Totally Unclean, unedited quotations

Be thee warned: these are also unconfirmed!

Take me back to loQtus!

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
-- Collette

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
-- Helen Keller

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
-- Amelia Earhart

Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going
to show.
-- Mignon McLaughlin

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
-- Emily Dickinson

Some things ... arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms
and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
-- Gail Goodwin

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
-- Anna Freud

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable
uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words,
we are the hero of our own story.
-- Mary McCarthy

I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting
there, with divine patience -- and laughter.
-- Susan M. Watkins

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites.
Moderation is for monks.
-- Lazarus Long

To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy--and
dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
-- Lazarus Long

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn
old falsehoods.
-- Lazarus Long

Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't
bet, you can't win.
-- Lazarus Long

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why.
Then do it.
-- Lazarus Long

It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
-- Lazarus Long

If man is to vanish from the earth, let him vanish in the moment of creation,
when he is creating something new, opening a path to the tomorrow he may
never see. It is man's nature to reach out to grasp for the tangible on
the way to the intangible.
-- Louis L'Amour

Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.
-- Louis L'Amour

The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the
hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures
I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer
because of the memories of this I was enduring.
-- Louis L'Amour

In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift ...
How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time,
I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants.
Before this voyage, I always had what I needed--food, shelter, clothing
and companionship--yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn't get
everything I wanted, when people didn't meet my expectations, when a goal
was thwarted, or when I couldn't acquire some material goody. My plight
has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value
each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst or
loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out
of the raft, I see God's face in the smooth waves, His grace in the
dorado's swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from
the sky. I see that all of creation is made in His image. Yet despite
His constant company, I need more. I need more than food and drink. I
need to feel the company of other human spirits. I need to find more than
a moment of tranquility, faith and love. A ship. Yes, I still need a
ship.
-- Steven Callahan
day 27 of 76 days lost at sea

The more fundamental the truth, the more politically incorrect is the
expression thereof.
-- G. Gordon Liddy

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come
nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
-- Han Suyin

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains
to be done.
-- Marie Curie

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.
-- Richard Bach

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"

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man
contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

pi seconds is a nanocentury
-- Tom Duff

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place
the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a great deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
-- Lewis Carroll

"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They
seem more afraid of life than death." -- James F. Byrnes

"There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's
brain death, and there's being off the network." -- Guy Almes

Music is like making love. There is a certain charm to good-naturedness and
technical mastery is impressive; but what we all want is passionate virtuosity.

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

"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

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." -- Maugham

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live
near him.
-- J. R. R. Tolkein

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
INDIAN PROVERB

Trust in God, but tie your camel first.
-- Mohammed

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
ANONYMOUS

The most costly of follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation.
-- H. L. Mencken

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting
for us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on
this earth.
-- Ayn Rand

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity, and fanaticism when they come
separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out,
if only to preserve one's sanity.
-- Adam Dalgliesh

Rule of the Great:
When people you admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

"To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
certain low passion for middle-class respectability."
-- Oscar Wilde

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as
far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-A. Einstein

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-Winston Churchill

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, thought
Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
-- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

"...The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,
that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves,
that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a
forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for
the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis

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

Q: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged
to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.
A: Mark Twain

"Sigismundo was backing up, automatically, into the forest of white serenity,
looking for something, *anything*, that might serve as a weapon, and at the
same time he was thinking that it was not fatigue that wore you down
eventually, and not even fear, but just outrage: the sense that the universe
had no *right* to be so pitiless and intractable. You surpass yourself in
courage and willpower, you do what you think you cannot do, and then do more,
and in the back of your mind is the thought always, *Now* I have done enough,
*now* no more will be asked of me. And the universe quietly demonstrates that
it does not give a rat's arse."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles

"There is no knowledge that is not power." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it." -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge
is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." -- Albert Einstein

"Adversity is the first path to Truth." -- Lord Byron

"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always."
-- Albert Schweitzer

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

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some." -- Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

"This world is a comedy for those who think but a tragedy for those who
feel."
-- Horace Walpole

"....I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
-- Thomas Edison

"Well, I mean, YES idealism, YES the dignity of pure research, YES the pursuit
of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin
to suspect that if there's any REAL truth, it's that the entire multi-
dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch
of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another 10
million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money
and running, then I for one could do with the exercise."
-- One of the white mice in the Hitchhikers' Guide

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
-- Isaac Asimov

Our faith comes in moments ... yet there is a depth in those brief moments
which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from
bad judgment." --Rita Mae Brown

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." --Carol Burnett

Chance favors only the prepared mind.
LOUIS PASTEUR

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
HENRI BERGSON

We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam
of both. We separate good and evil and find that mind is an
amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.
-- Isaac Asimov

The moving finger writes; and having writ
Moves on: not all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
-- The Rubaiyat

We should always be in a state of receptivity to an omnipresent
gift rather than yearning for the attainment of a distant goal.
-- Jean Houston

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the
heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
-- author unknown

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all
subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
-- Justice William O. Douglas

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

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

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant--
What then?
-- Stephen Crane

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

-- T. E. Lawrence
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally
sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We are taught to feel shame
for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our
feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during
our days and our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that
trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

It is important to realize that you cannot win unless your
opponent makes a mistake; there is no possibility of creating a
win solely out of your own genius.
-- Ken Wheyld

Only in one's dreams can one be truly free.
Twas always thus, and always thus will be.
-- Keating

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Old time is still a-flying,
and this same flower that smiles today,
tomorrow will be dying."
-- Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
-- Albert Einstein

Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth's and harmony's behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.
-- Emerson, "Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing"

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of travelling.
-- M.L. Runbeck

Contentment: The smother of invention.
-- Ethel Mumford

In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not
always an easy sacrifice.
-- Richard Bach, Illusions

"I believe... that the richness of life is not measured by its length but
by its breadth, its height, and its depth."
-- Richard M. Nixon

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving,
and that's your own self.
-- Aldous Huxley

There is a fountain of youth: It is your mind, your talents, the creativity
you bring in your life and the lives of people you love.
-- Sophia Loren

Judge not thy friend until thou standest in his place.
-- Rabbi Hillel

I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap.
-- Spanish Proverb

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of
nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
-- Tallulah Bankhead

It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known
in heaven.
-- Nicholas Caussin

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
-- C. D. Jackson

If not now, when?
-- Rabbi Hillel, "Pirke Avot"

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they
translate into their own language and forthwith it is something
entirely different.
-- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.
-- Daniele Vare

With equal pace, impartial fate,
Knocks at the palace and the cottage gate.
-- Horace

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you
something else is the greatest accomplishment.
-- Emerson

America is a country where they have freedom of speech but
everyone says the same thing.
-- Tocqueville

Friendship is neither transitive nor inherited.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup, "The C++ Programming Language"

There is material enough in a single flower
for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.
JOHN RUSKIN

This is the true nature of home - it is the place of Peace; the shelter,
not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.
JOHN RUSKIN

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
-- Sir William Schwenck Gilbert

Vi Veri Veneversum Vivus Vici. Ave Atque Vale.
(Talent is a flame, genius a fire.)

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
-- John F. Kennedy

Inexperienced players often have confused notions about sacrificial
combinations. Such moves are brilliant if they are the strongest available,
but they are anything but brilliant if they are objectively inferior moves.
The master, if he is a true artist, will seek perfection rather than fireworks
whose chief object is to lead his opponent astray.
-- Jose Raoul Capablanca

Chess has always struck me as the most fanatical,
sanguinary, and time-consuming of games, not healthful
enough for a sport or productive enough for social or
artistic significance. It is sequestered and sterile,
the antithesis of a humanistic pursuit.
-- John Simon

...for chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel
the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.
-- Herbert Russel Wakefield

Even if we could teach a machine to play chess merely as well as a- to use
Norbert Wiener's simile- majority of the human race (no offense meant),
we would be furnishing definite proof that a machine can solve problems of
sufficient complexity to defy the reasoning ability of millions of people
throughout their lives.
-- Edward Lasker, The Adventure of Chess

Les pawns sont l'ame du jeu.
The pawns are the soul of the game
-- Danican Philidor (1726-95)

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

I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That
piece cannot be moved.
-- Kierkegaard

Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. Byron

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 we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks
a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
-- T.H. Huxley

"Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God
had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity."
--Voltaire
quoted in _Dad's Own Cookbook_

"From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a
life." --Arthur Ashe

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

"The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late."
-- Daniel Defoe

"Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just
want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to
say has more lasting value."
-- Robert Maynard Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance")

"Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not
succeed."
Mark Twain

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

"For forms of government, let fools contest... what e're's best administered,
is best."
Alexander Pope

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
Albert Einstein

"Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.
For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to
hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great
wrongs, and they will be powerless to vex your mind."
Leonardo da Vinci

"One who looks for a friend without faults will have none."
Hasidic Saying

"If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the
other direction."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, _The Way to Freedom_

"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that
matters, in the end."
Ursula K. LeGuin

"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers

"People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something,
and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?'"
Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can."
Danny Kaye

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
Neils Bohr

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
William Shakespeare

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity."
George S. Patton

"Those who do not plan for the future will have to live through it anyway."
Len Fisher

"We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves
cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative
spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... We are not going to
be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless
we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common."
Buckminster Fuller

"We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it is
creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us."
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo astronaut

"Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds."
George Eliot

"The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom--they are the pillars of
society."
Henrik Ibsen

He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, will never
be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
-- Tryon Edwards

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or
convictions.
-- Dag Hammarskjold

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
-- Joseph Joubert

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that you will make you break
your word or lose your self-respect.
-- Marcus Antonius

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment; Mastering
others requires force; Mastering the self needs strength.
-- Tao te Ching

When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
-- Jiminy Cricket

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though
checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither
enjoy nor suffer too much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat.
-- Teddy Roosevelt.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If
you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one,
not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless,
airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become
unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable.
-- C.S. Lewis

"I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of
principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't."
-- Mark Twain

"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity."
-- H.G. Wells ("The Time Machine")

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about
what's really going to be scared.
--P.J. Plauger, Computer Language, Programming on Purpose, p.29, March 1983

Calvin: People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't
realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world
Hobbes: Isn't your pants' zipper supposed to be in the front?

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start
closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive
like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume
and at least a pint of ether.
-- H.S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore

I am not omniscient, but much is known to me.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem
strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A man that all the world hates,
There must be something about him.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who thinks little of himself, is often more than he thinks.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We really only know, when we don't know; with knowledge, doubt
increases.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude
towards the public.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had
acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.
-- Victor Frankl

There are two roads of abandoning resolutely one's present life in order
to make the life of one's dreams come true, and renouncing the dream in
order to throw oneself wholeheartedly into one's present situation.
-- Paul Tournier

Of course I shall go astray often...for who does not make mistakes?...
but I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.
-- Dostoevsky

God knows, when I go to the theater I don't want to emerge from it as
exactly the same person. I want to be made to think about something,
I want to be changed in some way - at least be forced to reconsider my
perceptions. Because life is very short. Why waste your time?
-- Edward Albee

We stand already, here and now, in the reflection of the things which
are to come; we are perplexed, but not hopeless; smitten by God, but
nevertheless, in this crisis, under His healing power.
-- Karl Barth

Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not
your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the
indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk
safely on the earth.
-- Edward Yashinsky

The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all
temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is the mark of an
abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.
-- Edmund Burke

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all
kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of
political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
-- Karl Popper

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-- Winston Churchill

Be sure to keep busy, so the devil may always find you occupied.
-- Flavius Vegetius Renatus

It is your business, when the wall next door catches fire.
-- Horace

Don't learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade.
-- Anonymous

Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it
will be all one a hundred years hence.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before you borrow money from a friend, decide which you need more.
-- Anonymous

The secret of contentment is the realization that life is a gift, not a right.
-- Anonymous

The best way to knock the chip off your neighborUs shoulder is to pat him
on the back.
-- Anonymous

"The perfection of a history consists in being dislikable to all
sects." -- Pierre Bayle (French critic?)

"History is something that never happened told by someone who wasn't there."
-- Gomez de la Serna, _Greguerias_

Finding a good man is as easy as nailing jello to a tree.
-- A hallmark greeting card message

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature
makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is
enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or
most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better
than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not
think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the
cat by getting to the grave first.
-- G. K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_

The layout of the text that has come to be regarded as conventional
is that which perpetuates the illusion that scientific research is
conducted by the inductive process.
-- P.B. Medawar, "Advice to a Young Scientist"

The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know.
-- Harry S Truman

We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because
there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it,
those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship,
for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a
healthy love for him.
-- Michael Montaigne

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to pentrate to the secret of their
occurance, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
-- Ivan Pavlov

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more
difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing in the tempting place.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-- Zelda Fitzgerald

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- Herbert G. Wells

"The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'"
-- Alice Walker

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.
-- Anatole France

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.
--Robert Browning

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

Be sure you're right; then, go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.
-- Emily Dickenson, #1768

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
-- Wallace Stevens, Adagia, In Opus Posthumus

Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture
available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want.
The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes, "New York Times," 1969

One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so
helpless. We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and
control others. If we are silent who will take control? God will take
control; but we will never let Him take control until we trust Him. Silence
is intimately related to trust.
-- Richard J. Foster

You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the
way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace.
Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and
unwinnable.
-- Jesse Jackson

Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be
anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
-- Matthew 6:34

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love
harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all
humankind.
-- Richard Dehmel

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them, I will use my time."
-- Jack London

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life,
but only a fool trusts either of them.
P.J. O'ROURKE

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence
is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?), "THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY"

Government investigations have always contributed more to our amusement
than they have to our knowledge.
WILL ROGERS

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented
systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of
Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one
are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
THOMAS PAINE

Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
HARRY S TRUMAN

We want individual freedoms. We want the government to stay out of our lives
*except* that we want the government to prohibit acts of wickedness.
RANDALL TERRY, FOUNDER OF "OPERATION RESCUE"

A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth,
no property, and vulgar employments.
ARISTOTLE

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human
hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
JAMES MADISON

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain
occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826)

But the chess they [God and the Devil] play is not the little ingenious game
that originated in India; it is on an altogether different scale. The Ruler of
the Universe creates the board, the pieces, and the rules; he makes all the
moves; he may make as many moves as he likes whenever he likes; his antagonist,
however, is permitted to introduce a slight inexplicable inaccuracy into each
move, which necessitates further moves in correction. The Creatos determines
and conceals the aim of the game, and it is never clear whether the purpose of
the adversary is to defeat him or assist him in his unfathomable project.
Apparently the adversary cannot win, but also he cannot lose so long as he can
keep the game going. But he is concerned, it would seem, in preventing the
development of any reasoned scheme of the game.
-- H.G.Wells, The Undying Fire

...for chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel
the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.
-- Herbert Russel Wakefield

Les pawns sont l'ame du jeu.
The pawns are the soul of the game
-- Danican Philidor (1726-95)

I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That
piece cannot be moved.
-- Kierkegaard

Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. Byron

Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way.
-- Isaac Goldberg

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I speak the
truth, and they never believe me.
-- Conte Camillo Benso di Cavour

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but
never remembers her age.
-- Robert Frost

The greatest danger to human beings is their
consciousness of the trivialities of their aims.
-- Gerald Brennen

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic
of Western religion, rejection without proof is the
fundamental characteristic of Western science.
-- Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"

Treat the other man's faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His
mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine.
-- Henry S. Haskins

If it is to be, it is up to me.
-- unknown

There is no use discussing what could be done if we were other beings
than what we are.
-- Werner Heisenberg

I shall leave you as you left me...as you left her. Marooned for all
eternity in the center of a dead planet. Buried alive! Buried alive!
-- Khan (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

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

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was very odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

He that has no fools, knaves nor beggers in his family
was begot by a flash of lightning.
-- Thomas Fuller

The threat is often stronger than the execution.
-- Nimzowitsch

It's not enough to have a lot of respect for bishops in the abstract --
you've gotta watch out for them!
-- Shelby Lyman, chesscaster (NY Times)

... when you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains,
however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign Of Four

No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as
well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
-- John Donne, Meditation XVII

As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought
for the other fellow. He could be plotting something.
-- Hagar the Horrible

"Elephants and hippopotamus have grown clumsy as well as big, and the elk is of
necessity less graceful than the gazelle."
-- D'Arcy Thompson.

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst
state, an intolerable one." -- Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_, chap. 1.

Quote: They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty,
which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth
stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
Author: Alexander Cockburn
Reference: The Nation, Feb. 4, 1991
Keywords: exact, war, truth

Quote: There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Author: Benjamin Franklin
Reference: Letter to Josiah Quincy, 11 Sept. 1773
Keywords: exact, war, peace

Quote: I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young
men to die in.
Author: George McGovern
Keywords: inexact, war, men

Quote: Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Author: Groucho Marx
Keywords: inexact, military, intelligence

Quote: Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Author: Groucho Marx
Keywords: inexact, military, music

Quote: Ich betrachte auch einen sigreichen Krieg an sich immer als ein
\bel, das die Staatskunst den Vvlkern zu ersparen bem|ht sein
muss.
(I regard even a victorious war as an evil, that politics must
strive to spare the people from.)
Author: Otto von Bismarck
Keywords: exact, war, vicory

Quote: This is a picture of the British High Command at the beginning
of World War I. These aren't evil men -- some of them aren't
even stupid.
Author: G. Dyer
Reference: WAR
Keywords: exact, war

Quote: 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.
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Reference: April 16, 1953
Keywords: exact, war, weapons

Quote: In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their
sons.
Author: Herodotus
Keywords: inexact, war

Quote: Before a war military science seems a real science, like
astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Author: Rebecca West
Keywords: inexact, war, military, science

Quote: I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one
who has seen its brutality, its futility, its _stupidity_.
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Keywords: inexact, war, soldiers

Quote: It is regrettable for the education of the young that war
stories are always told by those who survived.
Author: Louis Scutenaire
Keywords: inexact, war, education

War does not determine who is right -- only who is left.

-- Bertrand Russell

Renegade academician. They're a dangerous breed when they go feral.
-James P. Blaylock in "Lord Kelvin's Machine"

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your
acquaintances will know you in a thousand years
-- Richard Bach, Illusions

Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet
again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those
who are friends.
-- Richard Bach, Illusions

A friend is a present you give yourself.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

One who looks for a friend without faults will have none.
-- Hasidic Saying

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
-- Samuel Paterson

Who ceases to be a friend, never was one.
-- Anonymous

A friend you have to buy won't be worth what you pay for him.
-- G. D. Prentice

Friends are like melons; shall I tell you why? To find one good you must
one hundred try.
-- Claude Mermet

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
-- Woodrow Wilson

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
-- T. S. Eliot

Before you borrow money from a friend, decide which you need more.
-- Anonymous

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
-- Joseph Conrad

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should
have the guts to betray my country.
-- E. M. Forster

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell -- you see,
I have friends in both places.
-- Mark Twain

Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his
friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people.
Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals.
-- Cynthia Heimel

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there
must be a beverage.
- Woody Allen

Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong
about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly
taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-- (Hungarian proverb)

[In the context of quantum mechanics] "Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein

"Fishing gives you a sense of where you fit in the sceme of things - Your
place in the universe...I, mean, here I am,one small guy with a fishing pole
on this vast beach and out there in the blue expanse of ocean are these
hundreds of millions of fish...laughing at me."
-- Shoe

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
-- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
-- Virgil

"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics,
died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died
similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."
-- David L. Goodstein, _States of Matter_ (1975).

"He who saves one life saves the world."
- Talmudic saying

Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time.
-- Steven Wright

If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland"

Laziness is nothing more that the habit of resting before you get tired.
-- Jules Renard

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
-- Neils Bohr

Never speak more clearly than you think.
-- Jeremy Bernstein

It's good to hope; it's the waiting that spoils it.
-- Yiddish proverb

The bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362
admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean, that God doesn't
love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.
-- Lynn Lavner

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

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of
thought, a rivalry of aim."
-- Henry Brook Adams

As the man with the wooden leg said "It's a matter of a-pinion"
-- A. Stewart in his song " Dr. Finlay"

"Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters."
-- Samuel Johnson

"Take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then
say it with the utmost levity."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"_Don't stop the plough to kill a mouse._ Do not hinder important
business for the discussion of a trifle."
-- C. H. Spurgeon

"Never underestimate the power of a simple courtesy. Your courtesy may
not be returned or remembered, but discourtesy will."
-- Princess Jackson SMith

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

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

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but _minds_ alive on the shelves.
-- Gilbert Highet

If we make peaceful revolution impossible,
we make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy
"Some mornings it's not worth chewing through the leather straps."
-Emo Phillips

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you
smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work
and then they get elected and prove it.
-- P.J. O'Rourke

I've never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
-- Calvin Coolidge

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to
learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for
their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams, _Last Chance to See_

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce
our errors of youth for those of age.
-- Ambrose Bierce

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a
mistake when you make it again.
-- F. P. Jones

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the
wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat
that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a
hot stove- lid again - and that is well; but she will also she
will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-- Mark Twain

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not
the same river and he's not the same man." -- Heraclitas

"An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip
of the cutting shears." -- John Fowles

"So manifold are our interests in life that it is not
uncommon that, on a single occassion, the foundations
of a happiness which does not yet exist are laid down
simultaneously with the aggravations of a grief from
which we are still suffering." -- Marcel Proust

"For a man cannot change, that is to say, become another
person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self
which he has ceased to be." -- Marcel Proust

"I know I'm going to get old and be one of those crazy
women who sits on balconies and spits on people and screams,
'Get a haircut!' I know this, and I don't really fear it.
I'd just like to move toward it with as much grace and
dignity as possible." -- Carrie Fisher, "Postcards..."

Before you put on a frown . . . make absolutely sure there are no smiles
available.
-- Jim Beggs

Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in
eternity.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Each man's task is his life preserver.
-- George B. Emerson

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
-- Benjamin Franklin

The more we do, the more we can do.
-- William Hazlitt

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
-- Helen Keller

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making
exciting discoveries.
-- A. A. Milne

When by judgement one means knowing how something comes to be
what it is, the judgement must appear as re-constructing the
identical universe of the difference. Then every model
includes the measure of its own difference. No state of
equilibrium is empowered to remain identical, or to compel the
individual to alter (and integrate with it). The identical is
equal to itself, since it is different.
--Franco Spisani (1975)

If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.
JIMMY BUFFET

It is better to laugh about your problems than to cry about them.
OLD JEWISH PROVERB

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
VICTOR HUGO

He who Laughs, Lasts.
ANONYMOUS

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Once you get people laughing, they're listening and you can tell them
almost anything.
HERB GARDNER

They all laughed at Albert Einstein. They all laughed at Columbus.
Unfortunately, they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown.
WILLIAM H. JEFFERYS

The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.
SHIRLEY MAC LAINE

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
VICTOR BORGE

If you can't laugh at yourself,
then you can bet that everyone else is doing so.
ED JOHNSTON

If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.
MARTIN LUTHER

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.
ARNOLD GLASOW

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers,
the power of shared laughter.
FRANCOISE SAGAN

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge
is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

I make myself laugh at everything, in case I should have to weep.
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN DE BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-1799)

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

"Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the
lesson." -- Vernon Law

"Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
--Franklin P. Jones

"There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and
this is not learning from experience." -- Laurence J. Peter

One night after Ellie's death, Rowan had stood alone in the wide living
room beneath the high-beamed ceiling, talking aloud to herself, laughing even,
thinking there is no one, no one to know, no one to hear. The glass walls were
dark and indistinct with reflected carpet, furniture. She couldn't see the
tide that lapped ceaselessly at the pilings. The fire was dying out. The
eternal chill of the coastal night was moving slowly through the rooms. She
had learnt a painful lesson, she thought -- that as they die, the ones we love,
we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny
little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And
there is nothing left but the endless flow.
-- Anne Rice, "The Witching Hour"

In Germany they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I
didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Trade
Unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I
was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no one
was left to speak up.
--Pastor Martin Neinmoeller

You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never
the one with whom you have wept.
-- Kahlil Gibran

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep,
too grave to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
-- Kahlil Gibran

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for
others to laugh at him.
-- Thomas Szasz, _The Second Sin_

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
-- H. L. Mencken

I live in my own place
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself -- I laugh.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, inscribed over the door to his home

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep
-- George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Lord Byron, _Don Juan_

But if you had restraint, common sense, and creativity, why would
you be in college at all?
--Roger Simon, _Chicago Tribune_ column

If the only tool you have is a hammmer every problem begins to
look like a nail.
-- Mark Twain

"The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable,
is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be
distrusted."
--T. De Quincey, "On the Knocking at the Gate in _Macbeth_"

"Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give the signal."
- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind, I see, is in the hands of fools.
--King Crimson

Even in the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin
-- k.d.lang, _Constant Craving"

Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
Phillip K. Dick

How do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an
immense worlds of delight clos'd by your senses five?
-- William Blake

Do not be pessimistic and focus only on negativity. Take
things as they are without emotional exaggeration.
-- Hua Ching Ni

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
-W. C. Fields

The Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted
all the alternatives.
--Winston Churchill

The greatest of evils, indeed perhaps all evils, are compounded of accident,
ignorance, ego, and of virtue taken to excess.
-- Jon K. Hart, after Forest Church

For the love of love, how many changes can take place in a person before
it all becomes meaningless and there is nothing left but a sort of
numbness? Is that where I am now? No. Just the opposite; it is more
like pins and needles of the soul.
-- Jack Agyar, from Steven Brust's "Agyar"

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened
and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to
an absolute geometry that even stones -- maybe only the stones --
understood.
-- Annie Dillard, _An American Childhood_

"The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards."
--Alexander Jablokov, "The Place of No Shadows"

"Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog,
the scenery never changes."
- Lewis Grizzard

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson

In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-- Brian K. Reid

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself
now and then finding a smoother pebble off a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before
me."
-- Isaac Newton

Life can only be understood backward,
but it must be lived forward.
-- Kierkegaard

"Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool
from any side" Yiddish proverb

"Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right,
make us easy to live with." Rev. Peter Marshall

"No one beneath you can offend you. No one your equal would."
Jan L. Wells

"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
--Confusius

"Give every man thy ear but few thy voice."
--William Shakespeare

"He who is not busy being born is busy dying."
--Bob Dylan

"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money."
P.J. O'Rouke

"Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them."
--Andrew V. Mason

"Never date a man whose belt buckle is bigger than his head."
--"Grace under fire" ABC-TV (Casey Werner Co)

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
-- Roy Batty, in Blade Runner

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Peace with Germany will be impossible as long as
the Jews persist in failing to shoot Hitler."
--Neville Chamberlain

Evil often triumphs, but never conquers.
-- Joseph Roux

A good laugh is sunshine in a house.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
-- Woodrow Wilson

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact
and communion with others, however humble.
-- Washington Irving

Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
-- T. S. Eliot

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
-- Richard Hooker

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is
wholly rough.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

He who foresees calamities, suffers them twice over.
-- Beilby Porteus

Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
-- George Eliot

Half the failures in life arise from pulling in oneUs horse as he is
leaping.
-- Julius Hare

True dignity is never gained by place, and never lost when honors are
withdrawn.
-- Phillip Massinger

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have
nothing whatsoever to do with it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone
Distinction of Merit."
-- William Blake

"Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all
matter? So the Body of me, to all I meet, or know." --Walt Whitman

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of
thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If
only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." -- A. Einstein

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

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_

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H.L.Mencken: _Chrestomathy_

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one
young woman and another.
-- G.B.Shaw: "Major Barbara"

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's
to keep unmarried as long as he can.
-- G.B.Shaw: "Man and Superman"

Every woman should marry--and no man.
-- B. Disraeli: _Lothair_

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
-- H.L.Mencken

I married beneath me. All women do.
-- Lady Nancy Astor

It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and
persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and
unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for
years or even generations.
-- Khalil Gibran

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!
-- Thomas Carlyle

History... is little more than the register of the crimes, follies,
and misfortunes of mankind.
-- Edward Gibbon

It is not the neutrals or the lukewarms who make history.
-- Adolf Hitler

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
-- Virginia Woolf

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses
a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.
-- Scott Adams

Why do people park in driveways and drive on parkways?
-- Larry Anderson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the long run, we are all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it
is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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, April 16, 1953

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
-- Plato

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations,
whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring
effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found
the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an
entire year.
-- Albert Einstein
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

'Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?'" -Emily Bronte

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire

Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of
course, living in a state of sin.
-John Von Neumann

Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit.
-David McCord

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

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham
Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?
1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
2) Advising the President.
3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
-David Letterman

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't
cross the street to vote in a national election.
-Bill Vaughan

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces
it with.
-Tennessee Williams

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

Our computer has never had an undetected error.
-Weisert

I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.
-Kehlog Albran

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV
will be fought with sticks and stones.
-Albert Einstein

The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular
employment of violence.
-Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but hurled with great force.
-Dorothy Parker

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable.
-John F. Kennedy

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it
being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four
tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel
uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the past imperfect, the
present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect.
-Amrom Katz

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce. -J. Edgar Hoover

Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

In the beginning, I was made. I didn't ask to be made. But if it brought
some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way
through life's mournful jungle then so be it.
-Marvin, in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, by Douglas Adams

I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of
being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being
sick and tired. I'm certainly not! But I'm sick and tired of being told that
I am!
-Monty Python

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
-Confucius

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is
not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
-Will Durant

Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness
of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule.
-David Guaspari

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-George Saunders' last words

He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world
as he who is ready to die.
-Giacomo Leopardi

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

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-George Bernard Shaw

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy.
If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-Socrates

Never fight an inanimate object.
-P. J. O'Rourke

If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence
already.
-Lawrence J. Peter

There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.
-Ken Venturi

A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
-William Wordsworth, of Newton

The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other
solution.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"L'Homme pense; donc je suis," dit l'Univers.
-Paul Valery

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off
by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh,"
I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after
you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time
memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen
minutes. -Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
-Tom Robbins

To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
navigation!- Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor, I should have
known more about it.
-Henry David Thoreau

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

What I spent, is gone; what I kept, I lost; but what I gave away will be mine
forever.
-Ethel Percy Andrus

What's the matter, you poor dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, make yourself scabs?
-Shakespeare, Coriolanus

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-Hungarian Proverb

If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes.
-Robert Redford

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with
great force.
-Dorothy Parker

Wagner's music is better then it sounds.
-Mark Twain

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
-Mell Lazarus

The last Christian died on the cross.
-Nietzsche

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-James Russell Lowel

To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take
him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.
-Karl Kraus

I believe that every human has a finite number of heart-beats. I don't intend
to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
-Neil Armstrong

We were taken to a fast-food cafe where our order was fed into a computer.
Our hamburgers, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been
boiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially
flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents.
-Jean-Michel Chapereau

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a
woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the
Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-Quentin Crisp

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel
underneath.
-Oscar Levant

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

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me
as a citizen and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.
Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and
Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
-Albert Einstein

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
-Germaine Greer

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

I doubt if the vigilance of the law is equal to making money stick with
over-credulous people.
-Justice Jackson, 1944

Complete possession is proved only by giving.
All you are unable to give possesses you.
-Andre Gide

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from
comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did
not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments in the
future.
-Andre Gide

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard
to sleep after.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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

You are obviously suffering from delusions of adequacy.
-Alexis Carrington

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
-Emily Dickinson

When you don't have any money, the problem is food.
When you have money, it's sex.
When you have both, it's health.
If everything is simply jake,
then you're frightened of death.
-J. P. Donleavy

Birds never sing in caves.
-Henry David Thoreau

As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that
you understand what I'm doing or why you're paying me so much money. What's
important is that you continue to do so.
-Hunter S. Thompson's Samoan Attorney

You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a
child to have only two parents.
-Australian Aboriginal Elder

Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong
as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer
than any flame.
[Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB)]

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has
been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
-Fred Brooks, Jr.

...Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that
as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most
notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand
years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported
evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a
difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice
is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is
making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that
you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not
terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also.
But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the
evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
-Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned
in school. -- A. Einstein

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
-- Albert Einstein.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
- Samuel L. Clemens

A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is
no longer indispensible.
- Admiral Byrd

The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance.
- Shelley

Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
- Cowper

"Great wits are sure to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
-- Dryden, _Absalom and Achitopel_

"The major cause of accidents remains hunter error, Johnson says. And it's
hard to teach people not to be stupid."
-- The Capitol Times (a paper in Wisconsin)

"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

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells

"You know, there have been an incredible number of natural disasters this
year, but when you put it into the Big Picture, I don't think it's the end
of the world... because the Cubs didn't win the Pennant." -- A. Whitney Brown

"When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster."
--Lao Tse, _Tao Te Ching: 72_

"The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have
taken place." -- Claude T. Bissell

"Everything has a boolean value, if you stand far enough away from it."
-- Galena Alyson Canada

Language is a virus from outer space. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to
nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may
give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they
will never give the inner meaning of the original.
- Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941)

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr. or Sr.?)

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
- Leo Calvin Rosten (b.1908)

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak
it to? - Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is
not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
- Robert Burton (1577-1640)

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were
taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things
themselves. - John Locke (1632-1704)

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of
party, faction, and division of society.
- John Adams (1735-1826)

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the
pedigrees of nations. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no
laconism can reach it: 'tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great
deal in a little room. - Jeremy Collier (1650-1726)

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 BC)

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are
slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
"The Education of Henry Adams", 1907

No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But
this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced.
-- Bertrand Russell

When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty
years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter
gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have
never been in any accidentI or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen
but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck
and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that
threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
-- Capt. E. J. Smith, of the RMS Titanic, in 1907.

"Be a man!" said I. "You are scared out of your wits! What good is
religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and
floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God
had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent."
-- H. G. Wells

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV
will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert einstein

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

The eyes have one language everywhere.
GEORGE HERBERT
The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
MARCELLINUS AMMIANUS
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
LILY TOMLIN

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective
as a rightly timed pause.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?), "THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY"

Even if you do learn to speak correct English,
whom are you going to speak it to?
CLARENCE DARROW

"A degree, ... is a first step down a ruinous highway.
You don't want to waste it so you go on to graduate work
and doctoral research. You end up a thorough-going
ignoramus on everything in the world except for one
subdivisional sliver of nothing."
-- Isaac Asimov, _The Dead Past_

It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's
thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate from her 1981 novel "The Shooting Party"

"Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to
keep in touch."
-- Robert Orben

"In a mad world only the mad are sane." -- Akira Kurosawa

Language exists to conceal true thought. -- Tallyrand

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Goethe

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. -- H.L. Mencken

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no
schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by
having schools without education. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Einstein

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
-- Chinese proverb

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-- M. L. King, Jr.

The best way to get rid of temptation is to give into it. --Oscar Wilde (?)

"Education is a private matter between the person and the
world of knoweledge and experience, and has little to do
with school or college." - Lillian Smith
"Books are the curse of the human race." --Benjamin Disraeli

"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the
time, with my eyes hanging out." --Dylan Thomas

An ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books...and
thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is
possible to be happy. --Augustine Birrell

I am part of all I have read. --John Kieran

Show me the books he loves and I shall know
The man far better than through mortal friends.
--S. Weir Mitchell

The things i want to know are in books; my best freind is the man who'll
get me a book I ain't read. --Abraham Lincoln

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

Quote: A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
Author: Franz Kafka

Quote: The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over
the man that can`t read them.
Author: Mark Twain

History teaches that men behave wisely once they have
exhausted all alternatives.
-Abba Eban

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists
elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact
us.
-Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes)

Examinations are formidable, even to the best prepared, as the
greatest fool can ask more than the wisest man can answer.
-Chales Caleb Colton

"Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then
suddenly he turns on you with a miniature maching gun."
- from a cartoon by Matt Groening

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips
over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." --Matt Groening

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." -- H.L. Mencken

"Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain emties.~
--Jules Renard

"Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows
out the candle and blows up the bonfire." -- La Rochefoucauld

"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the
shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity, I call
their lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to
the emotional life what constancy is to the intellect - simply a confession
of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for
property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were
not afraid that others might pick them up." -- Ocsar Wilde

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
-- Charlie Brown

"Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends.
People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising
glance at his pals." -- Cynthia Heimel

"Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and VERY important." --Lisa Hoffmann

"Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last
romance." -- Ocsar Wilde

"The fickleness of the woman I love is only equaled by the infernal
constancy of the women who love me." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight
girdle, a higher tax bracket, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia."
-- Judith Viorst

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down
your house, you can never tell." -- Joan Crawford

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
--Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin -- it's the
triumphant twang of a bedspring.
-- S.J. Perelman

Change is what makes the world go 'round, not love. Love only
keeps it populated.
-- Charles H. Brower

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to
seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no
one will believe it.
-- Bertrand Russell

USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every
four people make up 75% of the population.
-- Dave Letterman

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

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself
are the will to power - and nothing else!
-- Nietzsche

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as
great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things
as possible.
-- Sean O'Casey, "The Plough and The Stars"

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to
enslave a philosohpy.
-- William Ralph Inge

Without a doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth.
For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears.
Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
-- Lord Samuel, "Romanes Lecture", 1947

In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason
it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
-- Charles Mingus

A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
-- William Wordsworth

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-George Bernard Shaw

A study of the science of technology defines what is possible; a
study of the economics of technology establishes which of the
possibilities is practical and useful.
-Montgomery Phister

All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect.
Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the
consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events.
-Laurence J. Peter

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-E. Rutherford

And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline,
can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion
to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal
or political motive.
-Sir Henry Hallett Dalt

Art is I; science is we.
-Claude Bernard

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science
can never regress.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer

But I have seen the science I worshiped and the airplane I loved
destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

By the time a social science theory is formulated in such a way that
it can be tested, changing circumstances have already made it obsolete.
-Professor Charles P. Issawi

HE: Let's end it all, bequeathin' our brains to science.
SHE: What?!? Science got enough trouble with their OWN brains.
-Walt Kelley

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess
them, needs religion.
-Goethe

I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above
the natural sciences.
-Thomas Mann

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a
very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom
everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or
at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade,
and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach
much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense
of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor
popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.
-Carl Sagan

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And
in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the
additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
-Carl Sagan

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
-Lazarus Long

If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible
and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind
of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the
good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community
ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the
media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper
in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly
astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational
system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that
may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the
human future.
-Carl Sagan

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

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not
to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-Sir William Osler

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shorte-
ned
itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period
the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles
long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only
a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling invest-
ment
of fact.
-Mark Twain

It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively
proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand
only from those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to
replace the religious catechism by something else, even it it be a scientific
one.
-Sigmund Freud

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.
-Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Mustgo:
Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so
long it has become a science project.
-Sniglets, Rich Hall & Friends

Parkinson's Finding on Journals: The progress of science varies inversely
with the number of journals published.

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

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over. Every major
advance in the technological competence of man has enforced revolutionary
changes in the economic and political structure of society.
-Barry Commoner

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
-Lazarus Long

The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.
The goal of nature is to build better mice.

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

The social problems raised by science must be faced and solved by
the humanities.
-Harold Dodd

The stature of a science is commonly measured by the degree to which
it makes use of mathematics.
-S. S. Stevens

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited
to open the way to the next better one.
-Konrad Lorenz

You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding
decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left
over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart.
-F. Allen

I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate
the human race.
-- Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)

Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom
you must account.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Do not let people put you down. Believe in yourself and stand for yourself
and trust yourself.
-- Jacob Neusner

You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better
than you think you can.
-- Jimmy Carter

It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say
the opposite.
-- Sam Levenson

Your mind must control, but you must have heart ... Give your feeling free.
-- Vladimir Horowitz

Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
-- Alexander Pope

Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things
that are beyond thy strength.
-- Apocrypha

"Serious men are inevitably shallow, just as virtuous women are always dull.
One must be a bit of a scoundrel to know the depths of oneself."
-- Sigismundo Celine, Nature's God (by Robert Anton Wilson)

"There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your
age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

--Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking-Glass_

I believe that once when asked his religion, Disraeli replied:
"Great men are all of the same religion"
Questioner: "And what religion is that?"
Disraeli: "Great men never say."

"Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where
their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes
its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach
farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from
adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and
character." -- Henry David Thoreau

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I
live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly
used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. Life is no 'brief
candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a
moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on
to future generations."
--George Bernard Shaw

"Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not
relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you."
--Stewart E. White

"Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out."
--Satchel Paige

"Do every act of your life as if it were your last."
--Marcus Aurelius

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

"Even if you're on the right track, if you stand still you'll get run over by
the next train."
--Will Rogers

"It always surprises me that some things are so surprising that they even
surprise people that nothing surprises any more."
--Erik Dasque

"Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph
of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
--James Joyce

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night"
--Edgar Allen Poe

"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to
diminishing returns."
--J.M. Clark

"Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the
least."
--Earl of Chesterfield

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

"Every thought is a seed. If you plant 'Crab' apples don't count on
harvesting 'Golden Delicious'."

"As for disappointing them, I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to
disappoint myself."
--Oliver Goldsmith

"Cut off the human race from the knowledge and comprehension of its history,
and its government will just turn into a monkey cage. We need the guidance
of history. All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the
way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and
the list of the fools."
-- Stephen Leacock

Broad, wholesome, charitable views ... can not be acquired by vegetating in
one's little corner of the earth.
-- Mark Twain, _Innocents Abroad_

"...Dreaming is a philogenetically older mode of thought..." - C.G. Jung

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live sturdily and Spartan-
like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and
shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest
terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and
genuine meaness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's
blood and probably themselves will not be realized.
Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering
that a noble and logical diagram once recorded will never
die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing
asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember
that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that
would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your
beacon, beauty.
-BURNHAM

"It is not good for all your wishes to be fulfilled; through
sickness you recognize the value of health; through evil,
the value of good; through hunger, satisfaction; through
exertion, the value of rest."
-HERACLITUS

Just remember, once youUre over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
-- Charles Schultz

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
-- Samuel Paterson

No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating
one peanut.
-- Channing Pollack

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was
once eccentric.
-- Bertrand Russell

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly
what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
-- Virginia Woolf

Who ceases to be a friend, never was one.
-- Anonymous

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.
-- Napolean Bonaparte

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of
scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture
of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin
or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
-- Bertrand Russell

"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men
to be thought half as good. Luckily this in not
difficult."
-Charlotte Whitton

If there is anything better than to be loved it is loving.
-Anonymous

The way to love is to realize that it might be lost.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
-John Donne

To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
-Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz

Love gives itself; it is not bought.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is better to have loved an lost, than not to have loved at all.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
-Benjamin Franklin

Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.
-H.L. Mencken

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-H.L. Mencken

There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand copies.
-Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
-Henry Ward Beecher

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A kiss: A peculiar proposition. Of no use to one, yet absolute bliss to two.
The small boy gets it for nothing, the young man has to lie for it, and the
old man has to buy it. The baby's right, the lover's privelege, and the
hypocrite's mask. To a young girl, faith; to a married woman, hope; and to
an old maid, charity.
-V.P.I. Skipper

The economic and technological triumphs of the last few years have not
solved as many problems as we thought they would, and, in fact, have brought
us new problems we did not forsee.
-Henry Ford II

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
-John Dewey

Whatever else scientists do, the most significant thing they do is to try
to find out things that are not known.
-Dennis Flanagan

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the
greater view?
-Victor Hugo

The Wright brother's flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
-Charles F. Kettering

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
-Sir Issac Newton

Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important
questions), few of us spend time wondering why nature is the way it is; where
the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here...or whether there are
ultimate limits to what humans can know...But much of science has been driven
by such inquire. An increasing number of adults are willing to ask
questions of this sort, and occasionally they get some astonishing answers.
-Carl Sagan, Introduction to _A Brief History of Time_ by Stephen W. Hawking

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your
heart's desire. The other is to get it.
-- BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman, IV

The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They
gave him love and he invented marriage.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from
the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution
wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
-- Ralph Emerson

There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon
as I learn what it is I'll get married again.
-- Clint Eastwood

Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
-- Agnes Allen

We may not return the affection of those who like us, but
we always respect their good judgement.

"Wedlock--the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of
the chaise lounge."
--Mrs. Patrick Campbell quoted in "Jennie" vo. 2, 1914.

"Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for
isolation of spirit."
--Ellen Glasgow, "Barren Ground" 1925 (not terribly romantic, that)

"Bernard placed one arm tightly round her. When will you marry me Ethel he
uttered you must be my wife it has come to that I love you so intensely
that if you say no I shall perforce dash my body to the brink of yon muddy
river he panted wildly. O don't do that implored Ethel breathing rather
hard."
--Daisy Ashford (age 9) "The Young Visitors" 1919 [lack of quotation not my
choice] [that was lack of punctuation]

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to
please everyone." -- Bill Cosby

"If you achieve success, you will get applause. Enjoy it -- but never quite
believe it." -- Robert Montgomery

"Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:
If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero."
-- David Ellis

"Success and failure are equally disastrous." -- Tennessee Williams

"In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success
because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its
efforts. Namely, the physical universe." -- Ken Jenkins

"A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by
its author." -- S. C. Johnson

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard P. Feynman

"If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average." -- Bill Cosby

"If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure."
-- Then-Vice President Dan Quayle

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and
the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to
find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a
healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know
even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to
have succeeded." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"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

"It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to
succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible." -- Arthur Machen

When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine
ourselves.
-- Confucious

Only the educated are free.
-- Epictetus

The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
-- Edward Gibbon

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
-- Victor Hugo

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A friend you have to buy won't be worth what you pay for him.
-- G. D. Prentice

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
-- George Bernard Shaw

"I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come
out of all this tumbling around."
-- poet Louise Brogan, on her affair with poet
Theodore Roethke

"I knew words were like chains, they held me back...
the act of description taints the description."
-- John Fowles (from "The Magus")

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are.
If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
-- Oscar Wilde

"All our life is crushed by the weight of words:
the weight of the dead."
-- Luigi Pirandello

"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely
a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the
reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps
never have seen in himself."
-- Marcel Proust

"It takes a lot of time being a genius -- you have to sit
around so much doing nothing."
-- Gertrude Stein

"Art isn't political because of a label, a theory, or a
rejected grant application; art is political because it
has the power to change lives."
-- Peter Zeisler

"We risk the greatest loss when we allow our questions to
be made smaller."
-- Stephen Dietz (in an article debunking
the oft-used advice "you should only write
what you know about")

Quote: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should
have the guts to betray my country.
Author: E. M. Forster
Reference: Two Cheers for Democracy

Quote: Rien n'est si dangereux qu'un ignorant ami; Mieux vaudrait un
sage ennemi.
(Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; better a wise
enemy.)
Author: Jean de la Fontaine

Quote: ... the most important thing in the programming language is the
name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have
recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a
suitable language.
Author: D. E. Knuth, 1967

Quote: She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong
by wrong.
Author: Mae West

"Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men.
Death will come, always out of season. It is the command of the Great
Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and what
cannot be prevented should not be grieved for.... Misfortunes do not
flourish particularly in our lives -- they grow everywhere."

Big Elk
Omaha Chief

"God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. One
must take it. The only choice is how." -- Henry Ward Beecher

"The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter."
-- Mandie Ellingson

"Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are
those which never come." -- Amy Lowell

"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without
trials." -- Chinese Proverb

"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for." --
unknown

"The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step." -- Chinese Proverb

"No wise man ever wished to be younger." -- Jonathan Swift

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." -- Thoreau

There will come a time when you will dicscover a thing called
loneliness. But remember life's cruellest irony: The time you feel most
lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
--Douglas Coupland

We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.
Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style.
A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace
failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of
us will ever be free.
--Tom Robbins

If you come to me with your fists doubled, I think
I can promise you that mine will double as fast
as yours; but if you come to me and say, "Let us
sit down and take counsel together and, if we differ
from one another, just understand what the points at
issue are", we will presently find that we are not so
far apart at all, that the points on which we differ
are few and the points on which we agree are many.
-Woodrow Wilson

Once the realization is accepted that even between
the closest human beings infinite distances continue
to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow
up, if they succeed in loving the distance between
them which makes it possible for each to see each
other whole against the sky.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
in LETTERS

Every worthwhile has a fence around it, but there
is always a gate and a key.
-Henry Frederick

"`You were hurt,' Kumiko said, looking down at the scar.
Sally looked down. `Yeah.'
`Why didn't you have it removed?'
`Sometimes it's good to remember.'
`Being hurt?'
`Being stupid.'" -- Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson

As a child, I understood how to give; I have forgotten that grace since
I became civilized. I lived the natural life, whereas I now live the
artificial. Any pretty pebble was valuable to me then, every growing tree
an object of reverence.
Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa)
Santee Sioux

"The sun, the moon and the stars that make the wind blow,
it took me twenty years to understand.
But lost to me is how the lives of friends go.
Like autumn leaves, in Oklahoma wind."
-- Vince Bell, "The Sun, Moon and Stars"

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we
leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we
can enter another." -- Anatole France

I should have known you'd bid me farewell
There's a lesson to be learned from this, and I learned it very well
Now I know you're not the only starfish in the sea
If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me

And I think it's gonna be all right
Yeah, the worst is over now
The morning Sun is shining like a red rubber ball.
-- Cyrkle, _Red Rubber Ball_

"Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have
not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of
our today." --Friedrich Nietzsche, _Human, All Too Human_

Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
-- Richard Whately

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-- Francis Bacon

You will never *find* time for anything. If you want time you must make
it.
-- Charles Buxton

Education is a progressive discovery of ignorance.
-- Will Durant

Energy and persistence conquer all thing.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Adventure is not outside a man, it is within.
-- David Grayson

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill ... Great works are
performed, not by strength, but perseverence.
-- Samuel Johnson

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do,
Nothing else.
-- Andre Malraux

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you
really stop to look fear in the face.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may
be very kind.
-- Edmund Spenser

When the gods choose to punish us, they merely answer our prayers.
-- Oscar Wilde

Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven.
-- Henry Ward Beecher

Love not what you are, but what you may become.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
-- Albert Einstein

Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts?
Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness? Or is it the exalting
separation from the turmoils of life, that veiling of the world in
which for the soul nothing there remains but souls? It is therefore
that the letters in which the loved name stands written in our spirit
appears like phosphorous writing by night, in fire, while by day,
in their cloudy traces, they but smoke?
-Richter

Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke.
-Claude McDonald

It is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge ...
and another to take the path that leads to it.
-- St. Augustine

With the first link of chain forged
First speech senteced
First thought forbidden
First freedom denied
Chains us all inevitably.
-- from Star Trek

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science."
-- Albert Einstein

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
-- Albert Einstein

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming
feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love
you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some
won't like you at all." - from _Venus Envy_, by Rita Mae Brown

A ... mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
-- Oliver Wendel Holmes

What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge,
and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.
-- Marina Horner

What publishers are looking for these days isn't radical feminism.
It's corporate feminism -- a brand of feminism designed to sell books
and magazines, three-piece suits, airline tickets, Scotch, cigarettes
and, most important, corporate America's message, which runs: "Yes,
women were discriminated against in the past, but that unfortunate
mistake has been remedied; now every woman can attain wealth, prestige
and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort.
-- Susan Gordon

"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged -- though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.
-- R.F.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
PLUTARCH

"Beloved, what more can I say than this--
In life, in death, in rebirth, stay my lord!
For love has tied a knot about your feet,
And love has put a girdle round my life.
I give you all, my self entire, your slave.
In all creation who else is my own:
When there is none to call me by my name:
And there is none at whose side I can stand;
Mid kinsfolk, friends and fellows--none my own.
So I seek shelter in you, lotus-cool,
And in your fleeting absence, dies my soul.
And ever round my throat, I wear
Even about my throat your jewel touch."
-- Chandidasa

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it
true. You may have to work for it, however
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions"

If you can dream it, you can do it.
-- Walt Disney

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream
preceds the goal.
-- Pamela Starr

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
-- Steve Smith

Some people dream of worthy accomplishments, while others stay awake and do
them.
-- Successories Poster

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream;
not only plan, but also believe."
--- Anatole France

Only the educated are free
--Epictetus "Discourses"

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
[Aristotle, in Diogenes Laertius: _Life_]

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
[Derek Bok (President of Harvard), in 1987. Probably not original with him.]

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
[John Dewey.]

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
[Benjamin Franklin. Probably not original with him either.]

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more
deadly in the long run.
[Twain: _A Curious Dream_ (1872). (I'd appreciate an explanation, if someone
has read this.)]

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Louis Berlioz (1803-1869)

Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest is
mere sheep-herding. - Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972)

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
- R. Ingersoll

Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
- George Iles

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home,
To scare myself with my own desert places.
-- Robert Frost, 1936

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets
as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or
Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all
the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great
street sweeper who did his job well."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding
of ourselves.
-- Carl Jung

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts about
reality.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything--and it
works.
-- William Strong

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde

Human rights rest on human dignity. The dignity of man is an ideal worth
fighting for and worth dying for.
-- Robert Maynard

I am large, I contain multitudes, as Whitman said; but some of the
multitudes are more multidinous than others.

"Prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double
existence both solid and subtle--solid as the
pyramids, subtle as the memory of hyacinths
which once scented the darkness." --George Eliot

If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded
in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will
ramify throughout his whole universe.
-- Gregory Bateson

"Those people who recognize that the imagination is reality's
master, we call sages,' and those who act upon it, we call
artists.' Or lunatics." Tom Robbins

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher
must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. -- Bertrand Russell

"Two roads diverged in the wood,
and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by
fearing to attempt.
-- William Shakespeare

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes
short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions,
and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the
triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt

Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution.
Ecstatically, ecstatically, estatically, ecstatically,
Existence is simply illusion.
-- Mr. Rogers

Indicate the direction of my domecile
Traversing solidified matter, oceanic regions or effervescent fluids..

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad"
[Salvador Dali]

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
-- James Joyce

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the
best, you very often get it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

Life was meant to be lived and curiosity must be kept alive. One must
never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

A friend is a present you give yourself.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Expedients are for the hour; principles for the ages.
-- Henry Ward Beecher

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

Culture is on the horns of a dilemma: if profound and noble it must
remain rare; if common it must become mean.
--George Santayana

Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to
diminishing returns.
--J.M. Clark

When words leave off, music begins.
--Heinrich Heine

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

The world is governed more by appearance than by realities, so that it is
fully as necessary to seem to know something as it is to know it.
--Daniel Webster

Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put
it in simple words.
T.S. Matthews

"Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage.
Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed.
Soon, they became more like aquariums, and then hatcheries.
>From farm fingerling to frozen fishstick is a short swim."
- Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All

" The world... appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which
connection of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and
thereby determine the texture of the whole."
(Physicist Werner Heisenberg)

" Nature is part of us, as we are part of it. We can recognize
ourselves in the description we give to it."
(Ilya Prigognine, Chemist
and Nobel Prize Winner)

"The world and thought are only the spumes; of
menacing cosmic images; blood pulsates with
their flight; thoughts are lit by their fires; and
these images are - myths."
Andrei Bely

"But Man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the
earth, and heedless of the growths within himself."
E.M. Forster

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome
nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately
I hate them!" -- A. Einstein.

Each person must decide for himself what he wants each day. As a
leader, I will expose you to the options and the likely
consequences of those options. I'll even share my opinion if
asked, but I'll never confuse it with the opinion, which simply
doesn't exist. Wayne Dyer

A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a
leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks
questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it
interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a
leader is interested in the group. Russell H. Ewing

Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality
in a good leader. Don't fall victim to what I call the Ready-
Aim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire.
T. Boone Pickens

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The
last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.
Max DePree, quoted in Working
Communicator, September 1992

Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the
fact.
--William Jones

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the
slave of your model.
--Vincent van Gogh

Perfection is the child of time.
--Joseph Hall

No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
--Mahatma Gandhi

We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without
hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.
--Seneca

Truth never hurts the teller.
--Robert Browning

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
--Arthur Conan Doyle

"If their is no wind, row"
-- Latin Proverb

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"You can judge a man by his enemies"
-- Edward Stuyvesant Bragg, 1884 Democratic national convention

"Reality keeps ruining my life" -- Calvin

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capaable of becoming, is the
only end of life" -- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual,
you also have an obligation to be one" -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Each man is the smith of his own fortune.
-- Appius Claudius Caecus

To many total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
-- St. Augustine

Is not absence death to those who love?
-- Alexander Pope

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
-- Thomas Carlyle

As for disappointing them I should not so much mind; but I canUt abide to
disappoint myself.
-- Oliver Goldsmith

Truth, like a torch, the more itUs shook it shines.
-- William Hamilton

If God can create a stone too heavy for Him to lift, there is
something He cannot do; and if He cannot create a stone too heavy
for him to lift, there is something He cannot create. If there's
something God cannot do He is not omnipotent, and if there's
something He cannot create He is not omnipotent. Therefore God is
not omnipotent.
--Elementary Symbolic Logic, 2nd Ed. Gustason & Ulrich

Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
-- Shelley, _Queen Mab_

"Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent - that is what Wisdom wants us
to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior."
Fred Nietzsche,
Zarathustra, book I

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
-- Bertrand Russell

Earth is the cradle of human kind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
-- Konstantin Tsiokovsky

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

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

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 & 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

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

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

"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw.
In my experience there is little else.
- Robertson Davies

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

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

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

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

The passion for science and the passion for music are driven by the
same desire; to realize beauty in one's vision of the world.
-- Heinz Pagels

We have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore
affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can
give it evidence. The sentence must also contain its own apology for
being spoken.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul
has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow
speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict
every thing you said to-day. -'Ah, so you shall be sure to be
misunderstood.'- Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was
misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus,
and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever
took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, _Self Reliance_

'God split himself into a myriad parts so that he might have friends.'
This may not be true, but it sounds good -- and is no sillier than
any other theology.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

One man's magic is another man's engineering. "Supernatural" is a
null word.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, it says so right
here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three
of these attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain
for you. No checks, please. Cash, and in small bills.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that
brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass
over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner
eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
-- Frank Herbert (Dune)

Science has proof without any certainty.
Creationists have certainty without any proof.
--Ashley Montague

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket,
a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange?
Uncertainty! Insecurity!
ISAAC ASIMOV

Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything
in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
ISAAC ASIMOV

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

"There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they
are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All
information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is
the human conditions; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean
that literally."
-- Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

my favorites from Cat's Cradle:

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and
I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my
history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-
white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of
myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at
You Know Who."
--Bokonon (from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle)

Better is the enemy of good enough.
ANONYMOUS

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve
our lives but have only one course of action.
FRANK HERBERT

"Success consists of going from failure to failure
without loss of enthusiasm" - Winston Churchill

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided
missiles and misguided men."
-- Martin Luther King (1965)

"Science has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the
world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."
Aldous Huxley (1964)

"The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by
an ugly fact."
T.H. Huxley (1894)

"I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from
this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women
and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch
as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see
that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in
the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream."
-- Black Elk, after surrender at Wounded Knee

Alas! it is our delusion all,
The future cheats us from afar;
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
-- Yeats

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me
and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the
inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will
be nothing. Only I will remain."
- Bene Gesserit
Litany Against Fear

"From time to time. What tenderness in these little words, what savagery."
-- Samuel Beckett

Cynic, n.:
A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not
as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of
plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up.
-- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It
doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over
human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His
precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other
hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions.
-- Benjamin Spock

Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his
misery. -- Matthew Arnold

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended -- civilizations are
built up -- excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong.
Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then
it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems
to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.
-- C. S. Lewis

I know you're supposed to take life one day at a time -- but lately several
days have attacked me at once.

Come away, o human child,
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand,
>From a world more full of weeping than you can understand.
-- Yeats

If you want magic, let go of your armor.
Magic is so much stronger than steel!
-- Richard Bach, "The Bridge Across Forever"

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
-- Albert Einstein

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out,
it's just sort of a tired feeling.
-- Paula Poundstone

We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
-- Shakespeare, The Tempest

"If I could go through the dorms and shoot people, exam pressures would be put
into perspective." -- Professor Ralph Noble

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many
worthwile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-
playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this
simple fact." -- Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

"Instead of having 'answers' on a math test, they should just call them
'impressions' and if you got a diffrent 'impression' so what, can't we all
be brothers?" -- Jack Handey

"Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.
If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people
for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of
power." -- P.J. O'Rourke

"No hand for me, abandon me,
Wash over me, watch over me, drowned forever,
Alone and crying, and a thousand miles astray,
I turned my face to God, but his face was turned away."
- Motorhead: Lost In The Ozone

"It is the absolute silence of infinite space that frightens me."
-- B. Pascal

" My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going."
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Quantum particles: the dreams that stuff is made of."
-- David Moser

"All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right
hands."
-- Saint Patrick

These are days you'll remember, never before, never since, I promise, will
the whole world be as warm as this.
-10,000 Maniacs

"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,
which constitutes poetic faith."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider,
the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Herman Melville

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits
of the world.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a
deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on
Earth.
- Feodor Dostoevsky

Called a blind date to set up a meeting at a restaurant. I
said, "I'll be the one in the leather jacket." She said, "I'll
be the one drinking sake." Turned out it was one of those
biker-sushi places. We never met.
- Stephen Wright

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical
invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts
them.
-- Mark Twain

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The last Christian died on the cross.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

The major contribution of Protestant thought to the knowledge of
mankind is its massive proof that God is a bore.
-- H.L. Mencken

I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go
down and meet them with baseball bats.
- Woody Allen, on the KKK

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and
pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no
humour in heaven.
-- Mark Twain

The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us,
if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything
else in the universe.
-- John Muir (1838-1914)

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
-- Stella Adler

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

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
-H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the
greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the
world ugly and bad.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

For others do I wait...for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant
ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and soul:
laughing lions must come.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality
at any point.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

[W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we
reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence
save to serve man.
-- Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our
Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967),
pp. 1203-1207.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to
suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
- Carl Sagan, "Contact"

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on
the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.
- Abraham Lincoln

I hold that a little rebellion is a good thing.
- Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or
no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
- Thomas Jefferson

It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not
enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it
is and not as it should be!
- Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote"

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls
and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself.
- Sir Richard F. Burton

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men
alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
-- Joseph Conrad

Life always gets harder toward the summit -- the cold increases, the
responsibility increases.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence
of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
-- Sigmund Freud

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a
sense of humor to console him for what he is.
-- Francis Bacon

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher
esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I live in my own place
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself -- I laugh.
-- inscribed over the door to Friedrich Nietzsche's house

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire
existence.
-- Honore de Balzac

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
-- George Santayana

Some men see things as they are and ask why.
Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came
from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
-- Hermann Hesse

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too
grave to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
--- Kahlil Gibran

Cancel me not -- for what shall then remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

I have looked into the abyss, and the abyss has looked into me. Neither
liked what we saw.
-- Brother Theodore

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs,
even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor
spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in
the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat." -- T. Roosevelt

"Baby, after considerable thought I've reached the conclusion that the
only conceivable legitimate answer to the Universe as constituted is
a peal of hysterical laughter." -- Keith Laumer, _Night of Delusions_

"scanf() is even more complicated and usually does something almost but
not completely unlike what you want."
-- Chris Torek, after Douglas Adams

"Curse the Baggins! It's gone! What has it got in its pocketses?
Oh we guess, we guess, my precious. He's found it, yes he must have.
My birthday-present." --Gollum, _The Hobbit_

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it
is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It
isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.
-- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of
statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are
extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive
displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every
case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts
down anything he damn well pleases.
-- Sir Josiah Stamp

"Give us a copper, Guv" said the beggar to the Treasury statistician,
when he waylaid him in Parliament square. "I haven't eaten for three
days." "Ah," said the statistician, "And how does that compare with
the same period last year?"
-Russell Lewis

I could prove God statistically.
-George Gallup

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The
first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about
the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies
died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime
Minister. That is a political statistic.
-Winston Churchill

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

The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics.
These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the
results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept
ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by
a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases.
-Sir Josiah Stamp

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
-Disraeli

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest
critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know
even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to
have suceeded.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
-- Albert Einstein

"If I ever meet myself," said Zaphod, "I'll hit myself so hard I won't know
what's hit me."
-- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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 theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of
time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't spent
at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it
was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a
certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first
place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by
its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but
this is clearly bunk.
-- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties
involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than
the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its
own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to
build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work
particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived
anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
-- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
-- Thornton Wilder

This day and your life ... are God's gift to you -- so give thanks and be
joyful always!
-- Jim Beggs

Error is discipline through which we advance.
-- William Ellery Channing

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
-- Duke Ellington

The best way out is always through.
-- Robert Frost

Courage is grace under pressure.
-- Ernest Hemingway

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
-- Rudyard Kipling

Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something
about it now.
-- Alan Lakein

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love...you make"
-- Paul McCartney, "Golden Slumbers Medly" (Abbey Road)

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want;
and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of makind achieve the second.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith, "Afterthoughts"

"I did not know then what I know now, that pride is a seed which
bears two vines: one life, and the other death."
-- Thurber

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-- Rudyard Kipling

"Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white."
-- Blake

[The Bible] "has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some
blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand
lies."
-- Twain

"Time alone can prove a just man just,
though you can know a bad man in a day."
-- Sophocles ("Oedipus Rex")

"Pi is good with ice cream."

Those who really deserve praise are the people who, while human enough to
enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than they are
compelled to do by their situation.
-- Thucydides

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
-- Theodor W. Adorno

Communism is socialism plus electricity.
-- Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili)
(actually originally said by Lenin)

This is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed would rock the world.
His dynamic energies would overpower those around him. But let him sleep.
-- Peter Sutcliffe, aka "The Yorkshire Ripper"

"Why dost thou awake me, O breath of spring? Thou dost woo me and say:
I cover thee with the dew of heaven! But the time of my fading is
near, near is the storm that will scatter my leaves! Tomorrow the
wanderer shall come. His eyes will search me in the field around,
and will not find me."
_The Sorrows of Young Werther_
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Attribution: Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Quote: Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool:
it will be one hundred years hence.
Topics: singularity, life

Attribution: Knopfler, Mark
Quote: Now the sun's gone to hell,
And the moon's rising high,
Let me bid you farewell,
Every man has to die.
For it is written in the starlight,
And the lines of your palm,
We're fools to make war,
On our brothers in arms.

Attribution: Nietche
Quote: Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars
requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and
heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant
stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.
Topics: time, deeds

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
-- Wilson Mizner

Failures are divided into two classes -- those who thought and never did,
and those who did and never thought.
-- John Charles Salak

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking
at the root.
-- Henry David Thoreau

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

Consider the postage stamp: Its usefulness consists in the ability to
stick to one thing till it gets there.
-- John Billings

Not the cry, but the flight of the wild duck, leads the flock to fly and
follow.
-- Chinese Proverb

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A year from now you may wish you had started today.
-- Karen Lamb

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so it is fully as
necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- Webster

Once you have flown, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,
for there you have been, there you long to return.
-- Leonardo da Vinci

Bigotry tries to keep truth in its hand
With a grip that kills it
-- Rabindranath Tagore

You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people
sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing
wild animals as librarians.
-- Monty Python

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here.
I'm mad, you're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
--Lewis Carroll, _Alice_In_Wonderland_

We will choose our lovers, we'll live out our own lives
We'll love whom we please with a passion and a sparkle in our eyes
Holly Near, _Step It Out, Nancy_

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on
account of one thing always leading to another.
-- E.B. White

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

Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small.
-- F. Von Logau

"My love does not, cannot _make_ her happy. My love can only
release in her the capacity to be happy."
-- J. Barnes

No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in
terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first
love? -Einstein

"To see the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour"
-- Blake

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;
it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
-- Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

Emotional complexity can be enjoyed, reveled in, and is
better served by acceptance and attention than by analysis.
-- Greg Parkinson

"Then the body shireked at me, with a dead cry
and all too late I knew that it was I."
-HPLovecraft

"Here was your home, he said, when you had sight."
-HPLovecraft (From the "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnet cycle)