary to understand electromagnetic theory before wiring a
lamp or to study physics in order to repair a pump. We count on our
fingers and give no heed to the proliferating implications of the act.
-- JAMES R. NEWMAN
[He]. . . was a letter writer of the type that is now completely
extinct. His circle of correspondents was perhaps no larger but it was
easily more bewildered than that of any other American of his
generation. . .
-- JAMES THURBER
In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out
in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets
out with a sieve.
-- SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
I'm lost, but I'm making record time.
-- ALLAN LAMPORT
*Cartesian*, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author
of the celebrated dictum, _Cogito ergo sum_. . . The dictum might be
improved, however, thus: _Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum_---``I think
that I think, therefore I think that I am''; as close an approach to
certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
-- AMBROSE BIERCE
-- _The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary_
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in
jeopardy.
-- JOHN DEWEY
Paper has a genius for multiplication that cannot be equalled anywhere
else in nature.
-- HUGH KEENLEYSIDE
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially
attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically
rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like
composing poetry or music.
-- DONALD E. KNUTH
Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid
strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is
music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we
may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions,
and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the
understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.
-- SIR THOMAS BROWNE
I can't see the point in the theatre. All that sex and violence. I get
enough of that at home. Apart from the sex, of course.
-- BALDRICK
-- Blackadder III:_Sense and Senility_, by Richard
Curtis and Ben Elton
Someone once said that the two most important things in developing
taste were sensitivity and intelligence. I don't think this is so; I'd
rather call them curiosity and courage. Curiosity to look for the new
and the hidden; courage to develop your own tastes regardless of what
others might say or think.
-- R. MURRAY SCHAFER
-- _The Composer in the Classroom_ (1965)
The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more we see that
all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence as liable to work for
our disadvantage as for our advantage. It flows like the water of a
river, it falls like rain, it is as impartial as the sea. It is as
innocent of malice as it is of compassion.
-- LLEWELYN POWYS
-- _The Pathetic Fallacy_
My house is small, but you are learned men / And by your arguments can
make a place / Twenty foot broad as infinite as space.
-- CHAUCER
-- The Reeve's Tale, in _The Canterbury Tales_
America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is
determined to set a speed record getting there.
-- LAURENCE J. PETER
There's certainly a growing atmosphere of academic totalitarianism. It
shows up in things like the attacks on the legitimacy of the more
eclectic and interdisciplinary fields, or in the increasing constraints
on student choice.
-- TOM NAYLOR
Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
-- FRANCIS BACON
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more
extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the
denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed
from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
-- STEPHEN JAY GOULD
-- _The Mismeasure of Man_
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
-- MARIE CURIE
You have perhaps heard the story of the four students---British,
French, American, Canadian---who were asked to write an essay on
elephants. The British student entitled his essay ``Elephants and the
Empire.'' The French student called his ``Love and the Elephant.'' The
title of the American student's essay was ``Bigger and Better
Elephants,'' and the Canadian student called his ``Elephants: A Federal
or Provincial Responsibility?''
-- ROBERT H. WINTERS
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret,
they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct
which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes
observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct
is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
-- JOHN VON NEUMANN
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, / And all that beauty, all
that wealth e'er gave, / Awaits alike th' inevitable hour: / The paths
of glory lead but to the grave.
-- THOMAS GRAY
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
-- PAUL DIRAC
Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us
who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people
might think we're stupid.
-- JULES FEIFFER
Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
-- GEORGE ILES
What can I wish to the youth of my country who devote themselves to
science?. . . Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a
man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for
you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
-- IVAN PAVLOV
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of
wonder.
-- RALPH W. SOCKMAN
I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris . . . it
would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and
1945---even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to
register the effects of violence---marked and dated as an indictment.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
-- _Dear Boullee_
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that
curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
-- ARNOLD EDINBOROUGH
Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear
to him.
-- PAUL ELDRIDGE
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
-- C.A.R. HOARE
One paramount truth / our society smothers / in petty concern / with
position and pelf: / It isn't enough / to exasperate others; / you've
got to remember / to gladden yourself.
-- PIET HEIN
In order to solve this differential equation you look at it until a
solution occurs to you.
-- Quoted by GEORGE POLYA
First, you must know what the thing is, and then after learn the use of
the same.
-- ROBERT RECORDE
Nor is it very difficult to understand why a Canadian passport should
be so popular. Part of the explanation is that with it one can travel
easily almost anywhere. Another reason for the popularity of the little
blue booklet stamped in gold is that one can speak English or French or
Ukranian or Polish or Chinese and still be a Canadian. One can, in
fact, be almost anyone and still be a Canadian; and to be a Canadian is
to have a passport to the whole world.
-- DOUGLAS LEPAN
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is
everything.
-- HENRI POINCARE
When this grey world crumbles like a cake / I'll be hanging from the
hope / That I'll never see that recipe again.
-- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
-- ``It's Not My Birthday''
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity
of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues,
which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven,
thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
-- LEO TOLSTOY
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him
_whose_?
-- DON MARQUIS
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the
geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our
purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history.
Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
-- STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Now, that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is, should have
regard of mankind, is a toy and vanity worthy to be laughed at.
-- PLINY THE ELDER
. . . those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a
tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. . . Sad, indeed, is
it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are
indifferent to the grandest phenomena---care not to understand the
architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some
contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!
-- HERBERT SPENCER
A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just
as bad.
-- BOB EDWARDS
If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must
study the extremists, the obscure and ``nutty''. You need the balance!
Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road
crap, twenty-four hours a day, _no matter what_. Network TV,
newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket. . . even if you never
watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and
blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable normals
surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in
consensus reality.
-- REV. IVAN STANG
-- _High Weirdness By Mail_
There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of
mathematics. . . We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head
of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
-- VOLTAIRE
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
-- SIR FREDERICK G. BANTING
Since this Galaxy began, vast civilizations have risen and fallen,
risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it's quite tempting to
think that life in the Galaxy must be (a) something akin to
seasick---space-sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing, and
(b) stupid.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _Life, the Universe and Everything_
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a
mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
-- ROBERTSON DAVIES
-- _Marchbanks' Almanac_ (1967)
Y is for YGGDRASIL. The legendary Nordic ash tree with its three roots
extending into the lands of mortals, giants, and Niflheim, the land of
mist, grows in Wisconsin. Legend has it that when the tree falls, the
universe will fall. Next Wednesday, the State Highway Commission comes
through that empty pasture with a freeway.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
-- ``From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet''
This principle is so perfectly general that no particular application
of it is possible.
-- Quoted by GEORGE POLYA
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things
that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it
some of the grace of tragedy.
-- STEVEN WEINBERG
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That
means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the
distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
If all the good people were clever; / And all clever people were good,
/ The world would be nicer than ever / We thought that it possibly
could.
-- ELIZABETH WORDSWORTH
-- ``Good and Clever''
An efficient organization is one in which the accounting department
knows the exact cost of every useless administrative procedure which
they themselves have initiated.
-- E.W.R. STEACIE
France has culture but no civilization. England has civilization but no
culture. The United States has neither. Canada has both.
-- ROBIN MATHEWS
There was never a great genius without a tincture of madness.
-- ARISTOTLE
A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or
a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical
truth.
-- O.G. SUTTON
In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of
imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
-- ``A Popular Virtue''
Even when uttered by Democrats, ``middle class'' often sounds like a
mealymouthed way of saying, ``Us, and not them,'' where ``them''
includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
-- BARBARA EHRENREICH
You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow,
unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily
dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab
and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable
drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
-- MONTY PYTHON
-- Show Ten
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are
of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not
cheat,they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to
prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance,
their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being
argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the
young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general
virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of
science.
-- JACOB BRONOWSKI
Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not
exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First,
many programmers do not use such compilers because ``They're not
efficient.'' (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong
answers quickly.)
-- KERNIGHAN and PLAUGER
-- _The Elements of Programming Style_
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human
face---for ever. . . And remember that it is for ever.
-- GEORGE ORWELL
-- _1984_ (1949)
There are. . . scientific works---star catalogues, for example---which
are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or
Maxwell are original, individual, ``very personal'' responses and
expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven
or Dostoievski.
-- JAMES R. NEWMAN
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- HENRY DAVID THOREAU
-- _Walden_ (1854)
Once you accept that the world is a giant computer run by white mice,
all other movies fade into insignificance.
-- MUTSUMI TAKAHASHI
Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide
swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum. If
you want to reach dead center, you will do well to avoid the most
advanced thinkers.
-- ANTHONY STANDEN
We talk about the American way, the British way. If we had any sense,
we would know that there is no American way, no British way. There is
only one way---the scientific way that cuts across racial lines with
international boundaries.
-- M.M. COADY
If we follow the advice of these people, we might as well go back into
the cave.
-- HANS BETHE
I loathe the expression ``What makes him tick.'' It is the American
mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish
expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the
hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes
stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
-- JAMES THURBER
About the only people who don't quarrel over religion are the people
who don't have any.
-- BOB EDWARDS
The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to
constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every
appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA
statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This
also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
-- From a FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple
memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time
to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A,
E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
-- SANDRA BOYNTON
-- ``Chocolate: The Consuming Passion''
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we
can solve them.
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the
tracery of the finger of God.
-- HERBERT WESTREN TURNBULL
I am a sociologist, God help me.
-- JOHN O'NEILL
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a
straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.
-- SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
Think until it hurts.
-- ROY THOMSON
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on
too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be
good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government
stupidity---and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will
fall into quicksand.
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have
taken place.
-- CLAUDE T. BISSELL
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous
ticking sound, and the future anybody's guess. It was fun back there
with the Rover Boys, the Little Colonel, Pollyanna, and
Peg-o'-my-Heart, but we don't want to be caught in the past while the
Russians are shaking hands with the Martians. Let us then be up and
doing.
-- JAMES THURBER
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but
after a war it seems more like astrology.
-- REBECCA WEST
There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The
most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the
surest is with technicians.
-- GEORGES POMPIDOU
This is th' original contract; these the laws / Impos'd by nature, and
by nature's cause.
-- JOHN DRYDEN
. . . it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our
self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore
of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics,
in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only
aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a
great art.
-- JOHN W.N. SULLIVAN
It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, . . . that all
politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life
are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to
prescribe death as a cure.
-- GEORGE McGOVERN
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
proportion.
-- FRANCIS BACON
-- Of Beauty
He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking
into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies
of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without
knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past
and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths
to come. . . And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these
uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and
their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the
days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things
coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.
-- GREGORY BENFORD
-- _Timescape_
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
-- CONFUCIUS
The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the
poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall
see them doing so upon our television sets.
-- C.P. SNOW
Reverend Belling (Graham) You know, there are many people in the
country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of
them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It
is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to
try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small
ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint
half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up
and down in a bowl of treacle going ``squawk, squawk, squawk. . . ''
And then you can go ``Neurhhh! Neurhhh!'' and then you can roll around
on the floor going ``pting pting pting''. . .
-- MONTY PYTHON
-- Show Twenty-One
But is such a thing fit to be discovered to the people? shall I do such
an unworthy Act? Ah! my pen falls out of my hand. Yet my desire to help
posterity, overcomes; for perhaps from this gleaning as it were,
greater and more admirable inventions may be produced.
-- GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA
-- Natural Magick
A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the
Pierian spring; / There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, / And
drinking largely sobers us again.
-- ALEXANDER POPE
All the secrets we may be able to keep from any and every god and human
being do not in the least absolve us from the obligation to refrain
from whatever actions are greedy, unjust, sensual, or otherwise
immoderate.
-- CICERO
-- ``On Duties''
Thought alone is eternal.
-- OWEN MEREDITH
The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do
not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy
particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.
-- JAMES JOSEPH SYLVESTER
Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
-- LORD CHESTERFIELD
If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five
billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so
unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing
our swansong with joy---_sic transit gloria mundi_.
-- STEPHEN JAY GOULD
In the world of human thought generally, and in physical science
particularly, the most important and fruitful concepts are those to
which it is impossible to attach a well-defined meaning.
-- H.A. KRAMERS
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know
where we can find information on it.
-- SAMUEL JOHNSON
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem,
consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the
least possible expenditure of thought.
-- ERNST MACH
How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat
conduction equation, $u_xx=u_t$]. . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the
equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to
derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great
mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have
effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.
-- CLIFFORD TRUESDELL
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
-- WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING
One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living
souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in
common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all
interest in who will be champion.
-- ANATOL RAPOPORT
The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost
insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and
flame, poisons and poverty, yet among all these evils I seem to live so
sweetly, that may I die if I would change places with the Persian
King.
-- JOHANN BECHER
Since when was genius found respectable?
-- ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of
the higher animals, directly follows.
-- CHARLES DARWIN
-- _The Origin of Species_
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization
implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a
central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly
barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an
authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no
single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to
be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).
-- ROBERT GRAVES
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly,
and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and
scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the
dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read
immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their
shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to
want concubines---not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their
master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.
-- ROBERTSON DAVIES
-- _Tempest-Tost_ (1951)
You are right on target when you say that mad scientists have a total
disregard for the wellbeing of others. We don't want to spread evil; we
just see no point in bothering to spread good.
-- RICHARD M. MATHEWS
Maybe we're just lucky to live in a universe composed by a divine Bach.
Perhaps next door, the inhabitants of a John Cage universe muddle along
in chaos. . .
-- MICHAEL WEISS
-- In sci.physics
Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a
game with rules and no objectives.
-- ANONYMOUS
I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.
-- ALFRED HITCHCOCK
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits
to grow sharper.
-- EDEN PHILLPOTTS
Sentimental or not, I confess that the predicament of poor Valentino
touched me. It provided grist for my mill, but I couldn't quite enjoy
it. Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of
other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who
had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
I didn't think; I experimented.
-- WILHELM ROENTGEN
[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were
destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only
the living who are killed in war.
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
You will be able to appreciate the influence of such an Engine on the
future progress of science. I live in a country which is incapable of
estimating it.
-- CHARLES BABBAGE
I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a
professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any
other minority viewpoint---no matter how distasteful to the majority,
provided. . .
-- RICHARD M. NIXON
You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.
-- HERMANN WEYL
Ambition has but one reward for all: / A little power, a little
transient fame, A grave to rest in, and a fading name.
-- WILLIAM WINTER
So as this only point among the rest remaineth sure and certain,
namely, that nothing is certain. . .
-- PLINY THE ELDER
-- The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who ``love
Nature'' while deploring the ``artificialities'' with which ``Man has
spoiled `Nature.''' The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of
words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are _not_ part of
``Nature''---but beavers and their dams _are_.
-- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
-- Time Enough For Love
They [corporations] cannot commit trespass nor be outlawed, nor
excommunicated, for they have no souls.
-- SIR EDWARD COKE
In political discussion heat is in inverse proportion to knowledge.
-- J.G.C. MINCHIN
All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.
-- EDWARD GIBBON
I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless
light, / All calm, as it was bright; / And round beneath it, / Time in
hours, days, years, / Driv'n by the spheres / Like a vast shadow mov'd;
in which the world / And all her train were hurl'd.
-- HENRY VAUGHAN
-- ``The World''
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who
think.
-- HORACE WALPOLE
War is just to those to whom war is necessary.
-- TITUS LIVIUS
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
-- GOETHE
It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in
order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that
everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as
those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.
-- RENE DESCARTES
-- Discourse I
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for
deeds left undone.
-- HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the
poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread.
-- ANATOLE FRANCE
Real-world problems are often ``high-dimensional'', that is, are
described by large numbers of dependent variables. Algorithms must be
specifically designed to function well in such high-dimensional
spaces.
-- DAVID ROGERS
-- ``Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory''
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
-- MARK TWAIN
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity
that would be clearly understood.
-- ALEXANDER HAIG
Everything you've learned in school as ``obvious'' becomes less and
less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are
no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no
straight lines.
-- R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
-- PAUL BEATTY
He had that rare weird electricity about him---that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving ``normally.''
-- HUNTER S. THOMPSON
-- _Fear and Loathing '72_
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not ``Eureka!'' (I found it!) but ``That's funny . . .
''
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- URSULA K. LeGUIN
There is scarcely an occurrence in nature which, happening at a certain
time, is not looked upon by some persons as a prognosticator either of
good or evil. The latter are in the greatest number, so much more
ingenious are we in tormenting ourselves than in discovering reasons
for enjoyment in the things that surround us.
-- CHARLES MACKAY
-- _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds_
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world;
and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve
men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
-- MARK TWAIN
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be
liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall
be deemed to be a cat.
-- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but
have only one course of action.
-- FRANK HERBERT
No doubt, a scientist isn't necessarily penalized for being a complex,
versatile, eccentric individual with lots of extra-scientific
interests. But it certainly doesn't help him a bit.
-- STEPHEN TOULMIN
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large,
I contain multitudes).
-- WALT WHITMAN
-- ``Song of Myself''
One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just
within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the
most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this
complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems,
our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal
doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our
fallibility and limitations.
-- FREDERICK P. BROOKS, JR.
-- _The Mythical Man-Month_ (1975)
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
-- ALDOUS HUXLEY
-- _The Devils of Loudun_
Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible---or even
sinful---that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of
cigarettes!
-- DR. PAUL MacCREADY JR.
Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do
and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and
young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die
alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and
abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an
abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of
them.
-- NEIL GAIMAN
-- The Sandman #20: _Facade_
We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap.
-- KURT VONNEGUT
Then the Lord himself spoke and said: ``If you can grasp what is meant
by this, you will be delivered from the fear of Endings. So do not
cease from searching. Yet, remember this; when you find that for which
you are looking, you will at first be struck with horror and amazement.
But after the horror will come understanding; and in the end you will
find yourself to be set apart, and honoured above them all.''
-- The Gospel of St. Thomas (Apocryphal)
Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to
speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a
current of Commonsense through the Universe.
-- ELBERT HUBBARD
The progress of science is often affected more by the frailties of
humans and their institutions than by the limitations of scientific
measuring devices. The scientific method is only as effective as the
humans using it. It does not automatically lead to progress.
-- STEVEN S. ZUMDAHL
What is the difference between method and device? A method is a device
which you use twice.
-- Quoted by GEORGE POLYA
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by
our institutions, great is our sin.
-- CHARLES DARWIN
Those who will not reason / Perish in the act: / Those who will not act
/ Perish for that reason.
-- W.H. AUDEN
-- Shorts
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe.
-- H.G. WELLS
Hence no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an
horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a
bending downwards.
-- WILLIAM WHEWELL
Those cave paintings are wonderful, but like everything we know, they
are not too wonderful to be true. It is their reality that gives them
wonder, and while there will never come a time when some of us will not
wish for more than we can have, the happiest of us will wait
confidently for other tangible finds. We treasure the cave at Altamira
where a century ago a little girl first saw the great painted bison.
New caves will be found, year after year, in lab or clinic or sky or
ocean depth, or even in ancient markings. That is the promise of real
science, which cannot allow wish to rule mind, but nonetheless finds
unendingly wonderful things.
-- PHILIP MORRISON
I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is
because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday
life.
-- PETRONIUS
-- The Satyricon
The universe may / be as great as they say. / But it wouldn't be missed
/ if it didn't exist.
-- PIET HEIN
Some people imagine that nuclear war will mean instant and painless
death. But for millions this will not be the case. The accounts of the
injured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the doctors who tried to tend
them, witness to the horrors and torments which would be magnified
thousands of times over in the kinds of attack we analyse here. . .
-- STAN OPENSHAW
-- _Doomsday_
Commandment Number One of any truly civilized society is this: Let
people be different.
-- DAVID GRAYSON
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is
fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- DANIEL WEBSTER
I work in celestial mechanics, but I am not interested in getting to
the moon.
-- MARSTON MORSE
No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, / And danced the skies on
laughter-silvered wings. . .
-- JOHN GILLESPIE MAGEE
Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and
our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for
politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation
stands forever.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the
middle and knows.
-- ROBERT FROST
-- ``The Secret Sits''
Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for
science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and
probably wrong.
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture.
Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the
cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change,
and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and
liberating---or toward the abyss.
-- STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Whatever you do, stamp out abuses, and love those who love you.
-- VOLTAIRE
My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional
sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God.
We would be unappreciative of that gift . . . if we suppressed our
passion to explore the universe and ourselves.
-- CARL SAGAN
``After all, did not Our Lord send a lowly earthworm to comfort Moses
in his torment?''
``No.''
-- PRINCE GEORGE and EDMUND BLACKADDER
-- Blackadder III: _Duel and Duality_, by Richard
Curtis and Ben Elton
Today's pop counterculture, especially among the young, is an awesome
mix of maximum mindlessness, minimum historical awareness, and a
pathetic yearning for (to quote Chico Marx) strawberry shortcut. To
hell with established religions, with science, with philosophy, with
economics and politics, with the liberal arts---with anything that
demands time and effort.
-- MARTIN GARDNER
If I were meta-agnostic, I'd be confused over whether I'm agnostic or
not---but I'm not quite sure if I feel THAT way; hence I must be
meta-meta-agnostic (I guess).
-- DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER
-- _G"odel, Escher, Bach_
If you can do an experiment in one day, then in 10 days you can test 10
ideas, and maybe one of the 10 will be right. Then you've got it made.
-- SOLOMON H. SNYDER
A hundred astronomers have left parts of their souls and their hopes in
drawings showing the surface of Mars. A score of men have left their
stamp in the major theories about life on the strange planet fourth
from the sun. The names of ten thousand technicians and scientists rest
now on a plaque standing a few feet above the soil of Mars, attached to
a spacecraft sent there in 1976. Fifty writers have tried their pen out
on Mars and things Martian; sixty movie directors have tried to grasp
the magic and mystery. . . I would like to show you how to fall in
love with a planet.
-- ROBERT M. POWERS
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been
much of a day.
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them
are even dumber than _that_.
-- J.R. ``BOB'' DOBBS
You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.
-- DONALD E. KNUTH
-- Said while answering questions after a lecture at
Concordia University, Montreal
Time itself flows on with constant motion, just like a river: for no
more than a river can the fleeting hour stand still. As wave is driven
on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments
of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new.
-- OVID
-- Metamorphoses
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
-- GOETHE
-- (1791)
Underachiever---and proud of it, man!
-- MATT GROENING
-- The Simpsons (1991)
``You are all a lost generation,'' Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We
weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go
home.
-- JAMES THURBER
Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no
such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for
the purposes of human life.
-- JOHN STUART MILL
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows
as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
-- WILL ROGERS
This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be
produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the
lines of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and
development of the older methods---the research in pure science has
given us an entirely new and much more powerful method. In fact,
research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science
leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial,
are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side.
-- J.J. THOMSON
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by
Frankenstein logic.
-- DAVID RUSSELL
In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a
nonworld.
-- PETER DRUCKER
If introductory physics were taught the way that introductory computer
science seems to be taught, students would not see equational
statements of Newton's Laws until their first semester of graduate
school.
-- JERRY KUCH
People who can't get laid watch _Star Trek_ and eat Twinkies!
-- HARLAN ELLISON
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of
it. . . He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives
light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to
another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
benevolently designed by nature. . .
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON
It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is
never better than knowledge.
-- ENRICO FERMI
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
-- SAMUEL JOHNSON
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
-- GALILEO GALILEI
The farce is finished. I go to seek a vast perhaps.
-- FRANCOIS RABELAIS
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
-- NIELS BOHR
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a
citizen of the world.
-- FRANCIS BACON
-- ``Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature''
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe; the rules of the games are what we call the laws of Nature.
The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play
is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that
he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance.
-- T.H. HUXLEY
With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
-- FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER
Nature is beneficent. I praise her and all her works. She is silent and
wise. She is cunning, but for good ends. She has brought me here and
will also lead me away. She may scold me, but she will not hate her
work. I trust her.
-- GOETHE
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been
forgotten.
-- B.F. SKINNER
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three
unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,
and the prudence never to practise either of them.
-- MARK TWAIN
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.
-- EDWARD TELLER
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not
unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of
thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we
can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at
all. How true that is.
-- J. DANFORTH QUAYLE
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
-- DESIDERIUS ERASMUS
If [in a rain forest] the traveler notices a particular species and
wishes to find more like it, he must often turn his eyes in vain in
every direction. Trees of varied forms, dimensions, and colors are
around him, but he rarely sees any of them repeated. Time after time he
goes towards a tree which looks like the one he seeks, but a closer
examination proves it to be distinct.
-- ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
Rule Number 1 is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule Number 2 is, it's
all small stuff.
-- ROBERT ELIOT
This person called up and said, ``You've got to come and take this
seminar. It will completely change your life in just one weekend.'' And
I said, ``Well, I don't want to completely change my life this weekend.
I've got a lot of things to do on Monday.''
-- RICK FIELDS
A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as
a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid.
-- GREGORY VLASTOS
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground
laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a
diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not
who writes the nation's laws.
-- S.J. PERELMAN
-- ``Captain Future, Block That Kick!''
God looks after the stupid, the drunk, and the United States.
-- ANONYMOUS
. . . Sir Isaac Newton. . . is in every Englishman's wallet. . .
he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good
luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our
feet on the ground is a good companion.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
-- _The Belly of an Architect_
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and
dead.
-- JAMES THURBER
I once asked a Christmas Eve group of children if they believed in
Santa Claus. The very smallest ones answered without hesitation, ``Why,
of course!'' The older ones shook their heads. The little girls smiled
but said nothing. One future scientist asserted boldly ``I know who it
is''; and a little make-strong with his eye on gain said: ``I believe
in it all; I can believe in anything.'' That boy, I realized, would one
day be a bishop.
-- STEPHEN LEACOCK
Setting loose on the battlefield weapons that are able to learn may be
one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made. It could also be one
of the last.
-- RICHARD FORSYTH
-- ``Machine Learning for Expert Systems''
She'd taken the harlot century she'd been born into for granted,
knowing no other, but now---seeing it with _his_ eyes, hearing it with
_his_ ears---she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to
please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed
sophistication; and, despite its zeal to spellbind, how utterly
unenchanting.
-- CLIVE BARKER
-- _Weaveworld_
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most
revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
-- GEORGE C. MARSHALL
As I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn't there. / He wasn't
there again today. / I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
-- HUGHES MEARNS
-- ``The Psychoed''
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
-- JOSEPH STALIN
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall
about the devils. One is to disbelieve their existence. The other is to
believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They
themselves are equally pleased by both errors. . .
-- C.S. LEWIS
-- _The Screwtape Letters_
Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't,
like a teaspoon and an open mind.
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In David Fisher's _The Creature From the Pit_
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared
to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some
infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame
performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and
is the object of derision of his superiors; it is the production of old
age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death,
has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force,
which it received from him.
-- DAVID HUME
I joy to journey among the stars, high above, to leave the earth and
this dull abode, to ride on the clouds and stand on stout Atlas'
shoulders, looking down from afar on men as they wander aimlessly,
devoid of any guiding principle, to unroll for them the scroll of fate.
. .
-- OVID
-- Metamorphoses
I was up at five, you know, we do have staff problems, I'm so sorry,
it's all done by magic.
-- BASIL FAWLTY
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is
the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason
has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.
-- J.B.S. HALDANE
At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves
against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as
Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman
world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of
a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses.
The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics
and the hallucinated create history.
-- GUSTAVE LE BON
Now, if you play straight with me, you'll find me a considerate
employer. But cross me, and you'll soon discover that under this
playful, boyish, exterior beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic
maniac.
-- EDMUND BLACKADDER
-- Blackadder II: _Head_, by Richard Curtis and Ben
Elton
Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?
-- WOODY ALLEN
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
But the Machine God. . . Ah, He is a special God. He loves his gears
and his pumps, his springs and his transistors, his printed circuits
and his boilers. He is not a jealous God, like some, but he is an
attentive God. He tends to business, and keeps his world of machines
functioning. But every now and then, every once in a while, every few
centuries in a mind that is Machine and not Man, the Machine God finds
one He can care about more than the others.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
-- ``Ernest and the Machine God''
To make a name for learning / when other roads are barred, / take
something very easy / and make it very hard.
-- PIET HEIN
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the
shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and
forgot.
-- NEIL GAIMAN
-- The Sandman #19: _A Midsummer Night's Dream_
To conclude, all other living creatures live orderly and well, after
their own kind: we see them flock and gather together, and ready to
make head and stand against all others of a contrary kind: the lions as
fell and savage as they be, fight not with one another: serpents sting
not serpents, nor bite one another with their venomous teeth: nay the
very monsters and huge fishes of the sea, war not amongst themselves in
their own kind: but believe me, man at man's hand receiveth most harm
and mischief.
-- PLINY THE ELDER
-- The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
For non-deterministic read ``Inhabited by pixies.''
-- ANONYMOUS
In a world deeply divided between those who are prepared to believe
nothing and those who are ready to believe anything, it is a tricky
business to enter into a discussion of matters that can be dismissed
either as miracles or as lies.
-- DENIS JOHNSTON
-- _The Brazen Horn_
I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it
for the utter magnificence of that corruption.
-- RICHARD J. NEEDHAM
One of the busiest areas of feminist research today is the gender
critique of the sciences. . . . Students are taught . . . that
Newton's Law of Mechanics and Einstein's relativity are gender-laden.
Regarding the latter, Sandra Harding says that the only remedy is ``to
reinvent science and theorizing itself to make sense of women's social
experience.''
-- CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS
Puns are little ``plays on words'' that a certain breed of person loves
to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way
to indicate that he thinks that _you_ must think that he is by far the
cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in
fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a
lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of
the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
-- DAVE BARRY
-- ``Why Humor Is Funny''
OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made
for man- who has no gills.
-- AMBROSE BIERCE
-- _The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary_
There are too many people, and too few human beings.
-- ROBERT ZEND
I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most
writers on logic strongly object to all symbols. . . I should advise
the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well
weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in
connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress
since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which
has produced no growth of symbols.
-- AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little
starbursts of _writing_ from the Book of Revelation than anything else
in the English language---and it is not because I am a biblical
scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild
power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and
makes it music.
-- HUNTER S. THOMPSON
-- _Generation of Swine_
Travel, of course, narrows the mind.
-- MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
In fact, one thing that I have noticed. . . is that all of these
conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever.
I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is
endlessly stupid.
-- BRIAN E. MOORE
``Necessity is the mother of invention'' is a silly proverb.
``Necessity is the mother of futile dodges'' is much closer to the
truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science
is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
-- ALFRED N. WHITEHEAD
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you
looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
-- POUL ANDERSON
Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than
an optimist, but an optimist has more fun---and neither can stop the
march of events.
-- ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
-- _Time Enough For Love_
When I returned to the soil, I had a ten-cent screwdriver and the
mechanical skill of a turtle. Today, thanks to unremitting study, I can
change a fuse so deftly that it plunges the entire county into
darkness.
-- S.J. PERELMAN
_Fiat justitia, ruat coelum_. (Do the right thing even if the heavens
fall.) It's not nearly as na"ive a maxim as it seems, because in the
real world it often turns out that doing what is morally the right
thing is also, in practical terms, the right thing to do.
-- GWYNNE DYER
A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't
try to knock her down with it.
-- MARK TWAIN
When _I_ come upon anything---in Logic or in any other hard
subject---that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it
over, _aloud_, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so
_clearly_ to one's self! And then, you know, one is so _patient_ with
one's self: one _never_ gets irritated at one's own stupidity!
-- LEWIS CARROLL
The purpose of the present course is the deepening and development of
difficulties underlying contemporary theory. . .
-- A. A. BLASOV
University President: ``Why is it that you physicists always require so
much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires
nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers. . . and the
Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for
erasers.''
-- Told by ISAAC ASIMOV
I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple.
-- BILL WATTERSON
-- _The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes_
. . . the genes almost _always_ accurately reproduce. If they don't,
you get one of the following results: One, monsters---that is, grossly
malformed babies resulting from genetic mistakes. Years ago most
monsters died, but now many can be saved. This has made possible the
National Football League.
-- CECIL ADAMS
I think it would be totally inappropriate for me to even contemplate
what I am thinking about.
-- DON MAZANKOWSKI
-- Mazankowski was the Canadian Finance Minister for
most of the 1980s.
How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which.
. . 90% of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and
100% of teachers in Germany have double majors, while the best we can
say about our ``pocket of excellence'' is that 75% of [American]
students have learned to ``critique tactfully?''
-- BARBARA J. ALEXANDER
If there's anything the Institute has too much of already, it's concord
and placidity. There's no tension on the premises, no crackle in the
air, no sense at all that there are mad geniuses lurking about.
``I wish we had more crazy people here,'' Freeman Dyson has said.
Just so.
-- ED REGIS
-- _Who Got Einstein's Office?_
We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists, free
love and ``art,'' but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and every
one of them soon or late.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
-- ``The Butte Bashkirtseff''
Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, when I am
suffering death with a cold in the head.
-- MARK TWAIN
Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end
product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can
ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the
saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth
century thought.
-- SIR PETER MEDAWAR
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid
moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the
possibility that there may be something to them [which] we are
missing.
-- GAMEL NASSER
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly
what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Restaurant at the End of the Universe_
Heroin wasn't around then. It was introduced as a ``safe'' alternative
to morphine, just as methadone was then introduced as a ``safe''
alternative to heroin. As usual, the drug problem had to be
continuously invented, or there would not be one.
-- CHRISTOPHER PETTUS
[Disney's machine] has placed a Mickey Mouse hat on every little
developing personality in America. As capitalism, it is a work of
genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror.
-- RICHARD SCHICKEL
-- _The Disney Version_
About those crude, hate-filled cartoons in your Lesbian, Gay and Bi
issue: they're meant to subvert and debunk the stereotypical notion
that all gay people are imbued with Wildean wit, right?
-- C. DOERKSEN
-- In a letter to the McGill Daily
Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity
for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly
labelled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified
as outrageous exceptions!
-- W.J. REICHMANN
As a wise programmer once said, ``Floating point numbers are like
sandpiles: every time you move one, you lose a little sand and you pick
up a little dirt.'' And after a few computations, things can get pretty
dirty.
-- KERNIGHAN and PLAUGER
-- _The Elements of Programming Style_
Men do not invent Myths. They only invent fables, and tell lies. True
Myths create themselves, and find their expression in the men who serve
their purpose.
-- DENIS JOHNSTON
-- _The Brazen Horn_
Sir Howard. It is the truth, Cicely, and nothing but the truth. But the
English Law requires a witness to tell the _whole_ truth.
Lady Cicely. What nonsense! As if anybody ever knew the whole truth
about anything!
-- G.B. SHAW
-- _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_
I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you
could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a
little chair and say, ``You'll have three score years and ten,'' and
take a photograph every minute. ``And we'll watch you and photograph
you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film.'' Wouldn't
that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and
flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble,
decay, and rot.
-- CLIVE BARKER
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly
strangled.
-- SIR BARNETT COCKS
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of
a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in
thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do
it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night
cometh, wherein no man can work.
-- THOMAS CARLYLE
The bigger the real-life problems, the greater the tendency for the
discipline to retreat into a reassuring fantasy-land of abstract theory
and technical manipulation.
-- TOM NAYLOR
[On superstring theory:] I don't like that they're not calculating
anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like
that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an
explanation. . . It is precise mathematically, but the mathematics is
far too difficult for the individuals that are doing it, and they don't
draw their conclusions with any rigour. So they just guess.
-- RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind
stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful.
Let those who do not, seek their own kind.
-- HENRI FABRE
Spring is here. For the love of heaven, let's open our windows or we'll
all die, suffocated by our false fears.
-- LYSIANE GAGNON
_Prospero's Books_ is the _Terminator 2_ for intellectuals.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
Psychographic marketing techniques helped Raid roach spray marketers
discover that the reason low-income Southern women were the heaviest
users of roach spray was that ``a lot of their feelings about the roach
were very similar to the feelings that they had about the men in their
lives,'' said the advertising executive on the account. They said the
roach, like the man in their life, ``only comes around when he wants
food.'' The act of spraying roaches and seeing them die was satisfying
to this frustrated, powerless group.
-- American Demographics, Nov. 1991
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and
calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for
ever.
-- EDMUND BURKE
-- _Reflections on The Revolution in France_
Fans are interesting things. Rush fans just can't comprehend why the
rest of the world doesn't like Rush. REM fans consider the rest of the
world beneath their refined dignities to notice. Kate Bush fans love
the rest of the world, and the world loves them, but spend long nights
plotting to knife one another in the back.
-- RICHARD DARWIN
-- ``Gradenza''
My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but
debasement, frustration, and ignoble deaths. . .
-- HARLAN ELLISON
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to
divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share
with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this
way.
-- RICHARD STALLMAN
-- The GNU Manifesto
``First,'' said Opus, reading from the government manual, ``Gather
shovels. Second, quickly and without panic, take refuge in countryside.
. . Dig shallow trenches. Lie down in trenches, cover self with wooden
door or like object and await blast. After shock wave passes, emerge
and go to nearest emergency Civil Defense Center and fill out emergency
change of address forms.''
-- BERKE BREATHED
-- _Bloom Country Babylon_
Never be fatalistic about the inevitability of nuclear war or the
destruction of our environment. There are _ways_ to avoid the holocaust
and to make the world a cleaner place. We must never cease to search
for them.
-- VICTOR F. WEISSKOPF
Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly
that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty,
in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals
refrain from as a matter of common decency.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
*Boffin:* A Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a
Baffin, a mercifully obsolete Fleet Air Arm aircraft. Their offspring
was a Boffin, a bird of astonishingly queer appearance, bursting with
weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possessed of staggering
inventiveness, analytical powers and persistence. Its ideas, like its
eggs, were conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away,
and they just roll back.
-- GEORGE PHILIP CHAMBERLAIN
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes
wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
But then. . . it used to be so simple, once upon a time.
Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist
panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream,
looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the
sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming
things of superstition.
Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like ``Hurrah, I've
discovered Boyle's Third Law.'' And everyone knew where they stood. But
the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big
fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and
creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of
rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting
interested in the chaos itself---partly because it was a lot easier to
be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns
that you could put on a t-shirt.
-- TERRY PRATCHETT
[On the Kwakiutl tribe:] At their potlatch ceremonies these people
would compete with each other in burning and destroying their money and
valuable possessions, and accordingly their ideal was the man who would
perhaps seem to us a paranoid megalomaniac or possibly an industrial
magnate.
-- J.A.C. Brown
-- _Techniques of Persuasion_ (1963)
Although I know her soft body / I cannot sound out her heart; / Yet we
have but to make a few lines on a chart / And the distance of the
farthest stars / In the sky can be measured.
-- The Sixth Dalai Lama
The spreadsheet matrix is a creative prison bound by A1 and Z1000.
Walls. A psychological prison. Unlike the Black Death, nobody sees this
malady. There will be no cure. Soon it will be too late.
-- JOHN C. DVORAK
No God is sane. How could it be? To be a Man is so much less taxing,
and most men are mad. Consider the God. How much more deranged the Gods
must be, merely to exist. There can be no doubt: consider the Universe
and the patterns without reason upon which it is run. God is mad. The
God of Music is mad. The Timegod is punctual, but he is mad. And the
Machine God is mad.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
-- ``Ernest and the Machine God''
Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers.
-- ROBERT HUMMEL
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those
who dream only by night.
-- E.A. POE
-- ``Eleonora''
We must also have a special care to know the right ministring of a
compound, and how to find out the just proportion of weight therein;
for the goodness of the operations of things, consists chiefly in the
due proportion and measure of them: And unless the mixtion be every way
perfect, it availeth little in working.
-- GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA
-- Natural Magick
It was very strange that I, who knew the whole extent of space and
time, and counted the wandering stars like sheep, overlooking none,
that I who was the most awakened of all beings, I, the glory which
myriads in all ages had given their lives to establish, and myriads had
worshipped, should now look about me with the same overpowering awe,
the same abashed and tongue-tied worship as that which human travellers
in the desert feel under the stars.
-- OLAF STAPLEDON
-- _Star Maker_
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth
did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing
about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about
whether it is flat.
-- VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
-- _The Standardization of Error_ (1927
All the evils of publishing can be traced to one source---copyright.
-- STEFAN STYKOLT
-- Quoted by Kildare Dobbs in _The Living Name_ (1964)
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of
finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the
only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself
occupied.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
I can speak French but I cannot understand it.
-- MARK TWAIN
The skeptic may be pardoned for thinking that hypertext encourages
irrelevance. What the user can end up with is little more than a series
of footnotes, marginalia, and ``see also'' references---items that have
historically been relegated to second-class citizenship in the good old
book format, with the added benefit of not having to stare at a lousy
screen display to read them. . . Indeed, when you boil it down to its
rudiments, hypertext seems to make one major claim: it makes computers
work almost as well as books.
-- STEPHEN MANES
God has made Canada one of those nations which cannot be conquered and
cannot be destroyed, except by itself.
-- NORMAN ANGELL
-- ``Canada's Best Service for British Ideals'' (1913)
To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their
freedom, there is nothing to say.
-- LIONEL TIGER
-- _The Imperial Animal,_ with Robin Fox (1971)
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but
that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in
line.
-- H.L. MENCKEN
If you travel to the States. . . they have a lot of different words
than like what we use. For instance: they say ``elevator'', we say
``lift''; they say ``drapes'', we say ``curtains''; they say
``president'', we say ``seriously deranged git''.
-- ALEXEI SAYLE
Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her
childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful
competition for the whitest, brightest wash, Madison Avenue's
girl-next-door is all the American male could wish for---unless, by
some miscarriage, he should fancy human companionship.
-- VIVIAN GORNICK and BARBARA K. MORAN
To create a community of radical scholars, men and women who recognize
that rules and social conventions are arbitrary, but have mastered them
nonetheless---a community which shares such a scorn and disrespect for
the present society that it can embrace the whole bundle of rules and
subvert them thereby---that should be our goal.
-- HOWARD ADELMAN
-- ``In Search of a University,'' _The University Game_
(1968)
Andy and Flo live in the past, and when faced with something they don't
like or understand, they do the sensible thing---ignore it.
-- REG SMYTHE
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount
of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more
satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function
in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these
taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed
jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If
anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and
conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming
special privileges which should not be granted.
-- ERIC IDLE
May every young scientist remember. . . and not fail to keep his eyes
open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to
give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an
important discovery.
-- PATRICK BLACKETT
I had always loved beautiful and artistic things, though before leaving
America I had had a very little chance of seeing any.
-- EMMA ALBANI
Many businessmen fail to understand Python principles---the ultimate
absurdity was an offer from America to buy the ``format'' of the Python
shows, that is, _Monty Python_ without the Pythons---corporate methods
do not have the conceptual framework to deal with an anarchist
collective, run by intelligent and arrogant comedians who have proved
that their method works.
-- ROBERT HEWISON
-- _Monty Python: The Case Against_
It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour
of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if
machines were used.
-- GOTTFRIED VON LEIBNIZ
His [Alan Turing's] high-pitched voice already stood out above the
general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves
for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard
to say: ``No, I'm not interested in developing a _powerful_ brain. All
I'm after is just a _mediocre_ brain, something like the President of
the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.''
-- ANDREW HODGES
-- _Alan Turing: The Enigma_
The FDA has so many rules that can be gotten around that the consumer
has no protection at all. You never know what you're eating. I'm
horrified when I discover the nature of ingredients in consumer
products as a result of my scientific work.
-- TINA CHEN
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the
development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural
environment.
-- RICHARD WILKINSON
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at
all.
-- CHARLES BABBAGE
Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself
above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of
ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more
intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistable force
of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by
society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and
detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the
solitude of his thoughts.
-- HEINRICH HEINE
Do you know about the Eleventh Commandment? It says, ``Thou shalt not
bore God, or he will destroy your universe.''
-- JOHN LILLY
Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or
political poison---a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
-- LOUIS MENAND
In our impatience to test our ideological wings, too many students are
trying to fly before they even know what feathers are; too many
students use half-baked versions of some cultural theory they overheard
in the cafeteria line-up as a valid justification for their actions.
Like Newman's ideal student, we too learn as we go along---only now
students use an idea like a weapon, to intimidate and destroy, instead
of as one tool in a constructive tool box. How often have students,
speaking in class, either justified themselves or cudgelled some rival
into silence and submission by evoking a great name or theory?
-- DEREK WEBSTER
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in
contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers
of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded
and dull, but also just stupid.
-- JAMES WATSON
I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
-- JEAN LOUIS AGASSIZ
. . . one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is
connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring
about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify
your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You
cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid
remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political
language---and with variations this is true of all political parties,
from Conservatives to Anarchists---is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity
to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at
least change one's own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if
one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase---some
_jackboot_, _Achilles' heel_, _hotbed_, _melting pot_, _acid test_,
_veritable inferno_ or other lump of verbal refuse---into the dustbin
where it belongs.
-- GEORGE ORWELL
-- ``Politics and the English Language''
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all
his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
-- MICHAEL FARADAY
The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and
ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the
confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity
and respect for the integrity of man.
-- PAUL BARAN and PAUL SWEEZY
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet
do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear
notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but
one.
-- SENECA
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural
fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
-- FRANCIS BACON
-- ``Of Death''
Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer
and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to
train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of
physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
-- EUGENE WIGNER
It constantly confounds me that not only the young, but also many
certified intellectuals accept uncritically the superiority of
spontaneous or unconscious products of mind over those subjected to
conscious, rational control.
-- ROGER SHATTUCK
In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism is richer
in information than a Caravaggio painting, Bach fugue, or any other
great work of art.
-- EDWARD O. WILSON
It may be objected by some that I have concentrated too much on the dry
bones, and too little on the flesh which clothes them, but I would ask
such critics to concede at least that the bones have an austere beauty
of their own.
-- A.B. PIPPARD
-- _Classical Thermodynamics_
Michael W. Fox (no relation), vice-president of the Humane Society,
said that, ``to call an animal with whom you share your life a `pet',
is reminiscent of men's magazines where you (a figure of speech, don't
take it personally) have the Pet of the Month.'' It is supposed that
the continued use of the word ``pet'' to designate dogs or cats
threatens to reduce their level of respect to the current status of
twentieth century North American women. Now that's radical.
-- The McGill Red Herring
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that,
from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely
different.
-- ALDOUS HUXLEY
-- _The Devils of Loudun_
Some people have so much respect for their superiors they have none
left for themselves.
-- PETER McARTHUR
Thermodynamics is the kingdom also of running current history as well
as polemics, not to mention verbosity. In no other discipline have the
same equations been published over and over again so many times by
different authors in different ill-defined notations and therefore
claimed as his own by each; in no other has a single author seen fit to
publish essentially the same ideas over and over again within a period
of twenty years; and nowhere else is the ratio of talk and excuse to
reason and result so high.
-- CLIFFORD TRUESDELL
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases,
when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence
flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing
touch in the most direct way possible.
-- ROLLO MAY
-- _Love and Will_
Professor Branestawm, like all great men, had simple tastes. He wore
simple trousers with two simple legs. His coat was simply fastened with
safety pins because the buttons had simply fallen off. . .
-- NORMAN HUNTER
-- ``The Professor Invents a Machine''
For that moment she shared an overwhelming sense of wonder and
elation---the joy and beauty of pure mathematics. It was the only
language possible in that narrow instant of triumph. And yet it also
carried love.
-- DAVID BRIN
-- ``Dr. Pak's Preschool''
``Social gains,'' ``social aims,'' ``social objectives'' have become
the daily bromides of our language. The necessity of a social
justification for all activities and all existence is now taken for
granted. There is no proposal outrageous enough but what its author can
get a respectful hearing and approbation if he claims that in some
undefined way it is for ``the common good.''
-- AYN RAND
-- _Anthem_
Privately owned radio has often been successful in its own terms:
profitability, stability, unflagging mediocrity.
-- KEITH DAVEY
I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of
the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by
the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity
of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and _bizarre_
motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is
mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.
-- E.A. POE
-- ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''
We owe most of what we know to about one hundred men. We owe most of
what we have suffered to another hundred or so.
-- R.W. DICKSON
In all such cases there is one common circumstance---the system has a
quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed
into motion, but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the
system has reached a certain configuration, to attain which requires an
expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitesimally
small, and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy
developed in consequence thereof. For example, the rock loosed by frost
and balanced on a singular point of the mountain side, the little spark
which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the world
a-fighting, the little scruple which prevents a man from doing his
will, the little spore which blights all the potatoes, the little
gemmule which makes us philosophers or idiots. Every existence above a
certain rank has its singular points: the higher the rank the more of
them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small
to be taken account of by a finite being, may produce re
-- JAMES CLERK MAXWELL
Above all nations is humanity.
-- GOLDWIN SMITH
There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.
-- ROBERT L. STANFIELD
What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and
stare?
-- W.H. DAVIES
-- ``Leisure''
There are, of course, several things in Ontario that are more dangerous
than wolves. For instance, the step-ladder.
-- J.W. CURRAN
We have beside us a mountain of Books, Magazines, Pamphlets and
Newspapers, that have been accumulating for the last two months,
unopened and unread. Like a Turk, in the dim twilight of his Harem, we
scarcely know which to choose, but, we shall commence at the apex of
the pyramid, and dig downwards.
-- JOSEPH HOWE
There's a saying among prospectors, ``Go out looking for one thing, and
that's all you'll ever find.''
-- ROBERT FLAHERTY
As a child I lived in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, and it was
there that I ran into the curious assumption that the world around me
was full of common people. This was never said in so many words. It was
just understood that greatness or extra value as a human being existed
only among the dead, or else it was an attribute of someone far away,
whom one never met. I grew up feeling the full weight of my
insignificance, and slowly, slowly began to build up my ego. Receiving
no help from the environment, I withdrew from it into a world of
imagination which was particularly illuminated by fiction stories which
I read. . .
-- A.E. VAN VOGT
In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec
Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the
maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding
us is the final and only sanction of human existence.
-- HUGH MacLENNAN
Food is rotting in warehouses, being burned and dumped into the sea. It
is the money system destroying food to maintain prices.
-- WILLIAM ABERHART
In order to invent the airplane you must have at least a thousand
years' experience dreaming of angels.
-- ARNOLD ROCKMAN
For a person to live in a country, and to be ignorant of its history on
almost every issue that comes up, means that he is really walking
around in the dark all the time. I think that history can give you a
sense of courage in a difficult and dark world. You can say to
yourself: I at least know something about this world, I know how it got
the way it is, I know where it's possibly going, not certainly but
possibly. I can stand up against the world.
-- DONALD CREIGHTON
Somehow the people who do as they please seem to get along just about
as well as those who are always trying to please others.
-- BOB EDWARDS
Of all national assets archives are the most precious; they are the
gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them
marks the extent of our civilization.
-- SIR A.G. DOUGHTY
There seems to be a strong correlation between people who relish tough
football and people who relish intimidating and beating the hell out of
Commies, hippies, protest marchers and other opposition groups.
Watching well-advertised strong men knock other people around, make
them hurt, is in the end like other tastes. It does not weaken with
feeding. It grows.
-- JOHN McMURTRY
Some people say the animals see the straight path and flee from it in
fear, for they know it was built by men.
-- JAMES HOUSTON
A Canadian settler _hates_ a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as
something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any
means. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even
with the most magnificent timber trees, such as among the Druids had
been consecrated, and among the Greeks would have sheltered oracles and
votive temples. The beautiful faith which assigned to every tree of the
forest its guardian nymph, to every leafy grove its tutelary divinity,
would find no votaries here. Alas! for the Dryads and Hamadryads of
Canada!
-- ANNA JAMESON
A day without a pun is a day without sunshine; there is gloom for
improvement.
-- JOHN S. CROSBIE
Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by
the dullness of that person.
-- J.D. GRIFFIN
Art history is the nightmare from which art is struggling to awake.
-- ROBERT FULFORD
It is a rotten world / Artful politicians are its bane / Its saving
grace is the / Artlessness of the young / And the wonders of the sky.
-- Epitaph, Ross Bay Cemetery, Victoria
Some commentators have suggested that I do not really exist, that I am
the figment of the imagination of certain newspaper columnists and
television producers. Personally, I reject this extreme view.
-- PIERRE TRUDEAU
The German method is to go to the principle of things, to select the
wrong principle, and to build on that.
-- LOUIS DUDEK
Every woman needs one man in her life who is strong and responsible.
Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to
do---fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible.
-- RICHARD J. NEEDHAM
In some of the poorer areas of the world it is sadly true that sex is
the only luxury available to the ordinary man. Whether the ordinary
woman also considers it a luxury is open to question.
-- HUGH L. KEENLEYSIDE
``Why is _The McGill Daily?_'' / Asked the pessimist sourly. / ``Thank
God,'' said the optimist gaily, / ``That it isn't hourly!''
-- A.J.M. SMITH
Wherever a set of alternative possible routes toward achieving a given
end presents itself, a student movement will tend to choose the one
which involves a higher measure of violence or humiliation directed
against the older generation.
-- LEWIS S. FEUER
And after all, why should I go to bed every night? Sleep is only a
habit.
-- CORNELIUS VAN HORNE
I know a lot of my friends who won't drive a car that is of a model
more than two years old. A great many of us have machinery in our heads
that is of a model a hundred years old.
-- J.S. WOODSWORTH
-- Quoted by F.H. Underhill in _In Search of Canadian
Liberalism_ (1960)
But I was not, to use the theological phrase, _receptive_. The great
obstacle to the influx of grace was my own perfect happiness, and it is
well known that God takes no thought for the happy, any more than He
does for birds and puppies, perhaps realizing they have no need of Him
and mercifully letting them alone.
-- JOHN GLASSCO
-- _Memoirs of Montparnasse_ (1970)
The stupidity of a stupid man is mercifully intimate and reticient,
while the stupidity of an intellectual is cried from the rooftops.
-- PETER USTINOV
-- _Dear Me_
If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies
grow / In Flanders fields.
-- JOHN McCRAE
-- ``In Flanders Fields''
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and
otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk,
whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence.
Or lack thereof.
-- NEIL GAIMAN
-- The Books of Magic III
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what
they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed
that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so
much---the wheel, New York, wars and so on---whilst all the dolphins
had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But
conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent than man---for precisely the same reasons.
-- DOUGLAS ADAMS
-- _The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not
truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music.
Music is the _best!_
-- FRANK ZAPPA
-- _Joe's Garage_
The mind, in fact, is trained to be able to deal with routine: the
routine of working in an office, the routine of working in a factory,
the routine even of teaching, the routine of going to school. The mind
is routinized. And under those circumstances it is understandable that
the most uncreative and frequently destructive aspects of the human
mind are brought out.
-- MURRAY BOOKCHIN
A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up
through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with
resignation, at the unconquerable unimplicated sun.
-- LLEWELYN POWYS
-- _The Pathetic Fallacy_
One form to rule them all, one form to find them, one form to bring
them all and in the darkness rewrite the hell out of them.
-- Digital Equipment Corporation
-- A comment from SENDMAIL Ruleset 3
I look around and it's obvious to me: spreadsheet programming is
turning the users into humorless accountant types. It is the embodiment
of the bookkeeper's thought pattern. If you don't already have this
peculiar pattern, then using a spreadsheet for any length of time will
slowly turn your mind into the mind of a bookkeeper. The final result
is not unlike the creation of mindless pod people seen in _Invasion of
the Body Snatchers_.
-- JOHN C. DVORAK
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives.
And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.
-- FREDERIK POHL
-- _The Way The Future Was_
What is termed ``disrespect for law'' in fact may only be the
manifestation of a burning desire for justice. Order, like law, to be
respected, must deserve respect. Disrespect for an order that does not
deserve respect ought not to be condemned as degeneration, but
commended as a healthy regeneration. What I am concerned about is that
lawyers and judges too often regard ``order'' as a shield for the
protection of privilege.
-- J.C. McRUER
We can't go on living on a planet that's two-thirds slum---not with
safety.
-- ARNOLD SMITH
If I die, the turtle will carry the secret of the trip and reveal it at
the proper time.
-- GEORGE L. STATHAKIS
-- Stathakis was a Greek-born Buffalo chef and mystic
who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel on July 5,
1930. He perished, but his pet turtle crawled out of
the barrel and lived for many years without revealing a
word of ``the secret.''
Mathematical concepts and facts gain in vividness and clarity if they
are well connected with the world around us and with general ideas, and
if we obtain them by our own work through successive stages instead of
in one lump.
-- GEORGE POLYA
And they all agreed that the expression _on_ the face was not one of
happiness. There were many possible explanations for that expression,
but no one would have said terror, for it was not terror. They would
not have said helplessness, for it was not that, either. They might
have settled on a pathetic sense of loss, had their sensibilities run
that deep, but none of them would have felt that the expression said,
with great finality: a man may truly live in his dreams, his noblest
dreams, but only, _only_ if he is worthy of those dreams.
-- HARLAN ELLISON
-- ``Delusion for a Dragon Slayer''
Jargon: Jargon consists of words, phrases and syntactic usages which
make communication easier between insiders in any field of study while
making it harder for outsiders, thereby linguistically enforcing the
elitism of expertise. Unless you use jargon liberally your career is
likely to stagnate, especially in the computer industry.
-- FORSYTH and RADA
-- _Machine Learning_ (definition in the glossary)
. . . it is the peculiar and perpetual error of human intellect to be
more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it
ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed toward both
alike.
-- FRANCIS BACON
-- ``Idols of the Mind''
I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
-- THE DOCTOR
-- In John Peel's _Timewyrm: Genesys_
But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to
venture a little way past them into the impossible.
-- ARTHUR C. CLARKE
-- ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination''
(1973)
Whenever I hear the word ``share'' I would reach for a gun if I had
one. ``Share'' is frequently followed by the word ``feelings,'' and I
have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress
yours.
-- STEWART BRAND
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved
children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children---but we
pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest
communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her
thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm
when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
-- GARRETT HARDIN
That is the problem with this rich and anguished generation. Somewhere
a long time ago they fell in love with the idea that politicians---even
the slickest and brightest presidential candidates---were real heroes
and truly exciting people. That is wrong on its face. They are mainly
dull people with corrupt instincts and criminal children.
-- HUNTER S. THOMPSON
-- _Generation of Swine_
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own
reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he
contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous
structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend a little
of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN
It should, therefore, be the goal of formal educational programs to
train the programmer to the point where he can use his tools as tools
to further his learning.
-- GERALD M. WEINBERG
-- _The Psychology of Computer Programming_
I am engaged in teaching, at graduate level, in producing one variety
of ``mathematical engineer.'' The most powerful test I know of for an
applicant to be one of my students is that he have an absolute mastery
of his native tongue: you just need to listen to him.
-- E.W. DIJKSTRA
And I have no desire to get ugly. / But I cannot help mentioning that
the door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of
the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
-- OGDEN NASH
-- ``Seeing Eye to Eye Is Believing''
There is a pleasure sure / In being mad, which none but madmen know.
-- JOHN DRYDEN
-- _The Spanish Friar_, II, i
It was Larry, of course, who started it. The rest of us felt too
apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was
designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework,
exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with
cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the
consequences.
-- GERALD DURRELL
-- _My Family and Other Animals_
Law I: The difficulty of using a program is proportional to its
usefulness, inversely proportional to its speed, size, and ease of
learning, and is a constant.
Law II: When multitasking applications on a personal computer,
difficulty is conserved and is a constant.
Law III: Creativity is inversely proportional to the memory size of a
computer.
-- ROBERT HUMMEL
In practically any comedy or tragedy of Shakespeare one cannot read
twenty lines without being made aware that, behind the clowns, the
criminals, the heroes, behind the flirts and the weeping queens, beyond
all that is agonizingly or farcically human, and yet symbiotic with
man, immanent in his consciousness and consubstantial with his being,
there lie the everlasting data, the given facts of planetary and cosmic
existence on every level, animate and inanimate, mindless and
purposively conscious.
-- ALDOUS HUXLEY
-- _The Devils of Loudun_
In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running
home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things
just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the
ludicrous assumption that _men_ know how to fix things, when in fact
all they know how to do is _look_ at things in a certain squinty-eyed
manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things
in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to
another home.
-- DAVE BARRY
-- ``Heat? No Sweat''
I don't do crack. I don't do heroin. And I don't do desktop
publishing.
-- STEPHEN MANES
What is now proved was once only imagined.
-- WILLIAM BLAKE
-- ``The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''
Nothing ever begins.
There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or
any other story springs.
The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the
tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the
connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the
tale told as if it were of its own making.
Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic becomes laughable; great
lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.
Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind
and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that
hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.
-- CLIVE BARKER
-- _Weaveworld_
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
-- ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds
created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside
will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the will
of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges
over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please?
These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of
commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
-- GALILEO GALILEI
One need not be a chamber to be haunted; / One need not be a house; /
The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.
-- EMILY DICKINSON
-- ``Time and Eternity''
Mathematics has its paradoxes, astronomy its uncertainties (about what
is being measured), physics having suffered certain metaphysical
relapses can survive only by swallowing entire jugs of wholly
contradictory measurements. As for psychology, its most brilliant and
its most scandalous success has been in a realm of theory in which
measurement is as welcome as Macduff at Dunsinane.
-- JAMES R. NEWMAN
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when
everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in
short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at
last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization
does. In place of this we have death.
-- CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE
The tendency to believe that things never change, the inertia of daily
existence, is a staple of living. It has always been a delusion.
-- DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been
sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful,
rebellious, and immature.
-- TOM ROBBINS
. . . I think Bergman would never have been celebrated as much had he
made films in English because the language is so cynical. If you say
``I'm full of fear,'' or ``I'm full of pain,'' in an English movie,
people fall out of the seats with laughter.
-- PAUL COX
It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the
security of a god.
-- SENECA
I'm not religious at all, but I don't believe in death. Death is a very
beautiful thing. I believe _that_. . . . I won't ever see you,
darling, but it's been very nice talking to you. Life is very
beautiful, you know.
-- SHEILA FLORANCE
The wonderful childlike game of infinite planes and smooth, perfect
bodies, reality unwrinkled, cast a web of consoling order, infinite
trajectories and infinitesimal instants, harmonic truths. From that
cartoon realm it was always necessary to slip back, cloaking
exhilarating flights of imagination in a respectable deductive style.
But that did not mean, when the papers appeared in the learned
journals, disguised by abstracts and references and ornate, distancing
Germanic mannerisms---that did not mean you forgot being in that other
place, the beautiful world where Mind met Matter, the paradise you
never mentioned.
-- GREGORY BENFORD
-- ``Newton Sleep''
Imaginative literature in the service of rebellion, or satanism,
quickly sinks into exhibitionism or obscurity. Imaginative literature
as the expression of a deeply apprehended truth, poetry which
interprets to a man the myth of his own age, can in the hands of Dante,
of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of Camoes and of Goethe, help to raise
the level of a whole civilization.
-- J.M. COHEN
When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens
and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living
among the gods.
-- LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
Canadian consumers race across the border to buy the kind of cheap
goods that a country with low wages and a third-rate social security
system can produce. So empty are their lives, apparently, that a
three-hour lineup of cars at the border coming back is viewed as an
acceptable trade-off.
-- CHARLES GORDON
There is a tendency among some Pagans to want to be back in, let us
say, sixth-century Wales instead of wanting a _transformed_ world.
Going back to sixth-century Wales is a fantasy that is dear to me. It's
part of the archetypal dream. But that is all it is. Nobody really
wants to go back into the past except a bunch of space cookies. It is
not modern technology that is desensitizing. It is the misuse of it
that is.
-- GWYDION PENDDERWEN
To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, _we must
see into the future._
-- ROBERT SCHOLES
-- _Structural Fabulation_
In the design of fission reactors man was not an innovator but an
unwitting imitator of nature.
-- GEORGE A. COWAN
-- ``A Natural Fission Reactor''
The aim of this article has been to show that our most successful
theories in physics are those that explicitly leave room for the
unknown, while confining this room sufficiently to make the theory
empirically disprovable. It does not matter whether this room is
created by allowing for arbitrary forces as Newtonian dynamics does, or
by allowing for arbitrary equations of state for matter, as General
Relativity does, or for arbitrary motions of charges and dipoles, as
Maxwell's electrodynamics does. To exclude the unknown wholly as a
``unified field theory'' or a ``world equation'' purports to do is
pointless and of no scientific significance.
-- SIR HERMANN BONDI
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the
steamroller, you're part of the road.
-- STEWART BRAND
-- _The Media Lab_
The road ahead can hardly help being strewn with many a mistake. The
main point is to get those mistakes made and recognized as fast as
possible!
-- JOHN A. WHEELER
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
-- HENRY BROOKS ADAMS
As for the passions and studies of the mind, avoid envy, anxious fears,
anger fretting inwards, subtle and knotty inquisitions, joys and
exhilarations in excess, sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes,
mirth rather than joy, variety of delights rather than surfeit of them,
wonder and admiration (and therefore novelties), studies that fill the
mind with splendid and illustrious objects (as histories, fables, and
contemplations of nature).
-- FRANCIS BACON
-- ``Of Regiment of Health''
To see the world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower; /
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.
-- WILLIAM BLAKE
-- ``Auguries of Innocence''
The world will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder.
-- G.K. CHESTERTON
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions---the little soon
forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt
compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial
feeling.
-- SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
To live by medicine is to live horribly.
-- CARL LINNAEUS
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than
to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
-- ARTHUR MACHEN
-- _The Hill of Dreams_
So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely
the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the
ultimate foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this
idea without any regret. The universe is infinite in all directions,
not only above us in the large but also below us in the small.
-- EMIL WIECHERT
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the
greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and
of sciences.
-- FREEMAN DYSON
-- _Infinite in All Directions_
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents.
-- NATHANIEL BORENSTEIN
Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within
us now that can never die again.
-- H.G. WELLS
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and
man's reason has never learned to separate them.
-- DESMOND BERNAL
The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations
consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are
sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind
of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is
commonly thought to be. . .
-- ANTOINE LAVOISIER
I don't mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don't even mind
using someone's reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it
is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle
centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles.
-- JOSEPH NEWCOMER
. . . men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they
may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up,
because there is always hope, though they know not the end and move
towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are
unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter
what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.
-- NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
-- _The Discourses_
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An
inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
-- G.K. CHESTERTON
[On chess]: In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre
motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is
mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.
-- E.A. POE
-- ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue''
Windows, and especially Windows/386, feels like iteration number 3 on a
list where the product becomes useful and important around iteration
number 7.
-- JIM SEYMOUR
. . . equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once
blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the
infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand
inanities a fragile loveliness.
-- OLAF STAPLEDON
-- _Star Maker_
I find television very educating. Every time sombody turns on the set,
I go into the other room and read a book.
-- GROUCHO MARX
For the difference between art and entertainment is, finally, one not
so much of direction as of degree: though all entertainment is not art,
all art must include entertainment. ``Entertaining'' means
interest-holding, and what bores and fails to involve has no real
artistic value. Granted, art makes demands; it entertains those who are
willing and able to feel, perceive, and think more deeply and
arduously---more courageously if you will---rather than those who
always want to leave their thoughts behind, most likely because thought
has abandoned them.
-- JOHN SIMON
MAN: But I am a man.
WOMAN: Yes, to a degree. That is a trifle abnormal. But not
insurmountable.
-- MYRNA LAMB
-- ``But What Have You Done For Me Lately''
The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it
incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend
their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in
which they themselves do not believe and that it teaches the essential
meaninglessness of all creations of the mind; words, images and ideas.
-- PAUL BARAN and PAUL SWEEZY
. . . there are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to
treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow
expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not
the purpose of art.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it.
-- DONALD E. KNUTH
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of
Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil
footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the
palaeontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant
dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
-- JOHN READER
-- _Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man_
We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that
I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude,
until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the
inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
-- CHARLES DICKENS
-- _Great Expectations_
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless
you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
-- DAVE BARRY
Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have
obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply
myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former
opinions.
-- RENE DESCARTES
-- First Meditation
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by
its author.
-- S.C. JOHNSON
. . . the social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided
what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature
frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.
-- PETER USTINOV
-- Dear Me
Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental
Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work
efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I
like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems,
worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving,
and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes
out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to
its new position.
-- ROBERTSON DAVIES
-- _Tempest-Tost_ (1951)
I have a friend who told me that the greatest computer system ever
built by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old
story. But what I like was that he felt that the Druids didn't die out,
they just went bankrupt trying to debug the software.
-- JAMES FINKLE
We tend to idealize tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves
infested with losers and nut cases.
-- PATRICK HAYDEN
Chemistry is physics without thought; mathematics is physics without
purpose.
-- ANONYMOUS
The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the
naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive,
that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has
just elected the new Pope).
-- JOHN BEAR
-- _Computer Wimp_
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came
before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that.
We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who
preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even
iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
. . . here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to
2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that
dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame
others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of
freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you
disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
-- GERARD K. O'NEILL
-- _2081_
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to
refresh my commitment to science.
-- HEINZ PAGELS
-- _The Dreams of Reason_
In a paper awaiting publication [Paul Horowitz] and [Carl] Sagan list
about 50 odd signals from the Megachannel ExtraTerrestrial Assay I and
its twin outside Buenos Aires, META II. Some have characteristics that
rule out their being messages from extraterrestrials. But dozens
remain, suspended forever in time like a ringing phone that you picked
up a nanosecond too late.
-- SHARON BEGLEY
You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across
fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they
won't laugh if you trip.
-- JONATHAN CARROLL
-- _Outside the Dog Museum_
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space,
as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really
old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though
they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases
than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that
are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant
equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good
bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
-- TERRY PRATCHETT
-- _Guards! Guards!_
Numbers and lines have many charms, unseen by vulgar eyes, and only
discovered to the unwearied and respectful sons of Art. In features the
serpentine line (who starts not at the name) produces beauty and love;
and in numbers, high powers, and humble roots, give soft delight.
-- E. DE JONCOURT
``Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born''; I need hardly
point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total
of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it
is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the
increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the
next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which
I refer should be corrected as follows: ``Every moment dies a man / And
one and a sixteenth is born.'' I may add that the exact figures are
1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of
metre.
-- CHARLES BABBAGE
-- In a letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The criterion of simplicity is not necessarily based on the speed of
the algorithm or in its complexity in serial computers.
-- ARMAND de CALLATAY
-- _Natural and Artifical Intelligence_
Imitation of nature is bad engineering. For centuries inventors tried
to fly by emulating birds, and they have killed themselves uselessly. .
. You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 747. Why not?
Because Nature didn't need anything that would fly at 700 mph at 40,000
feet: how would such an animal feed itself?. . . If you take Man as a
model and test of artificial intelligence, you're making the same
mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize
that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and
accordingly, _has never bothered to develop one._ So when an
intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on principles
different from those of Man's mind, and its level of intelligence will
certainly not be measured by the fact that it can beat some chess
champion or appear to carry on a conversation in English.
-- ANONYMOUS
-- Quoted in Jacques Vallee's _The Network Revolution_
I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls.
-- SENATOR GEORGE AIKEN
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right
keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
As life moves to this electronic frontier, politicians and corporations
are starting to exert increasing control over the new digital realm,
policing information highways with growing strictness. Before we even
realise we're there, we may find ourselves boxed into a digital ghetto,
denied simple rights of access, while corporations and government
agencies make out their territory and roam free. So who will oppose the
big guys? Who's going to stand up for our digital civil liberties? Who
has the techno-literacy necessary to ask a few pertinent questions
about what's going down in cyberspace? Perhaps the people who have been
living there the longest might have a few answers.
-- MARK BENNETT
Lovely girls are terribly insecure. They are convinced that their legs
are too thick, and their bottoms are too big, and their bosoms are too
small. They are conviced that their nose is the wrong shape, that their
ears stick out, and that their eyes are too close together. They need a
man who will tell them they are exactly right as they are. They do not
believe him, but they need to hear it said.
-- RICHARD J. NEEDHAM
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as
breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
-- RICHARD STALLMAN
We have plenty of information technology---what is perhaps needed now
is more intelligence technology, to help us make sense of the growing
volume of information stored in the form of statistical data,
documents, messages, and so on. For example, not many people know that
the infamous hole in the ozone layer remained undetected for seven
years as a result of infoglut. The hole had in fact been identified by
a US weather satellite in 1979, but nobody realised this at the time
because the information was buried---along with 3 million other unread
tapes---in the archives of the National Records Centre in Washington
DC. It was only when British scientists were analysing the data much
later in 1986 that the hole in the ozone was first ``discovered''.
-- TOM FORESTER
And so, the best of my advice to the originators and designers of ADA
has been ignored. In this last resort, I appeal to you, representatives
of the programming profession in the United States, and citizens
concerned with the welfare and safety of your own country and of
mankind: Do not allow this language in its present state to be used in
applications where reliability is crucial, i.e., nuclear power
stations, cruise missiles, early warning systems, antiballistic missile
defense systems. The next rocket to go astray as a result of a
programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a
harmless trip to Venus: it may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one
of our own cities. An unreliable programming language generating
unreliable programs constitutes a far greater risk to our environment
and to our society than unsafe cars, toxic pesticides, or accidents at
nuclear power stations. Be vigilant to reduce the risk, not to increase
it.
-- C. A. R. HOARE
-- 1980 Turing Award Lecture
[On role-playing games] Here we have a game that combines the charm of
a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.
-- CECIL ADAMS
-- _The Straight Dope_
Here lies, extinguished in his prime, / a victim of modernity: / but
yesterday he hadn't time--- / and now he has eternity.
-- PIET HEIN
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved
person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that
light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of
the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the
hearts you encounter.
-- ALBERT CAMUS
Childbirth is _not_ a miracle. Life is _not_ sacred. When you have
twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East
and that's it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live
birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, _then_ childbirth _is_ a
miracle and life _is_ sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in
Philadelphia's housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a
miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity.
-- DAVE SIM
-- Cerebus #142
The way of the portable computer user is as a stony path strewn with
plugs and sockets, all the wrong size. . .
-- TERRY PRATCHETT
-- In alt.fan.pratchett
Now, think about a kid in 5th grade today. They've grown up with
Nintendo and arcade-quality games on their computers. They've grown up
with zillions of utilities which typically have been polished for
years. They've grown up with operating environments that, no matter
what we may think of them, are orders of magnitude more sophisticated
and complex than what we started with. What's their motivation to
program? It's going to be years of work before their programs can equal
the quality and capability of stuff they can get just by asking. When I
started programming, I spent a lot of time writing games. Is a kid
who's used to animated 256-color action games with sound going to
bother, when the best they can do is produce some text or a few lines
moving around on the screen? And as everything moves toward GUI-ness,
that places another obstacle in their path---the work needed to put a
GUI on something may well be beyond them, let alone actually providing
any functionality. Sometimes I wonder if we aren't the last
-- JAMES W. BIRDSALL
-- In alt.folklore.computers
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean,
they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I
can pretend. . . I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that
lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker
and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are
transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into
cold and dust. But I can pretend.
-- NEIL GAIMAN
-- The Sandman #48: _Journey's End_
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as
if the sand were stone.
-- JORGE LUIS BORGES
In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone,
somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help
alleviate that fear.
-- JOHN C. DVORAK
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without
necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason---including
blind stupidity.
-- W.A. WULD
-- ``A Case against the GOTO'', _SIGPLAN Notices_,
November 1972
If you've been reading the trend sections of your weekly newsmagazines,
you know that ``yuppies'' are a new breed of serious, clean-cut,
ambitious, career-oriented young person that probably resulted from all
that atomic testing. They wear dark, natural-fiber, businesslike
clothing even when nobody they know has died. In college, they major in
Business Administration. If, to meet certain academic requirements,
they have to take a liberal-arts course, they take Business Poetry.
-- DAVE BARRY
-- ``Yup The Establishment''
The argument that we have to condition children to horrors is now seen
as fallacious; there is no question of introducing them to horrors,
because the horrors already known to them are far in excess of anything
we experience as adults.
-- P.M. Pickard
-- _I Could a Tale Unfold: Violence, Horror &
Sensationalism in Stories for Children_
[On Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson:] I see these two legendary men as
symbolic of the American dream. Their position atop a vast
religious/cable television/Bad Hair empire shows the entire world that
America truly is the Land of Opportunity(tm), where Narrow-Minded,
Really Dumb Guys can, and regularly do, get to the top.
-- Ron Barber
-- In alt.fan.lemurs
*pixel, n.:* A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen
displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology:
Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial
intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.
-- Jeff Meyer
-- a.k.a. Moriarty on Usenet
These petitioners had no conception of art; to them a picture was a
symbol of something else, and very readily the symbol became the
reality. They were untouched by modern education, but their government
was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit
from them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them
from belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where, I ask myself,
will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things
necessary to people who are well fed and know the wonders that lie
concealed in an atom? I don't regret economic and educational advance;
I just wonder how much we shall have to pay for it, and in what coin.
-- Robertson Davies
-- _Fifth Business_ (1970)
Much perverse incompetence comes from managers and/or secretaries
trying to use words whose meanings they don't know. Some people go
through their entire careers in a fog this way. They're often C or D
students who got accustomed to being confused in class, and who now,
after years of practice, have lost all awareness that it is _possible_
to understand things clearly and know the exact meaning of every word
that one uses. I know that as a teacher, I find my biggest challenge is
reaching people who are accustomed to being confused, and no longer
consider confusion undesirable.
-- Michael A. Covington
-- In Alt.folklore.computers
No, I wouldn't go as far as some of my fellow [mental] calculators and
indiscriminately welcome all numbers with open arms: not the
horny-handed, rough-and-tough bully 8 or the sinister 64 or the
arrogant, smug, self-satisfied 36. But I do admit to a very personal
affection for the ingenious, adventurous 26, the magic, versatile 7,
the helpful 37, the fatherly, reliable (if somewhat stodgy) 76. . .
-- Hans Eberstark
-- From the introductory comment to Steven B. Smith's
_The Great Mental Calculators_ (1983)
EMI may have been gambling when it signed Kate Bush, but it was a
gamble that paid. . . only EMI had a Kate Bush, and the idiosyncratic
nature of Bush's music made the construction of a Kate Bush clone an
accomplishment almost beyond the powers of imagination.
-- Holly Kruse
-- ``In Praise of Kate Bush'', in _On Record_ (1988)
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure
thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by
exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so
easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand
conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability
has its own problems.)
-- FREDERICK P. BROOKS, JR.
-- _The Mythical Man-Month_ (1975)
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple
reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become
disturbed.
-- JAMES THURBER
-- ``Carpe Noctem, If You Can'', in _Credos and Curios_
(1962)
``Since the invasion of Grenada,'' a military source informed me, ``we
call it $C^5$. That's Command, Control, Communications, Computers and
Confusion.''
-- BARBARA GARSON
-- _The Electronic Sweatshop_ (1988)
Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand
what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of
strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off
chaos.
-- PETER GREENAWAY
. . . don't waste too much effort in searching for conspiracies. Most
of the harm done in the world is out of stupidity, not by design. Be on
the watch for skulduggery. . . but don't fall into the trap of
thinking that every evil thing that occurs in the world in part of some
diabolic master plan. The notion that whatever is wrong with the world
can be blamed on somebody (never, of course, one's self) is a rather
infantile carryover from the childhood days when our parents were
thought to be all-powerful and therefore all-responsible.
-- GERARD K. O'NEILL
-- _2081_
The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at
the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial
conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible.
As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are
dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from
settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are
all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear
fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be
overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to
maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our
teeth.
-- FREEMAN DYSON
-- _Infinite in All Directions_
If there's another world, he lives in bliss; / If there is none, he
made the best of this.
-- ROBERT BURNS
-- ``Epitaph on William Muir''
Rest in peace. The mistake shall not be repeated.
-- Cenotaph in Hiroshima
Ahead, there were such sights unfolding: friends and places they'd
feared gone forever coming to greet them, eager for shared rapture.
There was time for all their miracles now. For ghosts and
transformations; for passion and ambiguity; for noon-day visions and
midnight glory. Time in abundance. For nothing ever begins. And this
story, having no beginning, will have no end.
-- CLIVE BARKER
-- _Weaveworld_
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life
fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of
hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
-- ISAAC ASIMOV
-- 1920-1992 RIP :'(
May you go safe, my friend, across that dizzy way / No wider than a
hair, by which your people go / From earth to Paradise; may you go safe
today / With stars and space above, and time and stars below.
-- LORD DUNSANY