My Favorite Quotations

"I hate quotations." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's kind of amazing to notice how many people these days like to put treasured quotations up on their personal web sites. It's as if each of us is publishing our own personal "good book," our own sacred collection of wisdom and insight.

The way I see this, in the old days we settled for a book of wisdom written by a committee, and naturally it was full of mistakes and nonsense. But in the future human truth will spread like wildfire in a much more reliable way, because each of us will have taken the responsibility to help carry from hand to hand only those insights we have personally verified.

Anyway, here are some of my own favorites for you to test drive.

NOTE: I have sprinkled a few of my own quotes in the following collection, mostly because I could get away with it. Some of them were extracted from larger texts, but some were always intended to be one-sentence essays. Since I have never heard of anyone treating the quotation as a literary form before, it may be appropriate at this moment to remember the words of that much misunderstood rebel of yesteryear:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand,
more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

P. S. I also invented the term dinosaurabilia.

Animal Liberation

Jeremy Bentham:

      The question is not can they reason, not can they talk, but can they suffer? [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

Henry Beston:

      We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and err greatly. For the animal should not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. [from The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928), which Rachel Carson once described as the only influence on her writing.]

Leonardo Da Vinci:

      The day will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

Ghandi:

      If animals could speak, they would state a case against mankind that would stagger the imagination.

Dean Hannotte:

      All of us, from pet owners to sociobiologists, describe animals as having "lovely" or "fierce" or "gentle" personalities. Isn't it time we agreed that anything with a personality is a person? And if corporations can be "persons" just to enjoy legal protections, shouldn't we grant legal protections to fellow creatures that can actually think and feel? If IBM is a person, why isn't my cat?

George Bernard Shaw:

      I wouldn't eat meat even if it were good for me.

Isaac Bashevis Singer:

      In our behavior towards animals, all men are Nazis.

Mark Twain:

      I believe I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

Cats, Reigning and Otherwise

[unknown]:

      Albert Schweitzer, a lefty, wrote prescriptions with his right arm because his cat Sizi preferred to sleep on his left arm. [from Pet House Magazine, 4/94, page 39]

[unknown]:

      Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.

[unknown]:

      I got rid of my husband. The cat was allergic.

[unknown]:

      My husband said it was him or the cat . . . I miss him sometimes.

[unknown]:

      No heaven wil not ever Heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me. [epitaph on a pet cemetary]

[unknown]:

      There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.

[unknown]:

      There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.

[unknown]:

      Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.

[unknown]:

      Whenever mice laugh at a cat, there is a hole nearby. [proverb]

Ellen Perry Berkeley:

      As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.

Mary Bly:

      Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later.

Colette:

      Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Colonial American proverb:

      You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.

Missy Dizick:

      Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.

English proverb:

      In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.

George Freedley:

      Four little Persians, but one only looked in my direction. I extended a tentative finger and two soft paws clung to it. There was a contented sound of purring, I suspect on both our parts. [American writer]

Bruce Graham:

      Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will pee on your computer.

Joseph Wood Krutch:

      Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.

Joseph Wood Krutch:

      Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

Ernest Menaul:

      The cat has too much spirit to have no heart.

Dave Platt:

      Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.

Faith Resnick:

      People that hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life.

Paul Rosenfels:

      Dogs believe that they are an inferior kind of human. Cats believe that people are an inferior form of cat.

Albert Schweitzer:

      There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Hippolyte Taine:

      I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

Mark Twain:

"Snookered" by George Hughes (click to enlarge)

Dear Mrs. Patterson:
      The contents of your letter are very pleasant and very welcome, and I thank you for them, sincerely. If I can find a photograph of my 'Tammany' and her kittens, I will enclose it in this. One of them likes to be crammed into a cornerpocket of the billiard table -- which he fits as snugly as does a finger in a glove and then he watches the game (and obstructs it) by the hour, and spoils many a shot by putting out his paw and changing the direction of a passing ball. Whenever a ball is in his arms, or so close to him that it cannot be played upon without risk of hurting him, the player is privileged to remove it to any one of three spots that chances to be vacant. . . .

Jeff Valdez:

      Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.

Deft Definitions

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn't.

[unknown]:

      A good pun is its own reword.

[unknown]:

      A leading authority is someone lucky who guessed right.

[unknown]:

      An actor is someone who, once he learns to fake sincerity, has got it made.

[unknown]:

      An enonomist is a man who measures the value of love by the price of prostitution.

[unknown]:

      Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. [spoken by Mickey Mouse]

[unknown]:

      Astronomy is the study of telescopes. [as quoted on page 28 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      Diplomacy is the art of repeating "Nice doggie" to a Pit Bull while searching for a rock.

[unknown]:

      Humorists are just philosophers who deal with one main mystery: "Is it me, or what?" [The 1999 Book Lover's Calendar (Workman Publishing)]

[unknown]:

      Psychoanalysis is the disease for which the only cure is more psychoanalysis.

[unknown]:

      Psychology is the science that discusses what everyone knows in terms that no one understands.

Joey Adams:

      A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Fred Allen:

      Committee -- a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.

Arthur C. Clarke:

      My favorite definition of an intellectual: "Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence." [from 3001: The Final Odessey, page 262]

Georges de Buffon:

      Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.

Miguel de Unamuno:

      Science is a cemetery of dead ideas. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Abba Eban:

      A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

Albert Einstein:

      Being a genius is just knowing what you're not very good at, and avoiding that subject.

Albert Einstein:

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

Albert Einstein:

      Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.

Albert Einstein:

      Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. [as quoted on page 52 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Albert Einstein:

      Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. THAT's relativity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      Man is a god in ruins.

Gustave Flaubert:

      Language is a cracked kettle on which we tap out crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Henry Ford:

      Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.

Max Gluckman:

      A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Ernie Kovacs:

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

John Lennon:

      Life is what happens to us while we're making other plans.

Plutarch:

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

Henri Poincaré:

      Sociology: the science with the most methods and the fewest results.

Sir Karl Popper:

      Science is merely common sense writ large.

Sir Karl Popper:

      Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification. [Observer (London, 1 Aug. 1982)]

Stolberg:

      An expert is a person who avoids the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.

Jonathan Swift:

      Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. [as quoted on page 9 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Henry David Thoreau:

      Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one. [On the Duty of Civil Disobedience]

Alvin Toffler:

      One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. [as quoted on page 75 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Paul Valery:

      Existence is no more than a flaw in the perfection of non-existence. [as quoted on page 12 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Gore Vidal:

      Psychiatry lies somewhere between astrology and phrenology on the scale of human gullability.

Voltaire:

      The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.

H. G. Wells:

      Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

William Whewell:

      We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist. [1840, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Oscar Wilde:

      What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. [Lady Windemere's Fan]

Eye Openers

[unknown]:

      A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.

[unknown]:

      A friend in need is a pest indeed.

[unknown]:

      A guy walked into a bar. He was treated for minor injuries.

[unknown]:

      A little girl after hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time, asked, "What do we do now?" [as quoted on page 56 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      A little greed can get you lots of stuff.

[unknown]:

      A man who smiles when things go wrong knows who to blame.

[unknown]:

      A manuscript, like a fetus, is never improved by showing it to somebody before it is completed.

[unknown]:

      A steak a day keeps the cows dead.

[unknown]:

      Adolescence is when children start bringing up their parents.

[unknown]:

      After all is said and done, usually more is said.

[unknown]:

      After things have gone from bad to worse, the cycle will repeat.

[unknown]:

      All general statements are false.

[unknown]:

      All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

[unknown]:

      All that glitters has a high refractive index.

[unknown]:

      All the world's a stage . . . most of us are just stagehands.

[unknown]:

      All things being equal, you lose.

[unknown]:

      All true wisdom is found on T-shirts.

[unknown]:

      An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
      The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."
      The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish.
      The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.
      The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"
      The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, Senor."
      The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and, with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC, where you will run your expanding enterprise."
      The Mexican fisherman asked, "But Senor, how long will this all take?" To which the American replied, "15-20 years."
      "But what then, Senor?"
      The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."
      "Millions, Senor? Then what?"
      The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

[unknown]:

      An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.

[unknown]:

      Anything that kills you makes you . . . well, dead.

[unknown]:

      As easy as 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841.

[unknown]:

      Ask not for whom the bell tolls, let the machine get it.

[unknown]:

      Atheists have no invisible means of support.

[unknown]:

      Avoid reality at all costs.

[unknown]:

      Back off, you jerks. This mother isn't going nowhere. [attributed to a Russian man blocking a Soviet tank in August of 1991, from the book Eyewitness by Vladimir Posner]

[unknown]:

      Be alert. The world needs more lerts.

[unknown]:

      Behind every successful man stands a woman waiting for his job.

[unknown]:

      Being politically correct means always having to say you're sorry.

[unknown]:

      Being superstitious brings bad luck.

[unknown]:

      Beware of sheep in sheep's clothing.

[unknown]:

      Beware the fury of a patient woman.

[unknown]:

      Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

[unknown]:

      Chicken little only has to be right once.

[unknown]:

      Cleanliness is next to clean-limbed, according to Webster's.

[unknown]:

      Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.

[unknown]:

      Common sense isn't.

[unknown]:

      Complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers.

[unknown]:

      Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons. [Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949]

[unknown]:

      Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog?

[unknown]:

      Don't count your checks before they're cashed.

[unknown]:

      Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep 'till noon.

[unknown]:

      Don't judge a book by its movie.

[unknown]:

      Don't use a big word where a diminutive word will suffice.

[unknown]:

      Drag the Joneses down to your level. It's cheaper.

[unknown]:

      Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy. [Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859]

[unknown]:

      Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? [as quoted on page 8 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      Eagles fly; but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.

[unknown]:

      Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends.

[unknown]:

      Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they may cancel your VISA.

[unknown]:

      Enough research will tend to support your theory.

[unknown]:

      Eternal nothingness is fine if you're dressed for it.

[unknown]:

      Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

[unknown]:

      Even if you're paranoid, maybe they really ARE after you.

[unknown]:

      Every silver lining has a cloud.

[unknown]:

      Everyone loves a moose. Some just don't know it.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      Fool-proof implies a finite number of fools.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      For every problem there is a simple solution, and it's always wrong.

[unknown]:

      Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

[unknown]:

      Get the facts first, THEN panic!

[unknown]:

      Get thee down. Be thou funky.

[unknown]:

      Given a conflict, Murphy's law supercedes Newton's.

[unknown]:

      God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them!

[unknown]:

      God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day.

[unknown]:

      Golf scores are directly proportional to the number of witnesses.

[unknown]:

      Good generally conquers evil. Unless, of course, good is stupid.

[unknown]:

      Gravity always wins.

[unknown]:

      Hard work never killed anybody . . . but why take chances?

[unknown]:

      He is the spectator of all musical time and existence, to whom it is not of the smallest importance whethor a thing be new or old, so long as it is true. [a music critic on J. S. Bach, quoted in "Civilization" on page 226]

[unknown]:

      He who throws mud loses ground.

[unknown]:

      He's dead, Jim. You grab his wallet, I'll grab his tricorder.

[unknown]:

      Heck was created for those who refuse to believe in Gosh.

[unknown]:

      Heisenburg probably rules.

[unknown]:

      Hellrung's Law: If you wait, it will go away.

[unknown]:

      Here lies Jan Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, marble Cutter. This monument was erected by her husband as a tribute to her memory and a specimen of his work. Monuments of this same style are two hundred and fifty dollars. [gravestone inscription]

[unknown]:

      High explosives are applicable where truth and logic fail.

[unknown]:

      Hire a teenager while they still know it all.

[unknown]:

      Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

[unknown]:

      Honour thy error as hidden intention.

[unknown]:

      I had an IQ test. The results came back negative.

[unknown]:

      If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution.

[unknown]:

      If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      If at first you don't succeed . . . forget skydiving.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      If hackers ran the world, there'd be no war -- lots of accidents, maybe.

[unknown]:

      If I could remember your name, I'd ask you where I left my keys. [bumper sticker]

[unknown]:

      If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.

[unknown]:

      If you aren't part of the solution, you're a precipitate.

[unknown]:

      If you can remember the '60s, then you weren't there.

[unknown]:

      If you can still hear the music, it's not loud enough!

[unknown]:

      If you can't dazzle them with dexterity, feed them a crock!

[unknown]:

      If you can't laugh at yourself, make fun of other people.

[unknown]:

      If you can't speak softly, just use the stick.

[unknown]:

      If you think nobody cares, miss a couple of payments.

[unknown]:

      In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.

[unknown]:

      In case of nuclear war, prayer in schools will be okay.

[unknown]:

      Inside every short man is a tall man doubled over in pain.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      It is interesting to speculate how different the world must have looked before Thomas Gray coined the word 'picturesque' in 1740 or before Whewell coined 'scientist' in the 19th century, or before Shakespeare coined the words 'assasination', 'disgraceful', or 'lonely'. [as quoted on page 67 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      It's a love story. No one's ahead. [as quoted on page 20 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      It's not an optical illusion, it just looks that way.

[unknown]:

      It's only fun if you can get in trouble.

[unknown]:

      Join the army, meet interesting people, and kill them.

[unknown]:

      Know thyself. If you need help, call the CIA.

[unknown]:

      Langsam's Law: Everything depends.

[unknown]:

      Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs louder.

[unknown]:

      Laugh and the world thinks you're an idiot.

[unknown]:

      Life is cheap. It's the accessories that kill you.

[unknown]:

      Life is essentially meaningless yet we all fear death.

[unknown]:

      Life is unsure, always eat your dessert first.

[unknown]:

      Live long enough to be a problem to your kids.

[unknown]:

      Love thine enemies . . . it really pisses them off.

[unknown]:

      LSD melts your mind, not in your hand.

[unknown]:

      Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce.

[unknown]:

      Moderation is good, but boring.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      Monday is the root of all evil.

[unknown]:

      Money can't buy everything. That's what credit cards are for.

[unknown]:

      Money is the root of all wealth.

[unknown]:

      Money talks . . . but all mine ever says is good-bye.

[unknown]:

      Most people deserve each other.

[unknown]:

      Murphy was an optimist.

[unknown]:

      Murphy's Law only fails when you try to demonstrate it.

[unknown]:

      Never draw fire; it irritates the people around you.

[unknown]:

      Never hit a man when he's down. He may get back up again.

[unknown]:

      Never hit a man with glasses; hit him with your fist.

[unknown]:

      Never put off to tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.

[unknown]:

      Never tell them what you wouldn't want to do.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      No one is listening until you make a mistake.

[unknown]:

      Nobody gets out of the Bermuda Triangle. Not even for lunch.

[unknown]:

      Nostalgia is okay but not what it used to be.

[unknown]:

      Nothing is so smiple that it can't be screwed up.

[unknown]:

      On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten.

[unknown]:

      On the other hand, you have different fingers.

[unknown]:

      One good turn gets most of the blankets.

[unknown]:

      Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune time.

[unknown]:

      Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?

[unknown]:

      Patience will come to he who waits for it.

[unknown]:

      People from my country believe -- and rightly so -- that the only thing separating man from the animals is mindless superstition and pointless ritual. ["Latka Gravis," from an episode of TAXI]

[unknown]:

      People who have their feet planted firmly on the ground often have difficulty getting their pants off. [as quoted on page 59 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      People who live in glass houses . . . shouldn't.

[unknown]:

      People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

[unknown]:

      Practice makes perfeckt.

[unknown]:

      Procrastination means never having to say you're sorry.

[unknown]:

      Rap is to music as Etch-A-Sketch is to art.

[unknown]:

      Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

[unknown]:

      Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

[unknown]:

      Reality is an illusion created by alcoholic deficiency.

[unknown]:

      Relax. Only dread one day at a time.

[unknown]:

      Religions change, but beer and wine remain.

[unknown]:

      Remember: 'i' before 'e', except in Budweiser.

[unknown]:

      Resistance is useless! (If <1 ohm)

[unknown]:

      Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm a schitzophrenic, and so am I.

[unknown]:

      Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it.

[unknown]:

      Sex is nobody's business but the three people involved.

[unknown]:

      Silence is one great art of conversation.

[unknown]:

      Skydiving . . . good 'till the last drop.

[unknown]:

      Smile, it makes people wonder what you're thinking.

[unknown]:

      So many cheques, so little money.

[unknown]:

      Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.

[unknown]:

      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge . . . others just gargle.

[unknown]:

      Some women get excited about nothing and then marry him.

[unknown]:

      Start off every day with a smile and get it over with.

[unknown]:

      Statistics show every two minutes another statistic is created.

[unknown]:

      Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.

[unknown]:

      Take 20 aspirins and you'll feel better, if you wake up.

[unknown]:

      Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.

[unknown]:

      Taxation WITH representation isn't so hot, either.

[unknown]:

      The bigger they are, the harder they hit.

[unknown]:

      The certain proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that no one has bothered to make contact with us.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible. [A Yale University management prof. in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)]

[unknown]:

      The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they'll be when you kill them.

[unknown]:

      The Earth is like a grain of sand, only bigger.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      The light at the end of a tunnel may be an oncoming train.

[unknown]:

      The pen is mightier than the sword, until it runs out of ink.

[unknown]:

      The problem with being too efficient is that once you've demonstrated the ability to walk on water, every SOB wants you to trot across the lake on an errand.

[unknown]:

      The problem with reality is the lack of background music.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      The real world is a special case.

[unknown]:

      The reward for a job well done is more work.

[unknown]:

      The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line.

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      The trouble with getting a life is making the payments.

[unknown]:

      The Two Rules of Success: 1. Don't tell everything you know.

[unknown]:

      The worst thing about censorship is [deleted by censorship bereau].

[unknown]:

      There are few problems that can't be solved with high explosives.

[unknown]:

      There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can't.

[unknown]:

      There are two times I feel stress -- day and night.

[unknown]:

      There is more room in your head for thoughts than thoughts in your head for room.

[unknown]:

      This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. [Western Union internal memo, 1876]

[unknown]:

      This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown away with great force. [in a book review]

[unknown]:

      Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it.

[unknown]:

      Those who live in stone houses shouldn't throw glass.

[unknown]:

      Three can keep a secret, if two are dead.

[unknown]:

      Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. [Example given in many artificial intelligence textbooks to show why simple sentences are hard to parse, especially for computers]

[unknown]:

      Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.

[unknown]:

      To err is human, to forgive is against company policy.

[unknown]:

      To err is human. And stupid.

[unknown]:

      To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.

[unknown]:

      Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns.

[unknown]:

      Trust in God, but lock your car.

[unknown]:

      Two doctors from Derby reported in 1981 about a woman, blind since the age of 27, who began to suffer deafness a few years later. "I can no longer hear the silence of the lamp-posts," she said one day. [as quoted on page 25 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      Two wrongs don't make a right -- three lefts do.

[unknown]:

      Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. [African Proverb]

[unknown]:

      Virtue is it's own punishment.

[unknown]:

      We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. [Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles, 1962]

[unknown]:

      What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul?

[unknown]:

      What goes around usually gets dizzy and falls over.

[unknown]:

      What I am is so real it dies on my lips. [as quoted on page 66 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      What the hell, go and put all your eggs in one basket.

[unknown]:

      When all else fails, follow instructions.

[unknown]:

      When asked about the possibility of life after death, Schweitzer replied, "No one ever came back. But as long as someone is kept alive in the heart and actions of others, he is alive." [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

[unknown]:

      When everything comes your way, you're in the wrong lane.

[unknown]:

      When in doubt, give advice.

[unknown]:

      When it comes to thought some people stop at nothing.

[unknown]:

      When you're run down the best thing to take is the licence number.

[unknown]:

      Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.

[unknown]:

      Work is a fine thing if it doesn't take too much of your spare time.

[unknown]:

      Worship the gods, listen to their advice, but don't lend them money.

[unknown]:

      You are accustomed to ostracism from childhood because you are overweight, deformed, stupid, or have an extremely short [deleted].

[unknown]:

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

[unknown]:

      You're never too old to learn something stupid.

Abd-El-Raham:

      I have now reigned above fifty years in victory and peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to be wanting for my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy confidence in this present world!

Douglas Adams:

      Don't try to engage my enthusiasum because I haven't got one. [Marvin the Paranoid Android, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]

Louis Agassiz:

      Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had been discovered before. Lastly, they say they always believed it. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar; see also William James]

Fred Allen:

      Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

William R. Allen:

      Certainly, it is a world of scarcity. But the scarcity is not confined to iron ore and arable land. The most constricting scarcities are those of character and personality. ['Bunnie Rabbit, Winnie, and the Grand Plan,' California Political Review, Winter 1993, page 13.]

Woody Allen:

      How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?

Woody Allen:

      More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

St. Thomas Aquinas:

      There is always something for the superior angels to make known to the inferior. [from 4-volume anthology read by the Ninth Street Center Study Group]

Aristophanes:

      It's not our friends teach us resourcefulness, but our wise enemies. Cities and princes have learned the use of warships and fortresses from necessity, not from friends. Enmity saves our homes, our children, everything that we love. [The Birds, translated by Dudley Fitts, page 182]

Aristotle:

      It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

Aristotle:

      The gods too are fond of a joke.

Gertrude Atherton:

      Laurens was dead. . . . Hamilton mourned him passionately, and never ceased to regret him. . . . Betsey consoled, diverted and bewitched him, but there were times when he would have exchanged her for Laurens. The perfect friendship of two men is the deepest and highest sentiment of which the finite mind is capable; women miss the best in life. [from The Conqueror, page 227]

Saint Augustine:

      Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

Francis Bacon:

      He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. [Of Marriage and Single Life]

Sir James Matthews Barrie:

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

John Bart:

      The truth belongs to all men, and the occasion of its discovery is of no particular importance. [tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, MD]

Jilian Becker:

      Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. [ Director, Institute for the Study of Terrorism]

Bernard Berenson:

      Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Ingrid Bergman:

      Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

A. R. Bernard:

      What we fail to repent of we are destined to repeat.

Yogi Berra:

      You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

Ambrose Bierce:

      Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.

Ambrose Bierce:

      The covers of this book are too far apart.

William Blake:

      If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. [as quoted on page 24 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

William Blake:

      It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Niels Bohr:

      The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Napoleon Bonaparte:

      Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Christian Nevell Bovee:

      False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

General Omar Bradley:

      Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

Berthold Brecht:

      Out of the libraries come the killers. Mothers stand despondently waiting, hugging their children and searching the sky, looking for the latest inventions of professors. Engineers sit hunched over their drawings: One figure wrong and the enemy cities remain undestroyed. [quoted by Freeman Dyson in the tv show A Glorious Accident, 1994]

Freda Bright:

      In the late 1600's the finest instruments originated from three rural families whose workshops were side by side in the Italian village of Cremona. First were the Amatis, and outside their shop hung a sign: "The best violins in all Italy." Not to be outdone, their next door neighbors, the family Guarnerius, hung a bolder sign proclaiming: "The Best Violins In All The World!" At the end of the street was the workshop of Anton Stradivarius, and on its front door was a simple notice which read: "The best violins on the block." [as quoted on page 17 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Mel Brooks:

      Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die.

Rita Mae Brown:

      Success isn't external. There is an inner life, a life deeper than intellect. Finding that chord might mean failing in the outer world. [from Six of One, quoted by Carl Luss in a letter to Paul Rosenfels]

Robert Browning:

      Sun treader, life and light be thine forever! [to Percy Bysshe Shelley]

William Jennings Bryan:

      No one can earn a million dollars honestly.

Jimmy Buffett:

      We are the people our parents warned us about.

Luther Burbank:

      I don't feel good. [last words]

Edmund Burke:

      The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

George Burns:

      I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.

Samuel Butler:

      A hen is just an egg's way of making another hen.

Samuel Butler:

      Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Joseph Campbell:

      People talk about finding the meaning of life, when what they're really looking for is an experience of it.

Joseph Campbell:

      The old patterns of the hero's quest still hold true. The latest incarnation of Oedipus is standing at the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street waiting for the lights to change.

Al Capone:

      Vote early and vote often.

Al Capone:

      You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

Mason Capwell:

      If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is Bambi, squashed beneath it, any less dead?

Andrew Carnegie:

      As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

Andrew Carnegie:

      People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

Joyce Cary:

      Love doesn't grow on trees like apples. You have to build it, step by step. It's all work, work, work.

Cato the Elder:

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

Charlie Chaplin:

      In the end, everything is a gag.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton:

      Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.

Winston S. Churchill:

      A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston S. Churchill:

      A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Winston S. Churchill:

      Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

Winston S. Churchill:

      A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Winston S. Churchill:

      I had a feeling once about Mathematics -- that I saw it all. Depth beyond Depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after dinner and I let it go. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Winston S. Churchill:

      Play the game for more than you can afford to lose . . . only then will you learn the game.

Winston S. Churchill:

      Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. [in 1949, speaking at Britain's National Book Exhibition about his World War II memoirs]

C. West Churchman:

      When you postpone thinking about something too long, then it may not be possible to think about it adequately at all. [quoted on pg. 24 of The Netweaver's Sourcebook by Dean Gengle]

Cicero:

      No sane man will dance.

Tom Clancy:

      The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Arthur C. Clarke:

      I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future. [3001: The Final Odessey, page 274]

Grover Cleveland:

      It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory. [1887, referring to the tariff]

Jean Cocteau:

      Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

William Congreve:

      Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.

Tom Connelly:

      He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes, but he who never asks a question remains a fool forever.

Gary Cooper:

      I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper. [on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind"]

Corbousier:

      City planning is too important to be left to citizens.

Sheryl Crow:

      No one said it would be easy, but no one told me it would be this hard.

e e cummings:

      I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

Dinesh D'Souza:

      Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated. [The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: The Free Press, 1995), page 554.]

Charles Darwin:

      As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. [end of next to last paragraph of The Origin of Species]

Charles Darwin:

      It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Clarence Day:

      The World of Books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out and after an era of darkness new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

Honore de Balzac:

      Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Charles de Gaulle:

      The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Charles de Gaulle:

      The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Jean (1645-1696) de La Bruyere:

      A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

Marquis de la Grange:

      When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Pierre-Simon de Laplace:

      All the effects of nature are only the mathematical consequence of a small number of immutable laws.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

      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:

      Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Eugene Victor Debs:

      While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. [quoted by the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, who said: "Noble words, and they find echoes down the ages."]

Jacques Delille:

      Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.

Demosthenes:

      Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

Rene Descartes:

      Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. ["Discours de la Methode"]

Denis Diderot:

      Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. [French philosopher (1713-84), from D'Alembert's Dream, "Conversation between d'Alembert and Diderot" (written 1769; published 1830; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. by Lester G. Crocker, 1966)]

Paul Dirac:

      In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Frederick Douglass:

      Everybody has asked the question . . . "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ["What the Black Man Wants," Negro Social and Political Thought 1850-1920: Representative Texts, edited by Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1962), page 283.]

Arthur Conan Doyle:

      "And now, Doctor we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to Violin Land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex with their conundrums." [The Red Headed League]

Arthur Conan Doyle:

      "Is there are point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

      "To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime."

      "The dog did nothing in the nighttime."

      "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. [as quoted on page 93 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Charles H. Duell:

      Everything that can be invented has been invented. [Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899]

Will and Ariel Durant:

      Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. [The Lessons of History, page 101.]

Will Durant:

      Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. [typical overwritten Durantism, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Esther Dyson:

      If you want to cure all the world's problems, kill all the people.

Abba Eban:

      His ignorance is encyclopedic.

Abba Eban:

      Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.

Meister Eckhart:

      Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground. [as quoted on page 7 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

May Edel:

      Some people have suggested that the Eskimos carried things too far. They think that the Eskimo habits of sharing are just foolish. They say that the Eskimos just didn't have enough foresight to bother about providing for their own future needs, or to care for their belongings, or even to have a clear idea of owning. This wasn't true at all. The Eskimos were always very careful with their things. The man who made a tool was its abolute owner. But there was no point in keeping it put away if someone else needed it. That kind of selfish 'human nature' hadn't been invented yet. [The Story of People, 1953, page 57]

Thomas Alva Edison:

      If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

Thomas Alva Edison:

      Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Alva Edison:

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

Thomas Alva Edison:

      What man's mind can create, man's character can control. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Albert Einstein:

      God may be subtle, but He isn't cruel.

Albert Einstein:

      He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Albert Einstein:

      I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to.

Albert Einstein:

      I never bother to memorize anything I can look up.

Albert Einstein:

      I never think of the future -- it comes soon enough.

Albert Einstein:

      If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German 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. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Albert Einstein:

      Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein:

      It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Albert Einstein:

      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Albert Einstein:

      Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein:

      Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Albert Einstein:

      Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein:

      Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Albert Einstein:

      There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein:

      We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

Dwight David Eisenhower:

      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 cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953]

T. S. Eliot:

      Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Black Elk:

      While I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw. [as quoted on page 43 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Prof. Scott Elledge:

      It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man. [on his retirement from Cornell]

George Elliot:

      Dorothea had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling that there was always some thing better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better. Her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who live faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. [concluding narration of BBC tv's Middlemarch, 1994]

Jim Elliot:

      He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

Paul Eluard:

      There is another world, but it is in this one. [as quoted on page 77 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . . 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 today. . . . The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag of a hundred tasks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. [from Self-Reliance]

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. [from Self-Reliance]

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      Hitch your wagon to a star.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      I hate quotations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. [from Self-Reliance]

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      Life consists of what a man is thinking about all day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      When it is dark enough, men see the stars. [saying imprinted on a 1970's Magnetic Novelty Co. refridgerator magnet]

Epicurus:

      Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.

Eric Erikson:

      Some day, maybe, there will exist a well informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit.

Jules Feiffer:

      I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived, but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary. [1965]

David B. Feinberg:

      Thomas Alva Edison said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. As every writer knows, writing is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent procrastination . . .

Paul Fix:

      The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.

Gustave Flaubert:

      It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew He could hear me. Praised may He be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.

Keith Floyd:

      Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for outside their own consciousness, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking. [as quoted on page 89 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Marechal Ferdinand Foch:

      Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value. [Prof. of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre]

Henry Ford:

      Every generation has its own problems; it ought to find out its own solutions. There is no use in our living if we can't do things better than our fathers did.

Henry Ford:

      Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.

Gene Fowler:

      Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Anatole France:

      The average person does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one that will last forever.

Benjamin Franklin:

      Well done is better than well said.

Benjamin Franklin:

      Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Benjamin Franklin:

      Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Robert Frost:

      A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Buckminster Fuller:

      Consideration -- a nice word meaning putting two stars together. [as quoted on page 14 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Buckminster Fuller:

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

Buckminster Fuller:

      When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. [as quoted on page 92 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Margaret Fuller:

      Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

John Kenneth Galbraith:

      Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

John Kenneth Galbraith:

      You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Galileo Galilei:

      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:

      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.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

      There is more to life than increasing speed.

Gandhi:

      The greatness of a nation . . . can be judged by the way its animals are treated. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

Bill Gates:

      640K ought to be enough for anybody. [in 1981]

Carl Friedrich Gauss:

      Ask her to wait a moment -- I am almost done. [when informed that his wife is dying]

Murray Gell-Mann:

      Around 1970 I was one of a small group of physicists, biologists, painters, and poets assembled in Aspen, Colorado to discuss the experience of getting creative ideas. We each described an incident in our own work. . . .

      The accounts all agreed to a remarkable extent. We had each found a contradiction between the established way of doing things and something we needed to accomplish: in art, the expression of a feeling, a thought, an insight; in theoretical science, the explanation of some experimental facts in the face of an accepted 'paradigm' that did not permit such an explanation.

      First, we had worked, for days or weeks or months, filling our minds with the difficulties of the problem in question and trying to overcome them. Second, there had come a time when further conscious thought was useless, even though we continued to carry the problem around with us. Third, suddenly, while we were cycling or shaving or cooking . . . the crucial idea had come. We had shaken loose from the rut we were in.

      We were all impressed with the congruence of our stories. Later on I learned that this insight about the act of creation was in fact rather old. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great physiologist and physicist of the late nineteenth century, described the three stages of conceiving an idea as saturation, incubation, and illumination, in perfect agreement with what the members of our group in Aspen discussed a century later.

      Now what goes on during the second stage, that of incubation? For the psychoanalytically oriented, among others, an interpretation that comes immediately to mind is that mental activity continues during the incubation period, but in the 'preconscious mind,' just outside of awareness. My own experience with the emergence of the right answer in a slip of the tongue could hardly fit better with that interpretation. But some academic psychologists, skeptical of such an approach, offer an alternative suggestion, that nothing really happens during incubation except perhaps a weakening of one's belief in the false principle that is obstructing the search for a solution. The real creative thinking takes place, in their view, just before the moment of illumination. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 264]

Murray Gell-Mann:

      Economists have sometimes been lampooned as people who would measure the value of love by the price of prostitution. . . .

      The apparently hard-headed practice of ignoring values difficult to quantify is often advertised as being value-free. On the contrary, it represents the imposition on any analysis of a rigid system of values, favoring those that are easily quantifiable over others that are more fragile and may be more important. All our lives are impoverished by decisions based on that kind of thinking. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 324]

Murray Gell-Mann:

      If one were to stand back and estimate the prospects for a successful, comprehensive program of conservation of biological diversity in the tropics, the results might not be encouraging. However, history shows clearly that humanity is moved forward not be people who stop every little while to try to gauge the ultimate success or failure of their ventures, but by those who think deeply about what is right and then put all their energy into doing it. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 338]

Murray Gell-Mann:

      Sometimes people who for some dogmatic reason reject biological evolution try to argue that the emergence of more and more complex forms of life somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics. Of course it does not, any more than the emergence of more complex structures on a galactic scale. Moreover, in biological evolution we can see a kind of 'informational' entropy increase as living things come into better adjustment with their surroundings, thus reducing an informational discrepancy reminiscent of the temperature discrepancy between a hot and a cold object. In fact, complex adaptive systems all exhibit this phenomenon -- the real world exerts selection pressures on the systems and the schemata tend to respond by adjusting the information they contain in accordance with those pressures. Evolution, adaptation, and learning by complex adaptive systems are all aspects of the winding down of the universe. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 372]

Murray Gell-Mann:

      The effective complexity of the universe is the length of a concise description of its regularities. Like the algorithmic information content, the effective complexity receives only a small contribution from the fundamental laws. The rest comes from the numerous regularities resulting from 'frozen accidents.' Those are chance events of which the particular outcomes have a multiplicity of long-term consequences, all related by their common ancestry.

      The consequences of some such accidents can be far-reaching. The character of the whole universe was affected by accidents occurring near the beginning of its expansion. The nature of life on Earth depends on chance events that took place around four billion years ago. Once the outcome is specified, the long-term consequences of such an event may take on the character of a law, at any but the most fundamental level. A law of geology, biology, or human psychology may stem from one or more amplified quantum events, each of which could have turned out differently. The amplifications can occur through a variety of mechanisms, including the phenomenon of chaos, which introduces, in certain situations, indefinitly large sensitivities of outcome to input. [The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994, page 134]

J. Paul Getty:

      The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.

Mahatma Ghandi:

      I think it would be a good idea. [when asked what he thought of Western civilization]

Kahlil Gibran:

      Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

Jean Giraudoux:

      Only the mediocre are always at their best.

James Gleick:

      [Douglas] Hofstadter has no shortage of metaphors for the mind. An ant colony. A labyrinth of rooms, with endless rows of doors flinging open and slamming shut. A network of intricate domino chains, branching apart and rejoining, with little timed springs to stand the dominoes back up. Velcro-covered marbles bashing around inside a "careenium." A wind chime, with myriad glass tinklers fluttering in the cross-breezes of its slowly twisting strands. [from "Exploring the Labyrinth of the Mind," New York Times Magazine, August 21, 1983]

Gail Godwin:

      Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

Goethe:

      When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Samuel Goldwyn:

      If I look confused it's because I'm thinking.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev:

      Thus we live today in a watershed era. One epoch has ended and a second is commencing. No one yet knows how concrete it will be -- no one. Having long been orthodox Marxists, we were sure that we knew. But life once again has refuted those who claim to be know-it-alls and messiahs. [excerpted from a 05/06/?? speech given at Westminister College in Fulton, MO, as translated by Cable News Network (CNN)]

Cary Grant:

      Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Robert Graves:

      The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Michael Green:

      Well, the heterotic theories are rather curious beasts. They can be thought of as combinations of the oldest kind of string theory, the original so-called bosonic string theory, on the one hand, and superstring theory on the other. So the heterotic string combines the string theory which works in twenty-six-dimensional spacetime with one which works in ten dimensions! That, of course, doesn't make sense. You can't have a different number of spacetime dimensions for the same string. What actually happens is that ten of the twenty-six dimensions are ordinary spacetime dimensions, so that the string is wriggling in ten-dimensional spacetime. In addition there are sixteen so-called 'internal' dimensions. These lead to extra structure in the theory that ought to describe the other forces, the forces other than gravity. So there's a rather geometrical picture for where these other forces come from. They come from the fact that twenty-six minus ten is sixteen! The sixteen mismatching dimensions are responsible for certain symmetries of the theory. These symmetries go under the names SO(32) and E8XE8, which are mathematical names for the relationships between the particles in the theory. SO(32) and E8XE8 are mathematical 'symmetry groups' which are naturally associated, in the heterotic theory, with the mismatch of sixteen dimensions between the bosonic string theory and superstring theory. [from Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? edited by P. C. W. Davies, Cambridge U. Press, 1988, page 118]

Sacha Guitry:

      You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

Moses Hadas:

      Thank you for sending me a copy of your book -- I'll waste no time reading it.

Moses Hadas:

      This book fills a much-needed gap. [in a review]

John Burden Sanderson Haldane:

      We have got to learn to think scientifically, not only about inanimate things, but about ourselves and one another. It is possible to do this. [English geneticist quoted in Living Philosophies (1931), ppage 330]

Sarah J. Hale:

      Do not grieve that I am at rest, but rouse up all your energies for the work that is before you.

Dean Hannotte:

      Building a world fit for people to live in takes lots of tentative steps, a willingness to make mistakes, the honesty to admit when you've taken a wrong turn, and the courage to trust a helping hand.

Dean Hannotte:

      I'll tell you a story. I actually met God once, twenty years ago when I was toying with atheism. He assured me that He was quite happy if people didn't believe in Him, that He actually preferred it. Well, I didn't like His smugness, and I don't like to be told what to do, so I said I was going to tell everybody what He'd just admitted, at which point he became apoplectic and keeled over stone dead. This is why I can tell you today, in all honesty, that God doesn't exist.

Dean Hannotte:

      If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

Dean Hannotte:

      Learning more about human nature than anybody you've ever heard of is easy; learning what matters is the hard part.

Dean Hannotte:

      One time I went to an exhibit of "concrete art." On one podium was a three-by-five index card saying "This piece has been temporarily removed." I asked one of the staff members when it would be put back on display and she laughed in my face. "I guess you don't get it," she smirked. She was right. I don't get it and I don't want it.

Lucille S. Harper:

      The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.

Joel Chandler Harris:

      It was a great and saving experience. It was just lonely enough to bring me face to face with myself, and yet not lonely enough to breed melancholy. I used to sit in the dusk and see the shadows of all the great problems of life, flitting about, restless and uneasy, and I had time to think about them. [on being a printer's apprenctice, from page 77 of Joel Chandler Harris by Alvin F. Harlow (Messner Books)]

Stephen W. Hawking:

      A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!" [from A Brief History of Time, 1988, page 1]

Stephen W. Hawking:

      Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind of God. [from A Brief History of Time, 1988, ppage 174-175]

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

      The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease.

William Hazlitt:

      The origin of science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Ernest Hemingway:

      Never mistake motion for action.

Thomas Henry Huxley:

      Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Thomas Henry Huxley:

      Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Jack Herbert:

      We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.

Bill Hirst:

      I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.

Adolf Hitler:

      What luck for rulers that men do not think.

Jimmy Hoffa:

      I do unto others what they do unto me, only worse.

Eric Hoffer:

      A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. [The Temper of Our Time, page 83.]

Eric Hoffer:

      In times of change, the learners inherit the earth -- the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to understand a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer:

      Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

Eric Hoffer:

      The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. [The True Believer, page 107.]

Eric Hoffer:

      There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. [The Passionate State of Mind, page 181.]

Lorin Hollander:

      By the time I was three, I was spending every waking moment at the keyboard, standing, placing my hands on the keyboard and pushing notes. And I would choose very carefully what tones I would play because I knew that when I would play a note I would become that note. [as quoted on page 55 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

      If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after I should be ready to say Goodbye.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

      What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Sherlock Holmes:

      While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. [quoted in 5/88 NYPC Newsletter]

Herbert Hoover:

      Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

Hu Shih:

      [Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics"] had been published in 1898 and had been immediately accepted by the Chinese intelligentsia with acclamation. Rich men gave money to have new editions made for wider distribution (there being no copyright law then), because it was thought that the Darwinian hypothesis, especially in its social and political application, was a welcome stimulus to a nation suffering from age-long inertia and stagnation. In the course of a few years many of the evolutionary terms and phrases became proverbial expressions in the journalistic writings of the time. Numerous persons adopted them in naming themselves and their children, thereby reminding themselves of the perils of elimination in the struggle for existence, national as well as individual. The once famous General Chen Chiung-ming called himself "Ching-tsun" or "Struggling for Existence." Two of my schoolmates bore the names "Natural Selection Yang" and "Struggle for Existence Sun." Even my own name bears witness to the great vogue of evolutionism in China. I remember distinctly the morning when I asked my second brother to suggest a literary name for me. After only a moment's reflection, he said, "How about the word shih [fitness] in the phrase 'Survival of the Fittest'?" I agreed and, first using it as a nom de plume, finally adopted it in 1910 as my name. [from Living Philosophies (1931), ppage 247-248]

Elbert Hubbard:

      Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

Victor Hugo:

      Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Johan Huizinga:

      The Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be absurd if their meaning were exhausted in their function and their place in the phenomenal world, if by their essence they did not reach into a world beyond this. This idea of a deeper significance in ordinary things is familiar to us as well, independently of religious convictions: as an indefinite feeling which may be called up at any moment, by the sound of raindrops on the leaves or by the lamplight on the table.

Robert Hutchins:

      We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

Aldous Huxley:

      Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley:

      Let us build a pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD'S EDUCATORS. [foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World]

Aldous Huxley:

      Science has "explained" nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. [Along the Road, pt. 2, "Views of Holland" (1925)]

William James:

      . . . when a thing was new people said "It is not true." Later, when its truth became obvious, people said, "Anyway, it is not important," and when its importance could not be denied, people said, "Anyway, it is not new." [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar; see also Louis Agassiz]

William James:

      Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Sir James Jeans:

      Our race cannot expect to understand everything in the first few moments of its existence. To-day, it is in the position of a new-born baby which has, just in the last minute, opened its eyes to study the outer world. Its first impressions are, no doubt, vague and imperfect; they probably contain many errors, but also a germ of truth. Even if the baby has only discovered that the world is a very large place and begun to suspect that babies are not its only content, it has discovered something. Its new point of view will be better than the vague, introspective, self-centred dreams in which it indulged before it could properly focus its eyes on external objects. But it would be absurd to expect the baby to understand everything. For a long time to come it must guide its conduct by instinct, by practical hand-to-mouth considerations, by its inborn moral sense, if it has one. Except in the very simplest of matters its newly awakened intellect is not yet a very safe guide. With this in mind, I do not worry overmuch about abstract philosophical problems, nor do I trouble much about questions such as finding a logical or rational basis for ethics or morality. Sayings of Christ -- "It is better to give than to receive," and "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" -- take one into regions where logic and science are at present unable to provide any guidance. We of the present age know very little -- almost nothing; we are rather pioneers setting out to explore a new country. We have the thrill of every-changing views, now and again we reach a ridge or summit which opens up new and unexpected vistas -- of necessity our point of view must continually change. Those who come after us will live in a very different world, which they will understand far better than we understand our world to-day. They may find it more wonderful than anything we can imagine; on the other hand, it may prove unspeakably dull. In either event, they will not know the thrill of the pioneer. And, unless human nature changes vastly in the meantime, we may be sure they will regret the "good old days" in which we are now living. They will think of our age as the Golden Age, the glorious morning of the world. And I, for one, do not regret that fate has cast my life in it. [quoted in Living Philosophies (1931), ppage 118-119]

Thomas Jefferson:

      I am a great believer in luck, I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson:

      I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.

Thomas Jefferson:

      I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson:

      That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Thomas Jefferson:

      When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

Thomas Jefferson:

      You can't expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. [on why the U.S. should have a constitutional convention every thirty years, as quoted by Gore Vidal on PRI's 'To the Best of Our Knowedge', 3/98]

Bill Jefferys:

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

Jesus (0?-32?):

      Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters and, yes, even your own life, you can't be my disciple. [Luke 14:26]

Alexander Jodorowsky:

      One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem. [as quoted on page 58 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Lyndon B. Johnson:

      Boys, I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.

Lyndon B. Johnson:

      I'm the only president you've got.

Lyndon B. Johnson:

      You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right. [Robert L. Hardesty, The Johnson Years: The Difference He Made (Austin: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, 1993), page 181.]

Paul Johnson:

      The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. [The Quotable Paul Johnson: A Topical Compilation of His Wit, Wisdom and Satire, edited by George J. Marlin, et al (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), page 138.]

Samuel Johnson:

      Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.

Samuel Johnson:

      Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

Howard Mumford Jones:

      Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

Thomas Jones:

      Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Joseph Joubert:

      Never cut what you can untie.

Joseph Joubert:

      What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.

James Joyce:

      History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.

C. G. Jung:

      Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Carl Jung:

      I remember a medicine man in Africa who said to me almost with tears in his eyes: "We have no dreams anymore since the British are in the country." When I asked him why, he answered: "The District Commissioner knows everything." [as quoted on page 85 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Carl Jung:

      The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Garson Kanin:

      Of all the dangerous and destructive "isms" that have plagued this century, ageism is the most stupid. . . . There's a story of a town in Connecticut that lost its power, had a complete outage. And they simply could not repair it [until] someone remembered that there was an old, old electrical engineer, who had installed the system in the first place, and he was living in some retirement community, and they sent for him. And he came along and he got a little mallet out and he went all through the [plant] and he went tap, tap, tap on a switch and all the lights came on. He sent the town a bill . . . for $1000.02 . . . itemized as follows: Tapping, 2 cents. Knowing where to tap, $1000. [Quoted by Don Hewitt in "Minute by Minute," 1985]

Abraham Kaplan:

      Two monks came to a ford in a river where a young girl was helplessly waiting to cross. The man of Zen picked her up, waded across, and set her down on the other bank. His companion, an orthodox Buddhist, was obviously distressed, and as they walked on their way he at last broke out in reproach: "You know perfectly well that we monks are not even permitted to touch a woman, and here you have held one in your arms!" To which the other replied, "I set her down by the river; are you still carrying her?" [The New World of Philosophy, page 322]

Helen Keller:

      Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

John F. Kennedy:

      Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

John F. Kennedy:

      Some men see things as they are, some see them as they they should be.

John F. Kennedy:

      Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy:

      Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

John F. Kennedy:

      When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters -- one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

Robert F. Kennedy:

      It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard:

      People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.

Soren Kierkegaard:

      People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.

Martin Luther King Jr.:

      In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

      Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

      In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Charlene Kirschner:

      We really are the first generation to parent ourselves, serve as our own mental health experts and learn computers all in the same decade, aren't we?

Fletcher Knebel:

      Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

Irving Kristol:

      Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

Eric Langmuir:

      A decision without the pressure of consequence is hardly a decision at all.

Lao-Tzu:

      A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

David Lauder:

      Never confuse where you are with where you're going.

David Lauder:

      The easiest way to manage change is to prohibit it.

John Lennon:

      Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. [as quoted on page 21 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Julius Lester:

      Linda failed to return home from a dance Friday night. On Saturday she admitted she had spent the night with an Air Force lieutenant. The Aults decided on a punishment that would "wake Linda up." They ordered her to shoot the dog she had owned about two years. On Sunday, the Aults and Linda took the dog into the desert near their home. They had the girl dig a shallow grave. Then Mrs. Ault grasped the dog between her hands and Mr. Ault gave his daughter a .22 caliber pistol and told her to shoot the dog. Instead, the girl put the pistol to her right temple and shot herself. The police said there were no charges that could be filed against the parents except possibly cruelty to animals. [from "Search for the New Land," quoting the New York Times of February 7, 1968]

Sam Levenson:

      Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

Kurt Lewin:

      If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.

Stanislaus Lezcynski:

      No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

A. J. Liebling:

      I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.

Fran Liebowitz:

      If you removed all of the homosexuals, and all of the homosexual influence, from what is generally regarded as American culture, you'd pretty much be left with Let's Make a Deal.

Abraham Lincoln:

      He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.

Abraham Lincoln:

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

Abraham Lincoln:

      It is better to remain silent and thought a fool, then to speak up and remove all doubt.

Abraham Lincoln:

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

Abraham Lincoln:

      What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

James L. Ling:

      Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

      It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth:

      If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

Father Larry Lorenzoni:

      The average person thinks he isn't.

Clare Booth Luce:

      All autobiographies are alibi-ographies. [television interview with William F. Buckley]

Sidney Lumet:

      All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen. [as quoted on page 81 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Moms Mabley:

      It ain't the depth of the river that drowns you; it's the water.

Ross MacDonald:

      Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

Niccolo Machiavelli:

      There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. [The Prince, 1513]

Terence MacSwiney:

      It is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.

John Madden:

      There's no point putting whipped cream on manure.

Brian Magee:

      Our knowledge has become so extensive, so complex, so technical and so specialized that it has to be formulated in language which is decreasingly related to that of ordinary life and interpersonal relationships. This in turn makes it ever less available to us as a basis for a view of the world that we can actually live with, in an everyday sense. The upshot of this is that we come very powerfully to feel that there is something dehumanizing, depersonalizing, about the consequences of the growth of our own knowledge. And the result of THAT is that -- side by side with the growth of knowledge and directly related to it -- there grows a sense of the need for what one might call a philosophy of man, some sort of theoretical conception of ourselves which helps us to preserve our sense of our own humanity and relate us to our social and cognitive situation. [Men of Ideas, ppage 293]

Bryan Magee:

      Mankind is like the crew of a ship at sea who can choose to remodel any part of the ship they live in, and can remodel it entirely section by section, but cannot remodel it all at once. [page 111, Philosophy and the Real World, summarizing Popper's argument against utopian totalitarianism]

Bryan Magee:

      No one can possibly give us more service than by showing us what is wrong with what we think or do; and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation. [page 37, Philosophy and the Real World]

René Magritte:

      I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn't mean we decide anything. [as quoted on page 18 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Horace Mann:

      A writer is someone for whom writing is much more difficult than it is for other people.

Lou Marinoff:

      Moral order isn't a drug, but it does have wonderful side effects. [from Plato, not Prozac!]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

      He found an enormous old umbrella in the trunk. The bright satin material had been eaten away by the moths. "Look what's left of our circus clown's umbrella," said the Colonel with one of his old phrases. Above his head a mysterious system of little metal rods opened. "The only thing it's good for now is to count the stars." [as quoted on page 30 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Don Marquis:

      Bores bore each other too, but it never seems to teach them anything.

Groucho Marx:

      From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Groucho Marx:

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

Groucho Marx:

      I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception

Karl Marx:

      The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Abraham Maslow:

      Human life will never be understood unless its highest aspirations are taken into account.

Abraham Maslow:

      If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. [quoted in PC Magazine, 1/15/91, page 21]

André Maurois:

      In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

Mazzini:

      The moral law of the universe is progress. Every generation that passes idly over the earth without adding to that progress remains uninscribed upon the register of humanity, and the succeeding generation tramples its ashes as dust.

Daniel & Paul Freiberger McNeill:

      Control is manipulating the environment toward some goal. It is not necessarily utter dominion and can even be gentle nudges. Yet it is the difference between a paramecium and a pearl. The lowly paramecium can sense information from outside and take action. A morsel of food drifts by and the creature moves toward it. The paramecium affects its world as the pearl cannot.

      The etymology reflects the gist. 'Control' derives from the medieval Latin 'contrarotulare', which meant to compare 'against the rolls,' the cylindrical records of ancient times. Bureacrats would receive information about a land parcel, match it with these rolls, and decide how much to tax or whether to arrest. In a similar way, the human body has countless control systems. For instance, the hypothalamus, a small organ in the briain, constantly assays the bloodstream for the chemical angiotensin II. When it reaches a certain level, the 'rolls' within the hypothalamus tell it to trigger thirst, and the higher the level, the keener the thirst.

      All control involves information processing. An animal, company, or government must be able to acquire information (input), apply rules to it (process it), and act on the results (output). For instance, when a paramecium senses food, it matches that sensation against its inner records and moves toward it. To keep its democracy representative, the United States conducts a census every 10 years, applies rules, and reallocates the number of congressional districts. Most people think of control as just the power to act, but without good rules this power goes berserk, and without initial information it is oblivious. [Fuzzy Logic, 1993, page 102]

Daniel & Paul Freiberger McNeill:

      There are at least four basic types [of uncertainty]: nonspecificity, fuzziness, dissonance, and confusion.

      Nonspecificity is basic ambiguity, a one-to-many relation between statement and possible meanings. For instance, a test might show a patient has either hepatitis, cirrhosis, gallstones, or pancreatic cancer. As among these four, it says nothing. It is nonspecific. Nonspecificity is lack of informativeness.

      Fuzziness, of course, is vagueness, the degree to which a term like "cirrhosis" applies.

      Dissonance is pure conflict. One statement is true and its rivals are false. For instance, the patient may have a liver ailment or a non-liver ailment. Some evidence supports one thesis, different evidence the other, and we are uncertain between the two.

      Confusion is pure and potential conflict. Suppose one test tells if a patient has liver disease and a second if he has stomach disease, but that for some ailments both tests are positive. In this case, a positive liver test may indicate stomach disease. Not only is there conflict, but the very meaning of the evidence is unclear. [Fuzzy Logic, 1993, page 187]

Margaret Mead:

      Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead:

      Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact it's the only thing that ever does.

Golda Meir:

      Don't be so humble -- you are not that great. [to a visiting diplomat]

H. L. Mencken:

      Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken:

      It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

H. L. Mencken:

      The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

Henry Louis Mencken:

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

Henry Louis Mencken:

      For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

Henry Louis Mencken:

      Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Krishna Menon:

      Dissent is essentially the opposite side, if you like, of progress. If you don't dissent, then how do you move forward? A man can't walk unless he puts one of his feet out. You have got to throw yourself into a condition of imbalance before you can progress. [page 86, from a conversation of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty broadcast on the CBS Radio Network March 22, 1953, and anthologized in The Invitation to Learning Reader on Popular Classics, No. 9]

Metrodorus of Chios:

      To consider the earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that on a vast plain only one stalk of grain will grow. [4th century B.C. Greek philosopher, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Arthur Miller:

      Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody loans him money.

A. A. Milne:

      One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making discoveries.

Richard Milner:

      When negative thoughts come into your mind, put them out gently but firmly, as you put out a muddy cat that comes in to track up a clean floor. Do not be angry with it or yourself, do not try to kill it or fight it. Just put it out calmly each time it comes in. Let it know that no matter how many times it comes back, you will calmly but persistently put it back out.

Wilson Mizner:

      Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.

Chistopher Morley:

      Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. [The Haunted Bookshop]

Christopher Morley:

      Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Malcolm Muggeridge:

      In the Western Desert they found an inscription. An officer in the Roman army years and years ago, serving in the Western Desert, had reached the conclusion that there were two things in life that you could pursue -- love and power -- and no one could pursue both. [from an interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line]

John Muir:

      Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

H. H. Munro [aka Saki]:

      A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.

Edward R. Murrow:

      Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation

Fridtjof Nansen:

      Whether there are absolute truths we cannot prove or disprove. But having got the capacity of thinking, we ought certainly to use it in deciding those questions which are of most importance in our whole conduct of life, and we must let our reasoning be guided by what we recognize to be the truths of our time. To allow our faith, our views of existence, to be tyrannized by the commands -- whether illogical or not -- of some other person, "a prophet of God," has nothing to do with morality or goodness. The command "thou shalt believe" is not moral; if we can force ourselves to obey it, we do so not because we are convinced that it is the naturally good and right thing for us to do, but for fear of displeasing some divine power, and of thus exposing ourselves to punishment. This is the contrary of morality, for we make ourselves subject to an alien despotism in order to gain something by it. Commands such as this are remnants from times when people believed in war gods, gods of vengeance and reward, like the Yahweh of Israel. In our day it might be expected that we should have outgrown such superstitions, and that we should consider it our duty to try, as best we can, to bring our views of life, our faith, our principles of morality, into harmony with our reasoning, and to base our conduct of life on principles which we consider to be right and just. [quoted in Living Philosophies (1931), ppage 94]

Jose Narosky:

      We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unearned applause.

New Zealand conservation party:

      We do not inherit the world from our parents; we borrow it from our children.

Issac Newton:

      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 or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller:

      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.

Richard M. Nixon:

      I would have made a good Pope.

Richard Nixon:

      When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

Novalis:

      Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. [as quoted on page 1 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Flannery O'Connor:

      Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Frank Ward O'Malley:

      Life is just one damned thing after another.

Ken Olson:

      There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. [president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977]

Aristotle Onassis:

      The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.

Robert Orben:

      Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.

Arthur Orrmont:

      One day Burton was discussing Darwin with a Catholic archbishopage The prelate noticed some monkeys frisking nearby. "Well, Captain Burton," the archbishop said, "there are some of your ancestors." Burton twirled his moustache and replied, "Well, I at least have made some progress. But what about your lordship who is descended from the angels?" The archbishop was not overly amused. [from Fearless Adventurer: Sir Richard Burton]

Albert Bigelow Paine:

      But just here developed one of those wholly unexpected events which make complete the great drama of human existence. [from Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, page 335]

Samuel Palmer:

      Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.

Pascal:

      I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.

General George S. Patton:

      A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood.

General George S. Patton:

      If a man does his best, what else is there?

General George S. Patton:

      The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

George Patton:

      Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

Ivan Pavlov:

      Only science, exact science about human nature itself, and the most sincere approach to it by the aid of the omnipotent scientific method, will deliver man from his present gloom, and purge him from his contemporary shame in the sphere of inter-human relations. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Octavio Paz:

      Deserve your dream. [as quoted on page 3 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Norman Vincent Peale:

      Change your thoughts and you change your world.

S. J. Perelman:

      Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21^st century.

Petrarch:

      It is one thing to know, another to love; one thing to understand, another to will. [quoted by Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 1986, page 174]

Petronius:

      We tend to meet every situation in life by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. [100 A.D.]

Steven Pinker:

      The symmetry in sensory and motor organs is reflected in the brain, most of which, at least in nonhumans, is dedicated to processing sensation and programming action. [The Language Instinct, page 303]

Robert Pinsky:

      Computers and poetry share two key attributes: speed and memory. They share a great human myth or trope, an image that could be called the Secret Passage: the discovery of large, manifold channels through a small ordinary-looking or all but invisible aperture. [as quoted in the NY Times, according to the Steven Barclay speakers agency's web site]

Robert Pinsky:

      My own bullshit meter is gonging a bit. [fumbling for an answer to an AOL chat question.]

Robert M. Pirsig:

      Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go. [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pt. 3, ch. 24 (1974)]

Plato:

      Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.

Plato:

      Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Sir Karl Popper:

      As I wrote many years ago at the very beginning of the debate about computers, a computer is just a glorified pencil. Einstein once said "my pencil is cleverer than I". What he meant could perhaps be put thus: armed with a pencil, we can be more than twice as clever as we are without. Armed with a computer (a typical World 3 object), we can perhaps be more than a hundred times as clever as we are without; and with improving computers there need not be an upper limit to this. [The Self and Its Brain, page 208]

Ezra Loomis Pound:

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

Elvis Presley:

      I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

J. B. Priestly:

      The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts, trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.

M. K. Ranjitsinh:

      It has been said that war is too important to be left to the generals. Perhaps whaling is too important to be left to the scientists. [Indian delegate to the International Whaling Commission]

Charles Reade:

      Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic hailstones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can he understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures.
      Thus records of prime truths remain a dead letter to plain folk; the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public -- as an interpreter.
      [opening passage of The Cloister and the Hearth]

Ambrose Redmoon:

      Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Daniel N. Robinson:

      Before Spinoza, philosophers by and large spoke in behalf of mind OR matter, mind AND matter. Spinoza, however, was able to deduce from his major axioms the conclusion that mind and matter are the same substance viewed from different perspectives. From one perspective -- which might be called a form of realism -- we are prepared to claim that every existing thing triggers in us an idea of it by way of sensations, images, memories and the like. From another perspective -- call it idealism -- since we are conscious only of sensations and ideas -- we are obliged to accept these as the only constituents of reality. [An Intellectual History of Psychology, 1986, page 270-1]

Daniel N. Robinson:

      Central to the Augustinian epistemology is his distinction between knowledge and wisdom, the former being
     
            "a rational cognizance of temporal things,"
     
while the latter is
     
            "an intellectual cognizance of eternal things."
     
      For Augustine, intellect and reason were different faculties. Reason was, indeed, a guiding light by which we might navigate through a confusing world, but reason alone could not equip us with that sublime knowledge of the eternal. And, of course,
     
      "it is not difficult to judge which is to be preferred or postponed to which."
     
      [An Intellectual History of Psychology, 1986, page 124, Augustine quotes from De Trinitate, Book XII, Ch. 15]

Daniel N. Robinson:

      The history of discourse on the human character may be summarized under two great headings: "Nature" and "Spirit." Beneath the former we find naturalism, Stoicism, materialism, and, ultimately, scientific determinism and logical positivism. Below the latter are the near opposites of these: spiritualism, idealism, transcendentalism, psychological indeterminism, and Romanticism. Every century or so the terms change but the essential positions remain stubbornly constant. In the Hellenistic period, the controversy was over the reality of the Platonic IDEAS. Among the Scholastics, this controversy surfaced in the form of the NOMINALIST-REALIST antagonism. In the individualistic climate of the Renaissance, it becomes a battle between neo-Platonists and Aristotelians. In the twentieth century, the labels are "Behaviorism" and "Mentalism"; in the eighteenth and nineteenth, "Empiricism" and "Idealism." [An Intellectual History of Psychology, 1986, page 179-80]

Francois-Auguste Rodin:

      I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues]

Eleanor Roosevelt:

      No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. [as quoted on page 82 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Eleanor Roosevelt:

      You must attempt the thing you think you cannot do.

Theodore Roosevelt:

      I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head.

Paul Rosenfels:

      God only sends as much pain as you can handle. [quoting a saying of the Marines]

Paul Rosenfels:

      I've taught them how to live; now I'll teach them how to die.

Paul Rosenfels:

      Man is the animal with a soul who thinks and builds; his penetrating insights into the laws of nature are there for any child to learn, and his impressive mastery of the materials of the earth stands ready to be imitated by anyone, but the home he has built for his own kind is still a lonely and impoverished place for many people. There is nothing about that loneliness that wisdom cannot change; there is nothing in that poverty that strength cannot overcome. Separated from each other, the thinker is a stranger in his own house, and the builder is a beggar at his own door. Together, they can bring the warmth of love and the helpfulness of power into the daily market place of living, taking a human position that is eternal and without compromise. In the midst of the obvious and the commonplace, and only in this birthplace of human contentment and happiness, the thinker and builder can leave the monastic cell and relinquish barracks mobility to claim the world in the name of human beings. When they do so, man can expect a human harvest equal to his dreams, and measured to the nobility of his posture. [Psychoanalysis and Civilization, 1962]

Paul Rosenfels:

      The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world. [end of his autobiography, A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story, 1979]

Paul Rosenfels:

      We live in an ignorant and immoral world.

Fred Ross:

      One of the most famous stories about Rembrandt concerns his painting Night Watch. After his death, no one wanted it. Finally, a gymnasium agreed to hang it on their back wall if the top foot of the painting would be cut off so it would fit. Today, this artistic masterpiece is known only in a mutilated form. [from a speech given December 1, 1998 at the University of Memphis entitled "The Rise and Fall and then Rise Again of 19th Century Traditional Academic Humanist Art"]

Fred Ross:

      Our 20th century has marked a period that celebrated the bizarre, the novel and the outrageous for its own sake. The defining parameter of greatness to Modernism is "Has it ever been done before?", "Is it totally original where there is no derivation from any former schools of art?", "Does it outrage?", "Does it expand the definition of what can be called art?" I propose to you today that if everything is art then nothing is art. If I call a table a chair have I expanded the definition of the word table? Would this make me brilliant? If I call a frog an alligator have I expanded the definition of frog? If I call a nail a hammer, have I expanded the definition of the word nail? Am I now a genius? If I call screeching car wheels great music have I expanded the definition of music? Or in reality have I perpetrated a fraud on the people who wanted to buy tables, frogs, nails and music and instead got chairs, alligators, hammers and a headache. . . .
      Modern and Post-Modern Art is nihilistic and anti human. It denegrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity while stripping mankind of his dignity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming bulk of its would be audience who can find nothing with which to relate. It has been called exciting and cutting edge, but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers, whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black, whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the statue of liberty, the effect is always the same: meaningless primitivism. [from a speech given December 1, 1998 at the University of Memphis entitled "The Rise and Fall and then Rise Again of 19th Century Traditional Academic Humanist Art"]

Walter Ross:

      Crawl -- it's the first step.

David Lee Roth:

      I'm not conceited. Conceit is a fault and I have no faults.

Bertrand Russell:

      Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. [as quoted on page 64 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Bertrand Russell:

      Despair is a useless emotion.

Bertrand Russell:

      Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform. [ quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Bertrand Russell:

      Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell:

      Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Bertrand Russell:

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

George Santayana:

      He who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal. [Reason in Religion, page 273]

George Santayana:

      Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

George Santayana:

      There are two stages in the criticism of myths. . . . The first treats them angrily as superstititions; the second treats them smilingly as poetry. . . . Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination. . . . The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophizing on that subject. . . . Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. . . . We seek rather to honor the piety and understand the poetry embodied in these fables. [quoted on ppage 543-544 of Durant's The Story of Philosophy]

Jean-Paul Sartre:

      Everything has been figured out except how to live.

Jean-Paul Sartre:

      Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Schopenhauer:

      Before you can build a house, you must first believe that the bricks are in fact bricks [quoted by Richard Milner]

Schopenhauer:

      We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.

Robert Schumann:

      To compose music, all you have to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.

Albert Schweitzer:

      Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Albert Schweitzer:

      No man is ever completely and permanently a stranger to his fellow-man. Man belongs to man. Man has claims on man. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times, Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Albert Schweitzer:

      One must speak to the heart of the individual; only then does one feel the power of the idea. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Albert Schweitzer:

      The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Albert Schweitzer:

      Through their own conduct [people] often lock themselves out of the best that is within them. Only afterward do they realize how poor they have become. They have cut themselves off from the world of goodness and beauty within them. They stretch their hands out but do not reach goodness, beauty and truth. So many people have to bear this burden. It is what makes them lose heart. They pass a garden and know that the flowers blossoming in it are no longer for them. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Albert Schweitzer:

      Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace. [Animal Protection Institute of America pamphlet]

Albert Schweitzer:

      What holds the deepest meaning in life is not what we hope for, nor what we wish from life, but it is the near and far people who are in need of us. . . . What a different world this would be if men dared to look deeply at each other, if they kept in mind the prospect of being torn from each other. Each would then become sacred to the other because of death. [quoted in Thoughts for Our Times Peter Pauper Press (1975)]

Hercules Furens Seneca:

      He who boasts of his ancestry praises the merits of another.

Ronnie Shakes:

      I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?

George Bernard Shaw:

      If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw:

      Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

George Bernard Shaw:

      The best thing in life is to die young, but to delay it as long as possible.

George Bernard Shaw:

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

George Bernard Shaw:

      There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

John A. Shedd:

      A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Max Shulman:

      Marry money. [advice to aspiring writers]

B. F. Skinner:

      Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate their subject matters. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Philip Slater:

      I can't recall who first pointed out that the word "explain" means literally to "flatten out." [as quoted on page 32 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Adam Smith:

      . . .mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. . . [The Theory of Moral Sentiments, page 170.]

Logan Pearsall Smith:

      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 mankind achieve the second.

Socrates:

      My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.

Herbert Spencer:

      Science is organized knowledge. [Education, ch. 2 (1861)]

G. Spencer-Brown:

      The theme of this book is that a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. [The Laws of Form, 1969]

Joseph Stalin:

      A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Joseph Stalin:

      Death solves all problems. No man, no problems.

Casey Stengel:

      The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.

Laurence Sterne:

      The desire of knowledge, like the desire of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

Adlai Stevenson:

      Power corrupts, but absence of power corrupts absolutely.

Tom Stoppard:

      It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Igor Stravinsky:

      Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

[Chessmaster] Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower:

      Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.

Terence (Roman playwright):

      I am man; nothing human is alien to me.

Teresa of Avila:

      Be gentle to all, and stern with yourself.

Henry David Thoreau:

      Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau:

      Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau:

      If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau:

      Men have become the tools of their tools.

Henry David Thoreau:

      The man who travels alone can leave today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Henry David Thoreau:

      The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. [Walden, Economy (1854)]

Henry David Thoreau:

      The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode. [Walden]

Henry David Thoreau:

      Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. [On the Duty of Civil Disobedience]

[Walden]

Time Magazine:

      This war was a revolution against the moral basis of civilization. It was conceived by the Nazis in conscious contempt for the life, dignity and freedom of individual man and deliberately prosecuted by means of slavery, starvation and the mass destruction of noncombatants' lives. It was a revolution against the human soul. [Time, May 14, 1945, page 15.]

Alvin Toffler:

      The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Leo Tolstoy:

      True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion. [What Is Art? ch. 10 (1898; repr. in Tolstoy on Art, ed. by Aylmer Maude, 1924)]

Lilly Tomlin:

      All my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I see I should have been more specific.

Arturo Toscanini:

      Assassins! [to his orchestra]

Christopher Toumey:

      Everyone wants to call every hunch and burp a paradigm shift. [author of Conjuring Science, interviewed on WPR's "To The Best of Our Knowledge"]

Sophie Tucker:

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

Martin Fraquhar Tupper:

      Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Mark Twain:

      Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

Mark Twain:

      Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Mark Twain:

      Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.

Mark Twain:

      Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.

Mark Twain:

      I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain:

      It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Mark Twain:

      Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Mark Twain:

      Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Mark Twain:

      The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

Mark Twain:

      The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain:

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

Mark Twain:

      Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Mark Twain:

      When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, swear.

Mark Twain:

      Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.

Sun Tzu:

      Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

John Updike:

      Isn't it a miracle, the oddity of consciousness being placed in one body rather than another, in one place and not somewhere else, in one handful of decades rather than in ancient Egypt, or ninth-century Wessex, or Samoa before the missionaries came, or Bulgaria under the Turkish yoke, or the Ob Riber Valley in the days of the woolly mammoths? Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the center of the universe. What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God? [Self-Consciousness, page 40]

Paul Valery:

      God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. [as quoted on page 54 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut:

      In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

Pancho Villa:

      Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. [last words, 1923]

Voltaire:

      Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Voltaire:

      Christianity must be divine since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it is so full of villainy and nonsense.

Voltaire:

      If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him.

Voltaire:

      Let us console ourselves for not knowing the possible connections between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and continue to examine what is within our reach. [quoted by Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 1986, page 325]

Voltaire:

      The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Wernher Von Braun:

      Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Von Clausewitz:

      The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

      Few people have the imagination for reality. [as quoted on page 32 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

      When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

John von Neumann:

      Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

Larry Wall:

      If I make a living off it, that's great -- but I come from a culture where you're valued not so much by what you acquire but by what you give away. [on Perl, the computer scripting language he invented, quoted in a C|Net interview 2/3/98]

Karl Wallenda:

      Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.

Horace Walpole:

      The world is comic to people who think, and tragic to people who feel.

H. M. Warner:

      Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? [founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927]

Geoffrey Warnock:

      If you're going to raise the question what we know for certain, or even the question what knowledge itself is, there has to be something that you're prepared to hold on to, otherwise you're utterly at sea. I think [G. E.] Moore would have been inclined to say that, if the proposition that I've got shoes on my feet at this moment is not a proposition that I know for certain to be true, then I simply have no idea what knowledge is supposed to be; I don't know what it is that we're trying to define or scrutinize, if this isn't an example of it. And I think this is an important point. I mean, if you question absolutely everything -- if you regard EVERY suggested instance of knowing as perhaps not an instance of that at all -- then, so to speak, all the guide-lines go, and we no longer have any way of testing whether we're talking sense or not. In a way, we literally don't know what we're talking about. [quoted on page 118 of Brian Magee's Modern British Philosophy]

Booker T. Washington:

      You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

Thomas Watson:

      I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. [Chairman of IBM, 1943]

Alan Watts:

      Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. [British-born U.S. philosopher, author. Life (New York, 21 April 1961)]

Alan Watts:

      You find out that the universe is a system that creeps up on itself and says "Boo!" and then laughs at itself for jumping. [as quoted on page 33 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Mae West:

      He who hesitates is a damned fool.

Mae West:

      I generally avoid temptation . . . except when I can't resist it.

Mae West:

      When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

William Whewell:

      As we read the Principia [by Newton] we feel as when we are in an ancient armoury where the weapons are of gigantic size; and as we look at them we marvel what manner of man was he who could use as a weapon what we can scarcely lift as a burden. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Alfred North Whitehead:

      A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. To this hesitation I ascribe the barrenness of logic. [First sentence was quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Alfred North Whitehead:

      It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. [as quoted on page 74 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Walt Whitman:

      Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you. [To a Common Prostitute]

Bishop Wilberforce's wife:

      Descended from apes! Let us hope that isn't true, or, if it is true, that it doesn't become generally known. [1860]

Oscar Wilde:

      A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde:

      Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. [as quoted on page 19 of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct]

Oscar Wilde:

      I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde:

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

Oscar Wilde:

      It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. [as quoted on page 40 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Oscar Wilde:

      Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. [quoted in PC Magazine, 1/15/91, page 21]

Oscar Wilde:

      The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Oscar Wilde:

      There are only two tradgies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Oscar Wilde:

      We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. [quoted in Strunk & White, pg.8]

[Oscar Wilde]:

      Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, was drifting in and out of consciousness. Once when he opened his eyes he was heard to murmur, "This wallpaper is killing me; one of us has got to go." [as quoted on page 91 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

William Carlos Williams:

      What becomes of me has never seemed to me important, but the fates of ideas living against the grain in a nondescript world have always held me breathless. [Autobiography, Foreword]

Earl Wilson:

      If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Gershon Winkler:

      'Holy' to me means perceiving your life as a gift from God and therefore as your right rather than God doing you a favor. If you look at life like some kind of divine favor, then you end up feeling like you owe God all the time. And you don't feel worthy, and in turn no one seems worthy. Why should the creator be experienced that way when our existence is given to us, not loaned. Like the ancient rabbis taught: "A person is obliged to declare 'Because of me was the universe created.'" So when I take an apple in hand and thank the Creator for providing me with sustenance, I can do so in such a way that I experience the Creator as some stingy ogre who begrudgingly let me have something to eat, or I can experience the Creator as a generous mom. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      Covenanting, taught the ancient Judaic teachers, is a quality of relationship-ing that creates ample space for negotiation, for individuality, for re-evaluating and redefining agreements. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      Face it: it doesn't say anywhere in the Torah that you have to believe in God. Believing in yourself and in others is more important to God than believing in God. I really don't believe that God is so insecure that if we don't believe in God, God will fall apart. There's a second-century talmudic teaching that goes something like this: "If we didn't believe in God but we were nice to each other, God would be okay with that." [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      God is a gentle loving friend, not a pushy, exacting, judgmental, insatiable, and psychotic deity of chronic wrath. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      Judaic law and ethics are largely situational, are part of a continuing process relative to time, circumstance and intent. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      Judaism -- even the most orthodox versions of it -- believe that you don't have to be Jewish to go to Heaven or to be loved by God. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      Judaism is traditionally not a tradition-fixated religion. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Gershon Winkler:

      We've got to see people as individuals, not as more gook for the gob, more mass for the collective. [from an interview with the author of The Place Where You Are Standing Is Holy]

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

      A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. [Culture and Value (ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, 1980), 1942 entry.]

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

      Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sct. 6:4311 (1921, tr. 1922).]

Mary Wollstonecraft:

      No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

      A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

      The truth is more important than the facts.

Malcolm X:

      Nobody can give you freedom.

William Butler Yeats:

      Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.

Yevgeny Yevteshenko:

      A newspaper called the US and USSR superpowers. There is only one superpower in the world today: the fragile human soul. [from a 1980's WNYC radio interview]

Yoda:

      Do, or do not. There is no "try". [The Empire Strikes Back]

Marguerite Yourcenar:

      It is impossible to change the thinking of most people, but it is still necessary to try. [as told by Karl Laub, 1987]

Frank Zappa:

      Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

Emile Zola:

      The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Carl Zwanig:

      Duct tape is like the Force. It has a dark side, it has a light side, and it holds the Universe together.

Folly

[unknown]:

      A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make. [response to Debbi Fields idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies]

[unknown]:

      But what . . . is it good for? [Engineer at IBM's Advanced Computing Systems Division, commenting on the microchip, 1968]

[unknown]:

      Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons. [Popular Mechanics Magazine, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949]

[unknown]:

      Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy. [drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859]

[unknown]:

      I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year. [The Prentice Hall editor in charge of business books, 1957]

[unknown]:

      Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. [1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work]

[unknown]:

      The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a "C" the idea must be feasible. [A Yale University management professor, in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.]

[unknown]:

      The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? [associates of David Sarnoff in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920's]

[unknown]:

      This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. [Western Union internal memo, 1876]

[unknown]:

      You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training. [response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus]

Arthur Alexander:

      Computers in the future may weigh no more than one and a half tons [Popular Mechanics, 1949]

Grover Cleveland:

      Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. [1905, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Gary Cooper:

      I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper. [on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind."]

Paul de Man:

      Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. [discredited deconstructionist and Nazi sympathiser]

Decca Recording Co.:

      We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. [rejecting the Beatles, 1962]

James Douglas:

      I say deliberately that it is the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature. The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with its leprous and scabrous horrors. All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ. . . . The book is already the bible of beings who are exiles and outcasts in this and in every civilised country. It is also adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult. [reviewing Ulysses in the Sunday Express (Dublin 1922); quoted in Stan Gébler Davies' "James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist" (Davis-Poynter, 1975), p.247, n.d. Note: Joyce insisted that the review be included in publicity material. The review is not listed in Deming's "James Joyce: The Critical Heritage" (1970)]

Charles H. Duell:

      Everything that can be invented has been invented. [Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Sir John Eric Ericksen:

      The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon. [British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873]

Irving Fisher:

      Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. [Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929]

Marechal Ferdinand Foch:

      Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value. [Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre]

Bill Gates:

      640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Bill Gates:

      There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

J. Edgar Hoover:

      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.

Steve Jobs:

      So we went to Atari and said, "Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you." And they said, "No." So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, "Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet." [Apple Computer Inc. founder on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer]

Lord Kelvin:

      Heavier than air flying machines are impossible. [President, Royal Society, 1895, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Lord Kelvin:

      Lighter than air travel is impossible.

Lord Kelvin:

      Radio has no future.

Lord Kelvin:

      There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement. [speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1900]

Lord Kelvin:

      X-rays are a hoax.

Robert Millikan:

      There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. [winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Ken Olson:

      There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. [President, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977]

Pierre Pachet:

      Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction. [Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872]

Ronald Reagan:

      It isn't that Liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.

Ronald Reagan:

      Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards. If you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book.

Dr. Leon Rosenberg:

      Science, per se, doesn't deal with the complex quality called "humanness" any more than it does with such equally complex concepts as love, faith or trust. Without experiments there is no science, no way to prove or disprove any idea. I maintain that concepts such as humanness are beyond the purview of science because no idea about them can be tested experimentally. [Chairman of the department of human genetics at Yale University School of Medicine, quoted in the November 1981 issue of Life magazine on the question of when a fetus becomes a human being.]

Spencer Silver:

      If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this. [on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads]

Tris Speaker:

      Ruth made a big mistake when he gave up pitching. [1921, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer:

      All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable . . . wherefore for the sake of their lusts [women] consort with devils. [Malleus Maleficarum, detailed legal and theological document (c. 1486) regarded as the standard handbook on witchcraft, including its detection and its extirpation, until well into the 18th century. Its appearance did much to spur on and sustain some two centuries of witch-hunting hysteria in Europe.]

Harry M. Warner:

      Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? [Warner Bros. Pictures, c.1927, quoted in a 1985 TRW ad]

Thomas Watson:

      I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. [Chairman of IBM, 1943]

Fortune Cookies

      A careful review of all matters would be a good idea.

      A secret admirer will soon send you a sign of affection.

      All happiness is in the mind.

      Ask advice, but use your own common sense.

      Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment.

      Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

      Get your mind set -- confidence will lead you on.

      Give this to your friend, he may pay for the meal.

      He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

      He who knows he has enough is rich.

      He who waits to do a great deal of good at once, will never do anything.

      Ideas you believe are absurd ultimately lead to success! (Lucky Numbers 8, 10, 14, 28, 30, 44)

      If you continually give you will continually have.

      Imagination is more important than knowledge.

      Including others in your life will bring you great happiness.

      Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.

      Stick to one thing and all will come.

      The first step to better times is to imagine them.

      The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.

      To achieve a great goal, one must begin with a small achievement.

      We expect everything and are prepared for nothing.

      You are a perfectionist. Don't spoil it.

      You are admirable, for you remained firm even when troubled by personal relationships.

      You have a yearning for perfection.

      You must learn day by day to broaden your horizon.

      You should presently be able to deal from a full deck.

      You will be called upon to help a friend in trouble.

      You'll find what you're looking for; just open your eyes!

      Your courage is like a kite; big wind raises it higher.

      Your life becomes more and more of an adventure.

      Your lover will be true to you.

Growth

Edmund Burke:

      Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.

Cassius:

      In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Oliver Cromwell:

      He who stops being better stops being good.

Simone de Beauvoir:

      One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

      Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions. [quoted on page 70 of the May 1982 issue of Science Digest]

Aldous Huxley:

      I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Paul Rosenfels:

      The price a man has to pay for not repeating the mistakes of the past is his greater awareness of the present. [as quoted by Tony Rostron in "The Storm"]

Humility

[unknown]:

      I don't have any ideas that are more than seven hundred words long. [as quoted on page 47 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Pat Bahn:

      If the human mind were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

Ronald Graham:

      The trouble with the integers is that we have examined only the small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can't get our hands on or even begin to think about in any very definite way. So maybe all the action is really inaccessible and we're just fiddling around. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions. I've had this image of a creature, in another galaxy perhaps, a child creature, and he's playing a game with his friends. For a moment he's distracted. He just thinks about numbers, primes, a simple proof of the twin-prime conjecture, and much more. Then he loses interest and returns to his game. [from The Man Who Loves Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman, about Paul Erdos ("AIR Dish"), Atlantic Monthly 11/87]

John Burden Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964, English geneticist):

      Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming. [from Possible Worlds and other Essays (1927), by John Burden Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964), English geneticist]

Thomas Henry Huxley:

      Mind and matter in our little speck of the universe are only two out of infinite varieties of existence which we are not competent to conceive -- in the midst of which . . . we might be set down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a flower-pot, on a London balcony has of the life of the great city . . . . [Essay on Materialism (1878), quoted by Richard Milner]

Humor

[unknown]:

      A friend of mine once showed a photograph of the Andromeda galaxy to the art director of a magazine on which he was working. The art director said, 'That's gorgeous! But can we get a shot of it from another angle?' [as quoted on page 51 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

[unknown]:

      Anybody who remembers the 60's wasn't there.

[unknown]:

      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]

[unknown]:

      Better that a girl has beauty than brains because boys see better than they think.

[unknown]:

      Deep down, actors are skin deep.

[unknown]:

      Did you hear the one about the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of 9 inches?

[unknown]:

      Happiness is Seeing Lubbock, Texas, in the Rear View Mirror. [song title]

[unknown]:

      I can't stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like "Hey, when are you going to pay me that hundred dollars you owe me?" or "Do you have that fifty dollars you borrowed?" Man, quit being so cheap. [Saturday Night Live: Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts"]

[unknown]:

      I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me Than Have a Frontal Lobotomy [song title]

[unknown]:

      If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at some guys, throw one of those little baby-type pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think of how crazy war is, and while they're thinking, you can throw a real grenade. [Saturday Night Live: Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts"]

[unknown]:

      My plot to take over the world is thickening.

[unknown]:

      One thing that makes me believe in UFOs is, sometimes I lose stuff.

[unknown]:

      Teachers are those who help us in resolving problems which, without them, we wouldn't have.

[unknown]:

      There are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can't. [contributed by web friend Jose Forget]

[unknown]:

      What's the difference between a centaur and a senator? One's a cross between a man and a horse's ass, and the other's a creature from mythology.

[unknown]:

      What's the difference between a Zeppelin and Rush Limbaugh? One's a Nazi gasbag and the other's a lighter-than-air machine.

[unknown]:

      Why do Tibetan Buddhists have such trouble with their vacuum cleaners?
      They lack attachments.

Douglas Adams:

      Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. [from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]

Woody Allen:

      It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. [as quoted on page 43 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Woody Allen:

      Time is nature's way of making certain that everything doesn't happen all at once.

Woody Allen:

      We stand at a crossroads. One path leads to despair, the other to destruction. Let's hope we make the right choice.

W. H. Auden:

      We're here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

Pearl Bailey:

      What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.

Dave Barry:

      I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

Dave Barry:

      Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

Robert Charles Benchley:

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

Edgar Bergen:

      Hard work never killed anybody, but why take the chance?

Kate Bornstein:

      When it comes to gender, why can't we count higher than two? [quoted in the November 1990 flyer for Performance Space 122]

Ashleigh Brilliant:

      The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!

George Burns:

      Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

George Burns:

      If it's a good script I'll do it. And if it's a bad script, and they pay me enough, I'll do it.

George Burns:

      Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.

George Carlin:

      In the future, religions will charge people a large fee at birth -- and then pretty much leave them alone.

Senator Frank Church:

      I can only assume that a 'Do Not File' document is filed in a 'Do Not File' file. [Senate Intelligence Subcommittee Hearing, 1975]

Winston S. Churchill:

      Madam [seeing a man with his pants down]: "Sir, I am surprised."
      Sir: "No, madam. You are astonished. I am surprised."
      [explaining the distinction between surprise and astonishment]

Winston S. Churchill:

      That's just the sort of criticism up with which I will not put! [on hearing his speech criticised in Parliament for having "dangling particples."]

G. Norman Collie:

      Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else -- and usually it's reading his own handwriting.

Norm Crosby:

      When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Peter De Vries:

      I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. [as quoted on page 90 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

W. C. Fields:

      I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes.

Arsenio Hall:

      Don't ever grab a black man's knee. Cause it ain't a knee.

Garrison Keillor:

      He was drawn to the higher things because you could pursue them in the shade.

Garrison Keillor:

      Catholics believe forgiveness is a divine quality -- so they don't practice it personally.

David Letterman:

      Late Night leaves no sticky residue like Ted Koppel's Nightline.

Groucho Marx:

      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. [quoted by Amazon Books]

Groucho Marx:

      Whatever it is, I'm against it. [as quoted on page 22 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Will Rogers:

      Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers:

      I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the one who sold it.

Will Rogers:

      If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?

Will Rogers:

      The Income Tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.

Will Rogers:

      The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Will Rogers:

      We are all ignorant -- just about different things.

Henry G. Strauss:

      I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

Steven Wright:

      I have a large collection of seashells, which I keep scattered all over the beaches of the world. Maybe you've seen it.

Steven Wright:

      You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

Movies and Television

[unknown]:

      "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." [The WOPR computer from War Games after practicing Thermonuclear War for a bit.]

[unknown]:

      Chris: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishin' in." -- Henry David Thoreau.
      Ed: "Pass me a sandwich." -- Ed Chigliack.
["Northern Exposure," episode 81]

[unknown]:

      Psychiatrist: "So, how do you feel about it?"
      J. R. Ewing: "I'm not paying $200 an hour for you to ask ME questions!"
["Dallas," 1/13/89]

Cyril Hume:

      Morbius: "Commander, may I borrow that formidable looking sidearm of yours? Thank you. Robbie, point this thing at that alfia frutix out there on the terrace. Fire."
      Sound effect: blaster.
      Morbius: "You understand the mechanism?"
      Robbie: "Yes, Morbius. A simple blaster."
      Morbius: "Alright, now turn around here. Point it at the commander. Aim right between the eyes. Fire."
      Robbie: Shorting-out electronic sound effects.
      Morbius: "You see, he's helpless. Locked in a sub-electronic dilemma between my direct orders and his basic inhibitions against harming rational beings. (pause) Cancelled."
[from Forbidden Planet, screenplay by Cyril Hume, from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler]

Cyril Hume:

      Quinn: "I'll bet any quantum mechanic in the service would give the rest of his life for a chance to fool around with this gadget."
      [from Forbidden Planet, screenplay by Cyril Hume, from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler]

Philosophy Jokes

[unknown]:

      Nietzche: "God is dead."
      God: "Nietzche is dead."

[unknown]:

      question: What joke about Wittgenstein ends in "9W"?
      answer: Do you spell your name with a "V", Professor Wittgenstein?

[unknown]:

      So the chicken and the egg are in bed and the chicken is smiling and lighting a cigarette. "Well!" says the egg. "I guess we answered THAT question!"

Mason Capwell:

      If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is Bambi, squashed beneath it, any less dead?

Ray Maliozzi:

      If a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong? [heard on Car Talk]

[unknown]:

There was a young man who said, "God,
It has always struck me as odd
      That the sycamore tree
      Simply ceases to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad:
      And that's why the tree
      Will continue to be,
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

Poetry and Song

[unknown]:

The limerick form is complex.
Its contents run chiefly to sex.
      It burgeons with virgins,
      And masculine urgin's,
And swarms with erotic effex.

[unknown]:

You think you own whatever land you land on
The earth is just a debt that you can claim
But I know every rock and tree and creature
Has a life, has a spirit, has a name.

You think the only people who are people
Are the people who look and think like you.
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger,
You learn things you never knew you never knew.

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grins?
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

Come run then, pine trails of the forest,
Come taste the sun-sweet berries of the earth,
Come roll in all the riches all around you,
And for once never wonder what they're worth.

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers,
The heron and the otter are my friends,
And we're all connected to each other
In a circle, in a hoop that never ends.

How high does the cycamore grow?
If you cut it down, then you'll never know,
And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn morn.
For whether we're white or copper skin,
We need to sing with all the voices of the mountain,
We need to paint with all the colors of the wind.
You can own the earth and still
All you'll own is earth until
You can paint with all the colors of the wind.

[ "Colors of the Wind" from the movie Pocahontas ]

W. H. Auden:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

William Blake:

Every tear from every eye,
Becomes a babe in eternity.

Jorge Luis Borges:

My books (which do not know that I exist)
are as much part of me as is this face,
the temples gone to grey and the eyes grey,
the face I vainly look for in the mirror,
tracing its outline with a concave hand.
Not without understandable bitterness,
I feel now that the quintessential words
expressing me are in those very pages
which do not know me, not in those I have written.
It is better so. The voices of the dead
will speak to me for ever.
[My Books]

Catullus:

I can't give you anything but love, baby.
[Poems, No. xiii (c.57 B.C.) Copley, tr.]

T. S. Eliot:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Mary Frye:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond that glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star that shines at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.

[thought to have been written in 1932]

Abe Gringer:

Of a book brought to Boston by Hannotte
All the prominent censors said "Ban it!"
      For the book writ by Dean
      They deemed was obscene.
"Let 'em ban it," said Hannotte, "Goddamit!"

Rudyard Kipling:

Oh, East is East, and West is West,
      and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
      at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West,
      Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
      though they come from the ends of the earth!

[from The Ballad of East and West]

Little Richard:

A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom. [from Tutti Frutti]

Hughes Mearns:

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

[poem that Steven Weinberg included in a lecture on the recently discovered acceleration of the expansion of the universe, which according to the New York Times of 11/30/99 "captures the endless frustration that physicists have faced in calculating the weight of emptiness"]

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Love is not all; . . .
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

[Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview, 1923]

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind.
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

[Dirge Without Music, 1928]

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough.

[Conversation at Midnight, 1937]

Christopher Smart (1722-1771):

      For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey.
      . . .
      For he is of the tribe of the tiger.
      For the Cherub Cat is the term of the Angel tiger.
      For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
      For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
      For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good cat.
      . . .
      For by stoaking of him I have found out electricity.
      For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
      For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
      For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
      For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
      For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadrupede.
      For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
      For he can swim for life.
      For he can creep.

[Christopher Smart is now acknowledged as one of the most remarkable poets of his century. Jubilate Agno [Rejoice in the Lamb]: a Song from Bedlam was written in 1758 (while he was in an asylum) but was not published until 1939. This excerpt is about Smart's cat, Jeoffrey.]

Wim Wenders:

When the child was a child
that was the time of these questions:
Why am I me and why not you?
Why am I here and why not there?
When did time begin and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun just a dream?

[from the film Wings of Desire]

William Carlos Williams:

I have had my dream -- like others --
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky --
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and
out at my nose --
and decide to dream no more.

[Thursday]

Marianne Williamson:

      Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
      We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
      We were all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone! And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

[a prayer entitled "Deepest Fear" from the book "A Return to Love", Harper Collins, 1992]

Xenophanes:

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses.

[Karl Popper's favorite Greek passage, quoted on p. 24 of Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee]

Proverbs

[unknown]:

      Don't abuse the earth.
      Life is sacred.
      [graffiti written on 324 E.9 by "dangerous anarchists" in the early '90s]

[unknown]:

      He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

[unknown]:

      The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

[unknown]:

      Thoughts are a hollow space in the heart, one inch square. [as quoted on page 52 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

African:

      If you can talk you can sing. If you can walk you can dance.

English:

      A stumble may prevent a fall.

English:

      Use soft words and hard arguments.

Ibo:

      Success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get.

Japanese:

      The reverse side also has a reverse side.

Maine fisherman:

      Words are fingers pointing to the moon.

Yiddish:

      When one must, one can.

Yugoslavian:

      Tell the truth and run.

Quayle Eggs

Dan Quayle:

      [It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.

Dan Quayle:

      A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.

Dan Quayle:

      Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.

Dan Quayle:

      Bobby Knight told me this: "There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense." In other words a good offense wins. [to the City Club of Chicago, comparing the offensive capabilities of the Warsaw Pact with the defensive system of NATO, 9/8/88, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are so many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans, I have heard a single voice.

Dan Quayle:

      For NASA, space is still a high priority. [9/5/90]

Dan Quayle:

      Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here. [4/25/89, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy. But that could change. [5/22/89, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      I deserve respect for the things I did not do.

Dan Quayle:

      I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Dan Quayle:

      I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix.

Dan Quayle:

      I stand by all the misstatements that I've made.

Dan Quayle:

      I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

Dan Quayle:

      If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure. [to the Phoenix Republican Forum, 3/23/90, reported in Esquire 8/92. Also reported by Reuters 5/2/90]

Dan Quayle:

      Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it. [5/20/92, reported in Esquire, 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

Dan Quayle:

      Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the -- to the back! [8/17/88, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      Mars is essentially in the same orbit. . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. [8/11/89, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

Dan Quayle:

      One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is "to be prepared". [12/6/89, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      Our party has been accused of fooling the public by calling tax increases revenue enhancement. Not so. No one was fooled.

Dan Quayle:

      People are not homeless if they are sleeping in the streets of their own hometowns.

Dan Quayle:

      People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

Dan Quayle:

      Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children. [9/18/90]

Dan Quayle:

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

Dan Quayle:

      Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a Mother and child. [US News and World Report 10/10/88]

Dan Quayle:

      The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.

Dan Quayle:

      The future will be better tomorrow.

Dan Quayle:

      The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Near East and the Far East from encroaching on each other.

Dan Quayle:

      The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century. [9/15/88]

Dan Quayle:

      The loss of life will be irreplaceable. [after the San Francisco earthquake, 10/19/89, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      This election is about who's going to be the next President of the United States! [9/2/88, reported in Esquire 8/92]

Dan Quayle:

      This President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

Dan Quayle:

      Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Dan Quayle:

      We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

Dan Quayle:

      We don't want to go back to tomorrow, we want to go forward.

Dan Quayle:

      We expect them to work toward the elimination of human rights.

Dan Quayle:

      We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a *part* of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a *part* of Europe.

Dan Quayle:

      We're going to have the best educated American people in the world.

Dan Quayle:

      Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.

Dan Quayle:

      What a waste it is to lose one's mind -- or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is. [The Vice President garbling the United Negro College Fund slogan in a 5/9/89 address to that group, gleefully quoted by Newsweek, reported in Esquire 8/92, reported in the NY Times 12/9/92.]

Dan Quayle:

      You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and as far as I'm concerned, happy campers you will always be.

Retorts and Paraphrases

Aristotle::	Entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. [The principle that a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms became known as Occam's Razor. In science, the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.]
proverb:	When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras. ]An old saying, adopted in medical schools where inappropriately exotic diagnoses are referred to "zebras". ]

 

proverb:	A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
[unknown]:	A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
[unknown]:	A bird in the hand is the best way to eat chicken.

 

Reporter:	Mr. Gandhi, what do you really think of Western civilization?
Gandhi:	I think it would be a good idea.

 

[proverb]:	If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
[unknown]:	If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

 

George Burns:	I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.
[unknown]:	We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I will be spending the rest of our lives! [Criswell in "Plan 9 From Outer Space"]

 

Nathan Hale:	I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
George Patton:	The object of war is NOT to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for HIS country.

 

Mason Capwell:	If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is Bambi, squashed beneath it, any less dead?
Ray Maliozzi:	If a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong? [heard on Car Talk]

 

Plato:	Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.
Friedrich Nietzsche:	Plato was a bore.
Leo Tolstoy:	Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Ernest Hemingway:	I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
Harold Robbins:	Hemingway was a jerk.

 

[proverb]:	He who hesitates is lost.
Mae West:	He who hesitates is a damned fool.

 

Samuel Palmer:	Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.
Dean Hannotte:	Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.

 

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (click to enlarge)

[proverb]:	If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, don't say anything.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth:	If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

 

[proverb]:	It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
Darrin Weinberg:	It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.

 

[proverb]:	The pen is mightier than the sword.
George Carlin:	The word processor is mightier than the particle beam weapon.

 

[unknown]:	Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Adlai Stevenson:	Power corrupts, but absence of power corrupts absolutely.

 

Walther Baghot:	The greatest pleasure in life is in doing what people say you cannot do.
Walt Disney:	It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

 

Phineas T. Barnum:	Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
Henry Louis Mencken:	Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

 

Clarence Darrow:	When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
Adlai Stevenson:	In America, anyone can become president. That's one of the risks you take.

 

Albert Einstein:	God doesn't play dice with the universe.
Stephen W. Hawking:	God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

 

Euripides:	To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish.
Star Trek:	In an insane world, the sane man must appear insane.

 

Nietzche:	God is dead.
God:	Nietzche is dead.

 

Carl Sandburg:	Nothing happens unless you dream it first.
Dean Hannotte:	The first swimmer was drowning, not dreaming.

 

Shakespeare:	To be or not to be.
Sartre:	To be is to do.
Sinatra:	Do be do be do.

 

Bishop Wilberforce:

I should like to ask the distinguished Professor Huxley a simple question: is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from a monkey?

Thomas Henry Huxley:

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a MAN, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. [from a meeting at the Oxford University of the British Assocation for the Advancement of Science, April 30, 1860.]

 

proverb:	A rolling stone gathers no moss.
[unknown]:	A closed mouth gathers no foot.

 

proverb:	A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
[unknown]:	A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

 

proverb:	A man's home is his castle.
[unknown]:	A man's house is his hassle.
[unknown]:	A king's castle is his home.

 

proverb:	A penny saved is a penny earned.
[unknown]:	A penny saved is 2.5 grams of zinc alloy.
[unknown]:	A penny saved is ridiculous!

 

Sarcasm

[unknown late night comic]:

      To say that my girl friend is a ball and chain would be inaccurate. A chain implies a certain degree of freedom which I don't have.

[unknown]:

      I hope your house gets a flat tire.

[unknown]:

      Your wheels are spinning but the hamster died.

Al Capone:

      You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

Winston S. Churchill:

      People will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they will pick themselves up and continue on.

Sinclair Lewis:

      People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

Steven Pearl:

      I can't believe that out of 100,000 sperm, you were the quickest.

Adam Walinsky:

      The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants.

Wizard of Oz:

      I can't give you brains, but I can give you a diploma.

Science

[unknown]:

      People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped. [as quoted on page 62 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

James Truslow Adams:

      Whatever may be said of some sciences, those of man and society still have to have their diapers changed every hour or so. To expect the mass of our populations to guide their lives according to the latest pronouncements of a Freud or any single 'modern' is to have lost all contact with reason. [quoted in Living Philosophies (1931), page 170]

Alfred Adler:

      The science of human nature should not be approached with too much presumption and pride. On the contrary, its practitioners are notable for exercising a certain modesty. The understanding of human nature is an enormous problem, whose solution has been the goal of our culture since time immemorial. It is not a science that should be pursued by a few specialists only. Its proper objective must be the understanding of human nature by every human being. [Understanding Human Nature, page 16]

St. Augustine:

      We can only know something if we love it.

Niels Bohr:

      A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teased the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. "Can it be that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?" "Of course not," replied Bohr with a wave of his hand. "BUT ... I understand it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not!" [as quoted on page 53 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Charles Darwin:

      A dog might as well try to understand the mind of Newton. [on man's trying to understand the cosmos in its entirety, quoted by Richard Milner]

John Dewey:

      Dewey had been reading an article in the "Psychological Review." As I came in he threw it down with an impatient gesture, remarking, "I despair of psychologists. They seem to think that borrowing a technique from another science makes them scientists." He pointed to the cracks in the plastered wall behind me and said, "If I measured each of those cracks, I could calculate their slopes and derive a formula for them. That would not be science, but I could fool a psychologist into thinking it was." [from Body Awareness in Action by Frank Pierce Jones, ppage 95-96]

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

      Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. . . . Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcriptions of their readings. [from The American Scholar]

Sigmund Freud:

      Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us. [quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Abraham Maslow:

      If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

      When the progress of a science comes to a standstill despite the best efforts of many active researchers, the fault usually lies in a certain habitual way of looking at things, to which the majority will acquiesce without further ado, and from which even thinking people tend to extricate themselves only with great difficulty.

F. Wikzek:

      If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake. [as quoted on page 51 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Edward Witten:

      Physics [has] progressed in a way which [has] made it possible to be more ambitious about what one regarded as a satisfactory answer to a physical question. It's good to bear in mind that in the nineteenth century physicists didn't even have the aspiration to explain why glass is transparent or why grass is green, why ice melts at the temperature it does, and so on. Those questions were not part of physics in the nineteenth century, and physicists didn't even dream of being able to answer questions like those. They had more modest aspirations. Given certain measurements about how flexible a material was they hoped to be able to calculate the outcomes of certain other experiments, but to predict the whole kitcat and caboodle from basic equations about electrons and nuclei as became possible in the twentieth century, this wasn't even a dream in the nineteenth century. [from Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? edited by P. C. W. Davies, Cambridge U. Press, 1988, page 105]

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951):

      Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: "Tell me, why do people always say it was 'natural' for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend said, "Well, obviously, because it just 'looks' as if the sun is going round the earth." To which the philosopher replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating?" [as quoted on page 79 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Technology

ACM:

      Communications security is too important to be left to secret processes and classified algorithms. [the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) U.S. Public Policy Committee, in a position statement released at a press conference on Capitol Hill]

Isaac Asimov:

      I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Charles Babbage:

      The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery. . . . As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science. [1864, quoted in the 1985 Wiley Science Calendar]

Joseph Campbell:

      I happen to know something about miracles. Have you looked inside one of these computers? A whole hierarchy of angels, all on slats. And those tubes? THey're miracles. They really are.

Anton Chekhov:

      Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism. [as quoted on page 46 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Arthur C. Clarke:

      Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

Rich Cook:

      Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

C|NET:

      A probe launched from Cape Canaveral was set to go to Venus. After takeoff, the unmanned rocket carrying the probe went off course, and NASA had to blow up the rocket to avoid endangering lives on earth. NASA later attributed the error to a faulty line of Fortran code. The report stated, "Somehow a hyphen had been dropped from the guidance program loaded aboard the computer, allowing the flawed signals to command the rocket to veer left and nose down . . . Suffice it to say, the first U.S. attempt at interplanetary flight failed for want of a hyphen." The vehicle cost more than $80 million, prompting Arthur C. Clarke to refer to the mission as "the most expensive hyphen in history." [from the 01/27/98 article, "Mariner 1 Venus probe loses its way: 1962," on the C|NET internet news service]

John Dewey:

      The change in knowledge has its overt and practical counterpart in what we term the Industrial Revolution, with its creation of arts for directing and using the energies of nature. Technology includes, of course, the engineering arts that have produced the railway, steamship, automobile, and airplane, the telegraph, telephone, and radio, and the printing press. But it also includes new procedures in medicine and hygiene, the function of insurance in all its branches, and, in its potentiality if not actualization, radically new methods in education and other modes of human relationship. 'Technology' signifies all the intelligent techniques by which the energies of nature and man are directed and used in satisfaction of human needs; it cannot be limited to a few outer and comparatively mechanical forms. In the face of its possibilities, the traditional conception of experience is obsolete. [quoted in Living Philosophies (1931), ppage 24-25]

Edgser Dijkstra:

      The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. ['How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt', found in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Springer-Verlag, 1982, ppage 129-131]

Don Estridge (IBM Entry Systems Division President):

      In 1960, IBM introduced the System 360. The entry-level model 30 had 64K of memory and wasn't expandable. It required a trained staff of technicians to keep it operating and several tons of air-conditioning equipment. It performed 90,000 operations a second and was an incredible bargain at $238,000. Compare that to the PCjr, which has 64K expandable to 512, needs no air conditioning and runs 290,000 instructions per second. That's why the growth. PCs are just phenomenal bargains. If Boeing had seen price/performance improvements that matched the computer industry's, you could fly around the world in 20 minutes for $1.75 in an airplane 3 inches long. [as quoted in PC WEEK, 9/25/84]

Christopher Evans:

      Suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more efficient would the current models be? If you have not already heard the analogy, the answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for $2.75, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you were interested in miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead.

Max Frisch:

      Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

Dean Hannotte:

      Computers can't simulate truly human behavior yet, but then neither can most people.

Dean Hannotte:

      If you play with hardware long enough, it BREAKS. If you play with software long enough, it WORKS.

Jocelyn Burnell Judson, and Horace Freeland, Ball:

      The energy you use to turn a single page of a book is more than all the radio telescopes have collected since the beginning of radio astronomy. [as quoted on page 2 of Richard Kehl's 1990 quotation anthology entitled Further Departures]

Alan Kay:

      The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Perl Reference Manual:

      Just as in C and C++, "->" is an infix dereference operator. If the right side is either a [. . .] or {. . .} subscript, then the left side must be either a hard or symbolic reference to an array or hash (or a location capable of holding a hard reference, if it's an lvalue (assignable)). See the perlref manpage. Otherwise, the right side is a method name or a simple scalar variable containing the method name, and the left side must either be an object (a blessed reference) or a class name (that is, a package name). See the perlobj manpage.

Robert M. Pirsig:

      The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1974)]

Laurie Spiegel:

      Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.

Turbo C++ Getting Started Manual:

      Note that in C++, as in life, friendship is not transitive: if X is a friend of Y, and Y is a friend of Z, it does not follow that X is a friend of Z. [Chapter 5, A C++ Primer, Friend Functions, page 184]

Turbo C++ Getting Started Manual:

      The descriptive branches of science (required before the explanatory and predictive aims of science can bear fruit) spend much time classifying objects according to certain traits. It often helps to organize your classification as a family tree with a single overall category at the root, with subcategories branching out in subsubcategories, and so on. [Chapter 5, A C++ Primer, Inheritance, page 126]

Wernher Von Braun:

      Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft . . . and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

T-Shirts I'd Like to See

Filthy, Stinking Rich -- Well, Two Out of Three Ain't Bad
Real Men Don't Waste Their Hormones Growing Hair
Upon The Advice Of My Attorney, My Shirt Bears No Message At This Time
Happiness Is Seeing Your Mother-in-law On A Milk Carton
Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted to Be When I Grew Up
Procrastinate Now
Rehab Is for Quitters
My Husband And I Married For Better Or Worse -- He Couldn't Do Better And I Couldn't Do Worse
My Dog Can Lick Anyone
I Have A Degree In Liberal Arts -- Do You Want Fries With That?
Finally 21, And Legally Able To Do Everything I've Been Doing Since 15
If A Woman's Place Is In The Home, Why Am I Always In This Car?
All Men Are Idiots, And I Married Their King
West Virginia: One Million People, Fifteen Last Names
Failure Is Not An Option -- It Comes Bundled With The Software
I'm Out Of Estrogen And I've Got A Gun
A Hangover Is The Wrath Of Grapes
A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Cash Advance
Stupidity Is Not A Handicap -- Park Elsewhere
Discourage Inbreeding -- Ban Country Music
Where There's A Will I Want To Be In It
Moosehead: A Great Beer And A New Experience For A Moose
They Call It "PMS" Because "Mad Cow Disease" Was Already Taken
How Long Is This BETA Guy Going To Keep Testing Our Stuff?
He Who Dies With The Most Toys Is Nonetheless Dead
"Time's Fun When You're Having Flies" -- Kermit The Frog
Police Station Toilet Stolen -- Cops Have Nothing To Go On.
Heck Is Where People Go Who Don't Believe In Gosh
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words -- But It Uses Up A Thousand Times The Memory
The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth -- After We're Through With It
HAM AND EGGS: A Day's Work For A Chicken, A Lifetime Commitment For A Pig
Hard Work Will Pay Off Later -- Laziness Pays Off Now
Welcome To Kentucky: Set Your Watch Back 20 Years
The Trouble With Life Is There's No Background Music
If There Is No God, Who Pops Up The Next Kleenex?
Suicidal Twin Kills Sister By Mistake!
The Original Point And Click Interface Was A Smith & Wesson
My Wild Oats Have Turned To Shredded Wheat
Automobile -- A Mechanical Device That Runs Up Hills And Down People
Computer Programmers Don't Byte, They Nybble A Bit
Computer Programmers Know How To Use Their Hardware
MOP AND GLOW: Floor Wax Used By Three Mile Island Cleanup Team
NyQuil: The Stuffy, Sneezy, Why-The-Hell-Is-The-Room-Spinning Medicine
Quoting One Is Plagiarism -- Quoting Many Is Research
(Baby's T-Shirt) Party -- My Crib -- Two A.M.
(Child's T-Shirt) That's It! I'm Calling Grandma!
(Cape Cod T-Shirt) Frankly, Scallop, I Don't Give A Clam
(Back Of A Motocyclist's T-Shirt) If You Can Read This, The Bitch Fell Off Again!

Yogi Berries

Yogi Berra:

      Baseball is 90% physical, the other half is mental.

Yogi Berra:

      I don't want to make the wrong mistake.

Yogi Berra:

      It ain't over 'til it's over.

Yogi Berra:

      It gets late early out there.

Yogi Berra:

      It's déja vu all over again.

Yogi Berra:

      You can observe a lot just by watching.

Yogi Berra:

      You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

Yogi Berra:

      When you come to a fork in a road, take it. [with thanks to Laurie Spiegel]

Mayor Richard B. Daley:

      The police aren't here to create disorder; the police are here to preserve disorder.

Wayne Gretsky:

      You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Werner Heisenberg:

      Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

William Safire:

      Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.