If at first you don't succeed, try something else.
-- Laurance J. Peter
%
Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xxvii, 6
%
And who (in time) knows whither we may vent
  The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent
  T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
  May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?
-- Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)
-- Musophilus, Stanza 163
%
Ga'ach is always best when served live!
-- Klag
%
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect."
-- Keats
%
Another day, another dollar.
-- Vincent J. Fuller
-- [defense lawyer for John Hinckley, upon Hinckley's acquittal]
%
Whatever we well understand we express clearly, and words flow with ease.
-- Nicholas Boileau (1636-1711)
%
Knowledge is true opinion.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)
%
:@-party: /at'par`tee/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address]
   n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed
   party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp.
   the annual Worldcon); one must have a {network address} to
   get in, or at least be in company with someone who does.  One of
   the most reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face
   with people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor
   dots on their screens.  Compare {boink}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone.
-- William Shakespeare
%
 .---... SOS
-- SMILEY
%
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing
with the enemy.
-- Henry Kissinger
%
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good;
and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
-- Dick Brandon
%
 Hello, you've reached Jim and Sonya.  We can't pick up the phone
 right now, because we're doing something we really enjoy.  Sonya
 likes doing it up and down, and I like doing it left to right...
 real slowly.  So leave a message, and when we're done brushing
 our teeth we'll get back to you.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
O Richard! O my king!
The universe forsakes thee!
-- Michel Jean Sedaine (1717-1797)
-- Sung at the Dinner given to the French Soldiers in the Opera Salon
-- at Versailles, Oct. 1, 1789
%
"C'mon DM, let's see some REAL monsters!"
-- Famous Last Words
%
:careware: /keir'weir/ n. {Shareware} for which either the
   author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity
   or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the
   distribution charge.  Syn. {charityware}; compare
   {crippleware}, sense 2.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain
too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything
its value.  I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather
strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business
of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience
approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
-- Thomas Paine
%
A Betazoid woman, when she goes through this phase, quadruples her
  sex drive.
"Or more."
Or more? You never told me that.
"I didn't want to frighten you."
-- Riker and Troi, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2
%
The denial of the magical, the transcendental, the transdimensional, the
mysterious, the weird, has left us playing with half a deck.
-- T. McKenna
%
It is better to debate a question without settling it
than to settle a question without debating it.
-- Joseph Joubert
%
    terrorists
Two: one to stage a suicide attack on the bulb and
another to claim responsibility in phone call to the
news media.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
He knew what is what.
-- John Skelton (c. 1460-1529)
-- Colyn Cloute, Line 1106
%
Nothing is ever so bad it can't be made worse by firing the coach.
-- Murray's Rule of Football
%
Decker: "Of course...we all create God in our own image!"
-- "ST:TMP", Stardate 1513.8.
%
He that sips of many arts, drinks of none.
-- Fulton
%
Climate is a theory. Weather is a condition.
-- Oliver Herford
%
Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear
of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 180
%
I won't let anything touch you in these golden years.
-- David Bowie
%
No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes
or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that
there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
-- Epictetus (c. 60 AD)
-- Discourses, Book i, Chap. xv
%
The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to
 safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster
 the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. Suffer it not to become a
 source of dissension and discord, of hate and enmity.

Religion is verily the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the
 world and of tranquillity amongst it's peoples...The greater the decline of
 religion, the more grievous the waywardness of the ungodly. This cannot but
 lead in the end to chaos and confusion.
-- Baha'u'llah, a selection from the Baha'i scripture
%
Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him
 on people's pianos.
-- Victor Borge
%
True friendship's laws are by this rule exprest,--
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xv, Line 83
%
You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet
of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- School for Scandal, Act i, Sc. 1
%
How pure the joy, when first my hands unfold
The small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold!
-- John Ferriar (1764-1815)
-- Illustrations of Sterne, Bibliomania, Line 137
%

-- Go to Hell Mr. Stout you stink as a human being.
-- Deb Paul
%
All courageous animals are carnivorous, and greater courage is to
be expected in a people, such as the English, whose food is strong
and hearty, than in the half starved commonalty of other countries.
-- Sir W. Temple
%

-- When in doubt, do what the President does guess.
%
 :] Gleep...a friendly midget smiley who will gladly be your friend
-- SMILEY
%
Bobby Knight told me this: "There is nothing that a good defense
cannot beat a better offense."  In other words a good offense wins.
-- Senator Dan Quayle, in a speech 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)
%
The greatness of kings is made at the margin; the greatness of legislatures, at
the mean. That is to say, a monarch is judged by individual virtues and
performance, but no legislature can be called great because it contained one or
a few impressive individuals, to whom it paid no heed. The standard of
judgement for monarchs and legislatures is always the same: the happiness and
well-being of the people.
-- Michael Scully
%
I'd quit the job of being me, but I have accumulated so much seniority.
-- Tom Wilson ("Ziggy")
%
Is this the sort of advice you're looking for?--Make money. Make it, if you
 can, fair and square. If not, make it anyway.
-- Horace
%
The amount of junk carried is in direct proportion to the amount
of space available.
-- Tony Hogg
%
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack
of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.
-- Vince Lombardi
%
   You know, all of these rules that may be completely correct for
normal people, make no sense for prodigies.  To say that Bach should
pay any attention to how he was socially adjusted is just a bad joke.
-- Paul Erdos
%
You were s'posed to laugh!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Try praising your wife even if it does frighten her at first.
-- Billy Sunday
%
Gorkon: "Well...I see we have a long way to go."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
By establishing real money, men rule out its debasement.
-- Lewis E. Lehrman
%
    developers
The light bulb works fine on the system in my office . . .
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
%
I can't imagine myself ever getting big enough to do two things: have a
 cartoon series about myself or wave from a float.
-- Richard Lewis
%
:glork: /glork/ 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with
   outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of
   editing and finds that the system has just crashed.  2. Used as a
   name for just about anything.  See {foo}.  3. vt. Similar to
   {glitch}, but usually used reflexively.  "My program just glorked
   itself."  See also {glark}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
  Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more
desire to throw a stone than you had.
    Satan!
    Oh, it's true.   I know your race.  It is made up of sheep.  It is governed
by minorities, seldom or never by majorities.  It suppresses its feelings and
its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.  Sometimes the
noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.
The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-
hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive
and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.  Think of it!  One
kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps
in iniquities which revolt both of them.  Speaking as an expert, I know that
ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of
witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics
in the long ago.  And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted
prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart
into the harrying of a witch.  And yet apparently everybody hates witches and
wants them killed.  Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make
follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
-- the most noise perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a
-- determined front will do it and in a week all the sheep will wheel and
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%
 :-)-O smiling doctor with stethoscope
-- SMILEY
%
We need never mistake local cloudcover for general darkness. The
Atonement saw to that.
-- Neal A. Maxwell
%
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper
chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
%
Education is helping the child realize his potentialities.
-- Erich Fromm
%
No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!
-- Reginald Heber (1783-1826)
-- Palestine
%
GETS ALONG EXTREMELY WELL WITH SUPERIORS AND SUBORDINATES ALIKE: A coward.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
 Now I lay me down to sheep
   I pray the Lord the sheep's asleep
   If, perchance, the sheep should wake
   Simple friendship shall I fake.
-- Frances Grimble
%
He makes a solitude, and calls it--peace!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Bride of Abydos, Canto ii, Stanza 20
%
Facts are obstinate things.
-- Joseph Stalin
%
:Yellow Book: [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File;
   "The New Hacker's Dictionary", MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN
   0-262-68069-6).  Includes all the material in the 2.9.6 version of
   the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by
   Eric S. Raymond.  Most importantly, the book version is nicely
   typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons
   by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream
setting forever in one direction.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- New England Two Centuries ago
%
Baby's heads have no hair,
Old men's heads are just as bare;
Between the cradle and the grave,
Lies a haircut and a shave.

Back to a simpler time of skins and stones!
Or evil spells or reading chicken bones
Or sacrifices to all gods but Mars.
-- When things go wrong the answer's in the stars
-- Jack Kirwan
%
If indeed you must be candid, be candid beautifully.
-- Khalil Gibran
%
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
-- Paul Gauguin
%
How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures
involving quantum mechanics. All of thy geometry, Herr Planck, is
fairly hard...
-- pi mnemonic
%
 'U (profile) yawning
-- SMILEY
%
McCoy: "To you, Chancellor Gorkon.  One of the architects of our future."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
The light that lies
In woman's eyes.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- The Time I 've lost in wooing
%
But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world; now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Ask not what A Group of Employees can do for you.   But ask what can
 All Employees do for A Group of Employees.
-- Mike Dennison, in response to an inspirational memo at Ferranti Controls
%
In a full belly all the devils dance.
-- Established Monkish Proverb
%
You only live once; but if you live it right, once is enough.
-- Adam Marshall
%
The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie.
-- Zimmerman
%
Early to bed and early to rise means it's time to meet more guys/gals.
-- THE FRANKLIN FACTOR
%
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually
conducted by government against its own people.
-- Edward Abbey
%
:choke: v. 1. To reject input, often ungracefully.  "NULs make System
   V's `lpr(1)' choke."  "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to
   use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all those `#define's."
   See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}.   2. [MIT] More generally, to fail at any
   endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is
   "to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
EXCLUSIVE .................. We're the only ones who have the documentation
-- computer terms as seen from a Marketing point of view
%
There are two sides to every argument,
unless a person is personally involved, in which case there is only one.
-- Cutler Webster's Law
%
Reuse
 using an existing product in a new context; especially as applied
 to proposals, resumes, disclaimers and excuses
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
Now as the Paradisiacal pleasures of the Mahometans consist in playing
upon the flute and lying with Houris, be mine to read eternal new
romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- To Mr. West, Letter iv, Third Series
%
The ruling power within, when it is in its natural state, is so related
to outer circumstances that it easily changes to accord with what
can be done and what is given it to do.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iv, 1
%
One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight;
Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Eloisa to Abelard, Line 273
%
Lights of the world, and stars of human race.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Progress of Error, Line 97
%
The captain. He's a real son of the sea. He first became interested in
 ships when his mother approached him. "John, your father wants you to build
 a boat at once," she said. "Where is Father?" inquired John. "In the middle
 of the lake, drowning," was the reply. He told me he had the sea in the
 blood, and believe me, you can see where it gets in.
-- Spike Milliganlligan
%
The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intention.
The accident occurred when I was attempting to bring my car out of a skid
by steering it into the other vehicle.
-- Excerpt from insurance form
%
Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee
break thy word or lose thy self-respect.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iii, 7
%
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.
-- William Shakespeare
%
A bird in the hand makes blowing your nose difficult.
-- Solomon Short
%
I was born by Caesarian section...but not so you'd notice.  It's just that when
 I leave a house, I go out through the window.
-- Steven Wright
%
We really won't need a Cleric anyway.
-- Famous Last Words
%
 :^( has had his nose put out of joint; useful for replying to flames
-- SMILEY
%
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
    Lutherans
Thirteen, one to change the bulb, and a committee of twelve
to talk about how they miss the old one.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
There are two kinds are art: (1) decorative, nonobjective, wallpaper art; and
(2) art with a moral purpose.
-- Edward Abbey
%
    JAPs
Three, two to watch and one to call Daaaaddy.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
For many are called, but few are chosen.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxii, 14
%
Dear Mr. Seldes:   I cannot remember the exact wording of the statement
to which you allude; but what I meant was that ... a man who calls
himself a 100% American and is proud of it, is generally 150% an idiot
politically.  But the designations may be good business for war
veterans.  Having bled for their country in 1861 and 1918, they have
bled it all they could consequently.  And why not?
-- George Seldes, The Great Quotations
%
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- When the Assault was intended to the City
%
Hello?  Enema Bondage?  I'm calling because I want to be happy, I guess..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%

-- Good sopranos and tenors have resonance where others have brains.
%
To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber; for though the wound may
heal, the scar of it will remain.
-- Saadi (1184-1291)
%
:pod: [allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] n. A
   Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer).  From
   the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it.  Not
   to be confused with {P.O.D.}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil
one.  To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you
possess.
-- Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
%
The most utterly lost of all days, is that in which you have not once laughed.
-- Chamfort
%
Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.   It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
-- Johnny Hart
%
What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable.
-- Albert Einstein
%
My father invented the burglar alarm--which unfortunately was stolen from
 him.
-- Victor Borge
%
I left my WALLET in the BATHROOM!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
-- Willa Cather
%
if the family business requires a lookout.
-- You may be redneck...
%
He Didn't Like Her Apartment, So He Knocked Her Flat.
-- Homer Haynes
%
Will the third world war keep ``Bosom Buddies'' off the air?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
    In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few
years ago, General David Sarnoff [head of RCA] made this statement: We are
too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of
those who wield them.   The products of modern science are not in themselves
good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.   That
is the voice of the current somnambulism.  Suppose we were to say, Apple pie
is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines
its value. ...    There is nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear
scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in
the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of
his own being in a new technical form. ... It has never occurred to General
Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but _add_ itself on to what we
already are.
-- Marshall McLuhan, _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (1964)
%
Nope.  No trap on THIS chest.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Kirk: "I was lucky that thing had knees."
Martia: "That was not his knee."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Make money, not war.
-- slogan popular in libertarian circles in the early 70s
%
He who laughs, lasts.
-- Mary Pettibone Poole
%
QUEEN
  Not much of a career to get into if you can help it. Tends to
  involve flying all over the place being famous. But you don't get
  to make lots of movies. It must get a bit dull after a while
  actually. Everywhere the Queen goes all she gets to do is open
  things, do walkabouts, go to the races...
      But the really scarey thing about the Queen is that she has
  kids. This means that at sometime she and the Duke of Edinburgh...
  must have... you know... *done it*. Eugghghgghh. That's pretty
  frightening. And think of the possible embarrassment. What if a
  servant or a bodyguard walked in. "Oops, sorry your Maj.. hey, how
  did you two get into that position? Should I pick these robes up
  for you... oh, I should just go? Okay then.. yes, I'll just go.
  Just please try not to get any marks on the red carpet. Yes, I'm
  averting my eyes.. Oh. Beheaded? Thank you very much your Majesty."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
To put a girdle round about the world.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- Bussy D'Ambois, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Everything tastes more or less like chicken.
-- Jeffery F. Chamberlain
%
Go away...I'm alright.
-- Last words of H. G. Wells
%
Every animal leaves traces of what it was;
man alone leaves traces of what he created.
-- Jacob Bronowski
%
I idolized my mother. I didn't realize she was a lousy cook until I went
 into the Army.
-- Jackie Gayle
%
You're a sorry excuse for a God.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Littering is dumb.
-- Ronald Macdonald
%
The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
-- Lucille S. Harper
%
:high bit: [from `high-order bit'] n. 1. The most significant
   bit in a byte.  2. By extension, the most significant part of
   something other than a data byte: "Spare me the whole {saga},
   just give me the high bit."  See also {meta bit}, {hobbit},
   {dread high-bit disease}, and compare the mainstream slang
   `bottom line'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe
and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be
servants of their human interests.
-- George Santayana
%
There is one thing to be said for country clubs; they drain off a lot of
people you wouldn't want to associate with anyway.
-- Joseph Prescott
%
Technologies change faster than out perceptions.
-- Jim Seymour, PC Week
%
Now I am depressed...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
That's always the way when you discover
something new; everyone thinks you're crazy.
-- Evelyn E. Smith
%
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
To be, or not to be: that is the question: whether 't is nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms
against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:
No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to,--'t is a consummation devoutly
to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream:
ay, there 's the rub: for in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause:
there 's the respect that makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong,
the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit
of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make
with a bare bodkin? who would fardels to grunt and sweat under a weary life,
but that the dread of something after death, the undiscover'd country
from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us
rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue
of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard
their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages
of documentation, and if there was,
I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool.
-- Joseph Costello, President of Cadence
%
Lawyers earn their living by the sweat of their browbeating.
-- James Gibbons Hanecker
%
My books are not taken seriously. But that's all right; they are given
playfully.
-- Edward Abbey
%
She doeth little kindnesses
Which most leave undone, or despise.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- My Love, iv
%
To give away money is an easy matter and in any man's power. But to
decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what
purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy
matter.
-- Aristotle
%
There are two types of coaches.  Them that have just been fired, and
them that are going to be fired.
-- Bum Philips, Houston Oilers Coach
%
Cease, every joy, to glimmer on my mind,
But leave, oh leave the light of Hope behind!
What though my winged hours of bliss have been
Like angel visits, few and far between.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 375
%
Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
%
Sick Building Migration:
 The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in
unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick
Building Syndrome.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Those people who tell you not to take chances, they are
all missing on what life's about, you only live once, so
take hold of the chance, don't end up like others the
same song and dance!
-- Metallica, 'Motorbreath'
%
Didn't I buy a 1951 Packard from you last March in Cairo?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfuly curled)
all worlds
-- e.e. cummings
%
Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process.
-- Barry Goldwater
%
Jack-And-Jill Party:
 A Squire tradition; baby showers to which both men and women
are invited as opposed to only women. Doubled purchasing power of
bisexual attendance brings gift values up to Eisenhower-era standards.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Right as an aspen lefe she gan to quake.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Troilus and Creseide, Book ii, Line 1201
%
Every actual State is corrupt.  Good men must not obey laws too well.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Politics"
%
Dear Auntie Em:
Hate you, hate Kansas. Goodbye. I'm taking the dog.
-- Dorothy
%
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
-- Billy Wilder
%
"A bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker!"
-- THE MUPPET MOVIE
%
Education you get from reading the small print.
Experience you get from not reading it.
-- Saul Lavisky's observation
%
You either have to lose weight or make more friends--six pallbearers isn't
 going to cut it.
-- Johnny Parker ("The Wizard of Id")
%
There are only two places where time takes precedent over the job to
be done; school and prison.
-- William Glasser
%
May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows your dead
-- An Irish toast.
%
 I hate Illinois nazis.

 We did have a band pow'rfull 'nuff to turn goat piss into gasoline.
-- The Blues Brothers
%
You shoot the stars to see the miles you've made.
-- Stan Rogers
%
A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time
And razure of oblivion.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Plastic gun.  Ingenious.  More coffee, please.
-- Lee Falk's THE PHANTOM by Peter David
%
Fishes that tipple in the deep,
  Know no such liberty.
-- Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)
-- To Althea from Prison, ii
%
Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it
 'til it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.
-- Will Rogers
%
you would have it so! This suits you very nicely, and you are served
right; you have precisely what you deserve.
-- Ah that IYou would have it so, you would have it so; George Dandin,
-- Jean Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673)
-- George Dandin, Act i, Sc. 19
%
When Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's hero, Frankenstein, endowed his
synthetic robot with a human heart, the monster which before had been a
useful mechanical servant suddenly became an uncontrollable force.  Our
ancestors feared that corporations had no conscience.  We are treated to
the colder, more modern fear that, perhaps they do.
-- A. A. Berle, Jr. (1895-1971)
%
"Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!"
-- Post Brothers Comics
%
    blacks
Three: One to boogie up the ladder, two to keep the beat.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest.
-- Bulwer
%
 :-$ uncertainty
-- SMILEY
%
 %-) cross-eyed
-- SMILEY
%
Kirk: "I did what you wanted.  I stayed away.  Why didn't you tell him?"
Carol: "How can you ask me that?  Were we together?  Were we going to be?  You
  had your world, and I had mine.  And I wanted him in mine.  Not chasing
  through the universe with his father."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Most people judge men only by success or by fortune.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 212
%
Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%
It's only a scratch.....
-- Famous Last Words
%
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act v, Sc. 5
%
How people try to avoid work, and how well some of them succeed...
-- Willian Feather
%
The time has come for all good men to rise above principle.
-- Huey Long
%
Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that
correspond with them.
-- Abigail Adams
%
Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a
process of evolution.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our
sacred honour.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
-- Declaration of Independence
%
If a lie is repeated often enough all the dumb jackasses in
the world not only get to believe it, they even swear by it.
-- B.B. Franklin
%
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
-- The Little Prince, chapter XXI
%
Azetbur: "We are a proud race.  And we ... intend to go on being proud."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Men argue, nature acts.
-- Voltaire
%
Mickey Mouse to a three-year-old is a six-foot-tall RAT!
-- Robin Williams
%
For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to
foreign nations, and to the next ages.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- From his Will
%
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally
convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
-- H. Poincare
%
The very room, coz she was in,
  Seemed warm from floor to ceilin'.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Biglow Papers, Second Series, The Courtin'
%
:microtape: /mi:'kroh-tayp/ n. Occasionally used to mean a
   DECtape, as opposed to a {macrotape}.  A DECtape is a small
   reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch
   wide.  Unlike those for today's {macrotape}s, microtape
   drivers allowed random access to the data, and therefore could be
   used to support file systems and even for swapping (this was
   generally done purely for {hack value}, as they were far too
   slow for practical use).  In their heyday they were used in pretty
   much the same ways one would now use a floppy disk: as a small,
   portable way to save and transport files and programs.  Apparently
   the term `microtape' was actually the official term used within
   DEC for these tapes until someone coined the word `DECtape',
   which, of course, sounded sexier to the {marketroid}s; another
   version of the story holds that someone discovered a conflict with
   another company's `microtape' trademark.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    Mac owners
Mac users don't screw, they just click the genital icon.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
What a fool cannot learn he laughs at, thinking that by his laughter he
shows superiority instead of latent idiocy.
-- M. Corelli
%
...you want to retract something said in haste, and think C-a C-@ C-e C-w
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
:Ninety-Ninety Rule: n. "The first 90% of the code accounts
   for the first 90% of the development time.  The remaining 10% of
   the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
   Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs, and popularized by Jon
   Bentley's September 1985 "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science"
   column in "Communications of the ACM".  It was there called
   the "Rule of Credibility", a name which seems not to have stuck.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we
were before.
-- Blaise Pascal
%
:drop-outs: n. 1. A variety of `power glitch' (see {glitch});
   momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.  2. Missing characters
   in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation
   (one cause of such behavior under UNIX when a bad connection to a
   modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see
   {screaming tty}).  3. Mental glitches; used as a way of
   describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down
   for a couple of beats.  See {glitch}, {fried}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 [:-) wearing a walkman
-- SMILEY
%
An idea which cannot be commercialized is just a passing thought.

-- Momofuku Ando (Nissin Foods)
%
There is none so blind as they that won't see.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue iii
%
People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor
jerk who is shy half a slug who must tighten his belt.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
If you can do it the hard way, it's worth doing it the easy way.
-- The SpamPope
%
I said it. I must've meant it.
There is nobody else to blame.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
I think children have an instinctive need for adults; they want to
  be told right and wrong.
-- Kirk, "Miri," stardate 2713.6.
%
There is no sadder sight in the world,
than to see a beautiful theory killed by brutal fact.
-- Thomas Huxley, biologist (1825-1895)
%
    feminists
Two..............IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH
THAT?????!!!!???
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A guy goes into a drugstore on a Friday and says, "Give me a gross of those
 safes." He comes back Monday and says, "There were only 143 in that gross."
 The clerk says, "I'm sorry I spoiled your weekend, sir."
-- Pearl Williams
%
Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
To get action out of management, it is necessary to create the illusion
of a crisis in the hope it will be acted on.
-- Gene Franklin
%
If thou shouldst lay up even a little upon a little, and shouldst
do this often, soon would even this become great.
-- Hesiod (c. 700 BC)
-- Works and Days, Line 360
%
I'm not sure, but he seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.
-- J.B.S. Haldane,
-- when asked what has the study of biology had taught him about the Creator
%
Don't think.  Thinking is the enemy of creativity.  It's self-conscious,
and anything self-conscious is lousy.  You can't try to do things.
 You simply must do things.
-- Ray Bradbury
%
:Orange Book: n. The U.S. Government's standards document
   "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard
   5200.28-STD, December, 1985" which characterize secure computing
   architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D
   (least).  Stock UNIXes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to
   about C2 without excessive pain.  See also {{crayola books}},
   {{book titles}}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 780
%
What fools these mortals be.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65)
%
If penicillin is such a wonder drug, how come it can't cure bread mold?
-- Ron Smith
%
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Idylls of the King, Launcelot and Elaine
%
If a man chooses to do evil... it becomes my
 sacred duty to bash him to a pulp.
-- Crime Crusher, an old 40's pulp superhero
%
In love and war, don't seek counsel.
-- French proverb
%
Sorry, I must have bypassed my good taste chip.
-- Kryten
%
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far,
something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
Civilisation is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does
 not know everyone else.
-- Julian Jaynes
%
Japanese Minimalism:
 The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by
rootless career-hopping young people.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Stuck in Mobile, with the Memphis blues again.
-- Bob Dylan
%
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination
cold and barren.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Speech on the Conciliation of America, Vol. ii, p. 116
%
Kirk: "It's a pleasure doing business with you, Mister Spock."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3201.7
%
Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity.
-- Julia A. Fletcher
-- Little Things, 1845
%
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic
devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers,
where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with
sledgehammers.  With their devices thus permanently destroyed,
consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than
have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones
repaired at so-called factory service centers, which in fact consist
of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic
devices with cheap cigars and going, Lookit all them WIRES in there!
-- Dave Barry, 'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants
%
Take Nothing but Pictures. Leave nothing but footprints. Kill nothing but
time.
-- Motto of the Baltimore Grotto (caving society)
%
if you've ever BBQ'ed chitlins on the grill.
-- You may be redneck...
%
    When traveling, the sages say, one must always be prepared to accept local
customs. Yet there are areas of this very kingdom where one might find it
customary to tax a wizard into poverty; to insist a wizard should not be paid,
for magic exists only for the common good; or even to tar and feather a wizard
unsuccessful at his task. Contrary to the sages, when one is traveling in these
areas, one should be prepared to avoid local customs altogether.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI
%
It's no longer socially acceptable to talk about rape as a crime of
 passion, boys; it's like making jokes about black people and
 watermelons.   Unless you're from the barefoot and pregnant school of
 social relations, you should have enough sensitivity to avoid
 discussing extremely unpleasant violent acts in a flippant manner in
 front of people who must live in fear of being potential victims, or
 who are likely acquaintances of actual ones.

 Jim Muller is of course an exception, because he's an artiste.
-- Dave Touretzky
%
Now then, what seems to be the trouble?
Well...it's my manservant.
Yes, well, don't be embarrassed. If you've got the pox, just pop your..
  ..er..'manservant' on the table and we'll have a look at it,shall we?
-- Doctor and Edmund : Bells
%
I thought you had the plane tickets!
-- Famous Last Words
%
 'P (profile) sticking tongue out
-- SMILEY
%
The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking
than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner,
that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness
alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
-- Chesterfield
%
How to make a million dollars:   First, get a million dollars.
-- Steve Martin
%
Compulsory volunteers.
-- Oxymoron
%
Forget living well. The best revenge is revenge.
-- William Hamilton
%
The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more
months, might as well have been written by someone else.  (Eagleson is
an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)
-- Eagleson's Law
%
By dint of railing at idiots you run the risk of becoming idiotic yourself.
-- Gustave Flaubert
%
She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power
of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
For him was lever han at his beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle, and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fidel, or sautrie.
But all be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 295
%
Picard: "This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation starship
Enterprise."
Macet: "I am Gul Macet of the Cardassian ship Tragor."
Picard: "Why have you fired on us?"
Macet: "Curious question, Captain.  In *war* one attacks one's enemies."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44429.6
%
In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognise terrorism if it
came up and bit him on his Internet.
-- Ross M. Greenberg
%
One night my mother sent me to fetch the doctor. "What's the matter with
 me? I'm sick from top to bottom. My head pounds, my eyes flicker, my heart
 jumps, my stomach gurgles, my knees crack, my ankles swell, my feet burn,
 and I myself don't feel so good. If I weren't, thank God, so healthy I
 couldn't stand the pain ..."
-- Sam Levenson
%
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,
Thou 'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee, nor without thee.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
-- Spectator, No. 68
%
Here is an Appalachian version of management's answer to those who are
concerned with the fate of the project:
"Don't worry about the mule.  Just load the wagon."
-- Mike Dennison's hillbilly uncle
%
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
%
ZOOT:  I'm afraid our life must seem very dull and quiet compared to yours.
       We are but eightscore young blondes, all between sixteen and
       nineteen-and-a-half, cut off in this castle, with no one to protect us.
       Oooh.  It is a lonely life ... bathing ...  dressing ... undressing ...
       making exciting underwear....
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
:fence: n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished
   ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items), used to
   delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the
   computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel').  The NUL
   (ASCII 0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence.
   Hex FF is also (though slightly less frequently) used this way.
   See {zigamorph}.  2. An extra data value inserted in an array or
   other data structure in order to allow some normal test on the
   array's contents also to function as a termination test.  For
   example, a highly optimized routine for finding a value in an array
   might artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for
   after the last slot of the array, thus allowing the main search
   loop to search for the value without having to check at each pass
   whether the end of the array had been reached.  3. [among users of
   optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge
   about the compiler, that blocks certain optimizations.  Used when
   explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill.  Typically a
   hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the
   optimizer's register-coloring info" can be expressed by the
   shorter "That's a fence procedure".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Macho does not prove mucho
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor
%
Out of too much learning become mad.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2
%
Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government
wrong?  Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?   Or
declared by any number of men to be good, if they are NOT good?
-- Henry David Thoreau - 'A Plea for Captain John Brown'
%
WELFARE
You're too incompetent to work for a living.
[We'll let you leach off those who do earn a living.]
-- George L Roman
%
Of whom to be disprais'd were no small praise.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Regained, Book iii, Line 56
%
Rights are not subject to negotiation.
-- Jeff Chan
%
Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.
-- Benjamin Jowett
%
:dot file: [UNIX] n. A file that is not visible by default to
   normal directory-browsing tools (on UNIX, files named with a
   leading dot are, by convention, not normally presented in directory
   listings).  Many programs define one or more dot files in which
   startup or configuration information may be optionally recorded; a
   user can customize the program's behavior by creating the
   appropriate file in the current or home directory.  (Therefore, dot
   program defining at least one, a user's home directory can be
   filled with scores of dot files, of course without the user's
   really being aware of it.)  See also {profile} (sense 1), {rc
   file}.
-- files tend to {creep} -with every nontrivial application
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A fool and his words are soon parted.
-- William Shenstone
%
Our parents were of Midwestern stock and very
 strict.  They didn't want us to grow up to be
 spoiled and rich.  If we left our tennis racquets
 in the rain, we were punished.
-- Nancy Ellis, George Bush's sister
%
A Mahler symphony is full of surprises--but each surprise, on second hearing,
turns out to be an *inevitable* surprise.
-- Edward Abbey
%
 Oooooommmmmmmmmmm...  (Heavy panting and breathing in the
 background), Oh!  Sorry, I can't come (Oh!  Yes!  Do it to me)
 to the (Oh!) phone right now (pant pant), leave your name and
 number at the (scream, I'm gonna come!) orgasm.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
       [Autumn changed into Winter ... Winter changed into Spring ...  Spring
       changed back into Autumn and Autumn gave Winter and Spring a miss and
       went straight on into Summer ...  Until one day ...]
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human
achievement incredible.
-- Peter's Postulate
%
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.
-- Emily Dickinson
%
You remind me of my brother Bosco--only he had a human head.
-- Judy Tenuta
%
       she's not for you.  She was cheap, she was stupid and she wouldn't
-- Holly: I was in love once a Sinclair ZX-81.  People said, No, Holly,
-- load well, not for me, anyway.
-- Red Dwarf - 'Stasis Leak'
%
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.
-- Poor Richard's Almanac
%
We laugh at the Indian philosopher, who to account for the support
of the earth, contrived the hypothesis of a huge elephant, and to support
the elephant, a huge tortoise.   If we will candidly confess the truth, we
know as little of the operation of the nerves, as he did of the manner in
which the earth is supported: and our hypothesis about animal spirits, or
about the tension and vibrations of the nerves, are as like to be true, as
his about the support of the earth.  His elephant was a hypothesis, and our
hypotheses are elephants.  Every theory in philosophy, which is built on
pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly
by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose
feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.
-- Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind", 1764
%
I'm Dan Quayle, who are you?
     a Hardee's restaurant with a handshake.  She
     responded, ``I'm your Secret Service agent.''
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, greeting a woman at
%
if both your dad and you are in the same grade.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I don't believe in psychology.   I believe in good moves.
-- Bobby Fischer
%
While the public says it wants a good Congressman, it votes for good
politicians.
-- Otis Pike
%
I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall
not be put out.
-- Old Testament
-- 2 Esdras xiv, 25
%
:wabbit: /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal
   line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack
   reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may
   have descended (if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS
   reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of
   Washington Computer Center.  The program would make two copies of
   itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system.
   2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication
   but is not a {virus} or {worm}.  See {fork bomb} and
   {rabbit job}, see also {cookie monster}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Every day should be passed as if it were to be our last.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 633
%
Early dead, early wed.
-- Hoary English Proverb
%
She was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Dream, Stanza 2
%
The effects are fleeting and lingering...
  - from Saul Rothstein (Chelmsford, MA, USA)
-- Overheard in a hallway
%
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving,
and that's your own self.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet.
-- Chinese Proverb
%
You see but you do not observe.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes"
%
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more
a man than they?
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
-- Burns, Edinburgh Review, 1828
%
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on
five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of
our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
-- Edward Abbey
%
If nothing went wrong today, you're probably dead.
-- Murphy's Last Law
%
Even things in themselves not positively advantageous, sometimes
become so, by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene,
which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself,
is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.
-- Alexander Hamilton
%
Identical units tested identically will not behave identically in the field.
-- The RPCISPE's Eighteenth Universal Law
%
Aristodemus, a friend of Antigonus, supposed to be a cook's son, advised
him to moderate his gifts and expenses. "Thy words," said he, "Aristodemus,
smell of the apron."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Antigonus I
%
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
-- Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar"
%
If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows.
-- Yiddish saying
%
Winning isn't everything - it's the ONLY thing.
-- Vince Lombardi, 1965
%
I 'm weary of conjectures,--this must end 'em.
Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life,
My bane and antidote, are both before me:
This in a moment brings me to an end;
But this informs me I shall never die.
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
-- Cato, Act v, Sc. 1
%
:FidoNet: n. A worldwide hobbyist network of personal computers
   which exchanges mail, discussion groups, and files.  Founded in 1984
   and originally consisting only of IBM PCs and compatibles, FidoNet
   now includes such diverse machines as Apple ][s, Ataris, Amigas,
   and UNIX systems.  Though it is much younger than {USENET},
   FidoNet is already (in early 1991) a significant fraction of
   USENET's size at some 8000 systems.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
DESERVES PROMOTION: Create new title to make h/h feel appreciated.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
Picard: "Amanda, uh, allow me to introduce, uh, Q, uh, he's, um, he's an
  aquaintance of ours.  We've, uh, we've known him...for years."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
Never thrust your own sickle into another's corn.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 593
%
...you try to bring a window to the front of something, then you realize
that "something" is a Post-It (tm) on your screen.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
I already have a hundred gifts to distribute at Christmas--my Christmas
 seals have arrived ... I wanted our street to have the prettiest Christmas
 decorations in the neighborhood, so I strung colored balls from house to
 house all the way down the block. And I did all the electric wiring myself.
 If you'd like further information, just drive down Moorpark Street in North
 Hollywood. We're the third pile of ashes from the corner.
-- Bob Hope
%
:quantum bogodynamics: /kwon'tm boh`goh-di:-nam'iks/ n. A theory
   that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as
   politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and {suit}s in
   general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and
   bogosity potential fields.  Bogon absorption, of course, causes
   human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may
   also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise
   mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not yet understood
   and remain to be elucidated.  Quantum bogodynamics is most often
   invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software
   failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which
   the former absorb.  See {bogon}, {computron}, {suit},
   {psyton}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
walking: uncommon means of mountain locomotion. see fall, glissade, etc.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Thou hast shown thy people hard things:
thou hast made us to drink the wine
of astonishment.
-- Psalms 60:3
%
Arise, Sir Doctor.
-- Kamelion, King's Demons
%
ABSTAINER, n.  A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying
himself a pleasure.  A total abstainer is one who abstains from
everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the
affairs of others.

    Said a man to a crapulent youth:  "I thought
        You a total abstainer, my son."
    "So I am, so I am," said the scrapgrace caught --
        "But not, sir, a bigoted one."
                                                                  G.J.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't,
like a teaspoon and an open mind.
-- Doctor Who, CREATURE FROM THE PIT
%
Jewels five-words-long,
That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time
Sparkle forever.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- The Princess, Part ii, Line 355
%
Once a dish is fouled up, adding anything to make it better will not
work.
-- Law of Kitchen Confusion
%
 :-M speaking no evil
-- SMILEY
%
Don't go to business school.
-- Paul Hawken (to aspiring entrepreneurs)
%
REVOLUTIONARY .............. Disk drives go round and round
-- computer terms as seen from a Marketing point of view
%
Like a pale martyr in his shirt of fire.
-- Alexander Smith (1830-1867)
-- A Life Drama, Sc. ii
%
I am not a number, I'm a man, a free man!
-- Number 6
%
MARINA
  One of those places where lots of people in boats sail around, and
  little kids hang their fishing rods over the edge in the belief
  that they're going to catch a whopper which will feed their family
  that night. And where you can walk to the end of the pier and buy a
  Coke for $3.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Walk in, plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the
 truth.
-- James Cagney
%
I'm not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why?  It would
 take about a billion ants just to AIM a gun at me, let alone fire it.  And you
 know what I'm doing while they're aiming it at me?  I just sort of slip off to
 the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if
 he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.
-- James Barrie
%
That he is mad, 't is true: 't is true 't is pity;
And pity 't is 't is true.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
That it is unwise to be heedless ourselves while we are giving advice
to others, I will show in a few lines.
-- Phaedrus (c. 8 A.D.)
-- Book i, Fable 9, 1
%
The secret of true genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age,
which means never losing your enthusiasm.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
>consult guide about towels
A towel is the most useful thing (besides the Guide) a Galactic hitchhiker
can have. Its uses include travel, combat, communications, protection from
the elements, hand-drying and reassurance. Towels have great symbolic
value, with many associated points of honour. Never mock the towel of
another, even if it has little pink and blue flowers on it. Never do
something to somebody else's towel that you would not want them to do to
yours. And, if you borrow the towel of another, you MUST return it before
leaving their world.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
If people listened to themselves more often, they would talk less.
-- Curtois' Rule.
%
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 6
%
Come o'er the moonlit sea,
The waves are brightly glowing.
-- Charles Jefferys (1807-1865)
-- The Moonlit Sea
%
To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
-- Thomas Carlyle
%
:nastygram: /nas'tee-gram/ n. 1. A protocol packet or item of
   email (the latter is also called a {letterbomb}) that takes
   advantage of misfeatures or security holes on the target system to
   do untoward things.  2. Disapproving mail, esp. from a
   {net.god}, pursuant to a violation of {netiquette} or a
   complaint about failure to correct some mail- or news-transmission
   problem.  Compare {shitogram}, {mailbomb}.  3. A status
   report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer.  "What'd
   Corporate say in today's nastygram?"  4. [deprecated] An error
   reply by mail from a {daemon}; in particular, a {bounce
   message}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Whatever became of Strange de Jim?  Well, he found a substitute for cocaine:
"You cover Q-tips with sandpaper and ram them up your nostrils as far as they
will go.  Then you sniff talcum powder while shredding hundred dollar bills."
-- Herb Caen [as discovered in Marya Schrier's scrapbook]
%
It is not I who am CRAZY...It is I who am MAD!
-- Ren Hoek
%
URCHIN
  Descriptive of a mischievous child, especially a boy, who has not
  destroyed any of your property. An urchin who *has* destroyed some
  of your property is more properly known as a "little bastard that
  I'm gonna lynch if I get my hands on him..."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
... What thou bid'st
Unargued I obey; so God ordains:
God is thy law; thou mine: to know no more
Is Woman's happiest knowledge, and her Praise.
-- Milton
%
I guess you'll have to ask the details to the management, I am here.
The Governor and I are announcing this today. It was just signed off on
by the Secretary of Defense as something that we have been monitoring,
and the Governor obviously has been very involved in this. And we're
making this announcement today.
                  in August, 1992, showing just how familiar he was
                  with the details of a $300 million plan to upgrade the
                  Army's M-1 tanks.  (reported in the NY Times 10/7/92)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle at a factory near Detroit
%
Fathers alone a father's heart can know What secret tides of still
enjoyment flow When brothers love, but if their hate succeeds, They
wage the war, but 'tis the father bleeds.
-- Edward Young
%
    Heroics can be costly and involve some degree of personal danger for the
participating wizard. But for the truly resourceful magician, this does not
have to be! Consider the advantages of long-distance magic, by which you may
gain all the publicity value and save all the expense. But, you say, don't
heroes have to be present at the battle? For the properly prepared mage,
nothing could be more heroic than a well-timed combination of printed
handbills, subtly placed rumor, and perhaps a brief personal appearance tour.
Still expensive? Nonsense! Do you know how much a heroic wizard can charge for
personal appearances?
-- Ebenezum The Wizard's Handy Pocket Guide To Everyday Wizardry
%
 If it's so safe to fly, why do they give you an hour of instructions when
 you get on the plane? Have safety instructions where you know it's
 dangerous to travel--like the New York City subway system. Have the
 conductor come out and say, "Ay! Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this
 is your conductor Angelo speakin'. Welcome to the D train. If the train
 should go above ground through the Bronx, bulletproof vests can be located
 under your seat. If the vest don't inflate, duck. All weapons may be stored
 in the overhead compartments. And, please, no stabbing until the train has
 come to a complete stop in the terminal. You'll notice the conductor has
 turned off the "No Urinating' sign. Just feel free to soil yourself. And
 now please return the homeless person to his original upright position.
 Should an unbathed bag lady walk on the train, a small mask will drop from
 the ceiling. Put it over your nose and mouth and breathe like your life
 depended on it."
-- Gabe Abelson
%
She what was honour knew,
And with obsequious majesty approv'd
My pleaded reason. To the nuptial bower
I led her blushing like the morn; all heaven
And happy constellations on that hour
Shed their selectest influence; the earth
Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;
Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs
Whisper'd it to the woods, and from their wings
Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book viii, Line 508
%
"It seemed like the thing to do at the time."
-- Law of Historical Causation
-- Michael Uhlmann
%
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears--by listening.
-- Dean Rusk
%
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction?  Fiction, after all,
has to make sense.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
The very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Excuse me, could I please just distract you for one brief second?
                   in Red Dwarf 'Inquisitor'
-- Kryten, distracting the Inquisitor
%
 Ah! don't say you agree with me.   When people agree with me
I always feel that I must be wrong.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
MANES, n.  The immortal parts of dead Greeks and Romans.  They were in
a state of dull discomfort until the bodies from which they had
exhaled were buried and burned; and they seem not to have been
particularly happy afterward.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Most people don't know this, but I'm pretty famous.
-- Norm Peterson
%
Court, n.:
    A place where they dispense with justice.
-- Arthur Train
%
For all that Nature by her mother-wit
Could frame in earth.
-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
-- The Faerie Queene, Book iv, Canto x, St. 21
%
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
-- Ben Jonson
%
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman"
%
Lindsey's not home now.  This is his domestic droid speaking.
I'm not programmed to answer the phone, so just leave a message,
and Lindsey will get back to you as soon as possible.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction, ice
Is also great
And would suffice
-- Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
%
First learn computer science and all the theory.  Next develop a programming
style.  Then forget all that and just hack.
-- George Carrette [1990]
%
The crucial memorandum will be snared in the out-basket by the paper
clip of the overlaying correspondence and go to file.
-- Charles P. Boyle
%
BASIC - It is practically impossible to teach good programming to
students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt",
-- ACM Sig Plan Notices, May 82
%
I suppose when it gets to that point, we shan't know how it does it.
-- Turing
%
"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be;
and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's
logic.
-- Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898)
%
"A survey is being made of this":  We need more time to think of an answer.
-- Kelvin Throop III, "The Management Dictionary"
%
"Personally, I was shocked to discover our plastic surgeon was
an alcoholic."
"Yes, he raised quite a few eyebrows."
-- The Cowboy Wally Show
%
No doubt equality of goods is just; but, being unable to cause
might to obey
justice, men have made it just to obey might.  Unable to strengthen
justice,
they have justified might; so that the just and the strong might unite,
and there would be peace, which is the sovereign good.
-- Pascal
%
if your nephew's wife calls you Cousin too.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I used to wonder about the meaning of life.
But I looked it up in the dictionary under L and there it was,
the meaning of life. It was less than I expected.
-- Dogbert
%
If everything is coming your way then you're in the wrong lane.
-- Law of Life's Highway
%
I was in Vietnam.
So what? I live in New York.
Really? Wow. How do you do it?
-- Denis Leary
%
presidential election.
-- DIP switch what we'll probably get out of the next
%
You raise your voice when you should reinforce your argument.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem...
-- Thomas S. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
%
Office employees will daily sweep the floors, dust the
furniture, shelves, and showcases.
-- Work Rule
%
When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English
language correctly...
I think
  Any fool can make a rule
  And every fool will mind it.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%

-- ASCII what you do-ie if you don't know-ie.
%
As clear as a whistle.
-- John Byrom (1691-1763)
-- Epistle to Lloyd, I
%

-- I can't help it I'm a lawyer.
%
Pro: Children ask better questions than do adults. "May I have a cookie?"
 "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to
 elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" "Why haven't you
 called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"

 Con: Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections,
 children tend to be sticky. One can only assume that this has something to
 do with not smoking enough.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
  How many poor I see!
What shall I render to my God
  For all his gifts to me?
-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
-- Divine Songs, Song iv
%
Under any system a few sharpies will beat the rest of us.
-- Al Goodfather
%
A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies,
scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom.
-- Parkinson
%
I went to correspondence school. They threw me out from there. I played
 hooky ... I sent them an empty envelope.
-- Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl)
%
The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
%
Delta: The kids will love our inflatable slides.
-- David Letterman
%
 :< midget unsmiley
-- SMILEY
%
Spock: "I sense you have a closed mind, Captain.  Closed minds have kept these
  two worlds apart for centuries.  In the Federation, we have learned from
  experience to view the Romulans with distrust.  We can either choose to live
  with that emity, or seek a way to change it.  I choose the latter."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity:
for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when
your boss is away and you get twice as much done.
-- Daniel B. Luten
%
I hope that after I die, people will say of me: ``That guy sure owed me a lot
 of money.''
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life,
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Bride of Abydos, Canto ii, Stanza 20
%
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should
attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless.
Would they not all fall together at some point?  In a letter in 1691 to
Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this
would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed
over a finite region of space.  But he reasoned that if, on the other hand,
there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly
over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be
any central point for them to fall to.

This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in
talking about infinity...
-- Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time"
%
"Always keep your bowler on in times of stress.
 And watch out for diabolical masterminds."
-- Emma Peel's parting comment to John Steed on THE AVENGERS
%
The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of the
 way when it struck my front end.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes.  Your ignorance
cramps my conversation.
-- Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933)
%
The type syntax for C is essentially unparsable.
-- Rob Pike
%
MMM-MM!!  So THIS is BIO-NEBULATION!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Be sure you are right, then go ahead.
-- The motto of David Crockett in the war of 1812
%
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and
tear on the brain tissues.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove
to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- The Complete Angler, Part i, Chap. 1
%
May the Great Bird of the galaxy bless you planet.
-- Sulu, "The Man Trap," stardate 1513.4.
%

-- Complex analysis is just that complex.
%
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder
of civilization.
-- Sigmund Freud
%
One more unfortunate
  Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
  Gone to her death.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- The Bridge of Sighs
%
:blargh: /blarg/ [MIT] n. The opposite of {ping}, sense 5; an
   exclamation indicating that one has absorbed or is emitting a
   quantum of unhappiness.  Less common than {ping}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
        Then welcome each rebuff
        That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
        Be our joys three-parts pain!
        Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Rabbi Ben Ezra
%
The finding of threats to security by a security office is totally
predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless.
-- Robert N. Kharasch
%
ULTRA
  Prefix invented by marketing people. Used when "very" just isn't
  adequate. "Ultra" is actually quite old hat, most reputable
  marketing people having moved on to "mega". But be careful, because
  "mega" comes from the Greek, and they might want it back.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather
have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.
-- Robert Keith Leavitt
%
You just don't get off a spaceship and run....
-- Avon
%
When I have a kid, I want to buy one of those strollers for twins.  Then put
 the kid in and run around, looking frantic.  When he gets older, I'd tell him
 he used to have a brother, but he didn't obey.
-- Steven Wright
%
Parents like stupid things.
       stardate 5029.5.
-- Don of the Starnes Expedition, "And The Children Shall Lead,"
%
Delays have dangerous ends.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellman's
 mayonnaise to a public meeting?
-- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities"
%
Welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Troilus and Cressida
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days,
but left to itself, a cold will hang on for a week.
-- Darrell Huff
%
You must not forget what happens here today. You must not let your
  children forget.
-- Picard to Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2
%
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xlv, 1
%
My superiority complex turned out to be an inferiority complex. I said,
 "Great, that makes me the least of my problems."
-- Sara B. Sirius
%
Calmness is great advantage; he that lets another chafe may warm
him at his fire, mark all his wand'rings and enjoy his frets, as
cunning fencers suffer heat to tire.
-- Herbert
%
The one day you'd sell you soul for something, souls are a glut.
-- Mason's First Law of Synergism
%
If God dwells inside us, like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas,
 because that's what He's getting!
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
HIIIIIIIIIIIIYAAAAAAAAAA!
-- Miss Piggy
%
Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part.
     published by the American Life League
-- Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, in a pamphlet
%
I loved him like a brothel.
-- S. J. Perelman
%
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound
to end in disaster.
-- Robert M. Pirsig
%
Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.
-- Homer
%
Every fool will be meddling.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xx, 3
%
Famous quotes need famous mouths.
-- Axiom 2.
-- Ralph Keyes, The Rules of misquotation
%
    recovering co-dependents
in a light bulb?   None.  The recovering co-dependent
detaches and tells the lightbulb to screw itself.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw
%
Every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew vii, 8
%
These most brisk and giddy-paced times.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of
distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on
some of them.  When they are governed by a common passion, their
opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.
-- James Madison
%
I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
-- (Jean) Louis (Rodolphe) Agassiz (1807-1873),
-- Swiss-born, American naturalist
-- Letter refusing lecture course offer
%
A hypothetical paradox:
       What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security
team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of
Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?
-- Tom Galloway
%
A snake lurks in the grass.
-- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
%
The great god Pan is dead.
Why the Oracles cease to give Answers.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Why the Oracles cease to give Answers
%
They say the dog is man's best friend. I don't believe that. How many of
 your friends have you neutered?
-- Larry Reeb
%
LaForge: "How about you, Commander?  Have any memories you feel like digging
  up?"
Riker: "None that I'd care to share with an audience."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xi, Line 736
%
The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
-- Whitney Griswold
%
I have heard a well-built woman compared in her motion to a ship under
 sail, yet I would advise no wise man to be her owner if her freight be
 nothing but what she carries between wind and water.
 (advising his son not to marry a beautiful but poor girl)

 Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
-- Francis Osborne
-- John Cheever (to his daughter Susan)
%
Gli arcobaleni d'altri mondi
hanno colori che non so.
Ma lungo i fiumi d'altri mondi
nascono fiori che non ho.
[The rainbows of other worlds
have colors I don't know.
But along the rivers of other worlds
flowers are born that I don't have.]
-- Fabrizio De Andre
%
Blot out vain pomp; check impulse; quench appetite; keep reason under
its own control.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ix, 7
%
Man's ego is the fountainhead of the human achievement.
-- Ayn Rand
%
Thine eye was on the censer,
  And not the hand that bore it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- Lines by a Clerk
%
L'extension des privileges des femmes est le principe general de tous progres
 sociaux.
-- Charles Fourier, 1808
%
The whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality,
but we must live with a character.
-- Peter DeVries
%
It's a time-honored way of practicing medicine. With your head, and
  your heart, and your hands.
-- Dr. Pulaski, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1
%
Prize that which is best in the universe; and this is that which useth
everything and ordereth everything.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, v, 21
%
While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
There are no ugly loves, nor handsome prisons.
-- Poor Richard
%
Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten.
-- Philip K. Saunders
%
C provides the infinitely-abusable GOTO statement, and labels to
branch to. Formally, the GOTO is never necessary, and in practice it
is almost always easy to write code without it.
-- Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language
%
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
-- N. Bohr
%
Military intelligence
-- Oxymoron
%
Antisthenes used to say that envious people were devoured by their
own disposition, just as iron is by rust.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Antisthenes, iv
%
:flame war: n. (var. `flamewar') An acrimonious dispute,
   especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as
   {USENET}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There has been a long history of optimizing the wrong things, using elaborate
mechanisms to produce beautiful code in cases that hardly ever arise in
practice, while doing nothing about frequently occurring situations.
-- Donald Knuth
%
:Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable
   {bug}; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but
   well-defined set of conditions.  Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also
   {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Rimmer: So let me get this straight.  You want to fly on a magic carpet
        to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your
        freedom, and you're telling me you're completely sane?
-- Red Dwarf - 'Quarantine'
%
MAC AIRWAYS
The cashiers, flight attendants, and pilots all look the same, feel
the same and act the same.  When asked questions about the flight
they reply that you don't want to know, don't need to know, and
would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.
-- if Operating Systems were Airlines...
%
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xiv, 1; liii, 1
%
If you want a track team that will win the high jump, you find one
person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can jump one foot.
-- Frederick E. Terman
%
:propeller head: n. Used by hackers, this is syn. with {computer
   geek}.  Non-hackers sometimes use it to describe all techies.
   Prob. derives from SF fandom's tradition (originally invented by
   old-time fan Ray Faraday Nelson) of propeller beanies as fannish
   insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I fear to love you, Sweet, because Love's the ambassador of loss.
-- Francis Thompson, To Olivia
%
This instrument [T.V.] can teach, inform, and even enlighten. But only
    as far as humans are willing to use it to those ends.
-- Edward R. Murrow
%
A communist is a person who publicly airs his dirty Lenin.
-- Jack Pomeroy
%
KNOB
  Erm... protruding object designed for easy grip to umm... See
  Innuendo
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
There is exactly one dogma - and you're looking at it.
-- Steve Gardner
%
Q: "I've never eaten before, what do I ask for?" Data: "The choice
of meal is determined by individual taste." Q: "What do you like?"
Data: "Although I do not require sustenence, I occasionally injest
semi-organic  nutrient suspension in a silcone-based liquid medium."
Q: "Is it good?" Data: "It would be more apporpriate to say it is
good for *me*, as it lubricates  my biofunctions." Q: "That doesn't
sound very appealing."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
"He thought he saw a Buffalo
  Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
    His sister's husband's niece.
'Unless you leave this house,' he said,
        'I'll send for the Police!'"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno"
%
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful
hints for the better ordering of the universe.
-- Alphonso the Wise (1221-1284)
%
After meat comes mustard; or, like money to a starving man at sea,
when there are no victuals to be bought with it.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. viii
%
Perhaps you are just different.  It's not a sin you know.  Though you may
  have heard otherwise.
-- Tam Elbrum, "Tin Man,"  stardate 43779.3.
%
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
     and Supreme Court Justice, 1804
-- Samuel Chase, signer of the Declaration of Independence,
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Supplemental.  With the Phoenix in close formation, we
  are proceeding directly to Starbase 211."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44431.7
%
What are the odds in such absolute duplication of life forms in
another galaxy?
The chances are very much against it.
-- Kirk and Spock, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4657.5
%
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of
values.
-- Edward Abbey
%
LAUNCELOT: I am, sir. I am a Knight of King Arthur.
FATHER:    'Mm ... very nice castle, Camelot ... very good pig country....
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?
-- Steven Wright
%
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 5
%
Mad, adj.: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence ...
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I went to college--majored in philosophy. My father said, "Why don't you
 minor in communications so you can wonder out loud?" So I did. I got out of
 school, landed a job as a morning DJ on an all-philosophy radio station:
 WYMI. "Good morning, it's 8:05 on YMI. For those of you just waking
 up--what's the point, really?"
-- Mike Dugan
%
Magistrate to act on indecent show.
-- Headline
%
They have cheveril consciences that will stretch.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subsect. 3
%
The die is cast.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.)
%
This never would've happened if I were captain.
-- Riker
%
Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
-- Emma Goldman
%
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
-- Will Rogers
%
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
 mind to correlate all its contents.   We live on a placid island of ignorance
 in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
 voyage far.  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
 harmed us little;  but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
 will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
 therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the
 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
%
This guy was puffing his cigar in my petite flower face! So I said, "If I
 wanted to shorten my life--I'd date ya!"
-- Judy Tenuta
%
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw;
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite;
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle ii, Line 274
%
Never justify anything. If it needs justification, it's already wrong.
-- Solomon Short
%
A very beadle to a humorous sigh.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Just 3 points- WHERE am I, WHO am I, & who're YOU? The Rani!
-- 7th Dr.
%
:bagbiting: adj. Having the quality of a {bagbiter}.  "This
   bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative
   number."  Compare {losing}, {cretinous}, {bletcherous},
   `barfucious' (under {barfulous}) and `chomping' (under
   {chomp}).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    Greenpeace researchers
Two, one to put in the new one and one to recycle the old one.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.
-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
-- The Garden, ii
%
handhold: what two climbers do during long bivouacs on narrow ledges.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Beat on the Brat With a Baseball Bat...
-- Ramones
%
Sex is the poor man's opera.
-- G. B. Shaw
%
We once were as you are.  Spears and arrows.  There came a time when
  our weapons grew faster than our wisdom, and we almost destroyed
  ourselves.  We learned from this to make a rule during all our travels
  never to cause the same to happen to other worlds ... just as a man
  must grow in his own way and his own time.
-- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8.
%
:stir-fried random: alt. `stir-fried mumble' n. Term used for the
   best dish of many of those hackers who can cook.  Consists of
   random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices.  Tasty and
   economical.  See {random}, {great-wall}, {ravs}, {{laser
   chicken}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {mumble}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
if you get into a custody fight over a hunting dog.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!
He can't do that, said the King, or else he'd have been here first.
-- Lewis Carroll
%
'Two drunken souls trying to save each other, but they can't
 save themselves.'
-- Tom Clancy
%
To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an
 idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only
 by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
%
Yow!  Are we laid back yet?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Don't worry...I've taken this drug a thousand times...
-- Famous Last Words
%
One thing men can do better than women: read a map. Men read maps better.
 'Cause only a male mind could conceive of one inch equaling 100 miles.
-- Roseanne Barr Arnold
%
No man in the world has more courage than
 the man who can stop after eating one peanut.
-- Channing Pollock
%
So far from God, so close to the United States
-- Old Mexican proverb
%
:MEGO: /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/ [`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine
   Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman
   Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'.  1. n. A {handwave} intended to
   confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because the
   listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going
   on.  MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and
   contains a high proportion of {TLA}s.  2. excl. An appropriate
   response to MEGO tactics.  3. Among non-hackers, often refers not
   to behavior that causes the eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing
   reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of
   technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Years ago, I was musing with a biologist friend about the curse
Jesus H. Christ! and asked idly, I wonder what the 'H' stands for?
and my friend said Haploid.        I nearly died laughing.
-- Kathryn Huxtable
%
The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
-- Aristotle, Rhetoric
%
A manager does the thing right.  A leader does the right thing.
-- Anonymous (the great Greek philosopher)
%
I don't think Christians should use birth control.   You consummate your
 marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies.
    health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women
-- Randall Terry, one of the people behind the current campaign to blockade
%
 You guys are making fun of me, aren't you?
-- ?
-- Buckaroo Banzai
%
NOVEMBER
  Oh come on, that was months ago, it's pointless dwelling on it now.
  The word November is actually Latin. Nov means nine, indicating the
  ninth month, which is due to the guy who made up all the months
  having a bit of a problem with adding up. Ember is something to do
  with open fireplaces, which are popular in some parts of the
  Northern Hemisphere, making the name of this month hemispherist, of
  course.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
'Tis the mind that makes the body rich.
-- William Shakespeare
%
The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of us who
trying to cook a shoe.
-- are fortunate enough never to have been one like watching Charlie Chaplin
%
Cut and come again.
-- George Crabbe (1754-1832)
-- Tales, Tale vii, The Widow's Tale
%
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply
indifferent.
-- John Hughes Holmes
%
We must love one another or die.
-- W.H. Auden
-- September 1, 1939
%
Tis better to delete one flame than to survive copy buffer terrorism.
-- I.  Net
%
Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to
a repetition of the same life from its beginnings, only
asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to
correct some faults.
-- Ben Franklin, "Autobiography"
%
if you've ever lost a tooth opening a beer bottle.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purpose.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
If you want to be loved, be loveable.
-- Ovid
%
Ignorance is never out of style.  It was in fashion yesterday,
it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow.
-- Franklin K. Dane
%
:virtual: [via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from
   the term `virtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative
   to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects
   (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory)
   created by a computer system to help the system control access to
   shared resources.  2. Simulated; performing the functions of
   something that isn't really there.  An imaginative child's doll may
   be a virtual playmate.  Oppose {real}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Data: "We are through the perimeter, sir."
Riker: "That was too easy."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and if that isn't
enough in the second half, you give what's left.
-- Yogi Berra
%
:GFR: /G-F-R/ vt. [ITS: from `Grim File Reaper', an ITS and LISP
   Machine utility] To remove a file or files according to some
   program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially
   one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce name-space
   clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape).  Often
   generalized to pieces of data below file level.  "I used to have
   his phone number, but I guess I {GFR}ed it."  See also
   {prowler}, {reaper}.  Compare {GC}, which discards only
   provably worthless stuff.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The burden of the desert of the sea.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xxi, 1
%
I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a
 network executive or a politician.
-- Marty Feldman
%
    people at a London Vegans meeting
a light bulb?
All thirty. Well, actually it's only one, but he has to wait
at least half an hour while the others read out all the
announcements.
-- How many
-- does it take to change
%
Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred
therewith.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xv, 17
%
Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his
understanding.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%
All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an
 unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
-- Pat Paulsen
%
The tall, the wise, the reverend head
Must lie as low as ours.
-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
-- Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book ii, Hymn 63
%
Millions long for immortality who do not know
what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- Susan Ertz
%
:flat-file: adj. A {flatten}ed representation of some database or
   tree or network structure as a single file from which the
   structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in {flat-ASCII}
   form.  See also {sharchive}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Anyone who has got a book collection/library and a garden
wants for nothing.
-- Cicero
%
Future, n.  That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our
friends are true, and our happiness is assured.
-- Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diver,--
One, when a beggar he prepares to plunge;
One, when a prince he rises with his pearl?
Festus, I plunge.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Paracelsus, Part i
%
Non-Alcoholic Beer
-- Oxymoron
%
There were few things more useless than a unloaded pistol
-- 'Without Remorse' by Tom Clancy
%
:BITNET: /bit'net/ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] n.
   Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see {network,
   the}).  The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and
   VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate
   using 80-character {{EBCDIC}} card images (see {eighty-column
   mind}); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of
   third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/{RFC}-822 world with
   annoying regularity.  BITNET is also notorious as the apparent home
   of {BIFF}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,
Sitting in a pleasant shade
Which a grove of myrtles made.
-- Richard Barnfield (1574-1627)
-- Address to the Nightingale
%
Have a good trip! I hope you enjoy your absence more than I will.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%
Luke  "I don't believe it!"
Kenobi  "That is why you fail."
-- Star Wars
%
 A little ignorance can go a long way.
-- Gerrold's Law
%

-- Famous clowns Bozo, Clarabell, Ronald McDonald, Homey and Clinton.
%
STATIONERY
  Objects such as pens, pencils, stapler and sticky-tape. These have
  been studied over the last few years, and it has now been confirmed
  that they are able to move around a house or office on their own.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxvi, 15
%
Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more sanitary due to
limited circulation.
-- Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
%
:spool file: n. Any file to which data is {spool}ed to await the
   next stage of processing.  Especially used in circumstances where
   spooling the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two
   devices or pieces of software.  For example, when you send mail
   under UNIX, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a
   transport {demon}'s attentions.  This is borderline techspeak.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 =^)
-- SMILEY
%
There is one tactical principle that remains unchanged.  It is:to so
use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of destruction on
the enemy, in the minimum time.
-- Gen. George S. Patton, 4/14/44,
-- First Letter of Instruction to the Third Army
%
 You've reached the B&D Hotline.  All our operators are tied up
 right now, so if you leave a name, number, a list of
 transgressions, and bark like a dog, we'll get right back to you
 with your penance.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
:shift left (or right) logical: [from any of various machines'
   instruction sets] 1. vi. To move oneself to the left (right).  To
   move out of the way.  2. imper. "Get out of that (my) seat!  You
   can shift to that empty one to the left (right)."  Often
   used without the `logical', or as `left shift' instead of
   `shift left'.  Sometimes heard as LSH /lish/, from the {PDP-10}
   instruction set.  See {Programmer's Cheer}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"What are your general areas of interests?"
"Aerodynamics.     Designer jeans.  Roofing supplies.  That sort of thing."
"What sort of thing?"
"You know, liquidity.  Point-of-sale.  Margin accounts.  Fast lane."
-- Doonesbury
%
There will not be a murky ending.
-- President George Bush, prior to invading Iraq
%
Word Processor - Software that magically transforms its user into a
   professional author.
-- From the Government Computer News, November 21, 1988 Issue
%
For still the new transcends the old
In signs and tokens manifold;
Slaves rise up men; the olive waves,
With roots deep set in battle graves!
-- John G. Whittier (1807-1892)
-- The Chapel of the Hermits
%
I never was an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti slavery,
but I try to judge farely & honestly and it become patent to my mind
early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at
peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.
-- Ulysses S. Grant, Letter to Elihu B. Washburne, August 30, 1863
%
"Almost all Eskimo jokes have the same punch line:
 'You know, he fell through the ice and died.'"
-- Larry Marder
%
We have met the enemy and they are us and you are me
and we are all together
-- Walt Kelly, Lennon, and the Beatles
%
It is the time you have wasted for your rose
that makes your rose so important.
-- Saint-Exupery
%
Almost anything  derogatory you could say about today's software
design would be accurate.
-- Kenneth E. Iverson
%
Kor: "In the meantime, keep the people in order."
Kirk: "Or I will be killed."
Kor: "That is exactly right.  You will be killed."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3201.7
%
There is no discharge in that war.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes viii, 8
%
Language works the way it does because it does.
-- John Ciardi
%
It is said that God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.
-- Francis M. Voltaire (1694-1778)
-- Letter to M. le Riche, Feb. 6, 1770
%
You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me
from your own life.  May it all turn out to your happiness.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that
they don't want to discourage it completely.
-- Franklin P. Jones
%
The balance of power.
-- Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745)
-- Speech, 1741
%
:rain dance: n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a
   hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be
   accomplished.  This especially applies to reseating printed circuit
   boards, reconnecting cables, etc.  "I can't boot up the machine.
   We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance."  2. Any arcane
   sequence of actions performed with computers or software in order
   to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals
   that include both an {incantation} or two and physical activity
   or motion.  Compare {magic}, {voodoo programming}, {black
   art}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a dead chicken}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
-- Parkinson's First Law
%
...[what] interesting word usements I structure...
-- Steve Martin, L.A. Story
%
Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope.
If he knows anything, he shouldn't
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
The question is not, can they reason?  Nor, can they talk?  But, can
they suffer?
-- Jeremy Bentham, philosopher and animal rights activist
%
A dropped tool will land where it will do the most damage.
-- The Law of Selective Gravitation
%
Bookkeeper: Mr. Goldwyn, our files are bulging with paperwork we no
      longer need.  May I have your permission to destroy all
       records before 1945?
Goldwyn:    Certainly. Just be sure to keep a copy of everything.
-- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer
%
When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
-- East African Proverb
%
:demo: /de'moh/ [short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To
   demonstrate a product or prototype.  A far more effective way of
   inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs,
   especially when important people are watching.  2. n. The act of
   demoing.  "I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof interface;
   how does it work again?"  3. n. Esp. as `demo version', can
   refer either to an early, barely-functional version of a program
   which can be used for demonstration purposes as long as the
   operator uses *exactly* the right commands and skirts its numerous
   bugs, deficiencies, and unimplemented portions, or to a special
   version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which
   is distributed at little or no cost to the user for enticement
   purposes.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Thinking of you is like breathing--it comes automatically.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
You're a very strong woman... Though this would be a traumatic experience
that you would never forget, I think that you would be very successful in
life.
                   why he would want her to have the baby if she were raped by
                   her father, 10/18/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Senator Dan Quayle telling an 11-year-old girl
%
 If you tell the boss you were late for work because you
had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
-- Cannon's Comment
%
Vertigo is something other than fear of falling.  It is the voice
 of the emptyness below us...the desire to fall, against which,
 terrified, we defend ourselves.
-- Milan Kundera
%
Data: "Neural connection is complete.  I have access to the Borg subspace
  signal.  Processing...processing."
Troi: "Data..."
Data: "Standby.  Processing...processing."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Its Freedom. You just happen to be a powerless slave to it.
-- found on the door to room 03, House L, Duke University, 1 Jan 97
%
I have little experience of marriage myself,sir,having only been
married once.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
    But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important
matter.  We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of
our ruts.  We had put down our passage money--booked a sailing to
Bombay.  This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence.  Until
one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always
ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation),
there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless
ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits
oneself, the providence moves too.  A whole stream of events issues
from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen
incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have
dreamt would have come his way.  I have learned a deep respect for one
of Goethe's couplets:
    Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
    Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
There was a jolly miller once,
  Lived on the river Dee;
He worked and sung from morn till night:
  No lark more blithe than he.
-- Isaac Bickerstaff (1735-1787)
-- Love in a Village, Act i, Sc. 2
%
Can you remember when you didn't want to sleep? Isn't it inconceivable? I
 guess the definition of adulthood is that you want to sleep ...

 Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow
 up--'cause they're lookin' for ideas.
-- Paula Poundstone
%
The hand that rocks the cradle can also cradle a rock.
-- Feminist saying, circa 1968-1972
%
His style has the desperate jauntiness of a orchestra fiddling away
for dear life on a sinking ship.
-- Edmund Wilson
%
INTRODUCTION, n.  A social ceremony invented by the devil for the
gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies.  The
introduction attains its most malevolent development in this century,
being, indeed, closely related to our political system.  Every
American being the equal of every other American, it follows that
everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the
right to introduce without request or permission.  The Declaration of
Independence should have read thus:

        "We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are
    created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
    inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to
    make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an
    incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the
    liberty to introduce persons to one another without first
    ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and
    the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of
    strangers."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Say first, of God above or man below,
What can we reason but from what we know?
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle i, Line 17
%
A guy is standing in front of his locker at the country club admiring a
 golf ball he has in his hand. One of his golfing buddies says to him,
 "What'd you do, get some new golf balls?"

 And the guy says, "Would you believe that this is the greatest golf ball
 ever made. You can't lose it. You hit it into the rough and it whistles.
 You hit it into the woods and a bell inside goes off. If you drive it into
 a lake, a big burst of steam shoots up six feet in the air for two
 minutes."

 And his friend says, "That's great. Where did you get it?"

 And the guy says, "I found it."
-- Soupy Sales
%
Ambition has but one reward for all:
A little power,
a little transient fame,
a grave to rest in,
and a fading name.
-- William Winter
%
... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks.  Generally, their
procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as
to infest the waters.  I would estimate that the primary food source of
sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making
documentaries.  Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly
listless.  The general shark attitude seems to be: Oh God, another
documentary.    So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking,
under the guise of Scientific Research.  We know very little about the
effect of electricity on sharks, the narrator will say, in a deeply
scientific voice.    That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White
in the testicles with a cattle prod.    The divers keep this kind of
thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and
then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very
dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all
along.
-- Dave Barry, The Wonders of Sharks on TV
%
SON: Have you ever smoked opium?

 FATHER: Certainly not! Gives you constipation. Dreadful binding effect.
 Ever see those pictures of the wretched poet Samuel T. Coleridge? Green
 around the gills. And a stranger to the lavatory. Avoid opium.
-- John Mortimer
%
 The trouble with most jobs is the job holder's
 resemblence to being one of a sled dog team. No one
 gets a change of scenery except the lead dog.
-- Moer's truism
%
If they don't, the lights stay off in Baghdad.
-- SD Cheney
%
Tush! tush! fear boys with bugs.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Taming of the Shrew
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
- "The entire world is appalled by the dreadful act"
             Javier Perez de Cuellar (United Nations) (peacelover@un.uucp)
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
I paid too much for it, but its worth it.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
%
He's a man out there in the blue,
ridin' on a smile and a shoeshine...
a salesman has got to dream, boys.
-- Arthur Miller
%
He knows not when to be silent who knows not when to speak.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 930
%
Don't SAY things. What you ARE stands over you the
while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you
say to the contrary.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-- Social Aims
%
This guy has blown me off for the last time.
-- Geordi
%
His red right hand.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 174
%
Only choose in marriage a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she
 were a man.
-- Joseph Joubert
%
I will not be as those who spend the day in complaining of the head-ache,
and the night in drinking the wine that gives the headache.
-- Goethe
%
1. Never draw what you can copy.
2. Never copy what you can trace.
3. Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
-- Wallace Wood's Rule of Drawing
%
What sought they thus afar?
  Bright jewels of the mine,
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
  They sought a faith's pure shrine.
-- Felicia D. Hemas (1794-1835)
-- Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers
%
:Stupids: n. Term used by {samurai} for the {suit}s who
   employ them; succinctly expresses an attitude at least as common,
   though usually better disguised, among other subcultures of
   hackers.  There may be intended reference here to an SF story
   originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark
   Clifton's "Star, Bright".  In it, a super-genius child
   classifies humans into a very few `Brights' like herself, a huge
   majority of `Stupids', and a minority of `Tweens', the merely
   ordinary geniuses.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My idea of heaven is eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
-- Sydney Smith
%
    Scorpios
Why do you want to know? Are you a cop?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart
dances under coarse wool.
-- Elias Root Beadle
%
Order is the first requisite of liberty.
-- Georg Wihelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
%
Man was created to complete the horse.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Arm'd at point exactly, cap-a-pe.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
-- Woodrow Wilson
%
Whenever people say we mustn't be sentimental, you can take it they are
about to do something cruel.  And, if they add, we must be realistic, they
mean they are going to make money out of it.
-- Brigid Brophy
%
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord,
 make my enemies ridiculous."  And God granted it.
-- Voltaire
%
vast void of nothingness.  A small status indicator reads "Condition
green".
-- All of the sensor screens show the same thing endless stars and a
%
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Envy
Rath
Pride
Lust
-- St. Thomas Aquinas' Seven Deadly Sins
%
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely get your
Feet wet.  Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
%
All the magick of creation exists within a single, tiny seed.
-- Magi
%
The Husband Defense
-- Female-Only Defense 03
%
Now, the first words out of your mouth are the most important. You may
  want to start with something like this here. You are the most beautiful
  woman in the galaxy. but that might not work."
"Yes! Yes, it would."
You don't know how long I've wanted to tell you that.
"But you were afraid."
Yes.
"Of me?"
Of us. Of what we might become.
-- Riker and Guinan, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8
%
A guilty conscience never feels secure.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 617
%
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is
trying to be funny.
-- Guy Davenport
%
On Siamese Fighting Fish:  "They're beautiful, they're elegant, they're vicious
as hell...there's a real life lesson here somewhere."
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never
nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with
intellectual food.
-- Dr. I. Watts
%
You look at a statue of Justice and get disappointed that the scales
aren't what and where you wanted them to be.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
Access Time:
The time between the instant at which information is called for, and
the instant at which management expects the final report.
-- Computing Definition
%
Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible
 suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
-- James Thurber
%
See what will happen if you don't stop biting your fingernails?
-- Will Rogers, to his niece on seeing the Venus de Milo.
%
Good manners are the settled medium of social, as
specie is of commercial, life; returns are equally expected
for both.
-- Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773)
-- Letters to his Son (1774) 25 December 1753
%
Abuse:  the bitter clamour of two evil tongues.
-- William Shakespeare
%
All things good to know are difficult to learn.
-- Greek Proverb
%
Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched
only by its ingenuity in destroying itself.
-- The 7th Doctor Who
%
Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea,
and that was wrong.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- Sybil, Book iv, Chap. v
%
Catch the wind, see it spin, sail away, live the day way up high in
 the sky.
-- Jimmy Page and Robert Plant
%
Though every prospect pleases,
  And only man is vile.
-- Reginald Heber (1783-1826)
-- Missionary Hymn
%
Lewd fellows of the baser sort.
-- New Testament
-- Acts xvii, 5
%
Modestus said of Regulus that he was "the biggest rascal that walks
upon two legs."
-- Pliny the Younger (61-105 AD)
-- Letters, Book i, Letter v, 14
%
Libertarian Organization
-- Oxymoron
%
 (In the background can be heard springs creaking and various
 moans; husky, soft female voice is best:)  Hi...  You've just
 reached Sharon's Pleasure Palace.  We're all busy as I'm sure
 you can tell, but when we're done...  we'll get back to you in
 whatever way we can.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
I never saw a more dreadful battle in my born days.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iv, Chap. viii
%
To be, or not to be: that is the question...
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
%
Barak?  That's a stupid name for a barbarian.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Not necessarily.  I *could* be arguing in my spare time.
-- Monty Pithon
%
Error buffer overflow - Too many errors encountered.
 Additional
            errors may not be displayed or recorded.
-- WindowError: 103
%
ENVELOPE, n.  The coffin of a document; the scabbard of a bill; the
husk of a remittance; the bed-gown of a love-letter.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
We're getting a lot of government these days, but we'd probably be worse
 off if we were getting as much as we're paying for.
-- Olin Miller
%
Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.
-- Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896)
%
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
-- W. H. Auden
%
No, but 11 other guys did.
-- Gordie Howe, former hockey player,
-- asked if he'd ever broken his nose playing hockey
%
:Right Thing: n. That which is *compellingly* the correct or
   appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc.  Often capitalized, always
   emphasized in speech as though capitalized.  Use of this term often
   implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree.  "What's the
   right thing for LISP to do when it sees `(mod a 0)'?  Should
   it return `a', or give a divide-by-0 error?"  Oppose
   {Wrong Thing}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The sound of laughter has always seemed to me the most civilized
music in the universe.
-- Peter Ustinov
%
Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick
%
I deserve respect for the things I did not do.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
If I had a Q-TIP, I could prevent th'collapse of NEGOTIATIONS!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
A cucumber never suffers from performance anxiety.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
Nobody is ever really ready for anything. If they were, there would be no point
in living through it.
-- Solomon Short
%
HISTORIAN, n.  A broad-gauge gossip.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward.
-- William E. Davidsen
%
Once you've seen the face of god, You see that same face on everyone you meet.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Information flows efficiently through organizations, except that
bad news encounters high impedance in flowing upwards.
-- Paul Gray
%
Never needlessly disturb a thing at rest. [Quieta non movere]
-- John Randolph
%
if you've ever shot a deer from inside your house.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
-- Austin Phelps
%
I liked him [Spock] better before he died!
-- McCoy,  "The Final Frontier,"  stardate 8451.1.
%
When I was at school we used to line up four or five of his sort
  and use 'em as a toast rack.
-- George : Dish and Dishonesty
%
The whole point of this sentence is to make clear
what the whole point of this sentence is.
-- Douglas R Hofstadter
%
You're one to tell me what I can and can't sense.
-- Troi
%
 <&&> message concerning rubber chickens
-- SMILEY
%
:furrfu: // [USENET] excl. Written-only equivalent of
   "Sheesh!"; it is, in fact, "sheesh" modified by {rot13}.
   Evolved in mid-1992 as a response to notably silly postings
   repeating urban myths on the USENET newsgroup
   alt.folklore.urban, after some posters complained that
   "Sheesh!" as a response to {newbie}s was being overused.  See
   also {FOAF}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    vampires
None, they *like* it in the dark.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- Virtue
%
I went to this restaurant last night that was set up like a big buffet
in the shape of an Ouija board.  You'd think about what kind of food
you want, and the table would move across the floor to it.
-- Steven Wright
%
You have to have a physical before you get into the Army. A doctor looks in
 one ear, another doctor looks in the other ear, and if they can't see each
 other, you're in. And if they can see each other, you become an MP.
-- Joe E. Brown
%
Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it.
-- Jack Wagner
%
Whatever you do kid, always serve it with a little dressing.
-- George M. Cohan (to Spencer Tracy)
%
She hugg'd the offender, and forgave the offence:
Sex to the last.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Cymon and Iphigenia, Line 367
%
Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
-- Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #6
%
Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
-- George S. Patton, Jr.
%
    Unix system vendors
None. All of the light bulbs you have are 'standard variants'
and as such won't fit your particular implementation of the
socket. (However you do have the source code for your socket,
so .....)
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't
  have to experience it.
-- Max Frisch
%
The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian's
readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of
some pieces of wood.  Indeed, the Russians' predisposition for quiet
reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led
the field for many years in both chess and ax murders.  It is well
known that as early as 1970, the U.S.S.R., aware of what a defeat at
Reykjavik would do to national prestige, implemented a vigorous program
of preparation and incentive.  Every day for an entire year, a team of
psychologists, chess analysts and coaches met with the top three
Russian grand masters and threatened them with a pointy stick.  That
these tactics proved fruitless is now a part of chess history and a
further testament to the American way, which provides that if you want
something badly enough, you can always go to Iceland and get it from
the Russians.
-- Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973
%
William, this is not your concern.
"It is now, you're about to commit a murder."
It isn't murder, it's justice.
-- Yuta and Riker, "The Vengeance Factor", stardate 43421.9
%
Poodles `N Noodles
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
Q: "I would've died back then had it not been for you."
Picard: "We all make mistakes."
-- "Qpid", Stardate unknown
%
His bark is worse than his bite.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- Jacula Prudentum
%
An ill weed grows apace.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- An Humorous Day's Mirth
%
A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world.
-- Mohammed
%
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
  The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
  And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 1
%
Your stupidity, Allen, is simply not up to par.

Yours is.
-- Dave Mack (mack@inco.UUCP)
-- Allen Gwinn (allen@sulaco.sigma.com), in alt.flame
%
Even water tastes bad when taken on doctor's orders.
-- MURPHY'S FLU PHILOSOPHY
%
if the QVC operator recognizes your voice.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Synch code - SOS from the Titanic
-- Data communications glossary
%
Hiya, Doc What's cookin'?
-- Data
%
Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%
'Is stuffy inside tagline.'
-- Confucius Says
%
You may be certain that age is galloping upon you when, after a feminine
 voice over the telephone says, "Do you know who this is?" you say, "No,"
 and hang up the receiver.
-- Franklin P. Adams
%
"It's no longer a blue world, Max.  Where can we go?"
"Argentina?"
-- Yellow Submarine
%
Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book v, Line 13
%
Lying lips are abomination to the Lord; but they that deal truly are his
delight.
A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger.
He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto
him.
Be not a witness against thy neighbor without cause; and deceive not with
thy lips.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue.
-- Proverbs, some selections from the Jewish Scripture
%
Love is staying awake all night with a sick child. Or a very healthy adult.
-- David Frost
%
    stock brokers
MY GOD!! IT BURNT OUT!! SELL ALL MY G.E. STOCK NOW!!!!!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Personally, I should like to see all Boy Scouts drilled.
I look upon the Movement as a further savings of the situation
for the nation in the future, and that it will pave the way
directly for its national service.
-- Lord Baden-Powell letter to Lord Meath (1910)
%
There are a lot of reasons to skydive.  It does take your mind off your
problems.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
 >:-I net.startrek
-- SMILEY
%
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been
convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
-- Aristotle
%
                           (####)
                         (#######)
                      (#########)
 BART!               (#########)         /
   \                (#########)         /
    __&__          (#########)
   /     \        (#########)   |\/\/\/|     /\ /\  /\               /\
  |       |      (#########)    |      |     | V  \/  \---.    .----/  \----.
  |   (o (o)      (o)(o)(##)    |      |      \_        /       \          /
  C   .---_)    ,_C     (##)    | (o)(o)       (o)(o)  <__.   .--\ (o)(o) /__.
   | .(***     /____,   (##)    C      _)     _C         /     \     ()     /
   |  \__/       \     (#)       | ,___|     /____,   )  \      >   (C_)   <
   /_____\        |    |         |   /         \     /----'    /___\____/___
  /_____/ \       OOOOOO        /____\          ooooo             /|    |\
 /         \     /      \      /      \        /     \           /        \

-- (#########)  Hey Man Don't have a COW!
%
Take out the word 'Quayle' and insert the word 'Bush' wherever it
appears, and that's the crap I took for eight years.  Wimp.
Sycophant.  Lap dog.  Poop.  Lightweight.  Boob.  Squirrel.  Asshole.
George Bush.
-- President George Bush
%
Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was
born so long ago.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as
 rather silly.   I would rather use them to mimic something better.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%

-- No wants no needs? We weren't meant for that.
%
MacDuff: "Memory or no, it seems clear that you and I were born for battle...
  more so than the others."
Worf: "I thought this as well."
MacDuff: "It's conceivable that that is the very reason why we have been
  assigned to this vessel."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
heading: going to the latrine.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Walking in a forest between two hedges of ferns transfigured by autumn -
that is a triumph. What are ovations and applause beside it?
-- E.M. Cioran
%
A joke is a very serious thing.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
Freedom is not an imposition.
-- Rush Limbaugh's truth #11
%
:Lions Book: n. "Source Code and Commentary on UNIX level 6",
   by John Lions.  The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire
   source listing of the UNIX Version 6 kernel, and (2) a commentary
   on the source discussing the algorithms.  These were circulated
   internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976--77,
   and were, for years after, the *only* detailed kernel
   documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs.  Because
   Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the
   kernel, the Lions book was never formally published and was only
   supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees (it is
   still possible to get a Bell Labs reprint of the book by sending a
   copy of a V6 source license to the right person at Bellcore, but
   *real* insiders have the UNSW edition).  In spite of this, it
   soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early UNIX
   hackers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 B-(8 Sir Robin Day (a British BBC TV presenter, famed for his grumpy
countenance, and who wears glasses and a bow tie)
-- SMILEY
%
Sing, riding 's a joy! For me I ride.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- The last Ride together, vii
%
"Addison, what are we going to do?"
  "Me, I'm examining the major Western religions. I'm looking for
   something that's soft on morality, generous with holidays, and has a
   short initiation period."
-- Dave and Maddie on Moonlighting
%
When a man tells me he's going to put all his cards on the table, I always
 look up his sleeve.
-- Lord Leslie Hore-Belisha
%
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
-- Douglas Adams
%
    When this grey world crumbles like a cake / I'll be
hanging from the hope / That I'll never see that recipe again.
-- They Might Be Giants
-- It's Not My Birthday
%
All the prophets of doom can always find room in a world full of worry
 and fear: tipped cigarettes, and chemistry sets, and Rudolf the Red
 Nosed Reindeer.
-- Raymond Scum
%
CONGRESS, n.  A body of men who meet to repeal laws.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
How Can I Miss You if You Won't Go Away?
-- Fortune's Fictitious Country Song Title of the Week
%
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
railroad tracks.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, i
%
True love is better than anything, except cough drops.
-- The Princess Bride (book), by William Goldman
%
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein
%
I took an economy flight. There wasn't any movie, but they flew low over
 drive-ins.
-- Red Buttons
%
Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
%
Rimmer: The lamb was a bit of a flop, though.
Lister: The lamb? Everyone thought the lamb was the cheese! And that lemon
Lister: Yeah, I wanted to try some on my athlete's foot!
-- meringue pie, man what was in that?
-- Rimmer: I thought you liked that you brought some back.
-- Red Dwarf - 'Better Than Life'
%
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew v, 14
%
Of what use is political liberty to those who have no bread?  It is of
value only to ambitious theorists and politicians.
-- Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)
%
I am convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal
second base than an automobile
-- Tom C. Clark
%

-- Mary had a little RAM too bad she couldn't run Windoze.
%
I have gained my experience.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
To mortal men great loads allotted be;
But of all packs no pack like poverty.
-- Herrick
%
Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed
by preparation, foolish preparations.
-- Jane Austen
%
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,--
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Oenone
%
I hope there's some respect and dignity for things I did not do.
                   allegations of involvement with Paula Parkinson,
                   8/23/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Senator Dan Quayle defending himself against
%
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and
a courageous person afterward.
-- Jean Paul Richter
%
if you use your mailbox to hold up the clothesline.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Eat to live, live not to eat.
-- Ben Franklin
%
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for youin
your private
heart is true for all men- that is genius.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
A study of the science of technology defines what is possible; a
study of the economics of technology establishes which of the
possibilities is practical and useful.
-- Montgomery Phister
%
Everybody's got plans...until they get hit.
-- Mike Tyson, heavyweight champ on plans released by Tyrell Biggs' camp
-- on how they would defeat the champ.
%
The one item you want is never the one on sale.
-- Finman's Principle
%
When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, 'Did you sleep
good?'  I said 'No, I made a few mistakes.'
-- Steven Wright
%
No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in
 session.
-- Lysander Spooner
%

-- Writing to Washington won't help he's dead!
%
Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.
-- Edward Abbey
%
All conversations with a potato should be conducted in private.
-- Wilner's Observation
%
To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is above the force
of human nature.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Fabius
%
The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected;
their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately, and
therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always
observable that those who are combined to destroy a people's
liberties practice every art to poisn their morals.
-- Samuel Adams, 1772
%
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which
the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost
all sense and meaning.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions
of his personality to the world he lives in.
-- Amy Lowell
%
The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
-- John Vance Cheney
%
The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is
getting ready to skin you.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
    pro-lifers
Nine: four to block the entrance to the room, four to
hold up pictures of burnt-out bulbs, and one to try and
convince the person with the new bulb to let the room
stay dark.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I'm not the heroic type.  I was beaten up by Quakers.
-- Woody Allen, Sleeper
%
"Who was that?"
"Who--the man with the five heads ant the elderberry bush full of kippers?"
"Yes."
"I don't know.  Just someone."
"Ah."
-- Arthur and Ford, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
The world is not thy friend nor the world's law.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.
-- Ovid
%
    lawyers
None, lawyers only screw us.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Honesty is the best policy and spinach is the best vegetable.
-- "Popeye"
%
To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.
-- Bess Myerson
%
    SAS programmers
It all depends on whether they can read the manuals or
not. That needs to be in there somewhere as a qualifier!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
"A man can do something for peace without having to
 jump into politics.  Each man has inside him a
 basic decency and goodness.  If he listens to it
 and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what
 it is the world needs most."
-- Pablo Casals
%
Hypotheses are not to be multiplied without necessity.
-- Occam's Razor
%
My brother is an only child.
-- Bennett Cerf
%
Let none admire
That riches grow in hell: that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 690
%
Nobody knows what goes between his cold toes and his warm ears.
-- Roy Harper
%
There is only one nature - the division into science and engineering is a
human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human
failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.
-- Bill Wulf
%
And make each day a critic on the last.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Criticism, Part iii, Line 12
%
The technology we know the least about APPEARS to be the most
attractive.
-- Amdahl customer speaking of CMOS and Parallel Sysplex
%
Lofty designs must close in like effects.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- A Grammarian's Funeral
%
Distress, n.:
 A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
%
    law professors
Hell, you need 250 just to lobby for the research grant.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
    USENET users
Six. One to point out the spelling (you illiterate
idiot!), one to flame: GET THIS GARBAGE OFF THE NET!!!,
one to flame the flamer, one to ask to be removed from
the news group, one to ask for a copy of the last
message :-) , and one to ask how to unROT the joke.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a ligth bulb?
%
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell
- you see, I have friends in both places.
-- Mark Twain
%
He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Housework can kill you if done right.
-- Erma Bombeck
%
Your data is your business. When you can't afford to be wrong, you
 put it on a mainframe.
-- Nick Donofrio
%
Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.
-- Spanish proverb
%
You play the way you practice.
-- Pop Warner
%
If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its
 laws.   Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people
 most of the time.
-- George Gerbner
%
The biggest myth, as measured by square footage, is that as you grow older,
 you gradually lose your interest in sex. This myth probably got started
 because younger people seem to want to have sex with each other at every
 available opportunity including traffic lights, whereas older people are
 more likely to reserve their sexual activities for special occasions such
 as the installation of a new pope.

 But does this mean that, as an aging person, you're no longer capable of
 feeling the lust that you felt as an 18-year-old? Not at all! You're
 attracted just as strongly as you ever were toward 18-year-olds! The
 problem is that everybody your own age seems repulsive.
-- Dave Barry
%
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes
cheated than not to trust.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
MONEY, n.  A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we
part with it.  An evidence of culture and a passport to polite
society.  Supportable property.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
    presidential candidates
Less and less all the time.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the
neglected opportunity.
-- Omar Idn Al-Halif
%
Any ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforth
have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
-- Augustine Birrell
%
Lord Percy...it's up to you. Either you can shut up...or you can
  have your head cut off.
-- Queenie : Chains
%
A stoic of the woods,--a man without a tear.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Gertrude of Wyoming, Part i, Stanza 23
%
BEDEVERE: Look!  It's the old man from scene 24 - what's he Doing here?
ARTHUR:   He is the keeper of the Bridge.  He asks each traveler five
          questions ...
GALAHAD:  Three questions.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
What is bred in the bone will never come out of the flesh.
-- Pilpay (or Bidpai)
-- The Two Fishermen, Chap. ii, Fable xiv
%

-- I'm not a witch doctorI'm only a folk medic.
%
Less is more.
-- Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto"
%
A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Bypass. Motorists
 are asked to be on the lookout for sixteen hardened criminals.
-- Ronnie Corbett
%
:deep magic: [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. An
   awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one
   neither generally published nor available to hackers at large (compare
   {black art}); one that could only have been composed by a true
   {wizard}.  Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of
   {OS} design used to be {deep magic}; many techniques in
   cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.
   Compare {heavy wizardry}.  Esp. found in comments of the form
   "Deep magic begins here...".  Compare {voodoo programming}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I have invented rubber food for old people with time to kill.
-- Pat McCormick
%
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
Breakthrough ideas are not from teams.
-- Hans von Ohain
%
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There 's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act. v, Sc. 1
%
I am myself indifferent honest.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
I think I may sneeze.
"A Klingon sneeze?"
Only one I know.
-- Worf and Geordi, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9
%
I love ROCK 'N ROLL!  I memorized the all WORDS to ``WIPE-OUT'' in 1965!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature,
proceed from custom.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book i, Chap. xxii, Of Custom
%
    Columbia students
Seventy-six, one to change the light bulb, fifty to protest
the light bulb's right to not change, and twenty-five to hold
a counter-protest.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit,
'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet;
Nor ever ever shall, until that I die,
For the longer I live the more fool am I.
-- "Wit and Mirth, an Antidote against Melancholy" (1684)
%
Any technical problem can be overcome given enough time and
money.
You are never given enough money.
-- Lerman's Law of Technology
-- Lerman's Corollary
%
Administration maintains the status quo.
-- Thomas L. Martin
%
    Klingons
Two, one to screw in the bulb and another to shoot him
and take the credit.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
SPIT HAPPENS
-- Sign on baby's bib
%
"...but that is another story. As far as we knew, we were
living happily everafter."
-- Royal Robbins
%
There is nothing so powerful as truth,--and often nothing so strange.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Argument on the Murder of Captain White, April 6, 1830, Vol. vi, p. 68
%
        One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
        Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many
years ago.  Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines.
Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use.  UNIX is a simple
language, easy to understand, easy to get started with.  It's great for
students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for
interchanging programs between different machines.  And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it.  We have good UNIX on
VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
      It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will
run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and
will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
        With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and
quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there.  With
is that it's all there.
-- VMS, no matter what you look for it's literally a five-foot shelf of
-- documentation if you look long enough it's there.  That's the
-- difference the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS
-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984
%
You are on the brink of destruction, Doctor.
Gods of Ragnarok, Greatest Show in the Galaxy
It's almost too horrible to think about.
-- Doctor, Ark in Space
%
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.
-- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
%
:cargo cult programming: n. A style of (incompetent) programming
   dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that
   serve no real purpose.  A cargo cult programmer will usually
   explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug
   encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason
   the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood
   (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}).

   The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions that
   grew up in the South Pacific after World War II.  The practices of
   these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and
   military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of
   the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the
   war.  Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's
   characterization of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in
   his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" (W. W. Norton
   & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Activation Energy:   The useful quantity of energy available in one cup
   of coffee.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
Let us treat men and women well;
Treat them as if they were real;
Perhaps they are.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Man was made to Mourn
%
Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
-- Mort Walker
%
"That's the trouble with godhood: it robs you of your finer judgement.
 A deity so rarely has to *pay* for his mistakes!"
-- The Midgard Serpent analyzes mythic concepts...
%
Books are burning
In the main square, and I saw there
The fire eating the text.
Books are burning
In the still air
And you know where they burn books
People are next.
-- "Books Are Burning", XTC
%
Intriguing. I did not know humans were so capable.
-- Data
%
To her, love was like the air of heaven- invisible, intangible; it
yet encircled her soul, and she knew it; for in it was her life.
-- Miss M'Intosh
%
Wine is wont to show the mind of man.
-- Theognis (c. 545 BC)
-- Maxims, Line 500
%
The judge's jokes are always funny.
-- Bloom's Seventh Law of Litigation
%
Aha! Brekkers! I could eat fourteen trays of it this morning, and
  still have room for a dolphin on toast.
-- George : Amy and Amiability
%
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas,--
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Pippa Passes, Part ii
%
If you like riding horses, consider going back to the traditional
side-saddle mode.  You will fall off far less.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as
charming as if she weren't.
-- Sacha Guitry
%
Man has a single basic choice:  to think or not, and that is the
gauge of his virtue.  Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality
use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance
of reason as an absolute.
-- not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless
-- John Galt
%
I lost a button hole today.
-- Steven Wright
%
We have to do more than just elect a new president if we truly want to
change this country."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is
no time left to change anything.
-- First Law of Corporate Planning
%
Hail fellow, well met.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- My Lady's Lamentation
%
Give him an inch and he'll screw you.
-- Dave Farber
%
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart;
for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
-- James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name" 1961
%
Have you ever debugged machine code over the telephone?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
:fix: n.,v. What one does when a problem has been reported too many
   times to be ignored.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I drink to make other people interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan
%
LaForge: "Well, she's a little slow, but she'll certainly get you to the Norpon
  Colony, if that's really where you want to go."
Scott: "The Norpon Colony is for old men to retire.  Maybe someday, I'll end up
  there.  But not yet."
-- "Relics", Stardate 46125.3
%
Although this sentence begins with the word because, it is false.
-- Douglas R Hofstadter
%
When I was growing up, all my friends wanted to have sex with anything that
 moved. "Why limit yourself?" I told them.
-- Emo Philips
%
I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes
 of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey.   I believe
 it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts...
 I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%
Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you
cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.
-- Jan de Hartog, "The Lamb's War"
%
Bias used to say that men ought to calculate life both as if they
were fated to live a long and a short time, and that they ought to
love one another as if at a future time they would come to hate one
another; for that most men were bad.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Bias, v
%
Jedda: "But what about Reliant?  She's on her way."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Make me! I dare you!
-- Famous Last Words
%
    alt.folklore.urban readers
light bulb?
Two-fifty.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a
%
Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Tragedy is when I cut my finger.
 Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
-- Mel Brooks
%
Cum on feel the NOIZE!
-- Twisted Sister
%
There is no idea so sacred that it cannot be questioned, analyzed...
 and ridiculed.
-- Cal Keegan
%
A hit, a very palpable hit.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
As of yet there have been no deaths attributed to the killer bees in Texas.
 However, two bees were caught this week planning a murder.
-- Dennis Miller
%
Bookie: A pickpocket who lets you use your own hands.
-- Henry Morgan
%
    Scousers
One, but 200 had to apply for the job.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
-- Austin O'Malley
%
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notion of time
are vaguer than yours.
-- J.B. Priestley
%
Because my name is Daffy,
 They think that I'm insane
 Please pass the ketchup,
 I think it's going to rain!

 Oh, you can't bounce a meatball,
 Try with all your might.
 Turn on the radio,
 I want to fly a kite!
-- D. Duck (daffy@wb.com)
%
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about
anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read
it. After that it's dead.
-- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Scoop (1938) bk. 1, ch. 5
%
 How do you leave a message on this thing?  I can't understand
 the instructions.  Hello.  Testing 1 2 3.  I wonder what happens
 if I touch this...  YOW!
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
Let 's go hand in hand, not one before another.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Comedy of Errors
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every
class is unfit to govern.
-- Lord Acton
%
The Sun is at the center of the Universe.
-- Copernicus
%
A record number of savings-and-loan failures left America with a nationwide
 shortage of flimsy toaster ovens, cheap pocket calculators, and ugly
 dinnerware.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
Books cannot always please, however good;
Minds are not ever craving for their food.
-- George Crabbe (1754-1832)
-- The Borough, Letter xxiv, Schools
%
It's slower to do it quickly,
It's more expensive to do it cheaply,
And it's more democratic to do it in secret.
-- The public servant's motto
%
He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.
-- Tacitus (54-119 AD)
-- Annales, vi, 39, 17
%
The rest were vulgar deaths, unknown to fame.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xi, Line 394
%
Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.
-- Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television.
%
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is
 absolutely fatal.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
Women who miscalculate are called 'mothers'.
-- Abigail Van Buren
%
Misled by fancy's meteor ray,
        By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray
        Was light from heaven.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- The Vision
%
Secretary not permanent fixture, until screwed on desk!
-- Confucius Says
%
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- The Princess, Prologue, Line 141
%
We hanged our harps upon the willows.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxxxvii, 2
%
:gonk: /gonk/ vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth
   beyond any reasonable recognition.  In German the term is
   (mythically) `gonken'; in Spanish the verb becomes `gonkar'.
   "You're gonking me.  That story you just told me is a bunch of
   gonk."  In German, for example, "Du gonkst mir" (You're pulling
   my leg).  See also {gonkulator}.  2. [British] To grab some
   sleep at an odd time; compare {gronk out}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Take all the pleasures of all the spheres,
And multiply each through endless years,--
One minute of heaven is worth them all.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Paradise and the Peri
%
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the
imagination.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
%
You can watch an actor absolutely sabotage a good script and then read
 reviews like 'Unfortunately, even the impressive talents of Cheech Marin
 could not salvage Anton Chekhov's trite and meandering script.'
-- Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University
%
While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear
 that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged.
 Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of
 even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution
 of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times
 and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer.
 Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting
 with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of
 Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each
 second.
-- John K. Stevens, Reverse Engineering the Brain
-- Byte magazine, Page 287, April 1985
%
Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring
with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed
beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent,
pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants
of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after
all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though
loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Vol. iii, p. 344
%
Timothy: "What do you think?"
Data: "Do you wish a frank evaluation?"
Timothy: [Nods yes]
Data: "It lacks the harmony that characterized this particular temple, and the
  Docharan culture in general."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
-- T.H. Huxley
%
The strength
Of twenty men.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
The finest edge is made with the blunt whetstone.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues, 1579 (Arber's reprint), Page 47
%
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
He hath riches sufficient, who hath enough to be charitable.
-- Sir Thomas Browne
%
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a
child at play.
-- Heraclitus
%
Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of
men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment.
-- Dr. I. Watts
%
Aren't you a little old to believe in human tales?
-- Chrysta's father.
%
I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.
-- Jonas Salk
%
Information is the currency of democracy.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our
thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
Incompetence tends to increase with the level of work performed.
And, naturally, the individual's staff needs will increase as his
level of incompetence increases.
-- Arthur J. Riggs
%
:netter: n. 1. Loosely, anyone with a {network address}.  2. More
   specifically, a {USENET} regular.  Most often found in the
   plural.  "If you post *that* in a technical group, you're
   going to be flamed by angry netters for the rest of time!"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    quantum mechanicians
They can't. If they know where the socket is, they cannot
locate the new bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
So much time, and so little to do.
-- Willie Wonka
%
:sysop: /sis'op/ n. [esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and
   usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system.  A common neophyte
   mistake on {FidoNet} is to address a message to `sysop' in an
   international {echo}, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops
   around the world.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
%
Legislation is a series of catastrophes that results in a policy.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%
:pico-: [SI: a quantifier
   meaning * 10^-12]
   pref. Smaller than {nano-}; used in the same rather loose
   connotative way as {nano-} and {micro-}.  This usage is not yet
   common in the way {nano-} and {micro-} are, but should be
   instantly recognizable to any hacker.  See also {{quantifiers}},
   {micro-}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The idle mind knows not what it is it wants.
-- Quintus Ennius
%
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean
that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are
happy you will be good.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
-- James Thurber
%
Truth varies.
-- Rule of Political Promises
%
:toto: /toh-toh'/ n. Reportedy the default scratch file name
   {foo}.  It is reported that the phonetic mutations "titi",
   "tata", and "tutu" canonically follow `toto', analogously to
   {bar}, {baz} and {quux} in English.
-- among French-speaking programmers -in other words, a francophone
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 "How Not To Handle Stress" by Sue E. Syde
-- Booktip of the month
%
if your brother-in-law is also your uncle.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Dimensions will be expressed in the least usable terms (i.e. Furlongs/Fortnight)
-- Klipstein's Third Law of Applied Engineering
%
Our contemporary Tories prefer the term "ordered liberty" to "freedom". The
word "freedom" scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
-- Edward Abbey
%
I would rather suffer defeat than have cause to be ashamed of victory.
-- Quintus Curtius
%
At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all
my soul.  At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my
ignorance upon the shore.
-- Kahlil Gibran
%
Kirk: "We will not be the instigators of interstellar war on the eve of
  universal peace."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
When a couple decides to divorce, they should inform both sets of parents
 before having a party and telling all their friends. This is not only
 courteous but practical. Parents may be very willing to pitch in with
 comments, criticism, and malicious gossip of their own to help the divorce
 along.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
I cast before the Moone.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues, 1579 (Arber's reprint), Page 78
%
In baseball, you don't know nothing.
-- Yogi Berra
%
Kitty. Shikspur? Shikspur? Who wrote it? No, I never read Shikspur.
Lady Bab. Then you have an immense pleasure to come.
-- James Townley (1715-1778)
-- High Life below Stairs, Act ii, Sc. 1
%
A baby was sleeping,
Its mother was weeping.
-- Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
-- The Angel's Whisper
%
 :-@ "I swear"
-- SMILEY
%
Beware a man of one book.
-- English Proverb
%
Now, when there are billions of people and not so many trees, it is
sustaining to imagine what it might be like to open one's flowers on
a spring afternoon, or to stand silently, making food out to sunlight,
for a thousand years.
-- David Rains Wallace  -  "The Klamath Knot"
%
If the main aim of playing is not to win, then why keep scores
-- Worf, "Star Trek: The Next Generation", televsion show
%
Riker: "You said he made a pass at you, but you failed to mention
whether he was
  successful or not."
Troi: [Just smiles]
Riker: [Looks at Beverly]
Beverly: [Just smiles]
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
    African Americans
Four hundred to march on the power company and threaten to
burn it down if they don't hire some African Americans to do
it.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war.
-- Nathaniel Lee (1655-1692)
-- Alexander the Great, Act iv, Sc. 2
%

-- When a man feels guilty about something something too terrible to
-- remember he blots it out of his conscious memory.
-- McCoy, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3614.9.
%
Riker: "Welcome aboard, sir.  I'm Commander Riker, first officer."
Maxwell: "I know all about you, commander.  Fine work you did with
the Borg.  We  all owe you on that one." Riker: "Thank you, sir."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44431.7
%
:tanked: adj. Same as {down}, used primarily by UNIX hackers.  See
   also {hosed}.  Popularized as a synonym for `drunk' by Steve
   Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The beginning is the half of every action.
-- Greek Proverb
%
We are perfect, but the code is terrible.
-- Microsoft Software Developer
%
What is the chief end of man? - to get rich. In what way? - dishonestly
if he can; honestly if he must.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
-- New York Tribune, September 27, 1871
%
God created man, but I could do better.
-- Erma Bombeck
%
Matters more urgent caused our absence. Now witness the result. Outposts
  destroyed, expansion of the Federation everywhere. Yes, we have indeed
  been negligent, Captain, but no more.
-- T'bok, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0
%
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of
fighting a foreign enemy.
-- James Madison
%
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and
the winds long to play with your hair.
-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
%
I didn't accept it.  I received it.
-- Richard Allen, National Security Advisor to President Reagan,
-- explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given
-- by two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange
-- a private interview for them with First Lady Nancy Reagan.
%
Trifles make perfection and perfection itself is no trifle.
-- Michelangelo
%
 :-( ) You backed your car over my toe
-- SMILEY
%
In a three-storey building served by one elevator, nine
times out of ten the elevator will be on a floor where you
are not.
-- Dedera's Law
%
 ($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%
 Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*'
 ,$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n
")&~1)/2)
-- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-in-3-lines-PERL
%
Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would
do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second
miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of
all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as
'I should not have thought of it.'"
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Iphicrates
%
:Physical Activity and Sports:
Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and
are determinedly anti-physical.  Among those who do, interest in
spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one
*does*, not something one watches on TV.

Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague (volleyball is a
notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively
friendly).  Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive
ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial
arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing,
aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating
(ice and roller).  Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw
them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can
tinker with.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every
fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing
between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
Never let your inferiors do you a favor--it will be extremely costly.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
I believe in living life one doldrum at a time.
-- Tom Wilson ("Ziggy")
%

-- Unable to load REALITY.SYS Invalid Parameter: /UTOPIA
%
One drink is just right, two are too many, three are too few.
-- Spanish proverb
%
For when I was a babe and wept and slept, Time crept.
When I was a boy and laughed and talked, Time walked.
Then when the years saw me a man, Time run.
But as I older grew, Time flew.
-- Guy Pentreath
%
I like your SNOOPY POSTER!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Troi: "We don't need any more convincing.  Please, obey the captain's orders.
  Stop whatever it is you're doing."
Barclay: "You must trust me."
Troi: "How can we trust an officer who doesn't follow orders?"
Barclay: "Trust me."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
"When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while
to keep them."
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Servants"
%
    Republicans
Two. One to do it and one to steady the chandelier.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The ideas expressed above are mine, and they intend to stay
that way...whether or not they suck.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
The life which others pay let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xii, Line 393
%
"Dick... YOU'RE FIRED!"
*POW* *POW* *POW*
-- The kind of executive order that REALLY results in termination.
-- from ROBOCOP
%
Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
It all begins, beneath the skin
 No one is near, no one will hear
 Your changeling song takes place
 In Shadowtime
-- Siouxie & The Banshies "Shadowtime"
%
These were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of the times.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiasticus xliv, 7
%
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the
not worth knowing.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River,
the Headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
%
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all
the others.
-- Cicero
%
Option Paralysis:
 The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.
[Often experienced when asked what kind of salad dressing one wants.]
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Troi: "In two or three weeks, Nanites may be all that's left of the
Federation."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Kirk: "Signal our surrender."
Uhura: "Captain?"
Kirk: "We surrender!"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Time ripens all things. No man is born wise.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. xxxiii
%
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
-- Allen Ginsberg
%
    The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try
to interpret, they mainly make models.  By a model is meant a
mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain
verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena.  The
justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and
precisely that it is expected to work.
-- John Von Neumann
%
I'd Be a Red-Hot Mama If I Didn't Have These Varicose Veins.
-- Anna Russell
%
There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial:
both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to
talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him
during the trial.
-- David Letterman
%
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for
 posterity.
-- George Ade
%
if you own a fur coat that's homemade.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet
 and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.
-- Omni
%
Thus woe succeeds a woe, as wave a wave.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- Sorrows Succeed
%
That Farrow bloke you executed today. You sure he's dead?
I cut his head off. That usually does the trick.
-- Edmund and Baldrick : Head
%
Never ask of money spent.
 Where the spender thinks it went.
 Nobody was ever meant
 To remember or invent
 What he did with every cent.
-- Robert Frost
%
Never ... know a public man well enough that he inhibits you from writing
 about him frankly and fully while he's living his public life.
-- Alistair Cooke
%
Shut up
In measureless content.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand
prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
-- Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Hero as a Man of Letters
%
Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.
-- Remy De Gourmant
%
What's a knockout like you doing in a computer generated gin joint
  like this?
-- Riker to Minuet, "11001001", stardate 41365.9
%
If you drink, don't drive.  Don't even put.
-- Dean Martin
%
The candy bar you planned to eat on the way home from the market is
hidden at the bottom of the grocery bag.
-- The Grocery Bag Law
%
Agnosticism is the philosophical, ethical and religious dry-rot of the
modern world.
-- F. E. Abbot
%
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
    To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to
    understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love.  So
    maybe I'll end up loving your theory.
-- John A. Wheeler
%
The wisest have the most authority.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)
%
Of the 500 or so films a year from all the
 Hollywood sources during [the height of the studio
 estimate that about two percent are worth the time
 of a cultivated viewer today.
-- system] and I saw many of them when they were
-- released, some of them much more recently I
-- Stanley Kauffmann
%
'What foods these morsels be.'
-- Sign on a hotdog stand
%
K:      Cobalt's metal, hard and shining;
     Cobol's wordy and confining;
  KOBOLDS topple when you strike them;
  Don't feel bad, it's hard to like them.
-- The Roguelet's ABC
%
The Lisa had problems, but it was a terrific piece of engineering that still
 puts the Macintosh to shame.
-- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
%
An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
%
Let thy maid servant be faithful, strong, and homely.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Thus far we run before the wind.
-- Arthur Murphy (1727-1805)
-- The Apprentice, Act v, Sc. 1
%
And whispering, "I will ne'er consent,"--consented.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto i, Stanza 117
%
. . . . the NAACP should have riot rehersal. They should get a liquor
store and practice robberies.
-- Rush Limbaugh
%
Science may have found a cure for most evils;
but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all
     Helen Keller
-- the apathy of human beings.
%
Their nature, by training and instinct, is to argue and procrastinate.
Yet we continue to elect lawyers.
-- Ben Franklin
%
ZEBRA
  A horse with stripes added. Now available in five different
  colours, and with optional spots. Zebras are now almost extinct,
  most of their number having been skinned to make pedestrian
  crossings. Just remember that the next time you cross the street,
  or play 'Abbey Road', you heartless bastards. Actually, I think if
  zebras had been spotted instead of striped, zebra crossings would
  be much more distinctive. Perhaps it's not too late to try leopard
  crossings.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er,
Scatters from her pictured urn
Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- The Progress of Poesy, III, 3, Line 2
%

-- Practice good mirth control use a conundrum.
%
Well-known messengers get credit for clever comments they
report from less celebrated mouths.
-- Axiom 2, Corollary 2A
-- Ralph Keyes, The Rules of misquotation
%
There's nothing disgusting about it [the Companion].  It's just
  another life form, that's all.  You get used to those things.
-- McCoy, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8.
%
... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ...
-- Dave Barry
%
Resignation - Oh f%*k it.
-- The everyday versatility of the "F" word
%
The C committee took something that wasn't broken, and tidied it up without
 breaking it.
-- Dennis Ritchie (dmr@alice.UUCP), about ANSI C standard X3J11
%
Laziness is a virtue if it causes you to work smarter instead of harder!
-- Michael K. Johnson
%
Try it, coppers!
-- Famous Last Words
%
I wonder if I could ever get started in the credit world?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
... the real friend... is, as it were, another self.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) Roman Orator, poet, statesman
-- De Amicitia (44 B.C.)
%
Za dvumya zaitsami pogonish'sya, ne odnogo ne poimaesh'.
[If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.]
-- Russian proverb
%
A hand grenade exploded in a school of fish will supply food for days.
-- U.S. Armed Forces Survival Manual
%
The most advantageous, pre-eminent thing thou canst do is not to
exhibit nor display thyself within the limits of our galaxy, but
rather depart instantaneously whence thou even now standest and
flee to yet another rotten planet in the universe, if thou canst
have the good fortune to find one.
-- Carlyle
%
The mildest manners, and the gentlest heart.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xvii, Line 756
%
Life is too short to balance a checkbook.
-- Howard Ogden
%
To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
Ever heard of this theory of "trickle down?"  That's ridiculous. We're
talking about trickling up. We're talking about climbing up the ladder.
                    students in Salinas, California to push themselves in
                    school. (The Fresno Bee, 5/19/92, taken from The
                    Quayle Quarterly, Summer/Fall 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle trying to encourage teenage
%
I would guess that there's adequate low-income housing in this country.
-- Senator Dan Quayle, 10/27/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
%
It would be a serious mistake to replace a seasoned statesman with a
temperamental tycoon who has no respect for the constitution.
                   Ross Perot's presidential campaign (June 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle giving his opinion about
%
Worf: "Shuttle has penetrated the Borg electromagnetic field."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
...you find yourself trying to CTRL-S the credits rolling on the TV screen.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
A little bit of perfume doesn't hurt you if you don't drink it.
-- Darrell Royal
%
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
-- Warren G. Bennis
%
A work project expands to fill the space available.
No matter how large the work space, if two projects must be
done at the same time they will require the use of the same
part of the work space.
-- The Einstein Extension of Parkinson's Law
-- Corollary
%
There are any number of individuals who know how
 to win, and far fewer who know how to make use of their victories.
-- Confucius Says
%
I think my mistake was yelling "Hi" to the eyewitnesses as they filed into
 court.
-- Phil Interlandi
%
Ground Round of Hound
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
That she won the game startled me cold. The way she won, the pattern of her
thought on the chessboard, charmed me warm again and then some.
-- Richard Bach, Thoughts of Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever
%

-- Just plead the Fifth or drink  it either way.
%
"If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and
expain that it's vitally important that you get away before your phone
bill arrives." - Douglas Adams.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Condemned into everlasting redemption.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough
for the photographer It has chosen.
-- Minor White, Photographer
%
The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a
giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire.
From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded
ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers,
processors of information.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Justice and solidarity feel good.  In the end.
-- A comment on the price of liberty.  From AARGH!
%
Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn,
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Tam o' Shanter
%
We're going to have the best-educated American people in the
world.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 9/21/88
%
Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream,
And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.
-- George Linley (1798-1865)
-- Thou art gone
%
A drowning man will catch at a straw.
-- Proverb
%
Volcanos have a grandeur that is grim
And earthquakes only terrify the dolts,
And to him who's scientific
There is nothing that's terrific
In the pattern of a flight of thunderbolts!
-- William S. Gilbert (1836-1911), "The Mikado"
%

-- There are three faithful friends an old wife, an old dog and ready money.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
%
I'm teaching my ferret to yodel.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 16 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life,
but only a fool trusts either of them.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
%
Faculty purchases of equipment and supplies always increase to match
the funds available, so these funds are never adequate.
-- Thomas L. Martin
%
Look at these cows and remember that the greatest scientists in the world
have never discovered how to make grass into milk.
-- Michael Pupin (1858-1935)
%
But the chances are that you will get nowhere with your spy scare. You have to
have a bigger territory to work in. That's one of the advantages of being a
government instead of just a private liar.
-- Robert Benchley
%
    mutants
Two thirds.
Note: Many mutations/birth defects result in people missing
limbs, etc. Thus, a mutant is often only "2/3 of a person".
Or, perhaps it's "Got three hands, only needs two for the
job?"
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Spick and span new.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- The Family of Love, Act iv, Sc. 3
%
Time: That which man is always trying to kill,
but which ends in killing him.
-- Herbert Spencer
%
Play well, or play badly, but play truly.
-- Konstantin Stanislavsky
%
People will swim through shit if you put a few bob in it.
-- Peter Sellers
%
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel,
and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- New England Two Centuries ago
%
The man with the biggest feet in the world, Irish-born, Italian-raised
Giovanni O'Shamus caused an upset at Wimbledon during the week, when h
stepped on his opponent in the first round of the Men's Singles. The
squashed man, American Rocky Steinburger was rushed to hospital but was
pronounced flat on arrival. O'Shamus, who is ranked forty-three thousandth
in the world, claimed he had been unable to see because John McEnroe's ego
had got in the way, obscuring most of the court, making it too dark to se
where he was going.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
The amount of research devoted to a topic in human behavior is inversely
proportional to its importance and interest.
-- Bernard I. Murstein
%
 :-) . innie belly button
-- SMILEY
%
some people get pissed
 when you play with your mind
 in a different way
 than they play with theirs
 these people are called ASSHOLES
-- the jambi's
%
Violence in reality is quite different from theory.
-- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4.
%
After lovemaking, a German woman is practical. She will say, "Ach, dat vas
 goot!" A French woman is solicitous. She will say, "Ah, mon cheri, did I
 please you?" And an English woman will say ... "Feeling better?"
-- Godfrey Cambridge
%
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
-- B.F. Skinner
%
The Arithmetic of Cooperation:
 When you're adding up committees
 there's a useful rule of thumb:
 that talents make a difference,
 and follies make a sum.
-- Piet Hein
%
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.
Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.
-- Bertolt Brecht, "Life of Galileo"
%
"We only ever had the one sun at home.  I came from a planet called
Earth you know." - Arthur.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads
besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which
he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ii, 14
%
When I was a lark, I sang; when I was a worm, I devoured.
-- Theodore Roethke
%
Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
:languages of choice: n. {C} and {LISP}.  Nearly every
   hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both.
   Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential
   communities.

   There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with
   FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice.  They
   often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other
   hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a
   Real Programmer}" in {Appendix A}).  Assembler is generally no longer
   considered interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL}
   implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and
   hardware-specific uses in systems programs.  FORTRAN occupies a
   shrinking niche in scientific programming.

   Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and
   {{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered
   necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}),
   and to regard everything even remotely connected with {COBOL} or
   other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and
   unmitigated {loss}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Needs are a function of what other people have.
-- Jone's Principle
%
With the proper consideration in choice of allies, victory may be
guaranteed in any conflict.
-- Benedict Arnold
%
Her that ruled the rost in the kitchen.
-- Thomas Heywood (c. 1574-1641)
-- History of Women (ed. 1624), Page 286
%
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.  No machine can do
the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
Cerebus:        I'd love to lick apricot brandy out of your navel.
Cerebus:    If Cerebus had a navel, would you lick apricot brandy
         out of it?
Jaka:               Ugh!
Cerebus:  You don't like apricot brandy?
-- Jaka:               Look, CerebusJaka has to tell you ... something
-- Cerebus #6, "The Secret"
%
    Object Oriented programmers
bulb?
None, they send it a message, and it changes itself.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light
%
:adger: /aj'r/ [UCLA] vt. To make a bonehead move with
   consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental
   effort.  E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the
   whole project".  Compare {dumbass attack}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You know the world's in trouble when it takes 2,000 laws to enforce
the Ten Commandments.
-- Alfred E. Newman
%
If a generalist delights to find a law he is ecstatic when he finds a law about
laws. If laws in his eyes are good, laws about laws are delicious and are most
praiseworthy objects of search.
-- Boulding
%
:Christmas tree: n. A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box
   featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of
   Christmas lights.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
If you are rude to your ex-husband's new wife at your daughter's wedding,
 you will make her feel smug. Comfortable. If you are charming and polite,
 you will make her feel uncomfortable. Which do you want to do?
-- Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
%
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social
part. The real part was the spiritual part.
-- Jerry Garcia (1942-1995), Musician, the Greatful Dead
-- Rolling Stone magazine, (November 30,  1989)
%
Uncertainty error.  Uncertainty may be inadequate.
-- WindowError: 01C
%
FEKR GABUL CRADAN DAVAT PAEH GUSH DIVAR.
I am delighted to accept your kind invitation to lie on the floor
with my arms above my head and my legs apart.
-- Useful phrases to know when traveling in moslem areas
%
So I'm ugly.  So what?  I never saw anyone hit with his face.
-- Yogi Berra
%
"Do you think the State or any other institution should do
more for writers?"

The State should do no more for writers than it should do for
any other person who lives in it.  The State should give shelter, food,
warmth, etc., whether the person works for the State or not.  Choice of
work, and the money that comes from it, should then be free for that
man; what work, what money, is his own bother.
-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
%
The VFW represents many who died to give this country a second chance
-- to make it what it is supposed to be God's guest house on earth.
-- John Wayne
%
You shudder every time you walk past a sushi bar.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
Be somebody. Know that a bunch of guys will do anything you tell 'em. Have
 your own way or nothin'.
-- Edward G. Robinson (in Little Caesar,
-- screenplay by Francis Edwards Faragoh)
%
If nuclear, therefore it must be bad; Denounce such power with
a protest squeal. The scientists made it (surely they're all mad),
It's better not to think and just to feel.
-- Jack Kirwan
%
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has
the best information.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
:bitty box: /bit'ee boks/ n. 1. A computer sufficiently small,
   primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia
   at the thought of developing software on or for it.  Especially
   used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines
   such as the Atari 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or
   IBM PC.  2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of `real
   computer' (see {Get a real computer!}).  See also {mess-dos},
   {toaster}, and {toy}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Riker: "What's on your mind?" Guinan: "I've heard a lot of people
talking down in Ten-Forward.  They expect to  be dead in the next
day or so.  They trust you, they like you, but they don't  believe
anyone can save them." Riker: "I'm not sure anyone can."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
-- Mark Twain
%
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he
 encounters needs pounding.
-- Abraham Kaplan
%
FIRST GUARD: Ah!  Now ... we're not allowed to ...
   SIR LAUNCELOT runs him through,  grabs his spear and stabs the other
   guard who collapses in a heap.  Hiccoughs quietly.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
-- Lucan
%
Law is order, and good law is good order.
-- Aristotle
%
No.
                 reporter if she had any message for the children of America
-- President Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy, when asked by a
%
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of
sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
-- C. S. Lewis
%
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,
but most stupid people are conservatives.
-- John Stuart Mill
%
Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.  Let
us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without
which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.  And let us
reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance
under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we
countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and
capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
I would like to lick apricot brandy out of your navel.
-- Cerebus
%
"Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
I wonder why prostitution is illegal. Why should it be illegal to sell
 something that's perfectly legal to give away?
-- George Carlin
%
:Macintrash: /mak'in-trash`/ n. The Apple Macintosh, as described
   by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the
   *real computer* by the interface.  The term {maggotbox} has
   been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle area of North
   Carolina.  Compare {Macintoy}. See also {beige toaster},
   {WIMP environment}, {point-and-drool interface},
   {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A nice part--only "four sides"--but good company and in for a long run.
-- Written on grave
%
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
-- G. K. Chesterton
%
If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it
might be of some use; but ir is make use of to laugh men out of virtue
and good sense, by attacking everything solemn and serious.
-- Addison
%
HARBOR, n.  A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed
to the fury of the customs.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:amoeba: n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Any comments or statements made are not necessarily those of my
Corporation, its subsidiaries or affiliates.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
 "Race To The Outhouse" by Willie Maykit
         Illustrated by Betty Doant, foreward by Betty Woant
-- Booktip of the month
%
We must eat to live and live to eat.
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
-- The Miser, Act iii, Sc. 3
%
But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
-- Alan Watts
%
:examining the entrails: n. The process of {grovel}ling through
   a {core dump} or hex image in an attempt to discover the bug that
   brought a program or system down.  The reference is to divination
   from the entrails of a sacrified animal.  Compare {runes},
   {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to
   electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232
   serial connection.  Line noise may be induced by poor connections,
   interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms,
   {cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone
   wires.  2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like
   the results of line noise in sense 1.  3. Text that is
   theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax
   so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2.  Yes,
   there are languages this ugly.  The canonical example is {TECO};
   it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable
   from line noise."  Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics
   `qed' and Unix `ed', in the hands of a real hacker, also
   qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as
   {INTERCAL}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along
without an education.
Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along
without the use of his intelligence.
-- A. E. Wiggan
%
You shout, "Change *him*, change *him*!" at Triton near the end of
_The Little Mermaid_.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%

-- My parents were first cousins that's why I look so much alike!
%
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act i, Sc. 4
%
Lal: "Wy are they leaving?"
Guinan: "Lal, there are some things your father's just going to have to explain
  to you when he thinks you're ready."
-- "The Offspring", Stardate unknown
%
Nothing ever goes away.
-- Barry Commoner
%
Where the hell is the power you promised me?

One damned minute, Admiral.
-- Kirk & Spock, "The Voyage Home," stardate 8390
%
If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of
ten it will.
-- Paul Harvey News, 1979
%
DRINKING: No falling down. No puking-unless to empty
the stomach in order to continue drinking. No slurring
of words. Tell a few war stories: "See that scar? I
was in 'Nam and I ate a grenade and it blew up in my
colon." If your aim is off due to alcohol, it's
acceptable to punch someone in the head or solar
plexus.
-- Denis Leary from "Are you Man enough?"
%
Luposlipaphobia: The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a
 kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.
-- Gary Larson
%
 :-C really bummed out
-- SMILEY
%
Control over thought is a long, painful and laborious process.
But I am convinced that, no time, no labor and no pain is too much
for the glorious result to be reached.
-- Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi
%
    sopranos
One hundred. One to do it, and ninety-nine to discuss how it
was really too high for her.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
%
Life is full of little surprises
-- Pandora
%
Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure
Thrill the deepest notes of woe.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Sweet Sensibility
%
If I had any humility I would be perfect.
-- Ted Turner
%
Interchangeable parts aren't.
-- Kilpatrick's law
%
You are beautiful and angular, and if you were a gas you would be inert.
-- Dieter, from _Sprockets_
%
Incens'd with indignation Satan stood
Unterrify'd, and like a comet burn'd
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In th' arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 707
%
 Union leader: Give us more shit or we'll strike.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
:spiffy: /spi'fee/ adj. 1. Said of programs having a pretty,
   clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. "Have you seen
   the spiffy {X} version of {empire} yet?"  2. Said
   sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more
   than a flashy interface going for it.  Which meaning should be
   drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context.  This word
   was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close
   to 1.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
GOUT, n.  A physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
LaForge: "Move it people, let's move it!"
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds", Stardate unknown
%
Hey you! Dotty Warner!
-- Famous Last Words
%
The two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Battle of the Books
%
Though he love not to buy the pig in the poke.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. ix
%
    Romanians
None: Ceaucescu restricted them to use only one 40 watt
bulb per family to save electricity.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Timothy: "'I am designed to exceed human capacity.'  'That is correct.'"
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one
was that they escaped teething.
-- Mark Twain
%
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House
%
I would trade that Oscar for one more second of life.
-- Woody Allen, "Stardust Memories"
%
Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death, To break the shock blind
nature cannot shun, And lands thought smoothly on the further shore.
-- Young
%
Kirk: "He won't break off now.  He followed me this far, he'll be back.  But
  from *where*?"
Spock: "He's intelligent, but not experienced.  His pattern indicates two-
  dimensional thinking."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
-- Steven Wright
%
Uh.. Apone. Collect all the magazines, we can't have any shooting in
   there. No grenades either. (they're in the middle of the Alien hive :)
-- Aliens
%
There is not a man in the country that can't make a living for himself
and his family. But he can't make a living for them AND the government,
too, the way his government is living. What the government has got
to do is live as cheap as the people.
-- Will Rogers
%
Angels listen when she speaks:
  She 's my delight, all mankind's wonder;
But my jealous heart would break
  Should we live one day asunder.
-- Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
-- Song
%
Voters to decide whether to vote!
-- Headline
%
Every one is more or less mad on one point.
-- Rudyard Kipling, "On the Strength of a Likeness"
%
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients,
and by parts.
-- Edmund Burke
%
If it can be borrowed and it can be broken, you will borrow it and
you will break it.
-- W. W. Chandler
%
Make it so.
-- Geordi, "Angel One", stardate 41636.9
%
So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found;
Among the faithless, faithful only he.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book v, Line 896
%
KNEE-JERK REACTION
  A controlled upwards movement of a knee into the groinal area of a
  jerk. Very fun, excepting when one is on the receiving of the said
  upwards movement.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
:forked: [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj.
   Terminally slow, or dead.  Originated when one system was slowed to
   a snail's pace by an inadvertent {fork bomb}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My life is like one long obstacle course with me being the chief
obstacle.
-- Jack Paar
%
You cannot eat your cake and have your cake;
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iv, Chap. xliii
%
There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man's own
observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the
best physic to preserve health.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Regimen of Health
%
Everything you've learned in school as obvious becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe.    For example, there are no
solids in the universe.  There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no
straight lines.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
%
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Letter to Gay, Oct, 6, 1727
%
:-oid: [from `android'] suff. 1. Used as in mainstream English to
   indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise
   slightly bogus resemblance.  Hackers will happily use it with all
   sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with
   it in mainstream English.  For example, "He's a nerdoid" means
   that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a
   `modemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at 9600 or
   up); a `computeroid' might be any {bitty box}.  The word
   `keyboid' could be used to describe a {chiclet keyboard}, but
   would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as
   to the speaker's city of origin.  2. More specifically, an
   indicator for `resembling an android' which in the past has been
   confined to science-fiction fans and hackers.  It too has recently
   (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term
   `trendoid' for victims of terminal hipness).  This is probably
   traceable to the popularization of the term {droid} in
   "Star Wars" and its sequels.

   Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at
   least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have
   probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long
   [though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were
-- already common in the mid-1970s -ESR].
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn
the lessons we have been taught, to remount first principles, and
to take nobody's word about them.
-- Bolingbroke
%
The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost
went back in time.
-- Steven Wright
%
Then a mournful smile; always pale and hungry.
-- Lew Romney
%

-- When giving a speech be prepared be prepared to be spontaneous
-- Mary Baumann
%
Kirk: "Gentlemen, I have seen what the Klingons do to planets like
yours.  They  are organized into vast slave labor camps.  No freedoms
whatsoever.  Your  goods will be confiscated.  Hostages taken and
killed.  Your leaders confined.  You'd be far better on a penal planet,
infinitely better off." Aelborne: "Captain, we see that your concern
is genuine, and we are moved.  But  again, we assure you that we are
absolutely in no danger.  If anybody is in  danger, you are.  And
that concerns us greatly.  It would be better if you'd  return to
your ship as soon as possible."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3198.4
%
if you drink from Mason jars at home.
-- You may be redneck...
%
A brain is as strong as it's weakest think.
-- Tom's Law
%
The heart of the wise is the home of sadness, and the heart of the foolish
is the home of joy.
-- Erasmus
%
He who finds Fortune on his side should go briskly ahead, for she
is wont to favor the bold.
-- Baltasar Gracian
%
 We're not home now.  Leave your name and number and we'll call
 you back as soon as you are a vegetarian.  (Replace "vegetarian"
 with prejudice of your choice.)
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
:number-crunching: n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp.
   those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers.  The only
   thing {Fortrash} is good for.  This term is in widespread
   informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream slang, but
   has additional hackish connotations: namely, that the computations
   are mindless and involve massive use of {brute force}.  This is
   not always {evil}, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals
   or some other use that makes {pretty pictures}, esp. if such
   pictures can be used as {wallpaper}.  See also {crunch}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there
is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
-- David Brinkley
%
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
edients,
and by parts.
-- Edmund Burke
%
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
 And heed well their advice... even though they be turkeys.
-- Anonymous
%
Even in 1956, when informed of his mother's brutal
 murder, he restricted his comments to one word:
 `Good.'
-- From the medical report on Rorschach. WATCHMEN #6
%
 Hi, you've reached 1-900-CALL-BREN, my personal message line
 where you can talk to me, Bren.  I'll tell you all about how I'm
 suffering in between sports seasons and about my part time hobby
 of being a power forward for the Portland Trailblazers.  I'll
 tell my deepest secrets, such as my desire to be kidnapped by
 short blonde sorority girls wearing short jean skirts, and you
 can decide whether or not I'm wearing pants.  Selected callers
 will get to talk to me live.  Since you're not one of them,
 leave your own personal secret at the beep.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
:de-rezz: /dee-rez'/ [from `de-resolve' via the movie
   "Tron"] (also `derez') 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the
   image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster
   lines and static and then dissolving.  Occasionally used of a
   person who seems to have suddenly `fuzzed out' mentally rather than
   physically.  Usage: extremely silly, also rare.  This verb was
   actually invented as *fictional* hacker jargon, and adopted in
   a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact.  2. vt. The
   Macintosh resource decompiler.  On a Macintosh, many program
   structures (including the code itself) are managed in small
   segments of the program file known as `resources'; `Rez' and
   `DeRez' are a pair of utilities for compiling and decompiling
   resource files.  Thus, decompiling a resource is `derezzing'.
   Usage: very common.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Let it serve for table-talk.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
:farkled: /far'kld/ [DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] adj.
   Syn. {hosed}.  Poss. owes something to Yiddish `farblondjet'
   and/or the `Farkle Family' skits on Saturday Nite Live.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a
fortune in which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue
of pleasurable activity.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
Spock: "We have volunteered to rendevous with the Klingon vessel which is
  bringing Gorkon to Earth, and to escort him safely through Federation space."
Kirk: "Me?"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9521.6
%
Belief is not the beginning but the end of all knowledge.
-- Goethe
%
There is a four-word formula for success that applies equally  well to
organizations and individuals: Make yourself more useful.
-- Leadership Magazine
%
Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount
 of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and
 an unlimited amount of money.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
Someone should tear him down and put up a human being.
-- Alan Alda, M.A.S.H.
%
An unexpectedly easy-to-handle sequence of events will be immediately
followed by an equally long sequence of trouble.
-- Charles Phelps
%
:virtual reality: n. 1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics
   and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact
   with the simulation.  See {cyberspace}.  2. A form of network
   interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games,
   interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true confessions'
   magazines.  In a virtual reality forum (such as USENET's
   alt.callahans newsgroup or the {MUD} experiments on Internet),
   interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel
   complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be
   personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common
   `background characters' manipulable by all parties.  The one
   iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a
   character without the consent of the person who `owns' it.
   Otherwise anything goes.  See {bamf}, {cyberspace}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character,
   particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your
   keyboard.  MIT people used to complain about the
   `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people
   complained right back about the `{altmode}-altmode-cokebottle'
   commands at MIT.  After the demise of the {space-cadet
   keyboard}, `cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was
   often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or
   non-intuitive keystroke command.  It may be due for a second
   inning, however.  The OSF/Motif window manager, `mwm(1)', has
   a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of
   keybindings and behavior.  This keystroke is (believe it or not)
   `control-meta-bang' (see {bang}).  Since the exclamation point
   looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have
   begun referring to this keystroke as `cokebottle'.  See also
   {quadruple bucky}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul?
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xvi, 26
%
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is
above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks
all things lawful for itself, and all things possible. It is therefore
able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and brings
them to a conclusion, where he who does not love, faints and lies down.
-- Thomas a Kempis
%
The best may slip, and the most cautious fall; He's more than mortal
that ne'er err'd at all.
-- Pomfret
%
Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it
works you're a hero; if it doesn't, well--nobody else has done it yet
either, so you're still a valiant nerd.
-- Paul Beatty, on Why Research is Good
%
If man evolved from the ape, how come there are still apes around?
Some of them were given choices.
-- Johnny Hart's comic strip B.C.
%
Are you mentally here at Pizza Hut??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Dog, ounce, bear, and bull,
Wolfe, lion, horse.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Week, First Day, Part iii
%
Have you ever paged or swapped off a tape drive?
... Off a card reader/punch?
... Off a teletype?
... Off a networked (non-local) disk?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
But sad as angels for the good man's sin,
Weep to record, and blush to give it in.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 357
%
Somehow, I can't see myself doing it for money.
-- Geordi
%
Moreover, freedom of the press includes "the right of the lonely
pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph as much as of the
large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition
methods."  Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 704 (1972).
-- Supreme Court decision quoted by Mike Godwin
-- in comp.org.eff.talk
%
look at the other guy's.
-- Opinions are like assholes everyone's got one, but nobody wants to
-- Hal Hickman
%
Thirty days hath November,
April, June, and September,
February hath twenty-eight alone,
And all the rest have thirty-one.
[Trenta di' conta Novembre,
con April, Giugno e Settembre.
Di ventotto ce n'e' uno,
tutti gli altri ne han trentuno.]
-- Richard Grafton, 1562
-- Italian proverb
%
In any given miscalculation, the fault will never be placed if more
than one person is involved.
-- Merle P. Martin
%
 Marxism:        The rich shit exploits the poor shit,
                 but deep down all shit is alike.
                 Dictatorship of the shit.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Results!  Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several
thousand things that won't work
-- Thomas Alva Edison
%
Delta: A real man lands where he wants to.
-- David Letterman
%
The church ought to be separated from the state, and the state from the church.
-- Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)
%
 (:-I egghead
-- SMILEY
%
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Here's a good joke to do during an earthquake: straddle a big crack in the
ground, and if it opens wider, go "Whoa! Whoa!" and flail your arms around,
like you're going to fall in.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
You can resole your boot, but you can't reboot your soul.
-- anonymous
%
I do know a few things about anatomy, Jean-Luc.
-- Beverly
%
HHHHAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH
-- James Brown
%
I never deny, I never contradict. I sometimes forget.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
Great souls by instinct to each other turn. Demand alliance, and
in friendship burn.
-- Addison
%
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
-- Arnold Bennett
%
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
Triumphal arch, that fill'st the sky
  When storms prepare to part,
I ask not proud Philosophy
  To teach me what thou art.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- To the Rainbow
%
Arthur and his wife Muriel were sitting in their Vauxhall Viva eating their
ice cream cornets.  Suddenly two enormous black birds started to flap around on
the bonnet of the car.    Arthur got out and placed his cornet on the bonnet,
instantly causing the birds to calm down.
 "Well, I've never seen that before," said Muriel.
 "Oh,it's just a case of stilling two birds with one's cone."
-- Steve Wickham
%
UH-OH!!  I put on ``GREAT HEAD-ON TRAIN COLLISIONS of the 50's''
 by mistake!!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
A reserved lover, it is said, always makes a suspicious husband.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
Kindly enter them in your notebook. And in order to refer to them
conveniently, let's call them A, B, and Z.
-- The tortoise in Lewis Carroll's
-- "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"
%
When a man comes to me for advice, I find out the kind of advice he wants,
 and I give it to him.
-- Josh Billings
%
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts: God is, they are;
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- A Death in the Desert
%
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
-- Don Marquis
%
No, 't is slander,
Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue
Outvenoms all the worms of Nile, whose breath
Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie
All corners of the world.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
The most interesting specimen will not be labelled.
-- Jones' Law of Zoos and Museums
%
Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subsect. 2
%
Preston: "Is the word given, Admiral?" Kirk: "The word is given. 
Warp speed." Preston: "Aye."  [Dies] Scott: "Oh, why?" Kirk: "He wants
to kill me for passing sentence on him fifteen years ago, and he 
doesn't care who stands between him and his vengeance." McCoy: "I'm
sorry, Scotty." Scott: "He stayed at his post, when the trainees ran."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Let cavillers deny that brutes have reason; sure tis something more, 'tis
heaven directs, and stratagems inspires beyond the short extent of human
thought.
-- Somerville
%
And ITT begat Hostess, and Hostess begat Morton, and Morton begat
Stuckey's and Stuckey's begat Beatrice, and Beatrice begat Little
Debbie.  And Beatrice did leave Little Debbie with Hostess and go
forth into the wastelands looking for a good spot at a truck stop.
And Beatrice then did go a few miles north from the wastelands and
did settle in Nebraska, never to return to Norman, Oklahoma.
-- Endust 12, 7-10
%
 (Drawling granny voice:)  Way back inna winner of fifty-two, we
 didn' have fanshy gadjets like no ansherin' machine.  You jusht
 had to call and call until shummbody got home.  Now, shum
 people, dey shay dey don' like 'em, but I shay it'll shave you a
 lotta trouble if you jusht leave a meshage.  Thanksh a lot.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is
none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the word "but."
Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period.
Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you
talked about.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
:spaghetti code: n. Code with a complex and tangled control
   structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other
   `unstructured' branching constructs.  Pejorative.  The synonym
   `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code
   has so many jumps in it.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 8-* just ate a hot pepper
-- SMILEY
%
I've got a COUSIN who works in the GARMENT DISTRICT...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?
-- Woody Allen, Without Feathers
%
Soviet power is a new type of state in which there is no bureaucracy,
no police, no standing army.
-- V. I. Lenin (1870-1924)
%
The hotel [in Kiev] checked us in very quickly.  Unlike the one in Moscow,
the door guard smiled, did not check our passes and did not wear a gun.
The hotel serves excellent country food for lunch, including dumpling
soup, pork and homemade ice cream.  The waitress is friendly.  Going from
Moscow to Kiev is like going from New York to Texas.
-- T. J. Rodgers, "High tech in the Ukraine", E. E. Times, 8/13/90, p. 16
%
It is hard to change when something has been good for you
for so long.
       addressing the new IBM (A.D. 1994)
-- Thomas Booker, IBM Sales Manager,
%
When you get into conflict, and regional conflicts, I mean, you have to
have certain goals, and a goal cannot be really a no-win situation.
                   service during the Vietnam war.
                   (reported in the Washington Post, 9/6/88)
-- Senator Dan Quayle attempting to explain his military
%
Ah, yes! I wrote the "Purple Cow"--
I'm sorry now I wrote it!
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'll kill you if you quote it!
-- Gelett Burgess (1866-1951)
-- The Burgess Nonsense Book (1914) "Confessional"
%
We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.
-- Albert Einstein on atomic energy, Jan. 22, 1947
%
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
-- Dame Rose Macaulay
%
    graduate students
1/100. A graduate student needs to change 100 light
bulbs a day.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%

-- The meek can inherit the earth the rest of us have other plans.
%
Alexander: "I don't want to be a warrior!"
-- "Reunion", Stardate unknown
%
Don't look to me. Don't ask for help.    Don't ask for anything that you
  can do yourself.
-- Lemmy Kilmister
%
'T is not for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Ay me, how many perils doe enfold
The righteous man, to make him daily fall!
-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
-- The Faerie Queene, Book i, Canto viii, St. 1
%
To kerke the narre from God more farre,
  Has bene an old-sayd sawe;
And he that strives to touche a starre
  Oft stombles at a strawe.
-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
-- The Shepheardes Calender, July, Line 97
%
People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year,
but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and
Christmas.
-- Duncan Bailey
%
A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed
on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new
game.  Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the
pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly
along it at the water's edge.  Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their
heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn
around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite
direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match.  Then, the
paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin
colony and overfly it.  Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins
fall over gently onto their backs.
-- Audobon Society Magazine
%
Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace;
If not, by any means get wealth and place.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epistle i, Book i, Line 103
%
For now the poet cannot die,
  Nor leave his music as of old,
  But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- To ------, after reading a Life and Letters
%
Woman is generally so bad that the difference
between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.
-- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
%
    elephants
Two, but it has to be a pretty big light bulb!
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
There is an eternal principle that states that service is essential to
salvation.
-- Bruce R. McConkie
%
Some people manage by the book while being completely ignorant of
who wrote the book or what's in it.
-- Theed's Fourth Law of Management
%
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction
listen to weather forecasts and economists?
-- Kelvin Throop III
%
Kirk: "That young man, he's my son!"
Spock: "Fascinating."
-- "STII:TWOK", STardate 8130.4
%
They never let you live it down. One little mistake!
-- Nero
%
"Bill Dickey is learning me his experience."
-- Yogi Berra
%
Visitors are expected to complain at the office between
 the hours of 9 and 11 A.M. daily.
-- In a hotel in Athens
%
Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at the
edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about the
spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to understand
our relationship to the whole universe.
-- Ruth Bernhard
%
Picard: "A defection?"
Brackett: "If it is, the damage to Federation security would be immeasurable."
-- "Unification I", Stardate Unknown
%
ACTIVE SOCIALLY: Drinks heavily.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
How about a platinum plated bucket to sleep in?
-- Quark
%
"Love is DEAD."
     "How depressing."
-- Creator
%
The bigger they are, the faster I run.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Jesus saves... but Gretzky gets the rebound!
-- Daniel Hinojosa (hinojosa@hp-sdd)
%
Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
-- Edward Abbey
%
For a while I didn't have a car...I had a helicopter...no place to park it, so
 I just tied it to a lamp post and left it running...[slow glance upward]
-- Steven Wright
%
Every physician almost hath his favourite disease.
-- from "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
%
Better to have bread and an onion with peace than stuffed fowl with strife.
-- Arab proverb
%
You can get a genuine Amulet of Yendor by doing the following:
-- more --
%

-- How much to downgrade to Turbo C?
%
Wait until it is night before saying that it has been a fine day.
-- French Proverb
%
:religion of CHI: n. /ki:/ [Case Western Reserve University] n.
   Yet another hackish parody religion (see also {Church of the
   SubGenius}, {Discordianism}).  In the mid-70s, the canonical
   "Introduction to Programming" courses at CWRU were taught in
   Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a
   Univac 1108 system using a homebrew operating system named CHI.
   The religion had no doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the
   worshipper noted that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she would
   recite the phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS,
   ARCTAN."  The last five words were the first five functions in the
   appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special
   pronunciations /obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more common
   /ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/.  Using an alarm clock to warn of 11:08's
   arrival was {considered harmful}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It's the magazine that tells the Tommies the _truth_ about the War.
...Or alternatively, the greatest work of fiction since laws of
  fidelity were included in the French marriage service...
-- George and Edmund : Captain Cook
%
Perhaps we are wiser, less selfish and more far-seeing than we were two
hundred years ago. But we are still imperfectly all these good things,
and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither
wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
%
The last girl I made love to, it was not going well. Anytime you make love
 and have to give her the Heimlich maneuver at the same time, it's not a
 good thing.
-- Garry Shandling
%
If it doesn't come from you, shouldn't it come from Gerber?
-- Bristol Meyers baby formula ad
%
Vulcans never bluff.
-- Spock, "The Doomsday Machine," stardate 4202.1.
%
I was stopped once for going 53 in a 35-mile zone, but I told 'em I had
 dyslexia.
-- Spanky (Steve McFarlin)
%
For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I'll put a very large
 blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat.  And if someone
 asks me why I didn't get more meat, I'll just say, "Oh, you mean this?" and
 pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I've
 hidden it.  Good magic trick, huh?
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
    A KNIGHT rides into shot and hacks him to the ground.  He rides off.
    We stay for a moment on the glade.  A MIDDLE-AGED LADY in a C. & A.
    twin-set emerges from the trees and looks in horror at the body of her
    HUSBAND.
MRS HISTORIAN: FRANK!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die,
life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
-- Langston Hughes
%
There is more than one way to boot a disk.
-- Dunstone's Philosophy
%
In dealing with their own problems, faculty members are the
most extreme conservatives.
In dealing with other people's problems, they are the
world's most extreme liberals.
-- Clark Kerr
%
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
%
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
-- William G. McAdoo
%
Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing.
-- Spock, "The Cloud Minders," stardate 5818.4.
%
If you are human, which I seriously doubt, you will have to work hard to
  earn our trust.
I'm not worried about that Jean-Luc. You only dislike me, there are others
  in the cosmos who truly despise me.
-- Picard and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
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!
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
Hear reason, or she'll make you feel her.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Dogs come when they are called; cats take a message and get back to
you.
-- Mary Bly
%
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
 error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
"And this," said Caesar, "you know, young man, is more disagreeable
for me to say than to do."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Caesar
%

-- I slept like a baby woke up every two hours.
%
Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found
 altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern
 would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.
-- Sir William Symonds - British Royal Navy, 1837
%
    When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make
    a decision.
-- Lord Falkland's Rule
%
Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the
-- year in either direction.
-- Augustine's Law Number XXXIX
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
Buy your chiropodist a farewell present.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
CONCORDE:  Quickly, sir, come this way!
LAUNCELOT: No!  It's not right for my idiom.  I must escape more  ... more ...
CONCORDE:  Dramatically, sir?
LAUNCELOT: Dramatically.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Don't throw away the old bucket until you know if the new one holds water.
-- Swedish proverb
%
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
-- Pliny the Elder
%
Coward, n.: One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of
statistics.  These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are
extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive
displays.   What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every
case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts
down anything he damn well pleases.
-- Sir Josiah Stamp
%
If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak.
-- Phil Wayne
%
If enough reports are prepared and technical reviews are held, negative
information will always filter its way to senior management.
-- Richard F. Moore
%
    rec.humor readers
1000. And they change the same bulb over and over and
over again and still no one notices it's been changed so
they change it again and again and then they even
discuss it and then someone flames them for not doing it
in rec.humor.d.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
They're holding us by our love of it, and we'll go on paying so long as
there's one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in
token of human intelligence.  We'll go on holding it afloat, like our
drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we'll go down with the
last wheel and the last syllogism.  I know what we're paying, but --
price is no object any longer.
-- Dagny Taggart
%
The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle
with his joy.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xiv, 10
%
While discussing the terms of the vice-presidential debate, Quayle's aide
suggested that "props" be allowed, mainly because the Vice-President
wanted to read directly from Al Gore's book on the environment,
"Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit." Gore's people agreed,
saying that the Senator would then use a potato as a prop. Quayle quickly
abandoned the proposal.
-- reported in The NY Times, 10/6/92
%
    Democratic presidential candidates from 1988
(Bruce Babbitt) It's foolish to talk about screwing in
light bulbs when we haven't even taken the first step,
and that is to remove the old bulb. I challenge my
fellow candidates to stand up with me and help me remove
this old light bulb [stands, but nobody else does] Hah!
What wimps. You guys make Bush look like Rambo.
-- How many
-- did it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Just weigh your own hurt against the hurt
of all the others, and then do what's best.
-- Lovers and Other Strangers
%
Not only around our infancy
Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;
Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,
We Sinais climb and know it not.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Vision of Sir Launfal, Prelude to Part First
%
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
    psychologists
How long have you been having this phantasy?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Human capital has replaced dollar capital.
-- Michael Milken
%
Of harmes two the lesse is for to cheese.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Troilus and Creseide, Book ii, Line 470
%
My high school English teacher at the Bronx High School of Science, Dr.
 Isobel Gordon, used to deal with smart but lazy students who were trying to
 coast through her classes by telling us: "Don't smell the poem--read it!"
 In other words, don't slide by; dig in and reach for the best you've got.
-- Jeff Greenfield
%
Simple tasks aren't.
-- Schmidt's law
%
The only way to amuse some people is to slip and fall on an icy
pavement.
-- Ed Howe
%
  the beauty of a flower, of a woman.
-- Being human does have certain advantages being able to appreciate
-- Kirk, "By Any Other Name," stardate 4658.9.
%
What are called inspirational books, like Gibran's "The Prophet" or Bach's
"Seagull", seem to have been strained through a bowl of fish-eye tapioca.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Elsie is so ugly she's been turned down more times than a bedspread ... Two
 weeks ago she won first prize in a beauty contest. It was for mules.
-- Charley Weaver (Cliff Arquette)
%
Data: "He laughed."
Troi: "Yes, it's nice to see, isn't it?"
Data: "It is certainly not consistent with his android persona."
Troi: "I'd say that he is beginning the process of letting go of that fantasy."
Data: "Hmm.  Then my work with him is done."
Troi: "No, I, I don't think it is, Data."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
-- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
-- Memorial Verses
%
Anxiety is interest paid on trouble before it is due.
-- Dean Inge
%
Never confuse activity with results.
-- Lou Gerstner
%
:tip of the ice-cube: [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and
   insignificant.  Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip
   of the iceberg' might be appropriate if the subject were at all
   important.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
TAKES ADVANTAGE OF EVERY OPPERTUNITY TO PROGRESS: Buys drinks for superiors.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist,
a woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God
the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-- Quentin Crisp
%
"A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flaming."
-- Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.toronto.edu
%
The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar
contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals
conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom
of the Grand Canyon, it would probably be a good idea.
-- Augustine's Law Number XXXVI
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
Reelometic fans will also go for a Hobart Muddy and a prize-winning Cuvee
 Reserve Chateau bottle, Nuit sans Woga Woga which has a bouquet like an
    Aborigine's armpit.
-- Australian Table Wine Assoc.
%
        ... But among the children of the Great Society there were
those whose skins were black.  And lo!  Their portion was niggardly,
and of the fatted calf they were sucking hind teat ...
      Now it came to pass that a prophet rose up amongst them, and
they called him King.  And he went unto Pharaoh and said, "Let my
people go to the front of the bus."
  But Pharaoh answered: "In the fullness of time and with all
deliberate speed shall this thing come to pass.  When ye shall prove
unto a snowball in Hell."
-- yourselves worthy, shall ye have your just portion yea, verily, like
-- "The Begatting of a President"
%
Woe unto you,... for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxiii, 23
%
A novice asked the master: "What is the true meaning of programming?"

The master replied: "Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are fatigued,
program when the moment is right."
-- The Zen of Programming
%
Behold on wrong
Swift vengeance waits; and art subdues the strong!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book viii, Line 367
%
"Boy, this would make a great TV series..."
-- A vagrant TV executive, from CROSSFIRE
%
Never elated when one man 's oppress'd;
Never dejected while another 's bless'd.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle iv, Line 323
%
Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.
-- Farber's Fourth Law
%
:hex: n. 1. Short for {{hexadecimal}}, base 16.  2. A 6-pack
   of anything (compare {quad}, sense 2).  Neither usage has
   anything to do with {magic} or {black art}, though the pun is
   appreciated and occasionally used by hackers.  True story: As a
   joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be
   worn as protective amulets against hostile magic.  The chips were,
   of course, hex inverters.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
-- Sara Teasdale
%
 !-( black eye
-- SMILEY
%
[Saddam Hussein is] Hitler revisited... worse than Hitler.
analogy, he said: ``I didn't say the Holocaust. I
mean, that is outrageous.''
-- President George Bush. When challenged on the
%
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
    Communists
Two - one to screw it in, and a second to hand out leaflets.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you
 could know how seldom they do.
-- Olin Miller
%
I'm not rushing into being in love. I'm finding fourth grade hard enough.
-- Confidential opinions about love
-- Regina, age 10
%
:server: n. A kind of {daemon} that performs a service for the
   requester and which often runs on a computer other than the one on
   which the server runs.  A particularly common term on the Internet,
   which is rife with `name servers', `domain servers', `news
   servers', `finger servers', and the like.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals.
You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them.
-- Robert Lucky
%
 :-bill Zydeco Bill, with harmonica in mouth and washboard on chest
-- SMILEY
%
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only
great poets can read them.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), III, Reading
%
All the good stuff at the right price
-- National Lumber.
%
Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut.
-- Daniel S. Greenberg
%
I'm not living in the real world, I'm living in a magazine.
-- Blondie
%
So in the name of security everyone who enters the room has to
  have his bottom fondled by this drooling prevert?
-- Edmund : General Hospital
%
Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
-- Seneca
%
:working as designed: [IBM] adj. 1. In conformance to a wrong or
   inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned.
   2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility.
   3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a
   criticism or suggestion.  At {IBM}, this sense is used in
   official documents!  See {BAD}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Hmmm..  A hash-singer and a cross-eyed guy were SLEEPING on a deserted
 island, when...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
"When you slithered out of your hole that day, and you spewed your venom all
over this defenseless 12-year-old girl, you made this court's top 10 hit list.
In a way, the best sentence this court could give would be no sentence at all,
because if you left this courtroom I don't think you would be alive 10
minutes. You are nothing but a weed, a weed among wheat...And when we have a
weed, it's my job to eradicate the weed, because if you don't you will choke
the wheat. Therefore, I'm going to take you off the streets for just as long
as I possibly can. It means you aren't even eligible for parole until you're
92. That leaves only one more count, aggravated robbery. ..You stole this
little girl's bra as a souvenir, probably to brag about it to your friends
later on. Well, I'm going to give you a souvenir of Trumbull County justice.
And that is, you will receive a maximum sentence of 10 to 25 on the aggravated
robbery for the stealing of that bra. And I hope that if you last 25 years in
prison that you remember that souvenir.

"Get this scum out of here!"
-- A sentence passed by Judge W. Wyatt McKay of Trumbull County, Ohio
%
Seeing Ministry live is like mainlining on the 20th Century
-- Melody Maker
%
if your coffee table used to be a TV cable spool.
-- You may be redneck...
%
To love and to be wise is scarcely granted to the highest.
-- Laberius
%
For a male and female to live continuously together
 is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural
 condition.
-- Robert Briffault
%
The prince wants your daughter for his wife.
 Well, tell him his wife can't have her.
-- Blackadder III
%
GUILLOTINE, n.  A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders
with good reason.
    In his great work on _Divergent Lines of Racial Evolution_, the
learned Professor Brayfugle argues from the prevalence of this gesture
and it is simply a survival of the habit of retracing the head inside
the shell.  It is with reluctance that I differ with so eminent an
authority, but in my judgment (as more elaborately set forth and
the shrug is a poor foundation upon which to build so important a
theory, for previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown.  I
have not a doubt that it is directly referable to the terror inspired
by the guillotine during the period of that instrument's activity.
-- the shrug among Frenchmen, that they are descended from turtles
-- enforced in my work entitled _Hereditary Emotions_ lib. II, c. XI)
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Have you ever talked into an acoustic modem?
... Did it answer?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to
sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in
every bodily orifice.
-- Edward Abbey
%
But this one goes to eleven.
-- Nigel Tufnel
%
 o-) cyclops
-- SMILEY
%
Everything you know is wrong.
-- The Firesign Theater
%
BRONZE
  The third highest medal obtainable at sporting events. Generally
  won by those athletes who go on to advertise underarm products,
  dog shampoos and toilet cleaners, rather than the more highly rated
  breakfast cereals (silver) and sneakers (gold).
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
The best of prophets of the future is the past.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Letter, Jan. 28, 1821
%
When a man reproached him for going into unclean places, he said,
"The sun too penetrates into privies, but is not polluted by them."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
It's OK, I'll pack on the plane.
-- My Mom is off to London
%
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more
even than death....Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and
terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and
comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.
Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief
glory of man.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Selected Papers"
%
As far as I can tell, you're as guilty as a puppy sitting next to
  a pile of poo...
Charming.
-- George and Edmund : Corporal Punishment
%
Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx' last words (1890-1977)
%
...I would go so far as to suggest that, were it not for our ego and
concern to be different, the African apes would be included in our
family, the Hominidae.
-- Richard Leakey
%
Keep your boss' boss off your boss' back.
-- First Law of Corporate Survival
%
To beguile many, and be beguil'd by one.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher
must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
Do you really believe that fear of the damage that you could inflict with
your .22 Squirrel Blaster is the only thing keeping the government in
check?
-- Mark Oehlert
%
No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.  Good and bad are
but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is
what is after my own constitution; the only wrong what is against it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
We can enjoy knowing that we were good to life,
rather than life was good to us.
-- Rabbi Joseph Edelheit
%
I waive the quantum o' the sin,
  The hazard of concealing;
But, och! it hardens a' within,
  And petrifies the feeling!
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Epistle to a Young Friend
%
I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library.
 When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
%

-- The way to a man's heart is through his pants wallet and underwear.
%
Such sober certainty of waking bliss.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 263
%
The hardest to plow are
someone else's field
and one's own wife.
-- Milorad Pavic
%
 Good cleavage.
-- Mr. Spock
-- The Apple, after breaking an indigenous rock.
%
In the multitude of counsellors there is safety.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xi, 14; xxiv, 6
%
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
-- Herman Melville
%
Without work all life goes rotten.
-- Albert Camus
%
I know nothing about it; I am my own ancestor.
-- Junot, Duc D'Abrantes (1771-1813)
%
The better technology does not always sell better, even if it is first.
-- William J. Spencer, Xerox Corporation
%
I did cancel one performance in Holland where they thought my music was so easy
that they didn't rehearse at all.  And so the first time when I found that out,
I rehearsed the orchestra myself in front of the audience of 3,000 people and
and they invited me to come to the Holland festival and they promised to
rehearse.  And when I got to Amsterdam they had changed the orchestra, and
again, they hadn't rehearsed.  So they were no more prepared the second time
than they had been the first.  I gave them a lecture and told them to cancel
the performance; they then said over the radio that i had insisted on their
cancelling the performance because they were "insufficiently Zen."
Can you believe it?
-- the next day I rehearsed through the second movement this was the piece
-- _Cheap Imitation_ and they then were ashamed.  The Dutch people were ashamed
-- composer John Cage, "Electronic Musician" magazine, March 88, pg. 89
%
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he
 can easily buy one for a few dollars.
-- Fred Allen
%
I went to the doctor last week. He told me to take all my clothes off. Then
 he said, "You'll have to diet." I said, "What color?"
-- Ken Dodd
%
I know of no sentence that can induce such immediate and brazen lying as
 the one that begins: "Have you read ..."
-- Wilson Mizner
%
When you find that flowers and shrubs will not endure a certain
atmosphere, it is a very significant hint to the human creature to
remove out of that neighborhood.
-- Mayhew
%
One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
-- Thomas Carlyle
%
Words that wise Bacon or brave Raleigh spoke.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epistle ii, Book ii, Line 168
%
A king that would not feel his crown too heavy for him, must wear it
every day; but if he think it too light, he knoweth not of what metal it
is made.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
The general himself ought to be such a one as can at the same time
see both forward and backward.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Whether an Aged Man ought to meddle in State Affairs
%
Young blood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day.
-- Charles Kingsley
%
By labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this
life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps
leave something so written to after times as they should not willingly
let it die.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- The Reason of Church Government, Introduction, Book ii
%
As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth
 attaining youth.
-- Douglas Coupland, from _Generation X_ (Tales for an Accelerated Culture)
%
Mars is essentially in the same orbit...[as the Earth]
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.
-- Vice President (and space program coordinator) Dan Quayle, 8/11/89
-- (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
%
An hors d'oeuvre is an unfamiliar creature curled up on a cracker and
 stabbed with a toothpick to make sure it's dead.
-- Pat Buttram
%
 Avoid any awful anachronistic aggravating
 antediluvian alliterations.
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
"Authorities are now saying that the war on drugs will be bigger than
World War II... Oh, *great*... more Time-Life books."
-- Jay Leno
%
A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.
-- Latin Proverb
%
...you can't digest anything except VendeCoffee(TM) and VendeChoc(TM).
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
A door is something you're on the wrong side of when you're too short to
 reach the knob. When you are tall enough to reach the knob, a door is
 something you have left open if it's supposed to be closed, or closed if
 it's supposed to be open. You can't win. Whichever you do, you have done it
 wrong. So close all open doors and open all closed doors. You will still be
 wrong but you will be busy.
-- Robert Paul Smith
%
Data: "A standard isolation procedure would be advisable."
LaForge: "I agree.  We'll cut off each reactor from the damaged control system,
  and repair them one-by-one."
Riker: "How long will that take?"
LaForge: "Two to three weeks, at least."
Picard: "All right, Mister LaForge."
Barclay: "I don't agree."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
When pleasure remains, does it remain a pleasure?
-- A Sinbad the Sailor film
%
1.  Always hire a rich attorney
2.  Never buy from a rich salesman.
-- Goldenstern's Rules
%
A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 205
%
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's
last romance.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.
-- Liz Smith
%
I asked Police Missing Persons about The Who
And they looked at me as if talking nonsense
I tried the gun shop for Guns N Roses
And they asked if I had a license
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary,
categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.
-- Abbie Hoffman
%
All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of
life is to enjoy it.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
%
Any inanimate object, regardless of its composition or configuration,
may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner
for reasons that are either totally obscure or completely mysterious.
-- Dr. Fyodor Flap
%
>>> >This is revisionist history.
>>> This is crap.
>>This is a lie.
>This is boring.

This is USENET...

    other attributions removed to protect the guilty
-- Hank Bovis (hb@Virginia.EDU),
%
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
-- Mother Teresa
%
motor will be yours, as well as ... any other secret you might wish
to know.
-- ... But reach the thought that it requires and the secret of the
-- John Galt
%
Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day.
-- Harry S. Truman
%
I'm a space cowboy.   Bet you weren't ready for that.
 I'm a space cowboy.  I'm sure you know where it's at.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
-- Steve Miller
%
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
-- Miguel de Unamuno
%
To solve the problems of today, we must focus on tomorrow.
-- Erik Nupponen
%
Failed the bright promise of your early day.
-- Reginald Heber (1783-1826)
-- Palestine
%
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.
-- Harlan Ellison
%
It is to hope, though hope were lost.
-- Mrs. Barbauld (1743-1825)
-- Come here, Fond Youth
%
It is better to sound a person with whom one deals afar off, than
to fall upon the point at first.
-- Fred Bacon
%
Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon,
there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he was so
Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how completely
Mournful he would be on Wednesday ...
-- Walt Kelly
%
When I mentioned that it seemed to me that the
 Reverend's followers were being systematically
 turned into mindless zombies by a fraudulent
 megalomaniac, it was taken as criticism.
-- Woody Allen
%
There Is No Land Unhabitable, Nor Sea Unnavigable
-- Richard Harluyt.
%
'T is my vocation, Hal; 't is no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
He must be heard--and also seen; for if he played
behind the scenes a great deal of the poetry of his playing
would be lost.
-- Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Neue Zeitschrift, On Franz Liszt
%
To deny we need and want power is to deny that we hope to be effective.
-- Liz Smith
%
PHOTOGRAPH, n.  A picture painted by the sun without instruction in
art.  It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite
so good as that of a Cheyenne.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
From up on the rooftops there arose such a clatter,
 I ran from my bed to see what was the matter.
 I ran to the window and threw up.
-- Tom Smothers
%
It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it
taken from you.
-- M. Grundler
%
For my part, getting up seems not so easy
      By half as lying.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- Morning Meditations
%
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iv, Chap. iv
%
Like jug, like lid
-- Ingrained Serbian Proverb
%
To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.
-- W. Churchill, on Korean War negotiations
%

-- Just out! The "I wanna be a Klingon" head vice!
%
The only thing that is faithful is a beer...
-- Cliff and Norm.
%
WINTER
  That time of year that everyone hates despite initially welcoming
  it after a long summer. Except for people who live so close to the
  equator that they don't notice the difference. Lucky bastards.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
".... For my purpose holds;
To sail beyond the sunset, and the light
Of all the western stars, until I die."
               Tennyson
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%

-- Always forgive your enemiesnothing annoys them so much.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and
demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of
justice and mercy.
-- Wendell Berry
%
   LAUNCELOT leaps into SHOT with a mighty cry and runs the GUARD through and
   hacks him to the floor.  Blood.  Swashbuckling music (perhaps).
   LAUNCELOT races through into the castle screaming.
SECOND SENTRY: Hey!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Normally our rules are rigid; we tend to discretion, if for no other
reason than self-protection.  We never recommend any of our graduates,
although we cheerfully provide information as to those who have failed
their courses.
-- Jack Vance, "Freitzke's Turn"
%
And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest
of these is charity.
-- I Corinthians, 13:13
%
May the Lord open your eyes and heart so that you may understand him more
 clearer.
-- Patrick Harubin, pgh@cs.duke.edu, soc.religion.islam
%
Spock: "Ship, out of danger?"
Kirk: "Yes."
Spock: "Don't grieve, Admiral.  It is logical.  The needs of the many...
  outweigh--"
Kirk: "The needs of the few."
Spock: "Or the one."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
It's a fine night to have an evening.
-- Steven Wright
%
    aerobics instructors
Five. Four to do it in perfect synchrony and one to stand there
going "To the left, and to the left, and to the left, and to
the left, and take it out, and put it down, and pick it up, and
put it in, and to the right, and to the right, and to the
right, and to the right..."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
'Tis home felt pleasure prompts the patriot's sigh; This makes him
wish to live and dare to die.
-- Campbell
%
SABBATH, n.  A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God
made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.  Among the
Jews observance of the day was enforced by a Commandment of which this
is the Christian version:  "Remember the seventh day to make thy
neighbor keep it wholly."  To the Creator it seemed fit and expedient
that the Sabbath should be the last day of the week, but the Early
Fathers of the Church held other views.  So great is the sanctity of
the day that even where the Lord holds a doubtful and precarious
jurisdiction over those who go down to (and down into) the sea it is
reverently recognized, as is manifest in the following deep-water
version of the Fourth Commandment:

    Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,
    And on the seventh holystone the deck and scrape the cable.

    Decks are no longer holystoned, but the cable still supplies the
captain with opportunity to attest a pious respect for the divine
ordinance.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Extremes meet.
-- Louis-Sebastien Mercier
%
Marta likes to talk about sensuality, but I don't think she would know
 sensuality if it bit her on the ass.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Mankind is the only one of God's creatures who will foul his own nest.
-- Mildred Martin
%
It is better for one's reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed
 unconventionally.
-- John Maynard Kyenes
%
 You have reached the Des Moines chapter of the Iowa
 Procrastination Society.  Please leave a message after the tone
 and we'll get around to it...
     (or)
 Hi!  This is Mary.  I'm afflicted with lysdexic procrastination.
 Please leave your message before the tone and I'll get around to
 getting it straight.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
Indeed, to quarantine a person with AIDS or the AIDS virus does entail a
 loss, in the short run, of human freedom.   Agreed.  But the idea of human
 freedom isn't now, and never has been, absolute.  Besides, in the long run,
 as I have noted, all people with AIDS die.
    quoted in The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves, a Planned Parenthood
     pamphlet
-- John Lofton, Anti-Choice Columnist, The Washington Times, 3/31/89, as
%
Hit the ball over the fence, and you can
take your time going around the bases.
-- John Raper
%
The road to the heart is the ear.
-- Voltaire
%
Kirk: "Captain's Log, Stardate 8141.6.  Starship Enterprise departing
for Ceti  Alpha V to pick up the crew of U.S.S. Reliant.  All is well.
 And yet, I can't  help wondering about the friend I leave behind.
 'There are always  possibilities', Spock said.  And if Genesis is
indeed life from death, I must  return to this place again."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8141.6
%
You can eat the whole cucumber, skin 'n' all.
-- Cucumbers are Better
%
Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee--and not too far away
 lest he forget thee.
-- Aneurin Bevan
%
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by
her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or
hearts.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
No one should hide their true self behind a false face.
-- L. Chaney
%
We think it's much better to entertain people and get medals
than to kill them and get medals for that.
-- Paul McCartney (c.a. 1965)
%
:HLL: /H-L-L/ n. [High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)]
   Found primarily in email and news rather than speech.  Rarely, the
   variants `VHLL' and `MLL' are found.  VHLL stands for
   `Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe a
   {bondage-and-discipline language} that the speaker happens to
   like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs.  `MLL' stands
   for `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to
   describe {C}, alluding to its `structured-assembler' image.
   See also {languages of choice}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Because he was human, because he had goodness,
Because he was moral they called him insane.
Delusions of grandeur, visions of splendor,
A manic depressive who walks in the rain.

Cinderella Man, doing what you can,
They can't understand what it means.
Cinderella Man, hang on to your plans.
Try as they might they cannot steal your dreams.
-- Neil Peart, Rush
%
History is a lie commonly agreed upon.
-- Nietzsche
%
    doctors
Three. One to find a bulb specialist, one to find a bulb
installation specialist, and one to bill it all to Medicare.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- The Ring and the Book, Pompilia, Line 357
%
There is one comforting conclusion which is easy for a real mathematician.
Real mathematics has no effects on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike
purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems
unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.
-- G. H. Hard, "A Mathematician's Apology", 1940
%
I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame
 everything on.
-- Oscar Levant
%
:bulletproof: adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation
   considered extremely {robust}; lossage-resistant; capable of
   rare and valued quality.  Syn. {armor-plated}.
-- correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition a
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The labourer is worthy of his hire.
-- New Testament
-- Luke x, 7; 1 Timothy v, 18
%
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
-- Jim Ryun
%
I was driving down the street at 100 miles per hour for no reason. The
 police stopped me for speeding. They said, "Why were you going so fast?" I
 said, "Why? I had my foot to the floor. It sends more gas to the carburetor.
 It makes the engine go faster. The whole car just takes off." And I said,
 "See this wheel, this steers it."
-- Steven Wright
%
"Drive carefully - we can wait!"
-- Sign in the Funeral Parlor
%
Who with a body filled and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.
-- Old Testament
-- Wisdom of Solomon ii, 5
%
Excuse me, Worker, I'll just be a nanosecond.
-- a computer, from Firesign Theater's I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus
%
A dream?   Really, Doctor. [ You'll be consulting the entrails of a
sheep next.]
-- Brigadier, The Time Monster
%
There is a higher law than the Constitution.
-- William H. Seward (1801-1872)
-- Speech, March 11, 1850
%
How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol?  How about the pillow?  It has
 more feathers than the dove, and it doesn't have that dangerous beak.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in
their death they were not divided.
-- Old Testament
-- 2 Samuel i, 23
%
And the heat goes on...where the hand has been.
-- Byrne/Eno
%
Take off your hat to your yesterdays;
take off your coat for your tomorrows.
-- Proverb
%
Mummy dust to make me old;
 To shroud my clothes, the black of night;
 To age my voice, an old hag's cackle;
 To whiten my hair, a scream of fright;
 A blast of wind to fan my hate;
 A thunderbolt to mix it well --
 Now begin thy magic spell!
-- The Evil Queen, Snow White, Elias Disney: 1937
%
Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons
 for it afterwards.
-- Soren F. Petersen
%
That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how
obvious they've been all along.
-- Madeleine L'Engle
%
"I knew that before you were born." Let him who would instruct a wiser
man consider this as said to himself.
-- Phaedrus (c. 8 A.D.)
-- Book v, Fable 9, 4
%
Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money
should be like grace--a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Thou canst not say I did it; never shake
Thy gory locks at me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
If it wasn't for half the people in the world, the other half would be all
 of them.
-- Colonel Lemuel Stoopnagle
%
Don't hold to anger, hurt or pain.  They steal your energy and keep
you from love.
-- Leo F. Buscaglia
%
When a woman is speaking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes.
-- Victor Hugo
%
Never lie when the truth is more profitable.
-- Stanislaw Lec
%
We may be stupid . . . but we're not clever!
-- F & L
%
Rand: "Do we report this, sir?"
Sulu: "Are you kidding?"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9521.6
%
Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriae, yet as Hieron
observes, they will put their names to their books.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsect. 14
%
Hangovers go away.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
 agree with them.
-- I have opinions of my own strong opinions but I don't always
-- George Bush
%
McCoy: "Happy birthday."
Kirk: "I don't know what to say."
McCoy: "Well, you could say, 'Thank you.'"
Kirk: "Thank you."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.3
%
Let me put it another way, Bob. You _are_ a girl. And you're a girl
  with about as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses
  trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club.
-- Edmund : Major Star
%
Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch
At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb;
Keep clean, be as fruit, earn life, and watch
Till the white-wing'd reapers come!
-- Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
-- The Seed growing secretly
%
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones
who will be writing about you.
-- Cyril Connolly, "Journal and Memoir" 1983
%
Inconsolable to the minuet in Ariadne.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- The Critic, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Just go out for a breath of air,
and you'll be ready for Medicare.
The city streets are really quite a thrill,
if the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
Pollution, pollution, wear a gas mask and a veil,
then you can breathe as long as you don't inhale.
-- POLLUTION by Tom Lehrer
%
"It was a mutual parting of the ways.  We gave him the freedom to
do what he wanted to do."
"What was that?"
"Drink himself to death."
-- The Cowboy Wally Show
%
I bought the latest computer;
it came fully loaded.
It was guaranteed for 90 days,
but in 30 was outmoded!
-- The Wall Street Journal passed along by Big Red Computer's SCARLETT
%
Egotist, n.:
  A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
%
I have decided that we shall stay here.
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
Jev: "Imzati..."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
Scheduled changes always mean cutbacks.
(Minor schedule adjustments always affect your bus (train, whatever))
-- Steve Ross
%
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
-- Desiderius Erasmus (1465-1536)
%
If there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one
would fly first.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), The Celebrated Jumping Frog
%
If you submit your paper to a second editor, his journal invariably
demands an entirely different reference system.
-- Maeve O'Conner
%
I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a
 bookmark.
-- Steven Wright
%
The next person to mention
spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off.
-- Bill Conrad
%
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood.
-- William Shakespeare
%
...you wish you could study for an exam by executing the command:
cat civ100 | tee brain
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago,
had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.
-- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), "The Dance of Life", 1923
%
    chickens
None. They're all far too busy crossing the road.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
[The members of the Chamberlain government] are decided only to be
undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, all-powerful
for impotency.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
 (O--< fishy
-- SMILEY
%
"For a tasteful evening."
-- Hannibal Lecter Dinner Theatre
%
It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are
equally entitled to liberty.
-- John C. Calhoun
%
The proper man understands equity, the small man profits.
-- Cervantes
%
And what would you do if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I
command that you be happy in the world.  As long as you live.'   What
would you do then?
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions"
%
I hate to agree with Tim Maroney on anything, but I guess this latest is
 an example of the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
-- Lee Lady, lady@uhccux.UUCP
%
The stormy March has come at last,
  With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
  That through the snowy valley flies.
-- William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
-- March
%
Hang around with dolphins, carrying a large pair of scissors in case
you meet a tuna fishing boat that hasn't learnt about driftnets being
illegal.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
"... but that's not important, that's just numbers."
-- Dr. Wu,  Math Professor
%
He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiasticus xiii, 1
%
I have six locks on my door, all in a row, and when I go out I only lock
 every other one. 'Cause I figure no matter how long somebody stands there,
 picks the locks, they're always locking three.
-- Elayne Boosler
%
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good,
 in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
-- Robert Graves
%
Animals feed; man eats.  Only the man of intellect and judgement knows
how to eat.
-- Antheime Brillat-Savarin
%

-- Trickle down theory when the $$$ go from George to Neil.
%
I'd give $1000 to be a millionaire.
-- Lewis Timberlake
%
Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue i
%
Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Samson Agonistes, Line 293
%
What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
your wall-to-wall carpet is a
welcome mat.
-- You know you have a small apartment when...
-- S. Rickly Christian
%
Private, what is the time?
We didn't receive any messages...and Captain Blackadder definitely
  did not shoot this delicious plump-breasted pigeon, sir.
...Do you want to be cremated, Baldrick, or buried at sea?
-- Melchett, Baldrick and Edmund : Corporal Punishment
%
Under active consideration: We're searching the files for it.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
%
I'm sorry, this is becoming a speech.
You're the Captain, sir. You're entitled.
-- Picard and Troi, "Code of Honor", stardate 41235.25
%
In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
An angel! or, if not,
An earthly paragon!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act iii, Sc. 6
%
All men profess honesty as long as they can.
To believe all men honest would be folly.
To believe none so is something worse.
-- John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)
%
"FREE BOTTLE OF CHIVAS WITH EVERY MILLION-DOLLAR DEPOSIT."
-- Sign on bank
%
Life that dares send
A challenge to his end,
And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend!
-- Richard Crashaw (c. 1616-1650)
-- Wishes to his Supposed Mistress
%
The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-- Roger Levian
%
Our values are creating jobs in America.
                   question: "[The Council on Competitiveness] has made it
                   easier for businesses to exceed pollution levels, it has
                   delayed regulations on aircraft noise, it has weakened
                   regulations to make apartment buildings more accessible to
                   wheelchairs. Are those your values?"
                   (ABC's "Prime Time Live," August 10, 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle answering Chris Wallace's
%
O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Tell me more about these "habits".
-- Beverly
%
No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in
 his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables.
-- Archie Goodwin
%
"Man, do I look like a cigarette butt?"
"huh?"
"Cause I sure feel smoked!"
-- D Jagoda
%
Beer doesn't use up your toilet paper.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
:cdr: /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ [from LISP] vt. To skip past the
   first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP
   operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list
   consisting of all but the first element of its argument).  In the
   form `cdr down', to trace down a list of elements:  "Shall we
   cdr down the agenda?"  Usage: silly.  See also {loop through}.

   Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 7090 that hosted
   the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called
   the `address' and `decrement' parts.  The term `cdr' was originally
   `Contents of Decrement part of Register'.  Similarly, `car' stood
   for `Contents of Address part of Register'.

   The cdr and car operations have since become bases for
   formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts.  GLS recalls,
   for example, a programming project in which strings were
   represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character
   operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The decision to work overtime is the decision to deliver late.
-- Tom DeMarco
%
Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit
rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out
requires a heroism which is transcendent.
-- of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth that
-- Henry Ward Beecher
%
It is meat and drink to me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
From seeming evil still educing good.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- Hymn, Line 114
%
 This is the Literacy Self Test Hotline.  After the tone, leave
 your name and number, and recite a sentence using today's
 vocabulary word.  Today's word is "supercilious".
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
What the hell is that noise?
-- Mayor of Hiroshima
-- Famous Last Words
%
LECTURER, n.  One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear
and his faith in your patience.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated
with true virtue.
-- Confucius
%
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical
invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
-- Mark Twain
%
 When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will
 do so at the most inconvenient possible time.
-- Johnson's First Law
%
In any household, junk accumulates to fill the space available for its storage.
-- Bruce O. Boston
%
In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart
there is room for nothing.
-- Antonio Porchia, Voces
%

-- When a poor man eats a chicken one of them is sick.
%
Nothing you can't spell will ever work.
-- Will Rogers
%
FLOP, v.  Suddenly to change one's opinions and go over to another
party.  The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus,
who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our
partisan journals.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Een schip op het strand is een baken in zee.
(A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to the sea.)
-- Dutch Proverb
%
TRIANGLE
  Three-sided object which, even in isosceles form, begins to get very
  boring after only a short time. For maximum excitement, an object
  with many more sides should be considered.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is
 cowardice.
-- Mark Twain
%
Always laugh at yourself first - before others do.
-- E. Maxwell
%
You'll miss the whole end of the war!
Yes, very bad luck. Beep.
Right...
Beep.
...Now, Baldrick, I'll be back as soon as I can.
Pa-paaaa.......
-- George and Edmund : Goodbyeee...
%
if you entertain with tapes of pro bowling.
-- You may be redneck...
%
We are all terrible little creatures.
-- Martin Amis
%
He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty
wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up
again.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 259
%
Short is my date, but deathless my renown.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book ix, Line 535
%
And threat'ning France, plac'd like a painted Jove,
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Annus Mirabilis, Stanza 39
%
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything.  Except
what is worth knowing.  Journalism, conscious of this, and having
tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
The forces of evil can marshal even more support than the forces of good,
 especially when pizza is served.
-- unknown
%
APL is a write-only language. I can write programs
 in APL, but I can't read any of them.
-- Roy Keir
%
NASA Awards Acronym Generation System (AGS) Contract For Space Station Freedom
-- Tom Neff
%
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been
granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
-- I do not shrink from this responsibility I welcome it.
-- John F. Kennedy (from his Inaugural Address)
%
The basic question is this: Why should *anything* exist? *Nothing* would be
tidier.
-- Edward Abbey
%
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional
and are the portals of discovery.
-- James Joyce, "Ulysses"
%
Albert Einstein was a late talker as a child. His parents were
understandably worried. finally at the supper table one evening,
He broke his silence to say, The soup is too hot. Greatly relieved,
his parents asked why he never said a word before. Young Albert
replied, Because up to now everything was in order.
-- From 'The Little, Brown Book Of Anecdotes' by Clifton Fadiman
%
He sees that this great roundabout
The world, with all its motley rout,
  Church, army, physic, law,
Its customs and its businesses,
Is no concern at all of his,
  And says--what says he?--Caw.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Jackdaw, (Translation from Vincent Bourne)
%
Computers are utterly subversive of dictatorships because they are such
 a powerful instrument of communication.
-- Brit Hume
%
Some women are like musical glasses.
To keep them in tune they must be wet.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%
"I find it hard to sit still in one spot, and impossible to
sit still in two spots."
-- Brother Theodore
%
The saying, "Practice is everything," is Periander's.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Periander, vi
%
Now is the accepted time.
-- New Testament
-- 2 Corinthians vi, 2
%
Halcyon days.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.
-- Harry S. Truman, "Memoirs, Vol. II", 1955
%
Nought shall prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that
all which we behold Is full of blessings.
-- Wordsworth
%
    Chuck Robbs does it to take to screw in a light bulb?
None, Douglas Wilder broke his lamp and Oliver North sold his
light bulb to Iran.
-- How many
%
Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.
-- Bill Cosby
%
In the gates of Eternity, the black hand and the white hand hold
each other with an equal clasp.
-- Mrs. Stowe
%
:ogg: /og/ [CMU] v. 1. In the multi-player space combat game
   Netrek, to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are
   carrying armies or occupying strategic positions.  Named during a
   game in which one of the players repeatedly used the tactic while
   playing Orion ship G, showing up in the player list as "Og".
   This trick has been roundly denounced by those who would return to
   the good old days when the tactic of dogfighting was dominant, but
   as Sun Tzu wrote, "What is of supreme importance in war is to
   attack the enemy's strategy."  However, the traditional answer to
   the newbie question "What does ogg mean?" is just "Pick up some
   armies and I'll show you."  2. In other games, to forcefully
   attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended
   will be renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his
   previous advantage.  Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has
   gained a simple name.  3. To do anything forcefully, possibly
   without consideration of the drain on future resources.  "I guess
   I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow."  "Whoops!
   I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming
   car."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny.
-- E. B. White
%
There is never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.
-- Meskimen's Law
%
Unfair animal names:

-- tsetse fly                   bullhead
-- booby                   duck-billed platypus
-- sapsucker                   Clarence
-- Gary Larson
%
 $$ for academic jobs
-- SMILEY
%
To be a real folk-song singer you have to collect the songs straight from
 the horse's mouth. The way to do this is to go to a village and find the
 oldest inhabitant and ask him to sing you the songs his mother taught me.
 Him, I mean. Well, you'll probably find that he's deaf, and if he isn't
 deaf he can't sing, and if he can sing he doesn't want to, and by the time
 you've persuaded him and he does sing, you won't understand a word of what
 he's singing about. This is how folk songs have been passed down from
 generation to generation.
-- Anna Russell
%
Aelborne: "You are our visitors. Welcome, welcome."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3198.4
%
FATHER:    Who are you?
PRINCE:    I'm ... your son ...
FATHER:    Not you.
LAUNCELOT: I'm ... er ... Sir Launcelot, sir.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Always remember that you are unique.  Just like everyone else.
-- Meade's maxim
%
Well, I wouldn't exactly call it 'working'... more like
'groveling for dollars.'
-- Night Court
%
Crikey, I'm looking forward to today. Up-tiddly-up-up, down-diddly-
  down-down, whoops-poop-twiddly dee, a decent scrap with the
  fiendish Red Baron, a bit of a jolly old crash landing behind
  enemy lines, capture, torture, escape, and then back home in time
  for tea and medals!
...George, who's using the family brain cell at the moment?
-- George and Edmund : Private Plane
%
It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.
-- Norman Douglas (1868-1952; British Author)
%
...you want to wash your hair and think:  awk -F"/neck" '{ print $1 }' | shower
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah ii, 22
%
Not all who own a harp are harpers.
-- Marcus Terentius Varro
%
It's amazing to me that one of the world's most feared diseases would be
 carried by one of the world's smallest animals: the real tiny dog.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
I read the book of Job last night - I don't think God comes out well in it.
-- Virginia Woolf
%
Never wear a suit costing less than two hundred clams.
-- "Legs" Diamond (to Larry Adler)
%
    pawnbrokers
None. It's of no interest to them.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Atheism
%
The reason I feel guilty is, I'm so bad at it.
-- David Steinberg
%
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%
Against Idleness and Mischief

How doth the little busy bee         How skillfully she builds her cell!
Improve each shining hour,           How neat she spreads the wax!
And gather honey all the day         And labours hard to store it well
From every opening flower!           With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill       In books, or work, or healthful play,
I would be busy too;                 Let my first years be passed,
For Satan finds some mischief still  That I may give for every day
For idle hands to do.                Some good account at last.

-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748), Divine Songs, Song xx
%
Well I've been to one world fair, a picnic and a rodeo, and that's
 the stupidest thing I even heard come over a set of earphones!
-- Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
%
    sorority girls
6 - one to screw it in and 5 to make the t-shirts.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Did YOU find a DIGITAL WATCH in YOUR box of VELVEETA?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Those who believe in astrology are living in houses with foundations of
 Silly Putty.
-- Dennis Rawlins, astronomer
%
It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before
it provided valuable data and considerable employment.
-- The Concorde excuse
%
    gully dwarves
You sure it's dark?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light light bulb?
%
A man once asked Diogenes what was the proper time for supper, and
he made answer, "If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if
you are a poor man, whenever you can."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
Salish: "Behold, the god who bleeds!"
-- "The Paradise Syndrome", Stardate 4842.6.
%
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
Danger, you haven't seen the last of me!
     No, but the first of you turns my stomach!
-- The Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger
%
He that knows not what the world is, knows not where he is himself.
He that knows not for what he was made, knows not what he is nor what
the world is.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, viii, 52
%
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and
more sense than we have.
-- Don Herold
%
If your wife wants to learn to drive, don't stand in her way.
-- Sam Levenson
%

-- Brooklyn the Fertile Crescent of Civilization.
%
I wished now that I had gone to the restaurant across the street where
the food had at least the merit of being tasteless.
-- Found on a company cafeteria door
%
    punk rockers
Three. One to do it and two to argue about who did it first.
Note: refers to punk pastime of arguing about whether the
first punk band was The Sex Pistols, The Damned, or The Dead
Kennedys etc.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Combat
-- Glass Cellar of Male Disposibility, 09
%
To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
%
Man had achieved freedom from- without yet having achieved freedom to
-to be himself, to be productive, to be fully awake.
-- Erich Fromm
%
Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle,  US News and World Report (10/10/88)
%
Politician, n.:
   From the Greek "poly" ("many") and the French "tete" ("head" or
"face," as in "tete-a-tete": head to head or face to face).  Hence
"polytetien", a person of two or more faces.
-- Martin Pitt
%
One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and
 show you a nice, brand- new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet
 broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack
 of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do
 not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up
 with an earful of cider.
-- Damon Runyon
%
 :-' spitting out chewing tobacco
-- SMILEY
%
A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
couple of hours in the library.
-- Westheimer's Discovery
%
Our country is the world; our countrymen are all mankind.
-- William Lloyd Garrison (1804-1879)
-- Prospectus of the Liberator, Dec. 15, 1837
%
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
-- Carl Jung
%
So, if there's no God, who changes the water?
-- [two goldfish in a bowl, New Yorker Cartoon]
%
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without
integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
engine and a working horn.
-- LOGO A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real
%
 PSYCHOLOGY:  Based on your knowledge of their works, evaluate
 the emotional stability and repressed frustrations of the following:
 Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ramses II, Gregory of Nicea, Hammurabi.
 Support your evaluation with quotations from each man's work,
 making appropriate references.  It is not necessary to translate.
-- Life Studies 101 (Bob Pasker <rbp@NETCOM.COM>)
%
Half the things that people do not succeed in, are through fear of
making the attempt...
-- James Northcote
%
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. xvi
%
Don't open a shop unless you know how to smile.
-- Jewish proverb
%
If your capacity to acquire has outstripped your capacity to enjoy,
you are on the way to the scrap-heap.
-- Glen Buck
%
Many-headed multitude.
-- Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
-- Arcadia, Book ii
%
I guess you say that about most things in life; it isn't so bad as
long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
-- Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks)
%
A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physics, or divinity, to be
overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes,
and gives employment to all its professors.
-- Addison
%
Contrasting this modest effort [of Seymour Cray in his laboratory
to build the CDC 6600] with 34 people including the janitor with
our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have
lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer
the world's most powerful computer.
-- Thomas J. Watson, IBM President, 1965
%
The woman of my dreams knows how to break into systems.
-- Doug Tygar
%
Worf, you MUST be a wimp.
-- Famous Last Words
%
The ideal voice for radio may be defined as having no substance, no sex, no
 owner, and a message of importance to every housewife.
-- Harry V. Wade
%
Brother, brother! we are both in the wrong.
-- John Gay (1688-1732)
-- The Beggar's Opera, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the
children of light.
-- New Testament
-- Luke xvi, 8
%
:BiCapitalization: n. The act said to have been performed on
   trademarks (such as {PostScript}, NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc,
   FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the
   ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization.  Too many
   {marketroid} types think this sort of thing is really cute, even
   the 2,317th time they do it.  Compare {studlycaps}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Wesley: "Data, you're supposed to rip the paper off."
Data: "With the application of a little care, Wes, the paper can be utilized
  again."
Troi: "Data, you're missing the point."
-- "The Measure Of A Man", Stardate unknown
%
The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices
as public trusts,
-- Johann L. Uhland (1787-1862)
-- Speech, Feb. 13, 1835
%

-- Do not spit on the floor -it is forbidden to discuss politics in public!
%
An Englishman thinks he is moral only when he is uncomfortable.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman"
%
Stocks have reached what looks like a permanent high plateau.
-- Professor Irving Fish, Economics, Yale, 1929
%
For angling-rod he took a sturdy oake;
For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke;
His hooke was such as heads the end of pole
To pluck down house ere fire consumes it whole;
The hook was baited with a dragon's tale,--
And then on rock he stood to bob for whale.
-- Sir William Davenant (1605-1668)
-- Britannia Triumphans, Page 15, 1637
%
University lecturers are people who have a profound influence on our society.
They are people with a message; a message that the world should listen to. Here
are just a few pearls of wisdom from university lecturers.

"Moses was a manager"                                           H.Eisen 30/7/90
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a
point of view.
-- All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it an oblique,
-- Peter Conrad, from the _Guardian_ (UK newspaper)
%
There are ten church members by inheritance for one by conviction.
-- Austin O'Malley
%
Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything
that can be counted counts.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Small have continual plodders ever won
  Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights
  That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
  Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
When you pull a plastic garbage bag from its handy dispenser package,
 you always get hold of the closed end and try to pull it open.
-- Poorman's Rule
%
A good deed never goes unpunished.
-- Gore Vidal
%
The probability of your word processor crashing is
directly proportional to the amount of unsaved text.
-- Yoshi
%
"Regardless of the legal speed limit, your Buick must be operated at
speeds faster than 85 MPH (140kph)."
-- presumable misprint from the 1987 Buick Grand National owners manual.
%
Most of the change we think we see in life
is due to truths being in and out of favor.
-- Robert Frost, The Black Cottage
%
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
-- Dean Martin
%
Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics,
because the stakes are so low.
-- Wallace Sayre
%
Shut up, Wesley!
-- Picard, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4
%
What is the first business of one who studies philosophy? To part
with self-conceit. For it is impossible for any one to begin to learn
what he thinks that he already knows.
-- Epictetus (c. 60 AD)
-- How to apply general Principles to particular Cases,
-- Discourses, Book ii, Chap. xvii
%
What we see depends on mainly what we look for.
-- John Lubbock
%
Arms on armour clashing bray'd
Horrible discord, and the madding wheels
Of brazen chariots rag'd: dire was the noise
Of conflict.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book vi, Line 209
%
Most of us spend the first 6 days of each week sowing wild oats,
then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.
-- Fred Allen
%
:core: n. Main storage or RAM.  Dates from the days of
   ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside
   IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time
   hackers or those who would sound like them.  Some derived idioms
   are quite current; `in core', for example, means `in memory'
   (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core
   image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor.  Some
   varieties of Commonwealth hackish prefer {store}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The more we condemn unadulterated Marxian Socialism, the stouter
should be our insistence on thorough-going social reforms.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
%
PIG, n.  An animal (_Porcus omnivorus_) closely allied to the human
race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is
inferior in scope,
   {WYSIWYG}.  Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to
   have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they
   often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a
   command-style interface.  When this happens, the frustrated user
   has a WYSIAYG problem.  This term is most often used of editors,
   word processors, and document formatting programs.  WYSIWYG
   `desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for
   creating small documents with lots raveler that is taken seriously.
A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted
to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts,
where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
    Conservative economists
None, because, look! It's getting brighter! It's definitely
getting brighter !!!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the
 opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
%
Thou seest how few be the things, the which if a man has at his command
his life flows gently on and is divine.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ii, 5
%
An oath is a recognizance to heaven, binding us over in the courts
above, to plead to the indictment of our crimes, that those who 'scape
this world should suffer there.
-- Sothern
%
The lobsters all cluster on your side when you're walking past their tank.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
Little boy blue, come blow your horn,...
-- Nursery rhyme
%
Measure twice and saw once.
-- Advice from an old carpenter
%
Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have
an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light
me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage
by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly
roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is
it not man that keeps and serves me?"
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book ii, Chap. xii, Apology for Raimond Sebond
%
Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return.  Here's an often
overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of
dollars:  For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your
tax return around under your armpit.  No IRS agent is going to want to
spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document.  So even if you owe
money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will
probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit.  What does he care?
It's not his money.
-- Dave Barry, Sweating Out Taxes
%
Apathy -      Who gives a f%*k anyway?
-- The everyday versatility of the "F" word
%
Barclay: "You shouldn't have to wait too long for the results."
Beverly: "What do you mean?"
Barclay: "Couldn't you use a global mode in your scanner?  It would be a lot
  faster."
Beverly: "That's not possible.  We're talking about human cells here, not
  isolinear circuits.  I think you'd better stick to Engineering, Lieutenant."
Barclay: "A cell has an electromagnetic signature, just as a circuit element
  does.  Theoretically, it should work, with just a few adjustments.  I could
  set it up for you if you like."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44704.2
%
Shortly after the 911 emergency number became available, an elderly and
 quite ill lady appeared in a Rochester hospital emergency room, having
 driven herself to the hospital and barely managing to stagger in from the
 parking lot. The horrified nurse said, "Why didn't you call the 911 number
 and get an ambulance?"

 The lady said, "My phone doesn't have an eleven."
-- Authentic incident!
%
Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
If you're confident after you've just finished an exam, it's because
you don't know enough to know better.
-- Jay Weisman
%
Patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few
to be chewed and digested.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Studies
%
if you've ever rolled your riding lawn mower.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Speech on the Conciliation of America, Vol. ii, p. 108
%
'T is the curse of service,
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to the first.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
    survivors of a nuclear war
None, you just hold it up and it glows by itself.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A leader is a dealer in hope.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France (1769-1821)
%
I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to
tell such LIES, LIES!  ALL LIES!
-- Voltaire's Evil Twin
%
Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.
-- Will Rogers
%
The weather for catching fish is that weather, and no other,
in which fish are caught.
-- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
%
Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a
great delicacy.
-- Jacques Cousteau,  'Octopus and Squid:  The Soft Intelligence'
%
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely
rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball
of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes
more than a great many turns will wind again.
-- William James
%
 #:-) for people whose hair is in a mess, like mine
-- SMILEY
%
As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave
well where they have behaved badly.
-- Lew Wallace
%
Hypocrisy is the lubricant of society.
-- David Hull
%
Many a man's done a terrible thing just to get baby a shiny diamond ring.
-- Robert Hunter
%
Eat more possum.
-- West Virginian bumper sticker
%
ROBIN:  (warily) And if you get a question wrong?
ARTHUR: You are cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
ROBIN:  Oh ... wacho!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever"
arrangement which may be put into a mighty poor watch. I suppose it is
about as common as the power of moving ears voluntarily, which is a
moderately rare endowment.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
%
:whack: v. According to arch-hacker James Gosling, to "...modify a
   program with no idea whatsoever how it works." (See {whacker}.)
   It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if
   the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at
   {glark}ing things from context.  As a trivial example, it is
   relatively easy to change all `stderr' writes to `stdout'
   writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise
   mysterious.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
By the apostle Paul, shadows to-night
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
She frieth in her owne grease.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. xi
%
Hi there I'm interested in having breakfast with you. Can I call you or nudge
you?
-- Pick up line
%
I am not going to focus on what I have done in the past what I stand
for, what I articulate to the American people.  The American people
will judge me on what I am saying and what I have done in the last
12 years in the Congress.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
:elvish: n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms
   resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the "Book
   of Kells".  Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The
   Lord of The Rings" as an orthography for his fictional `elvish'
   languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically
   {elegant}) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued
   by artificial languages in general).  It is traditional for
   graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to
   support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items.  See also
   {elder days}.  2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface
   produced by a graphics device.  3. The typeface mundanely called
   `B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
-- Alice Walker
%
    Your average ghost is a much more complex and interesting individual than
is generally imagined. Just because someone is dragging chains or has one's
head perpetually in flames does not necessarily make them of a lesser class.
Some ghosts, especially those with heads attached and mouths to speak through,
are actually quite good conversationalists, with other-worldly stories by the
score. In addition, ghosts generally subscribe to the happy custom of
disappearing completely at dawn, a habit many living associates and relatives
might do well to cultivate.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI (Appendix B)
%
We be of one blood, ye and i.
-- Rudyard Kipling
%
Do not cry, for thy tears shall rust thy skates.
-- Rollerblade (yes, BLADE)
%
    Microsoft employees
Eight: one to work the bulb and seven to make sure Microsoft
gets $2 for every light bulb ever changed anywhere in the
world.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The muse of humor has once again looked down upon me, and found me worthy to
carry out the deeds of her noble cause.
-- Michael S. Rosenberg
%
Now, am I by any chance addressing a senior dignitary of the Spanish
  Inquisition? Because if I am, I would like to say that I am prepared
  to tell you absolutely..._anything_.
-- Edmund to Spaniard : Chains
%
>consult guide about large plug
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
Part of a spare Improbability Drive.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being
as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of
the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the
dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with
this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine
doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
This is not what I signed up for!!!
-- Kira
%
I'm a professional.  I *know* what I'm doing.
-- The Doctor
%
BANES: a type of food.  "Ah love pinto banes!"
-- Texan Dictionary
%
Bare the mean heart that lurks behind a star.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Satire i, Book ii, Line 110
%
Methuselah lived to be 969 years old.  You boys and girls will see
more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Seasons, Summer, Line 67
%
Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the
end of the ocean.
-- David Searls
%
And do as adversaries do in law,--
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Taming of the Shrew
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Get caught in a lie? Deny you ever said it!
-- Liberal Rule # 5
%
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
    Newtons
Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Beer waits in the car while you play football.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
Men, some to business, some to pleasure take;
But every woman is at heart a rake.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Moral Essays, Epistle ii, Line 215
%
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what
the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions.
-- David Jones @ Megatest Corporation
%
What is your sex's earliest, latest care,
Your heart's supreme ambition? To be fair.
-- Lord Lyttleton (1709-1773)
-- Advice to a Lady
%
Oh, I get it!!  ``The BEACH goes on,'' huh, SONNY??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with
them.
-- Louis Bromfield
%
Picard: "I'm willing to entertain suggestions."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44704.2
%
Scrambled Legs.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
This bunker can withstand a OH SH%*@$)(@
-- Famous Last Words
%
RECOUNT, n.  In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded
to the player against whom they are loaded.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The reason I had this difficulty is that the tree wasn't where it would
 have been if I had selected the right driveway, but since I did not, there
 it was where it shouldn't be, and this is why I hit it.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
We the unwilling led by the unknowing are doing the
impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so
little for so long that we are now capable of doing
practically anything with virtually nothing.
-- The Metro Para pledge
%
PRAY, v.  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf
of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Game is an ill you may with ease obtain, A sad oppression to be born
with pain; And when you would the noisy clamor drown, You'll find
it hard to lay the burden down.
-- Cooke
%
What this country needs is a law that when children grow up and leave
home they have to take their dogs, cats, turtles, snakes and canaries
with them.
-- Bill Vaughn
%
Timothy: "Data, can we build something else...later?"
Data: "That would be acceptable."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Well, what can it possibly be?
(Kate undoes her blouse and reveals all to Edmund)
Aha...Good Lord.
-- Edmund to Kate : Bells
%
Lack of Foreign Policy is No Problem.
-- George Bush answers his critics.
%
Private Baldrick here is obviously a bit of an impressionist.
  ...The only decent impression _he_ can do is of a man with no talent.
-- George and Edmund : Captain Cook
%
No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.
-- Sir Winston Churchill, "Their Finest Hour"
%
It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.
-- St. Francis of Assisi
%
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
-- Finagle's First Law
%
When we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
-- Marquis de LaGrange
%
Fear not death; for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.
-- Ben Franklin
%
I'm not just one of your snuggle-girls, Will.
-- Beverly
%
"So we're not home and dry," he said.
"We could not even be said," replied Ford, "to be home and vigorously
towelling ourselves off."
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
You must have an IQ of at least half a million.
-- Popeye
%
Default is more revolutionary than ideals.
-- Marion J. Levy, Jr.
%
Flowers are like the pleasures of the world.
-- William Shakespeare
%
BLACK KNIGHT: I'm invincible!
ARTHUR:       You're a looney.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
"I am the Supreme Being, you know.  I'm not entirely dim."
-- Sir Ralph Richardson as God) in TIME BANDITS
%
Ambition: The glorious frailty of the noble mind.
-- Hoole
%
On a lone barren isle, where the wild roaring billows
  Assail the stern rock, and the loud tempests rave,
The hero lies still, while the dew-drooping willows,
  Like fond weeping mourners, lean over his grave.
The lightnings may flash and the loud thunders rattle;
  He heeds not, he hears not, he 's free from all pain;
He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle;
  No sound can awake him to glory again!
-- Leonard Heath
-- The Grave of Bonaparte
%
Live free or WISH you had
-- Gail L. Grant grant@pa.dec.com
%
The signs of the times.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xvi, 3
%
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
%
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.
-- Thomas Parnell (1679-1717)
-- When thy Beauty appears
%
What is this, a Chinese fire drill?
-- Sun Tzu
%
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning
 and gets to bed at night, and in between he does
 what he wants to do."
-- Bob Dylan
%
You humans have that emotional need to express gratitude.  "You're
welcome," I believe, is the correct response.
-- Spock, "Bread and Circuses", stardate 4041.2
%
The unexpected always happens.
-- Peter's Law
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter
%
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain:
At least I 'm sure it may be so in Denmark.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%

-- But where do all the calculators go? Kryten
%
As Caesar was at supper the discourse was of death,--which sort was
the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Caesar
%
Chide a friend in private and praise him in public.
-- Solon
%
He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
 Environmentalism:
                 Shit is biodegradable.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you.
-- Mae West
%
 %-(I) laughing out loud
-- SMILEY
%
The blood will follow where the knife is driven,
The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- The Revenge, Act v, Sc. 2
%
Brackett: "Three weeks ago, one of our most *celebrated* ambassadors and
advisors to Federation leaders for generations, disappeared.  He left no word
of his destination.  Two days ago, intelligence reports placed him on Romulus,
and I assure you it was an unauthorized visit."
-- "Unification I", Stardate Unknown
%
They say the atmosphere there was so full of goodness that evil
   just shriveled up and died.  Maybe that's why I never went there.
-- Doctor, Keeper of Traken
%
The trouble with Congress is every time they make a law, it's a joke,
and every time they make a joke, it's a law!
-- Will Rogers
%
The trouble with computers is
that they do what you tell them, not what you want.
-- D. Cohen
%
      Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
      That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
-- Edmund Waller (1605-1687)
-- Go, Lovely Rose
%
Cache is, by definition, a compromise.

Yes, cache is a compromise.     Mainly to your wallet and the speed of light.
-- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
-- Jim Hutchison (ucsd!celerity!hutch)
%
Bruce is too obsessed with the Beatles
-- comment on report card from Spring '64
-- Bruce Dumes Stratus Computer, Inc.
%
How can a man of integrity get along in Washington?
-- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
%
I'll eat ANYTHING that's BRIGHT BLUE!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
A child can go only so far in life without potty training.  It is not
mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty
trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.
-- Dave Barry
%
If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on each other,
it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
-- Augustine's Law Number XXVI
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
Why is it that they have Bibles in every motel room? Why should a man want
 to read the Bible when he's with a woman alone in a motel room? Why would
 he be interested? Whatever he's praying for, he's already got!
-- Jackie Mason
%
But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,
  As round and round we run;
And the truth shall ever come uppermost,
  And justice shall be done.
-- Charles Mackay (1814-1889)
-- Eternal Justice, Stanza 4
%
And kids... learn something from Susie and Eddie.
 If you think there's a maniacal psycho-geek in the
 basement:
     1)   Don't give him a chance to hit you on the
   head with an axe!
    2)   Flee the premises... even if you're in your
   underwear.
    3)   Warn the neighbors and call the police.
 But whatever else you do... DON'T GO DOWN IN THE DAMN BASEMENT!
-- Saturday Night Live meets Friday the 13th
%
Keep a stiff upper chin.
-- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer
%
local cat-box liner; but the first second that that third-rate representative
of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense
said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming
for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and while humming The
Twelfth of Never, I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth.
-- She really wasn't my type a hard-looking, untalented reporter for the
-- William Buddy Ocheltree, Georgia
%
I'm jealous of the unborn's and the passed-on's.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Whose undertakings are all devoid of desires and purpose, and whose
actions have been burnt by fire-of-knowledge, him the wise call a sage.
-- Gita, Chapter 4, Verse 19.
%
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you 'll forget them all.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Rape of the Lock, Canto ii, Line 17
%
SHOULD GO FAR: Please.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
Trust in God - but tie your camel tight.
-- Persian Proverb
%
 ... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have
clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence
I may weep undetected.  She will hang the night with stars so that I may
walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in
great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
-- Oscar Wilde,
-- De Profundis
%
DATABASE
  Developed in the early 1800's, by Rodney Database of Darlington,
  the database is a marvellously efficient way of putting large
  amounts of information into one central repository, never to be
  seen again. The design of the database is now an art form in
  itself, and will usually include:
      - just a dash of normalisation
      - a whole bunch of useless information
      - a whole bunch of fairly important information that no-one will
        ever actually ask to see
      - a whole bunch of very important information which will get
        unexpectedly lost when a hardware fault occurs (eg someone
        presses the wrong button) and the whole of your disk gets
        wiped / paper files get burnt / tape gets melted down into a
        large pudding, thrown out, buried in landfill and split in
        two during an earthquake
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto ii, Stanza 26
%
We three drunks from Omaha are
 Spending Christmas eve in a car.
 Driving, Drinking, glasses clinking;
 Who needs a lousy bar?
-- Mad Magazine
%
Who pants for glory finds but short repose:
A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epistle i, Book ii, Line 300
%
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial
means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger
looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
-- William Faulkner
%
If we lose much by having things go wrong, take all possible care.
-- Hill's First Commentary on Murphy's Law
%
I feel like I am sharing a ``CORN-DOG'' with NIKITA KHRUSCHEV..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Your duty is, as ferre as I can gesse.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- The Court of Love, Line 178
%
:well-connected: adj. Said of a computer installation, asserts
   that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that
   it relays a large fraction of available {USENET} newsgroups.
   `Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the
   site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service
   or active USENET users).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Like it or not, America is inching toward the metric system.
-- Boyle's Conundrum
%
Money can't buy love--but it certainly puts you in a wonderful bargaining
 position.
-- Harrison Baker
%
Remember, it's not the size, it's the frequency: 101.5 WPDH
-- Heard on the radio
%
In his errors a man is true to type.  Observe the errors and you will
 know the man.
-- Confucius
-- Analects, IV.7
%
The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're
hungry again.
-- George Miller
%

-- Save a mouse eat a pussy.
%
We have among us a class of mammon worshipers, whose one test of
conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to
accumulated wealth.  Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the
wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no
matter what they call socialism.
-- Richard T. Ely (1854-1943)
%
Desk-top publishing: A system of software and hardware enabling users to
create documents with a cornucopia of typefaces and graphics and the
intellectual content of a Formica slab.
-- Stephen Manes
%
"The more society becomes information instead of material objects,
this question of whether a person can copy things will make the difference
between a world of universal prosperity or a world of constant rat race."
-- Richard M. Stallman
%
The  greatest love is a mother's; then comes a dog's; then comes a sweetheart.
-- Polish Proverb
%
So little time and so little to do.
-- Oscar Levant
%
Great bouncing icebergs!
-- Santa
%
If you want to solve a problem, draw a diagram.
If you still can't solve it, make the diagram bigger.
-- Stevan's Rule
%
Bread is the staff of life.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Tale of a Tub, Preface
%

-- PC's -the junk bonds of the computer industry.
%
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or
not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-- Ernest Benn
%
We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from
the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging
you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right
in his bowl full of jelly.
-- Dave Barry, Simple, Homespun Gifts
%
:line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional
   line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons,
   implying either that *somebody* is out to get it (when you are
   the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when
   you are not).  "It works when I trace through it, but seems to
   crash on line 666 when I run it."  "What happens is that whenever
   a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast.
   Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the
still waters.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xxiii, 2
%
:spam: [from the {MUD} community] vt. 1. To crash a program by
   overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data.
   See also {buffer overflow}, {overrun screw}, {smash the
   stack}.  2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or
   inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as
   one well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking "What do you
   think of abortion?" on soc.women).  This is often done with
   {cross-post}ing (e.g. any message which is crossposted to
   alt.rush-limbaugh and alt.politics.homosexuality will
   almost inevitably spam both groups).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I'm not cynical about marriage or romance.  I enjoyed being married.
And although being single was fun for a while, there was always the risk
of dating someone who'd owned a lunch box with my picture on it.
-- Shaun Cassidy, married at 21, divorced at 33.
%
My fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in 't: I have supp'd full with horrors.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 5
%
Universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery.
-- Otto von Bismarck
%
Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot
be friends with anyone else in the world.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
%
As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that
all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community
are equally entitled to the protections of civil government.  I hope
ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
-- George Washington
%
Like any writer, I'd rather be read than dead. Like any serious *author*, I'd
rather be dead than not read at all.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Life doesn't have to be depressing and miserable... but it is, so get used
to it.
-- Dan Goodman
%
Nobody works as hard for his money as the man who marries it.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
All the news that fits, we print.
-- Alfred E. Newman
%
Gurmlish, n.:
 The red warning flag at the top of a club sandwich which
prevents the person from biting into it and puncturing the roof of his
mouth.
-- Rich Hall & Friends, Sniglets
%
Remember the old saying, "Faint heart never won fair lady."
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. x
%
This is the life.   To be young, stupid, and have no future at all.  I love
 Brooklyn!
-- Dan Akyroyd, Samurai Night Fever, Saturday Night Live
%
To be complacent is to be but one step from decay.
-- Gilt Proto
%
The most important thing in the programming language is the name.  A language
 will not succeed without a good name.  I have recently invented a very good
 name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
-- D. E. Knuth, 1967
%
Whose life is a bubble, and in length a span.
-- William Browne (1590-1645)
-- Britannia's Pastorals, Book i, Song 2
%
Against those skilled in the attack, the enemy does not know where to defend.
Against the experts in defence, the enemy does not know where to attack.
-- Sun Tzu
%
"Be fair," say the temporizers, "tell both sides of the story." But how can
you be fair to both sides of a rape? Of a murder? Of a massacre?
-- Edward Abbey
%
Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen!
-- Martin Luther (1483-1546)
-- Speech at the Diet of Worms
%
:broken arrow: [IBM] n. The error code displayed on line 25 of a
   3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of
   protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including
   connection to a {down} computer).  On a PC, simulated with
   `->/_', with the two center characters overstruck.

   Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that `broken
   arrow' is also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear
   weapons....
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 My wife and I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'll
 leave your name and number, we'll get back to you as soon as
 we're finished.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, Where have I gone wrong?
 Then a voice says to me, This is going to take more than one night.
-- Charlie Brown, _Peanuts_ [Charles Schulz]
%
I am about to---or I am going to---die; either expression is used.
-- Last words of Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian
%
Vietnam is a jungle. You had jungle warfare. Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
you have sand.  [There is no need to worry about a protracted war because]
from a historical basis, Middle East conflicts do not last a long time.
                   (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 10/2/90
%
A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself.
-- Salvor Hardin
%
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are,
at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
-- Susan Sontag
%
It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak,
and then decide not to say it after all.
-- P. G. Wodehouse
%
He is a legend in his own mind.
-- Ron Randall
%
Love cures people--both the ones who give it and the ones who
receive it.
-- Dr. Karl Menninger
%
Ever seen a 90 column card?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Honest politician
-- Oxymoron
%
With a little luck,
there's no reason why you can't live to be one hundred.
Once you 've done that, you've got it made,
because very few people die over one hundred.
-- George Burns
%
 @-( "Ulysses! Bring me Ulysses!"
-- SMILEY
%
We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition
 from nonlife to life.
-- Hans Moravec (on artificial intelligence)
%
No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People
imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each
other by.
-- Franz Schubert
%
... bacteriological warfare...hard to believe we were once foolish
  enough to play around with that.
-- McCoy, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown.
%
The French for London is Paris.
-- Ionesco
%
Do you believe menus belong in restaurants?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
SALACITY, n.  A certain literary quality frequently observed in
popular novels, especially in those written by women and young girls,
who give it another name and think that in introducing it they are
occupying a neglected field of letters and reaping an overlooked
harvest.  If they have the misfortune to live long enough they are
tormented with a desire to burn their sheaves.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 "Chinese Vulgarities" by Phuck Yoo
-- Booktip of the month
%

-- Overload core meltdown sequence initiated.
%
No generalization is wholly true, not even this one.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.
%
Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both
 unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If
 you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something
 sweet and the feeling will pass.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
You understand the Klingons better than I thought.
Thank you, my friend.
-- Klag and Riker, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5
%
Hands that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
  Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 12
%
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is
obvious.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.
-- Ugo Betti
%
Linus:  I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow.
Maybe we should think only about today. Charlie Brown:  No, that's
giving up.  I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better.
-- Charles Schulz
%
Nebraska is proof that hell is full and the dead are walking the earth.
-- Lizz Winstead
%
Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long
 time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't
 always go with everything else in the house.
-- Jean Kerr
%
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace --
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
-- Justin Richardson.
%
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
-- John Stuart Mill
%
'And if you've just tuned in, we're talking about the red-hot,
 tight-buttocked, hairy host of Hell.'
-- The Church Lady
%
Guys are like dogs. They keep comin' back. Ladies are like cats. Yell at a
 cat one time, they're gone.
-- Lenny Bruce
%
I do not believe that this generation of Americans is willing to resign itself
to going to bed each night by the light of a Communist moon.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
%
My LESLIE GORE record is BROKEN..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a physician.
-- McCoy
%
Practise wearing a dress or skirt rather than jeans.  It'll be far more
comfortable in the end.  Give up on conventional underwear.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
 to your destination, say to your driver, Pay? I was hitchhiking.
-- Tourists have some fun with New york's hard-boiled cabbies.   When you get
-- David Letterman
%
:sandbox: n. 1. (also `sandbox, the') Common term for the
   R&D department at many software and computer companies (where hackers
   in commercial environments are likely to be found).  Half-derisive,
   but reflects the truth that research is a form of creative play.
   Compare {playpen}.  2. Syn. {link farm}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
 would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
-- AMAZING BUT TRUE...
%
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with
deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will
not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
-- Herman Melville
%
Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.
-- William Shakespeare
%
The stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah iii, 1
%
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are
willing to love.
-- Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
%
Q: "You've disappointed me, Jean-Luc.  I'm very disappointed!"
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Good enough is never good enough.
-- Steckel's Rule to Success
%
What on earth would a man do with himself
if something did not stand in his way?
-- Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
%
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.  It's
the life in your years.
-- Abraham Lincoln
%
To secure peace is to prepare for war.
-- Carl von Clausewitz
%
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was
once eccentric.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
Here we will stand!
Then here you will die.
-- Gosheven and Data, "The Ensigns of Command", stardate unknown
%
Bleeding Ponytail:
 An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or
pre-sellout days.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
    white trash pickup truck driven cheap beer drinkin cable
tv pirating obnoxious belchin americanos
screw in a LIGHT BULB.
One, but he'll be too busy touting the superiority of
the soft white variety over all others.
-- How many
-- does it take to
%
19. Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
-- One of 21 Thoughts to Get You Through Almost Any Crisis
%
"On wings of winds came flying all abroad."
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires, Line 218
%
 (:- unsmiley frowning
-- SMILEY
%
Before marriage, a man declares he would lay down his life to serve you;
 after marriage, he won't even lay down his paper to talk to you.
-- Helen Rowland
%
Norma wants me to help her have a baby.
-- Sam Beckett.
%
Death is all in the mind.
Once you're dead you forget all about it.
-- Jack Storey
%
The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends
 thought I didn't exist.
-- Aaron Machado
%
I'm not sure I'm up for a "Murphy Brown" appearance yet. I'm not sure
that they want a guest appearance by me either... Well, I'd consider
it.
He also said that he'd make a guest appearance as long
as his point of view wasn't censored.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle on Larry King Live.
-- (CNN, July 22, 1992)
%

-- Welfare breeding for dollars.
%

-- Bloody Cardassians I just got this damn thing fixed.
%
And thereby hangs a tale.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. iv
%
"We would like to apologize for the way in which politicians are
represented in this programme.  It was never our intention to imply
that politicians are weak-kneed, political time-servers who are more
concerned with their personal vendettas and private power struggles
than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that
they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital
matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before
the well-being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply
at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce
of concern for the vital social problems of today.  Nor indeed do we
intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little
self-seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to
alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might
find offensive.  We are sorry if this impression has come across."
-- Monty Python
%
Just don't create a file called -rf
-- Larry Wall
%
If two wrongs don't make a right, try three.
-- The Nixon principle
%
O, hell! to choose love by another's eyes.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
    mathematicians
One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the
problem to an earlier joke.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Lives of great men all remind us
  We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
  Footprints on the sands of time.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- A Psalm of Life
%
Principle of Conservation of Ignorance:
A false notion once arrived at is not easily dislodged.
-- Georg Cantor
%
Hearkners, we say, seldom hear good of themselves.
-- Mathew Henry (1662-1714)
-- Commentaries, Ecclesiastes vii
%
Power Mist:
   The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be
diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
"Felis catus" is your taxonomic nomenclature:
an endothermic quadroped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations ---
a singular development of cat communications
that obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents.
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance,
and when not being utilized to aid in locomotion
it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O, Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

-- Lt. Cmdr. Data, "Schisms", Stardate 46
%
Tax and spend often.
-- Liberal Rule # 1
%
People see what they have been conditioned to see; they refuse to
see what they don't expect to see.
-- Merle P. Martin
%
Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to
your neighbors.
-- Rudyard Kipling
%
I HAVE no powers. Q, the ordinary.
"Q, the liar. Q, the misanthrope."
Q, the miserable. Q, the desperate. What must I do to convince you people?
'Die.'
Oh, very clever Worf. Eat any good books lately?
-- Q, Picard, and Worf, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%

-- Stop domestic violence enact Joint PHYSICAL Custody.
%
Of surpassing beauty and in the bloom of youth.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Act i, Sc. 1, 45, (72.)
%
Carol: "What exactly is Genesis?  Well, put simply, Genesis is life from
  lifelessness.  It is a process whereby molecular structure is reorganized at
  the subatomic level into life-generating matter of equal mass.  Stage One of
  our experiments was conducted in a laboratory.  Stage Two of the series will
  be attempted in a lifeless underground.  Stage Three will involve the process
  on a planetary scale.  It is our intention to introduce the Genesis Device
  into a preselected area of a lifeless space body, a moon or other dead form.
  The device is delivered, instanteously causing what we call the 'Genesis
  Effect'.  Matter is reorganized with life-generating results.  Instead of a
  dead moon, a living, breathing planet capable of supporting whatever we see
  fit to deposit on it."
Spock: "Fascinating."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Mother didn't make it to the hospital. I was born on the bus. Mother was
 furious when she had to open her pocketbook the second time.
-- Jack Douglas
%
He rais'd a mortal to the skies,
She drew an angel down.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Alexander's Feast, Line 169
%
The agnostics prayer: O God, if there is a god, save
my soul, if I have a soul
-- Ernest Renan (1823-1890)
%
Primrose, first-born child of Ver,
Merry springtime's harbinger.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act i, Sc. 1
%
MAYONNAISE, n.  One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a
state religion.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree
or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me.
And as much as anyone deserves.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Draft
-- Glass Cellar of Male Disposibility, 08
%
Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic.
-- Edward Abbey
%
ARTHUR:        What?
BLACK KNIGHT:  None shall pass.
ARTHUR:        I have no quarrel with you, good Sir knight, but I must cross
               this bridge.
BLACK KNIGHT:  Then you shall die.
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
The Constitution speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty
without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation the Constitution
does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty.
-- Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
%
There's no such thing as an unsuccessful operation. It's the recovery that
 gets 'em.
-- Lee Tully
%
Vanity of vanities,... all is vanity.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes i, 2; xii, 8
%

-- Speed Pays the doctor, the hospital, the mortuary.
%
If you take your boots off, you'll never get them back on again.
-- Milt Barber
%
You know you're the first one to pop a beer.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
:ironmonger: [IBM] n. A hardware specialist (derogatory).  Compare
   {sandbender}, {polygon pusher}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 @= "Kafka was a momma's boy"
-- SMILEY
%
They are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.--Something too much of this.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.
-- Conte Vittorio Alfieri
%
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than
the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a
vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters,
and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet
have a name.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The only new show worth watching will be cancelled.
-- Jones' Law of TV
%
Knowing how hard it is to collect a fact,
you understand why most people want to have some fun
analyzing it.
-- Samuel McChrod Crothers
%
English language?  We don't need no stinking english language!
-- Wintermut  ( RDT Student )
%
Power does not corrupt.  Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
-- John Steinbeck
%
As a rough rind sometimes covers the sweetest fruit,
so a rough exterior often conceals a kindly and hearty nature.
-- S. Smiles
%
Somewhere between real and real real.
                   aboard the Quayle campaign plane.
                   (reported in Wall Street Journal, 10/21/88)
-- Senator Dan Quayle pinpointing their location to reporters
%
 (Start, low pitch, slow:)  Hhhhheeelllllloooooo thheeeerrrrrrre
 evvvvveerrrryyyboooodyyyy...  (Middle, normal:)  ...home of
 Veronica, Jaw-Chyi, Mark, and Mike.  Nobody's home...  (Later,
 high pitch, fast:)  ...liketoleaveamessageafterthetonethen...
 (End, incomprehensible chipmunk gibberish:)
 ...kkfjdkeirucjkljfklreudjfkleqBEEP
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an
inventor.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
-- an actual excerpt from student science exam papers
%
 :*) drunk smiling face, for those of us who like get intoxicated before
or while reading netnews
-- SMILEY
%
Carpe Diem, lads. Sieze the day.
 Make your lives extraordinary.
-- Robin Williams, Dead Poet's Society
%
 Don't use no double negatives
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
A hat not much the worse for wear.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- History of John Gilpin
%
Oh what a fate worse than death it is to be strapped to the back
of a Wookiee!
-- C-3PO
%
The solitary monk who shook the world
From pagan slumber, when the gospel trump
Thunder'd its challenge from his dauntless lips
In peals of truth.
-- Robert Montgomery (1807-1855)
-- Luther, Man's Need and God's Supply
%
Wine is bottled poetry.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
Worf: "Mission accomplished.  We have him."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
McCoy: "God's sakes!  What is it?"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
How many times a day I gotta threaten your life
-- Tony
%
Satisfaction guaranteed, or twice your load back.
-- sign on septic tank truck
%
 Most people deserve each other.
-- Shirley's Law
%
The number of taxis at an airport is inversely proportional
to the number of flights arriving.
-- The Third Law Of Air Travel
%
I'm suffering from mood poisoning - must be something I hate
-- Taken from 'Wild Palms'
%
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
%
 Hello, this is the Computer Music Research Institute of
 Portland, Oregon.  We can't take your call at the moment, but we
 would like you to leave a critique of one of our current works
 in progress.  BEEP
-- Answering machine madness - mainly musical theme
%
Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras dire.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 628
%
Thirty seconds on the evening news is worth a front page Headline
in every newspaper in the world.
-- Edwin Guthman
%
A court is a place where what was confused before becomes more unsettled
than ever.
-- Henry Waldorf Francis
%
I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book ii, Chap. xx, That we taste nothing pure
%
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
  Just for a riband to stick in his coat.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- The Lost Leader, i
%
The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one
that was new and untried.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap. ix
%
Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Locksley Hall, Line 137
%
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at
children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end,
which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games which
it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark," and which is also named
(by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The
players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have
to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait
until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. Then they go and do
something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great
fun.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
%
We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend
 that we have nothing to express.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952), "Soliloquies In England"
%
Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't
explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
-- Calvin
%
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%

-- "How much for the little girl?  Your women how much for the women?"
-- The Blues Brothers
%
You'd better stand back... I don't know how big this thing gets.
-- Adam to Eve
%
Uhura: "Uh, General, are you fond of...Shake...speare?"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
The grace of God means something like:  Here is your life.  You might
never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been
complete without you.  Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible
things will happen.  Don't be afraid.  I am with you.  Nothing can
ever separate us.  It's for you I created the universe.  I love you.
There's only one catch.
Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll
reach out and take it.  Maybe being able to reach out and take it
is a gift too.
-- Frederick Buechner
%
Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone.
-- G. B. Stearn
%
The coward threatens when he is safe.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
Success is never final.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
 Random fact number 10:  The first manned mission to Jupiter will
 be crewed by the Smiths.  Random fact number 64:  Dairy Queen
 discovered cold temperature fusion before the bums in Utah.
 Random fact number 36:  Bren's not here and he wants you leave a
 message.  Random fact number 22:  Bismarck is the capital of
 North Dakota.
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
You can't play your friends like marks, kid.
-- Henry Gondorf, "The Sting"
%
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.  The question which
divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being
correct.  My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
-- Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to Albert Einstein
%
A professional is a man who can do his best at a time
when he doesn't particularly feel like it.
-- Alistair Cooke, journalist
%
Riker: "I don't know who any of you are."
Picard: "Neither do I.  I don't...I don't even remember who I am."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
ETYMOLOGY:  Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations
that were hard for the public to believe.  The term 'etymology' was
formed from the Latin 'etus' ("eaten"), the root 'mal' ("bad"), and
'logy' ("study of").  It meant "the study of things that are hard to
swallow."
-- Mike Kellen, Oakdale, Minnesota
%
We are no more than candles burning in the wind.
-- Japanese Proverb
%
Now that it's all over,
what did you really do yesterday that was worth mentioning?
-- Coleman Cox
%
Every puny whipster.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
:studlycaps: /stuhd'lee-kaps/ n. A hackish form of silliness
   similar to {BiCapitalization} for trademarks, but applied
   randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks.  ThE
   oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Middle age is a time of life that man first notices in his wife.
-- Richard Armour
%
"They own a mountain?  I thought only God could own a mountain."
"We got a good deal."
-- Dennis Booker & Chick Sterling, Booker
%
STEERING COMMITTEE
  Picture a huge semi-trailer, hurtling uncontrolled down the road...
  and inside the vast cab, is the steering committee, trying to pass
  a motion to swerve to avoid a little old lady.
      "I would like to put forward a motion to steer 10 degrees left,
      to dodge the little old lady."
      "Any seconders? Objections...?"
      "Well, I'm uncertain at this point as to the potential
      viability of such a move. It would almost certainly involve
      indicator loadings, excess steering wheel turning, and the need
      for specialist mirror engineers to check the traffic in the
      next lane. I would propose cost-benefit analysis..."
      *SQUISH*
      "... ah well, I think the point may now be academic. But let's
      formulate a review study of the situation, in order that..."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
RIME, n.  Agreeing sounds in the terminals of verse, mostly bad.  The
verses themselves, as distinguished from prose, mostly dull.  Usually
(and wickedly) spelled "rhyme."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
A word spoken in due season, how good is it!
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xv, 23
%
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
-- Jonathan Swift
%
Fortune: You will be attacked next Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. by six samuri
sword wielding purple fish glued to Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Oh, and have a nice day!
-- Bryce Nesbitt '84
%
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
%
:fuel up: vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to
   hacking.  "Food-p?"  "Yeah, let's fuel up."  "Time for a
   {great-wall}!"  See also {{oriental food}}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What's that green stuff drippin' from the.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes,
running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime
pits, and debris.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The worst speak something good; if all want sense,
God takes a text, and preacheth Pa-ti-ence.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- The Church Porch
%
This isn't Earth.   This isn't real wood, it's some kind of
   artificial material, like plastic.  These aren't real trees,
   and you're not the real Sarah!
-- Doctor 4, THE ANDROID INVASION
%
We'll remove any stain & sew up the hole.
-- Laundram
%
Just as there are three R's there are also three A's of business life.
They are: Ability, Ambition, and Attitude. Ability establishes what a
worker does and will bring him a paycheck. Ambition determines how much
he does and will get him a raise. Attitude guarantees how well he does.
-- Wilbert E. Sheer
%
Because I could not stop for Death,
 He kindly stopped for me --
 The Carriage held but just ourselves
 And Immortality.
-- Emily Dickinson
%
:English: 1. n.,obs. The source code for a program, which may be in
   any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary
   produced from it by a compiler.  The idea behind the term is that
   to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming
   language is at least as readable as English.  Usage: mostly by
   old-time hackers, though recognizable in context.  2. The official
   name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System,
   actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of
   grandeur.  The name permits {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you
   can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s
   without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What is algebra, exactly?  Is it one of those three-cornered things?
-- J. M. Barrie
%
    academics
Five: One to write the grant proposal, one to do the
mathematical modelling, one to type the research paper, one
to submit the paper for publishing, and one to hire a student
to do the work.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a
better garbage collector.  We must keep a reference count of the
pointers to each cons." Moon patiently told the student the following
story-
  "One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to
  make a better garbage collector...
-- AI koan
%
Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your
kittens and rainbows.
-- effective lifetime and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
My advice to young people who wish to earn their living by writing is:
DO.
-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
%
We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to
become insoluble without computers.  I do not fear computers.  I fear
the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov
%
    A wizard's reputation is his bond, or so the sages say. And, as all
learned men know, a reputation is difficult to build, and all too easily
besmirched.  The wizard with a fallen reputation is often led to less savory
forms of employ, and, while these sometimes pay better than whatever the
wizard was doing before, they are not the sort of thing one writes home to
Mother about.  The successful wizard, therefore, should develop three or
four reputations simultaneously, and then, happily, will have one for every
occasion.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XIII
%
Prophecy is the wit of a fool.
-- Vladimir Nabokov
%
The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men
of the blasts of fortune.
-- William Penn
%
I can see the hate that was there; I can see the bigotry. I can see
it from his perspective.
                   of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."
                   (The Wall Street Journal, 6/8/92 - taken from
                    The Quayle Quarterly, Summer/Fall 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle discussing his impressions
%
Tarmin: "It's been three centuries since we treated anyone for this...this
form  of rape.  But there are medical records from that era.  It was
a time of great  violence for my people.  A time we thought we had
put far behind us.  That  this could happen now...is unimaginable."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45435.8
%
    Republican Presidential candidates from 1988
(Robertson) Oh, Lord, with thy divine illumination, heal
this light bulb!
-- How many
-- did it take to change a light bulb?
%
He looks good ... mighty good!
-- Mr. Horse
%
The secret of a good sex life is to have a good sex life ... In other
 words, kid, don't let yer meat loaf.
-- R. Crumb
%
The fat is in the fire.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. iii
%
Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.
-- Arthur Freed
%
Descended from apes!
My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is,
let us pray that it will not become generally known.
-- wife of the Bishop of Worcester
%
Be sure that God
Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Paracelsus, Part i
%
It is better to have tried and failed than to have failed to try, but
the result's the same.
-- Mike Dennison
%
Wars on nations change maps. War on poverty maps change
-- Muhammad Ali
%
The women's uneven parallel bar event. I think I'm gonna be a little
 skeptical the next time a woman tells me I'm being too rough in bed. I'm
 watchin' these girls bang their cervix off a frozen theater rope at eighty
 miles per hour. You don't see men in that event, okay?
-- Dennis Miller
%
The matchless Ganymed, divinely fair.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xx, Line 278
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Stardate 45429.3.  While on a mapping survey, we are
  conveying a delegation of Ullian to Caldra IV.  These telepathic historians
  conduct their research by retrieving long forgotten memories."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
Internal consistency is valued more highly than
efficiency.
-- Peter's Inversion
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter
%
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
The journey of a thousand leagues begins from beneath your feet.
-- Lao-Tzu
%
You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word
alone.
-- Al Capone (1899-1947)
%
It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing
warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or
two things still safe to eat.
-- Robert Fuoss
%
ORIGINAL SOFTWARE
  Something of a rarity in this universe.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
:double DECkers: n. Used to describe married couples in which both
   partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Life is a desease from which sleep gives us relife every sixteen hours.
Sleep is a palliative, death is a remedy.
-- Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794)
-- Maximes et Pensees (1796)
%
With all its beauteous honours on its head.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book iv, Line 557
%
He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and
old men from the chimney-corner.
-- Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
-- Defence of Poesy
%
My mother told me, "Elwood,"--she always called me "Elwood"--"in this
 world you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was
 smart. I recommend pleasant."
 screenplay by Mary Chase and Oscar Brodney)

 You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired, and we
 all love hospitals.
-- James Stewart (as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey,
-- Queen Mary (to her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II)
%
As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
Permit me to introduce myself.  My name's Dracula, Lord of the Undead.
 God, I do love the way that sounds.
-- "Dinosaurs For Hire"
%
Never look at data on a Friday night. It can spoil your weekend.
-- Anonymous Researcher
%
Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything,
 except over technology.
-- John Tudor
%
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the
ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
-- Frederick Douglass
%
I didn't resolve the questions... and I find that
 entertaining.      And if my life were to end
 tomorrow, it would be fulfilled in that manner.  I
 would say, 'The questions have been terrific.'
-- Jack Kirby on his work
%
ARTHUR:       Now stand aside worthy adversary.
BLACK KNIGHT: (Glancing at his shoulder) 'Tis but a scratch.
ARTHUR:       A scratch?  Your arm's off.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true
 that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a
 series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
Out the 10Base-T, through the router, down the T1, over the leased line,
 off the bridge, past the firewall...nothing but Net.
-- Gary Predmore
%
Data is a physical representation of a dream, an idea conceived by the
  mind of a man. His purpose? To serve human needs and interests. He is
  a collection of neural nets and heuristic algorithms. His responses are
  dictated by an elaborate software program written BY a MAN. The hardware
  was built by a MAN. And this MAN has turned him off. Pinnochio is
  broken, the strings have been cut.
-- Riker, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7
%
I have two tickets on the Titanic.
-- Famous Last Words
%
NEW ALLIED WEAPONRY
- TXjet - Specially developed fighter/bomber for use by Texan pilots. It has
          an enlarged cockpit to cope with their hats.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
 Greetings, you have reached the Sixth Sense Detective Agency.
 We know how you are and what you want, so at the sound of the
 tone, please hang up.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
Remember that there is an outside world to see and enjoy.
-- Hans Liepmann
%
'There are more things than just looks.'  - this only applies if you're going
to marry someone.  Then you want her to be hot AND intelligent, so that you can
produce socially-acceptable smart kids.
I hate kids.  Kids like snow.  I hate snow.
-- Rob Liebscher,  3/14/93
%
True, Doctor.  Constant exposure does result in a certain degree
of contamination.
-- Hope I always thought that was a human failing, Mr. Spock?
-- McCoy and Spock, "The Gamesters of Triskelion,", stardate 3211.7
%
    social workers
Four. One to remove the bulb from the socket and take it
away, without checking whether or not there was actually
anything wrong with it, one to accuse its owners of
mistreating it, one to find somewhere else to screw it
in for the next 6 months, and one to eventually bring it
back and say it was all done with the light bulb's best
interests at heart.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither
 of them works.
-- Charlie Lau
%
Kirk: "Clear the bridge."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
They, they've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off.

Sure, Murderers.   Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do.
 It's the regular strikebuster types and all that... They're going to beat
 the shit out of some of these people.  And, uh, hope they really hurt 'em.
 You know, I mean go in... and smash some noses.
-- Richard Nixon, May 5, 1971, discussing a proposal to use Teamsters Union
-- members to attack Vietnam War protestors
-- H. R. Haldeman's response
%
Chilo advised, "not to speak evil of the dead."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Chilo, ii
%
"I am Number Two."
"WHO IS NUMBER ONE?...."
"You are Number Six."
"I AM NOT A NUMBER! I AM A FREE MAN!"
-- The Prisoner
%
I've got a plan!! And it's as _hot_ as my _pants_!!!!
-- Lord Flashheart : Bells
%
    actors
Two. One to change the light bulb and one to say "what's the
big deal, I could have done that."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
:Winchester:: n. Informal generic term for `floating-head'
   magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the
   disk surface on an air cushion.  The name arose because the
   original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the
   IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30--30 became
   `Winchester' when somebody noticed the similarity to the common
   term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30
   referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the
   charge).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
We had it tough ... I had to get up at 9 o'clock at night, half an
hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 29 hours down
mill, and when we came home our Dad would kill us, and dance about on
our grave singing Haleleuia ...
-- Monty Python
%
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts;
wisdom lies in their semplification.
-- Martin H. Fischer
%
"We never repent of having eaten too little."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
How forcible are right words!
-- Old Testament
-- Job vi, 25
%
The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
-- Claude Levi-Strauss, "Tristes Tropiques", 1955
%
Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
-- Havelock Ellis
%
Stretch'd on the rack of a too easy chair,
And heard thy everlasting yawn confess
The pains and penalties of idleness.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Dunciad, Book iv, Line 342
%
Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do.
Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without
them. "Justice" is a search for workable customs.
-- Dr. Margaret Mader
%
If a man really has strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
"We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. ...
We are the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. ... It is
grander to think and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed.
... I look for the day when *reason*, throned upon the world's brains,
shall be the King of Kings and the God of Gods.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
%
Aw isn't that the cutest little Snarf Beast?
-- Famous Last Words
%
 PHILOSOPHY:  Sketch the development of human thought;
 estimate its significance.  Compare with the development
 of any other kind of thought.
-- Life Studies 101 (Bob Pasker <rbp@NETCOM.COM>)
%
I like work; it fascinates me.  I can sit and look at it for hours.
-- Jerome K. Jerome
%
The Public is merely a multiplied "me".
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
I awoke from the same dream realizing that I had subconsciously gained
kowledge of a deductive technique involving mind-body coordination operating
hand in hand with the deepest level of intuition.
-- Dale Cooper
%
More is thy due than more than all can pay.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 4
%
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over
every living thing that moves upon the earth.
-- Genesis 1:28
%
Now Hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
-- Lord Byron
%
Schlattwhapper, n.:
   The window shade that allows itself to be pulled down,
hesitates for a second, then snaps up in your face.
-- Rich Hall, Sniglets
%
 :-( boo hoo
-- SMILEY
%
What man doesn't like to stare once in a while?
-- O'Brien
%
I think you enjoyed that, Captain.
You're DAMNED right!
-- Riker and Picard, "The Ensigns of Command", stardate unknown
%
 8-| eyes wide with surprise
-- SMILEY
%
It has been a bitter moritification for me to digest the conclusion that the
'race is for the strong' and that I shall probably do little more but be
content to admire the strides others made in science.
-- Charles Darwin
%
:BLOB: [acronym, Binary Large OBject] n. Used by database people to
   refer to any random large block of bits that needs to be stored in
   a database, such as a picture or sound file.  The essential point
   about a BLOB is that it's an object that cannot be interpreted
   within the database itself.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Have you ever patched binary code?
... While the program was running?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
I'm the one who's got to die when its time for me to die, so let me live
 my life the way I want to.
-- Jimi Hendrix
%
When people aren't stupid Usenet is even more useful.   Too bad this
 happens so rarely.
-- Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us>
%
When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were
    able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not
    to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she,
    with him to the station?
MR. BROOKS: Objection.        That question should be taken out and shot.
-- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court"
%
Do-be-do-be-do.
-- F. Sinatra
%
Democracy is the theory that the people
know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
Come, give us a taste of your quality.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not
take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.
-- Booth Tarkington
%
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter: that when he speaks,
The air, a chartered libertine, is still.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
    The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the
shoreline of wonder.
-- Ralph W. Sockman
%
They all laughed at Albert Einstein. They all laughed at Columbus.
Unfortunately, they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- William H. Jefferys
%
He is at no end of his actions blest
Whose ends will make him greatest, and not best.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Act v, Sc. 1
%

-- Wrap that rascal Use write protect tabs.
%
"If you lived here, you'ld be home now"
-- Spraypainted on a wall in an urban getto
%
One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span,
Because to laugh is proper to the man.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Gargantua and Pantagruel, To the Reader
%
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 5
%
We are not rich by what we possess but rather by what we can do without.
-- Immanuel Kant
%
Evolution...is--a change from an indefinite homogeneity, to a definite
coherent heterogeneity.
-- Herbert Spencer
%
It is harder to live when those we love are dead.
-- Lemuel K. Washburn
%
Valeris: "You men have work."
Burke and Samno: "Yes, ma'am."
Valeris: "Then snap to it."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
:die horribly: v. The software equivalent of {crash and burn},
   and the preferred emphatic form of {die}.  "The converter
   choked on an FF in its input and died horribly".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You ought to go to Hollywood. The walk would do you good.
-- Archie Campbell
%
On one screen, you see a beautiful view of a planet.  On another, you
can see a telescopic enlargement showing four square islands grouped
together.  there is a large building on one of the islands, indicating
some kind of intelligent life-forms exist on the planet.  A third screen
shows the results of a deep-probe scan on the same islands, thus
revealing underground caverns.  But by far the largest screen shows
firing on this ship at once!  A small status indicator reads "Condition
red".
-- the view in the other direction a fleet of hostile-looking ships, all
%
The wheels of nature are not made to roll backward; everything presses
on toward Eternity; from the birth of Time an impetuous current has
set in, which bears all the sons of men toward that interminable
ocean. Meanwhile Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial
to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting
within its capacious bosom, whatever is pure, permanent and divine.
-- Robert Hall
%
:firmy: /fer'mee/ Syn. {stiffy} (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"God willing, we will return."
-- Eugene Cernan, the Moon, 1972
%
Did you understand the music, Yoko, or was it all in vain?
-- Roger Waters
%
In unanimity there is cowardice and uncritical thinking.
-- Marion J. Levy, Jr.
%
Owe no man anything, but to love one another.
-- New Testament
-- Romans xiii, 8
%
Who are the artists in the Computer Graphics Show?  Wavefront's latest
box, or the people who programmed it?  Should Mandelbrot get all the
credit for the output of programs like MandelVroom?
-- Peter da Silva
%
The conclusions of most good operations research studies are obvious.
-- Robert E. Machol
%
What 's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
The woman who runs will never lack followers.
-- Ashley Dukes
%
The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety
of the senses and understanding.
-- Bacon
%
How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
-- Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form
%
Pour the full tide of eloquence along, Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong.
-- Alexander Pope
%
Oh, I have roamed o'er many lands,
  And many friends I 've met;
Not one fair scene or kindly smile
  Can this fond heart forget.
-- Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839)
-- Oh, steer my Bark to Erin's Isle
%
Saavik: "David is dead."
-- "STIII:TSFS", Stardate 8210.3
%
Diplomacy ... the art of restraining power.
-- Henry Kissinger
%
Cat:    Look at my hands, I had lovely hands.
Lister: Well wear the smegging gloves.
Cat:    (picking up gloves) Marigold with blue?  Are you crazy?
-- Red Dwarf 'Queeg'
%
:ENQ: /enkw/ or /enk/ [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for
   0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's availability.
   After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone apparently in
   heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?' (the SYNs
   representing notional synchronization bytes), and expect a return
   of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not the person felt
   interruptible.  Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the usage of
   `FOO?' listed under {talk mode}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:boustrophedon: [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while
   plowing] n. An ancient method of writing using alternate
   left-to-right and right-to-left lines.  This term is actually
   philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon.  Erudite hackers
   use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting
   software and moving-head printers.  The adverbial form
   `boustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love
   constructions like this).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
In durance vile
And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Epistle from Esopus to Maria
%
Give me a man that laughs all the time, though the rest of the world's in a
 rut. Yes, show me a man that laughs all the time, and, my friend, I'll show
 you a nut!
-- Jackie Kannon
%
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
-- Abraham Lincoln
%
I never got along with my dad. Kids used to come up to me and say, "My dad
 can beat up your dad." I'd say yeah? When?
-- Bill Hicks
%
If you drop your keys into molten lava just let 'em go 'cause, man,
 they're gone.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
"The question raised by the prospect of President
 Quayle is the same as the question raised by the
 prospect of President Bush and for that matter by
 the reality of President Reagan: How long can a
 great nation afford to have silly leaders?"
-- Hendrik Hertzberg
%
Whatever you can lose, you should reckon of no account.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 191
%
:postcardware: n. {Shareware} that borders on {freeware}, in
   that the author requests only that satisfied users send a postcard
   of their home town or something.  (This practice, silly as it might
   seem, serves to remind users that they are otherwise getting
   something for nothing, and may also be psychologically related to
   real estate `sales' in which $1 changes hands just to keep the
   transaction from being a gift.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
No sun, no moon, no morn, no noon,
No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day,
     .     .     .     .     .     .
No road, no street, no t' other side the way,
     .     .     .     .     .     .
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no buds.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- November
%
To us, killing is murder, even for revenge.
-- Kirk, "Plato's Stepchildren," stardate 5784.3.
%
When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the
plane will fly.
-- Donald Douglas
%
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them, so
of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are
strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills
the very good and the very gentle and the very brave...
-- Ernest Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms"
%
What is good to know is that cheese whiz exists and milk whiz doesn't.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Champagne don't make me lazy.
Cocaine don't drive me crazy.
Ain't nobody's business but my own.
-- Taj Mahal
%
You know you're a little fat if you have stretch marks on your car.
-- Cyrus, Chicago Reader 1/22/82
%
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody;
and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
-- Thomas Kempis
%
Life is a serious burden, which no thinking,
humane person would want only inflict on someone else.
-- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938)
%
 :-z yet another cross smiley
-- SMILEY
%
You say you had three men punching at you, kicking you, raping you,
    and you didn't scream?
No ma'am.
Does that mean you consented?
No, ma'am.   That means I was unconscious.
-- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court"
%
wages.  From now on, your login must be accompanied by slipping a ten
dollar bill behind the space bar.
-- This is your computer speaking I'm tired of serving for such paltry
%
Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I'm glad to say that I have no grasp
 of it.
-- Baron Munchausen
%
It is better that ten guilty persons escape
than one innocent suffer.
-- Sir William Blackstone (1723-80.)
%
Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book iii, The Garden, Line 566
%
Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing
but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
-- Heinrich Heine
%
The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination.  The choice is
independence or dependence.  The code of the creator or the code of
the second-hander.  This is the basic issue.  It rests upon the
alternative of life or death.  The code of the creator is built on
the needs of a reasoning mind which allows man to survive.  The code
of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of
survival.  All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good.
All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil.
-- Howard Roark
%
Respect the faculty that forms thy judgments.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iii, 9
%
Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
-- Wilhelm Meister, Book vii, Chap. ix
%
Be prepared, be sharp, be careful, and use the King's English well. And you
 can forget all the [other rules] unless you remember one more: get paid.
-- Robert N. C. Nix
%
The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they
die fighting each other--instead of their real enemies back home in the
capitals.
-- Edward Abbey
%
They say in an awkward or embarrassing situation don't freeze up. Pay a
 compliment. You will lessen the tension. I remembered that. I was talking
 to this guy, I didn't know him too well, and his toupee blew onto the
 sidewalk. Very embarrassing. So I said, "Gee, I like your hair like that."
-- George Miller
%
If you chose to dance with a bear, don't stop when you get tired.
-- Old Russian Proverb
%
Riker: "Maybe you haven't heard, I tried to kill him yesterday!" Guinan:
"You tried to kill whatever that is on the Borg ship...not Picard.
 Picard is still here with us...in this room.  If he had died, it
would've been  easier.  But he didn't.  They took him from us, a piece
at a time."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.
-- Joshua Reynolds
%
Bus schedules are arranged so your bus will arrive at the transfer
point precisely one minute after the connecting bus has left.
-- John Corcoran
%
I took a course in speed waiting.  Now I can wait an hour in only ten minutes.
-- [Imitation] Steven Wright
%
Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act iv, Sc. 6
%
Your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- The Maiden Queen, Act i, Sc. 2
%
"Why is the camera moving
 around so much?"
  "It's a film style called
   cinema verite."
"Huh? What's that?"
  "It's a fancy French
   expression for 'sloppy
   camera work'."
-- The Tracy Ullman Show
%
In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement,
can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge
which they cannot lose.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer
%
   [Another hideous roar.]
BEDEVERE: That's it!
ARTHUR:   What?
BEDEVERE: It's The Legendary Black Beast of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Run to daylight.
-- Vince Lombardi
%
We are morally superior to _all_ conservatives.
-- Liberal Rule #38
%
There are two million interesting people in New York and only seventy-eight
 in Los Angeles.
-- Neil Simon
%
You look like someone who owes me money.
-- Tony Ianuzzi
%
"You Trash It, We Hash It"
-- Road Kill Cafe
%
 to swing a dead CAT in Jerusalem without hitting
 someone descended from the house of David...
 anointed by a close relative... riding into town
 on a donkey."
-- "...and so for weeks after you won't be able
-- The tantalizing tail end of the Judge's soliloquy, from CEREBUS
%
And when you stick on conversation's burrs,
Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- A Rhymed Lesson, Urania
%
An older couple are in bed one night, and the woman wakes up and says,
 "Sam, get up and close the window. It's cold outside." The fellow just
 keeps right on snoring. A little while later, she nudges him and says
 again, "Sam, get up and close the window! It's cold outside." He's about to
 go back to sleep, but she keeps shaking him, and so finally he gets up and
 shuts the window. He gets back into bed and says, "So now it's warm
 outside?"
-- Myron Cohen
%
First get an absolute conquest over thyself, and then thou wilt easily
govern thy wife.
-- Fuller
%
if your wife ever burned out an electric razor.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I have wagered heavily in the ships pool that you will take him past
  the 6th plateau.
"If I don't?"
I will be...irritated.
-- Worf and Riker, "Peak Performance", stardate 42923.4
%
Ring in the valiant man and free,
  The larger heart, the kindlier hand!
  Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be!
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- In Memoriam, cv, Stanza 8
%
We have all got to die some day; a few years more or less
of our lives don't much matter if by dying a year or two
sooner than we should otherwise do from disease we can help to
save the flag of our country from going under.
-- Lord Baden-Powell Scouting for Boys (1908)
%
If you need a spoon, keep one around. Carry a thermos to help wash it
    down.  Now if there's some left, don't just throw it out - use it for
  spackle or bathroom grout.
-- A. Yankovic, "Spam"
%
:feeping creaturism: /fee'ping kree`ch*r-izm/ n. A deliberate
   spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply that the
   system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of
   hacks.  This term isn't really well defined, but it sounds so neat
   that most hackers have said or heard it.  It is probably reinforced
   by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their
   customary noises.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You're damn right I know where I am.  I'm in Madison Square Garden
getting beat up!
-- Boxer Willie Pastrano to a concerned referee from the mat.
%
Immature poets imitate;  mature poets steal.
-- T.S. Eliot
%
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the
maximum of opportunity.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Marriage"
%
:GNUMACS: /gnoo'maks/ [contraction of `GNU EMACS'] Often-heard
   abbreviated name for the {GNU} project's flagship tool, {EMACS}.
   Used esp. in contrast with {GOSMACS}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
We have exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity,
which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity.
-- Bishop Henry C. Potter (1835-1908)
-- Address at the Washington Centennial Service in St. Paul's Chapel,
-- New York, April 30, 1889
%
Female: One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
A malfunction...emotional awareness.
-- Picard about Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
Times before you, when even living men were antiquities,--when the
living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world could not be
properly said to go unto the greater number.
-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
-- Dedication to Urn-Burial
%
 {} 'no comment'
-- SMILEY
%
If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average.
-- Leonard Levinson
%
 You have reached the Strategic Air Command Nuclear Missile
 Storage Facility.  We are unable to come to the phone right now.
 At the tone, please leave your name, number, and target or list
 of targets, and we'll launch as soon as we can.  And have a nice
 day.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person,
of pre-Adamite ancestral descent.   You will understand this when I tell
you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial
atomic globule.  Consequently, my family pride is something
inconceivable.  I can't help it.  I was born sneering.
-- Pooh-Bah, The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan
%
When you get your PH.D. will you get able to work at BURGER KING?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out
of the hamburger joints.  If I don't fight, I'll eat this planet.
-- George Foreman, 1990, Quoted in London Times
%
:yellow wire: [IBM] n. Repair wires used when connectors
   (especially ribbon connectors) got broken due to some schlemiel
   pinching them, or to reconnect cut traces after the FE mistakenly
   cut one.  Compare {blue wire}, {purple wire}, {red wire}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:runic: adj. Syn. {obscure}.  VMS fans sometimes refer to UNIX as
   `Runix'; UNIX fans return the compliment by expanding VMS to `Very
   Messy Syntax' or `Vachement Mauvais Syst`eme' (French; lit.
   "Cowlike Bad System", idiomatically "Bitchy Bad System").
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Omag: "What is that dreadful noise?!  It sounds like a Bardakian pronghorn
  moose!"
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
To kill an enterprise, never think of introducing new members.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
%
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original
 in your work.
-- Gustave Flaubert
%
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that
 there is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
%
Tinsel is really snakes' mirrors.
-- Steven Wright
%
Here's a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don't know
anybody: First, take out the garbage.  Then go around and collect
any extra garbage that people might have, like a crumpled-up napkin,
and take that out too.  Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy
garbage guy.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%

-- Adam to Eve "I'll wear the plants in this family."
%
    chess grandmasters
21. One to have the idea, and a whole load more to do
all the analysis.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Picard: "Wesley, you will be missed."
-- "Final Mission", Stardate unknown
%
When you go ice-skating, try not to swing your arms too much, because that
 really annoys me.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Do you have exactly what I want in a plaid poindexter bar bat??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
It's not my Goddamn planet! Understand, Monkey-Boy?
-- Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller
%
We don't need no stinkin' badges.
-- IRS
%
Forget thyself to marble.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Il Penseroso, Line 42
%
A little flattery will support a man through great fatigue.
-- James Monroe
%
Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
My very noble and approv'd good masters,
That I have ta'en away this old man's daughter,
It is most true; true, I have married her:
The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless'd with the soft phrase of peace:
For since these arms of mine had seven years' pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish'd tale deliver
Of my whole course of love.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Swab the poop deck, raise the mizzenmast
-- Picard
%
Push the button, Frank!
-- Mystery Science Theater
%
He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know
him any more.
-- Old Testament
-- Job vii, 10; cf. xvi, 22
%
You can always get a job in international affairs because 90% of everything
happens in a foreign country.
-- Steve Connelly
%
He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so
powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world.
-- E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
%
TAMPON COMMERCIAL
  A unique form of advertising, that shows just about everything
  except for the actual product. Typically seen are young women
  bouncing around beaches, on horses and running around gardens
  smiling a lot, enjoying their weekends. 98% of tampon commercial
  slogans contain the word "free", or a derivative. Which, if they're
  not careful, will result in hundreds of women flocking around
  tampon factories demanding they hand them over for free.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Let me see if I've got this Santa business straight. You say he wears a
 beard which hides his face, has no discernible source of income, and flies
 to cities all over the world under cover of darkness? You sure this guy
 isn't laundering illegal drug money?
-- Tom Armstrong ("Marvin")
%
    U.S marines
50. One to screw in the light bulb and the remaining 49 to
guard him .
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
if you're excited by gals who can field dress deer.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes
in which pure air is found.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
The safest place is behind a BFG9000.
-- Unknown Virtual Reality Fanatic
%
(1)  There is nothing more permanent than a temporary building.
(2)  There is nothing more permanent than a temporary tax.
-- Mix's Laws
%
There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a
bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
%
Yet there was round thee such a dawn
  Of light, ne'er seen before,
As fancy never could have drawn,
  And never can restore.
-- Charles Wolfe (1791-1823)
-- To Mary
%
Spock: "If the Romulans do have an ulterior motive, it is in the best interests
  of all concerned that we determine what it is.  So, I will play the role that
  they would have me playing."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
When in doubt, sing loud.
-- Robert Merrill
%
"It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork" he said.  "We've got
 three hundred and sixty three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the
 monsoon's about to break and we're wearing ... we're wearing ... sort
 of things, like glass, only dark... dark glass things on our eyes..."
-- Terry Pratchett "Moving Pictures".
%
And microbrain. Growl for me. Let me know you still care.
-- Q to Worf, "Q-Who?", stardate 42761.3
%
Simplicity is the true test.
-- Ron Randall
%
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their
hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt,
without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only
in the God idea, not God Himself.
-- Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish philosopher and writer
%
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican
 friends...that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we
 will stop telling the truth about them.
-- Adlai Stevenson
%
Fearful concatenation of circumstances.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Argument on the Murder of Captain White, April 6, 1830, Vol. vi, p. 88
%
'T is not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Saul, xviii
%
STOCK ITEM .... We shipped it once before, and we can do it again, probably
-- computer terms as seen from a Marketing point of view
%
if your local ambulance has a trailer hitch.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I'll never forget the time I was flying over Milwaukee and the pilot said,
 "We're now approaching the great city; let's set our watches back one
 hundred years."
-- Jack E. Leonard
%
 :-v speaking
-- SMILEY
%
Romulan #1: "Do not move."
Picard: "What?  Hey, you've made a mistake."
Romulan #2: "Quiet, come with us."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
La Belle Dame Sans Merci: The beautiful lady who never says thank you.
-- Michael Flanders
%
It is not possible to convey sarcasm to certain members of the
 net without using a 2x4.  The smiley face merely reminds them
 of why their head is being dented.
-- John Woods
%
SCRIPTURES, n.  The sacred books of our holy religion, as
distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other
faiths are based.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Sulu: "So much for the little training cruise."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Act upon your impulses, but pray that they may be directed by God.
-- Emerson Tennent
%
    Dario Argento fans
Two. One to change it and one to film the demise of the old
one in explicit gorey detail, using obscure camera angles.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Nice boy, but a little dumb.
-- Foghorn Leghorn
%
They hear a voice in every wind,
  And snatch a fearful joy.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Stanza 4
%
Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
-- C.D. Jackson
%
Never send a letter requesting information to an editor unless you
expect to receive a prolix letter in return.
-- Robert Cook
%
That's not my stomach, my stomach is this basketball shaped thing that
holds my pants up.
-- Doodle, American Eagle in Roger Ramjet
%
I love you for what you are, but I love you yet more for what you are
going to be.
-- Carl Sandburg
%
Of those who say nothing, few are silent.
-- Thomas Neill
%
There are so many earthquakes and tornados that we don't even
recognize them as signs.
-- Mark E. Petersen
%
Hope, of all passions, most befriends us here.
-- Young
%
The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.
-- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
%
There is no mechanical problem so difficult that
it cannot be solved by brute strength and ignorance.
-- William's Law
%
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 anymore so it eats
it!  (It's rather like getting tenure.)
-- Daniel Dennett, _Consciousness Explained_, p. 177
%
You still don't know what you're dealing with do you?  Perfect organism.
Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility [...] I admire
its purity, a survivor; unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of
morality.
-- Ash, "Alien"
%
A little in one's own pocket is better than much in another man's purse.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Chap. vii
%
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.
-- Les Brown
%
ARENA, n.  In politics, an imaginary rat-pit in which the statesman
wrestles with his record.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Ask not what you can do for your country,
but what your country's been doing to you.
-- Avengers
%
As a criminal organization, the Federal government makes the Mafia
 look like a bunch of purse snatchers.
-- Kevin S. Van Horn
%
Rumor travels faster, but it doesn't stay put as long as truth.
-- William Rogers, The Illiterate Digest
%
DINGO:   And after the spanking ... the oral sex.
GALAHAD: Oh, dear! Well, I...
GIRLS:   The oral sex ...  The oral sex.
GALAHAD: Well, I suppose I could stay a BIT longer.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated
speak to the half-converted.
-- William Ralph Inge
%
A robot played chess with a punch,
But died with a hideous crunch
One day when the pawns
Appeared to be prawns
And he gobbled them up for his lunch.
-- C. M. and G. A. Maxson
%
Hiccuping & trembling into the WASTE DUMPS of New Jersey like some
 drunken CABBAGE PATCH DOLL, coughing in line at FIORUCCI'S!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
:return from the dead: v. To regain access to the net after a long
   absence.  Compare {person of no account}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Honey! you got a package! its ticking!
-- Famous Last Words
%
You meaner beauties of the night,
  That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light;
  You common people of the skies,--
  What are you when the moon
-- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
-- On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia
%
All things come round to him who will but wait.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- Tales of a Wayside Inn, The Student's Tale
%
How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
Works of charity  negligently performed are of no worth.
-- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote (1605-1615)
%
... democracy is not something you believe in, or a place you hang your hat,
 but it's something you do.  You participate.  If you stop doing it,
 democracy crumbles and falls apart.
-- Abby Hoffman
%
I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above
the natural sciences.
-- Thomas Mann
%
Fascinating, a totally parochial attitude.
-- Spock, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8.
%
Jupiter has loaded us with a couple of wallets: the one, filled with
our own vices, he has placed at our backs; the other, heavy with those
of others, he has hung before.
-- Phaedrus (c. 8 A.D.)
-- Book iv, Fable 10, 1
%
    New Yorkers
Five - one to change the bulb and four to protect him from
muggers.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
      This universal frame began:
      From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, Line 11
%
    SAS programmers
Well, it depends upon the platform on which one stands!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
-- Edmund Waller (1605-1687)
-- Go, Lovely Rose
%
Omag: "What are you?"
Riker: "Commander William Riker, U.S.S. Enterprise."
Omag: "Oh, am I supposed to stand up and *salute*?!"  [Laughs]
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Set the cart before the horse.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. vii
%
IMPENITENCE, n.  A state of mind intermediate in point of time between
sin and punishment.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Deep calleth unto deep.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xlii, 7
%
:spl: /S-P-L/ [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way
   traditional UNIX kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code
   at high interrupt levels.  Used in jargon to describe the act of
   tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication.  Classically, spl
   levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's at spl 6 today" would mean
   that he is very hard to interrupt.  "Wait till I finish this; I'll
   spl down then."  See also {interrupts locked out}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of
 their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our
 natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 1816
%
Over my dead body.
-- Written on grave
%
I'm as pure as the driven slush.
-- Tallulah Bankhead
%
Rome was not built in one day.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. xi
%
Liberty Federation
-- Oxymoron
%
I only wish I may see your head stroked down with a slipper.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Act v, Sc. 7, 4, (1028.)
%
If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on
their feet, what happen if you strap toast on the back of a cat
and drop it?
-- Steven Wright
%
It is fun being in the same decade with you.
-- FDR to Winston Churchill, 1942
%
Big Brother is Watching You!
-- George Orwell
%
Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities,
enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot
escape from its charm.
-- Agnes Repplier (1858-1950) U.S. Essayist
%
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so
small.
-- Henry Kissinger
%
There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Non-Determinism is not meant to be reasonable.
-- M. J. O'Donnell
%
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book ii, The Timepiece, Line 1
%
I am against all hobbies. I have been against ever since I figured
out that nothing I ever do is considered a hobby. All my life I have
had to fill out forms that ask about hobbies. I always wanted to
write down "reading", but reading is not a hobby. If you collect
books, that is a hobby. If you actually read them, it is not. If
you happen to watch a butterfly in a field, that is not a hobby.
If you put a pin through its little heart, that is a hobby.
-- Richard Cohen
%
Truth and falsehood are both whatever, and simultaneously not so,
rather than not.
-- Tim Larkin, March 31, 1993
%
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
-- Duke Ellington
%
"Existence is random.  It has no pattern save what we imagine after
staring at it for too long.
-- Rorschach, "Watchmen"
%
Let me think...I wonder if an anvil will drop like an apple?
-- Tradition tells us these are the last words of sir Isaac Newton
%
            All men are poets at heart
            All poets are mad
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-- Robert Burton
%
Three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
    cats
You can throw away your light bulbs. Just douse the cat with
gasoline, light it up with a match, and you'll have all the
light you need.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
God help those who do not help themselves.
-- Wilson Mizner
%
MUSTANG, n.  An indocile horse of the western plains.  In English
society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending
 with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take
 the credit. As well as very fat fees.
-- Anthony Burgess
%
The worst feature of a new baby is its mother's singing.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
To be alive is to take risks;
to be always safe and secure is death.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire;
you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the
hours are lost.
-- Gourd's Axiom
%
There is no fear in love; but perfect love drives out fear.
-- 1 John 4:18
%
If my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
The structure of the joke is the juxtaposition of the trivial and the mundane.
We have to reconcile the paradox of it all. The joke mirrors the paradox.
-- Woody Allen
%
Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
-- New Testament
-- Mark ix, 44
%
Walk softly and carry a big stick.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
%
You don't fix a boat from the outside because you might not be able
to tread water long enough to point out everyone elses mistakes.
-- Mike Warnke, Good News Tonight.
%
I saw a want ad. "light housekeeping." They said "Here, change this bulb." I
 said "I'll need some friends." I forgot and left the lighthouse on all
 night. Next day the sun wouldn't rise.
-- Steven Wright
%
An armed society is a polite society.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress'
%
 |-) hee hee
-- SMILEY
%
When Darius offered him ten thousand talents, and to divide Asia equally
with him, "I would accept it," said Parmenio, "were I Alexander."
"And so truly would I," said Alexander, "if I were Parmenio." But
he answered Darius that the earth could not bear two suns, nor Asia
two kings.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Alexander
%
Programmer
 one who is too lacking in people skills
 to be a software engineer
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
You know how with some girls you feel sorry the next day? With Pamela
 you're sorry when it's going on.
-- Roger Price
%
I go up to the Lich and try to pick his pocket.
-- Famous Last Words
%
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling
into my inkpot.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops.
-- Kelvin Throop
%
And he that will to bed go sober
Falls with the leaf still in October.
-- John Fletcher (1576-1625)
-- The Bloody Brother, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
If you were any more perfect, Data, I'd have to write you up in a
  Starfleet medical textbook.
I am already listed in several bio-mechanical texts doctor.
Yes...Of course.
-- Dr. Crusher and Data. "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2
%
Beer doesn't have cold hands/feet.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people who make
them unsafe.
-- Frank Rizzo (ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia)
%
PRISON, n.  A place of punishments and rewards.  The poet assures us
that --

    "Stone walls do not a prison make,"
but a combination of the stone wall, the political parasite and the
moral instructor is no garden of sweets.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
There's a lot than can be said about procrastination, but this isn't the time
to talk about it.
-- Kevin Barkes
%
Thrice he assay'd, and thrice in spite of scorn
Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 619
%
:tiger team: [U.S. military jargon] n. 1. Originally, a team whose
   purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures.
   These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks,
   e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense
   installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your codebooks have
   been stolen" (they usually haven't been) inside safes, etc.  After
   a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up
   the next morning for a `security review' and finds the sign,
   note, etc., and all hell breaks loose.  Serious successes of tiger
   teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and
   security officers (see the {patch} entry for an example).
   2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team or
   special {firefighting} group called in to look at a problem.

   A subset of tiger teams are professional {cracker}s, testing the
   security of military computer installations by attempting remote
   attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels.  Some of
   their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the
   greatest hacks of all times.  The term has been adopted in
   commercial computer-security circles in this more specific sense.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
UFP President: "What is the position of the Romulan government, Ambassador
  Nanclus?"
Nanclus: "I must concur with my colleagues."
UFP President: "But you can't possibly believe that James Kirk assassinated the
  Chancellor of the High Council!"
Nanclus: "Mister President, I don't know what to believe."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Running together all about,
The servants put each other out,
Till the grave master had decreed,
The more haste, ever the worst speed.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
When I was in England I experimented with marijuana a time or two, I
didn't like it, I didn't inhale it, and never tried it again.
-- Bill Clinton
-- The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1993
%
"An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to
New Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but
not new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax."
-- David Letterman
%
Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we
have learnt to walk.
-- Cyril Connolly
%
He who slings mud generally loses ground.
-- Adlai Stevenson
%
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy
-- N.F.Simpson
%
If there 's delight in love, 't is when I see
That heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.
-- William Congreve (1670-1729)
-- The Way of the World, Act iii, Sc. 12
%
Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit
of freedom. I could walk about freely, make my own meals, and even
hurl large rocks at their heads.  It was only later that I discovered
they were not Indians at all, but dirty clothes hampers.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
And if the orbit were a flow line, we would go right into the sun. Luckily,
Newton put in a second prime.
-- Prof. J. P. Solovej, Princeton math department
%
For though his body 's under hatches,
  His soul has gone aloft.
-- Charles Dibdin (1745-1814)
-- Tom Bowling
%
"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else,
 a refining of the sense of truthfulness.  The
 stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only
 the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult
 it is."
-- Willa Cather
%
Greed is eternal.
-- The 10th Rule Of Acquisition
%
For the egoist has so far the advantage over every other species of
devotee, that his idol is ever present.
-- Catherine Gore
%
Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht
%
Birds of prey know they're cool.
-- Gary Larson, The Far Side
%
'T is chastity, my brother, chastity:
She that has that is clad in complete steel.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 420
%
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
-- Francious de la Rochefoucauld
%
The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as
twilight approaches.
-- Milt Barber
%
That's one HELL of a tan, Miss Glasya.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.
-- Publilius Syrus BC 42
%
All files, papers, memos, etc.,
that you save will never be needed until such time as they are disposed of,
when they will become essential and indispensable.
-- John Corcoran
%
Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.
-- Epictetus (c. 60 AD)
-- Discourses, Book i, Chap. xii
%
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould....
The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war
betwixt princes.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book ii, Chap. xii, Apology for Raimond Sebond
%
Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are
ever at their wit's end devising. The hall and the theater and the church
have been invented, and compulsory education. Why not add compulsory
recreation? Our forefathers forged chains of duty and habit, which bind us
notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation add
link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. Yet few think
of pure rest or of the healing power of Nature.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
REDRESS, n.  Reparation without satisfaction.
    Among the Anglo-Saxon a subject conceiving himself wronged by the
king was permitted, on proving his injury, to beat a brazen image of
the royal offender with a switch that was afterward applied to his own
naked back.  The latter rite was performed by the public hangman, and
it assured moderation in the plaintiff's choice of a switch.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.
-- Brander Matthews
%
Given a problem of 'n' equations, there will be 'n+1' variables.
-- The First SNAFU Equation
%
START
-- Windows95
%
If it runs GNUemacs it's a computer, otherwise it's a peripheral.
-- Kevin Johnson
%
 8(:-) Mousketeer
-- SMILEY
%
Riker: "Well, with that Holodeck we just saw.  I think I could conjure up an
  interesting program or two."
Ro: "Now that's disappointing."
Riker: "Why?"
Ro: "You don't strike me as a man who needs a Holodeck to have a good time."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
Eighty-four. Because at that age, you don't have to work anymore, and
you can spend all your time loving each other in your bedroom.
-- Concerning the proper age to get married
-- Carolyn, AGE 8
%
Virtue is insufficient temptation.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Stardate 44705.3.  The Enterprise has destroyed the
  alien probe, but now we are left with the difficult task of repairing the
  Argus Telescope.  Failure to do so would represent an incalculable scientific
  loss."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
I think Little League is wonderful.  It keeps the kids out of the
 house.
-- Yogi Berra
%
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the
 point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
 The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), "Was There A Time"
%
    gay men
None, they get screwed in the ass instead.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Poetry, like chastity, can be carried too far.
-- Mark Twain
%
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.
-- Old Testament
-- Job xii, 8
%
Mankind has no need for gods.  We find the One quite adequate.
-- Kirk, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1.
%
That disease
Of which all old men sicken,--avarice.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- The Roaring Girl, Act i, Sc. 1
%
I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people
 there are hungry for information about the West.   He was asked about many
 things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in
 the Soviet Union.  The first question he was asked was if we had exploding
 television sets.  You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color
 television sets, and many are exploding.  They assumed we must be having
 problems with them too.  The other question he was asked often was why the
 CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a
 few years ago; their propaganda is very effective.
   Defense Electronics, Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
%
He bids fair to grow wise who has discovered that he is not so.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 598
%
No man knows of what stuff he is made until prosperity and ease
try him.
-- A.P. Gouthey
%
The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- Endymion, Chap. lxx
%
He hath a daily beauty in his life.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
History is a collection of agreed upon lies.
-- Voltaire
%
Have you got your income tax papers yet? They've done away with all those
 silly questions now. There are only three questions on the form:

       1. How much did you earn?

       2. How much do you have left?

       3. Send it in.
-- Sandy Powell
%
They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
-- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
%
Burke: "They all look alike."
Samno: "What about that smell?  You know only top-of-the-line models can even
  talk--"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
 This is Dr. Ruth, Sexually Speaking, you're on the air...
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
:op: /op/ n. 1. In England and Ireland, common verbal
   abbreviation for `operator', as in system operator.  Less common in
   the U.S., where {sysop} seems to be preferred.  2. [IRC] Someone
   who is endowed with privileges on {IRC}, not limited to a
   particular channel.  These are generally people who are in charge
   of the IRC server at their particular site.  Sometimes used
   interchangeably with {CHOP}.  Compare {sysop}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
PRESENTABLE, adj.  Hideously appareled after the manner of the time
and place.
    In Boorioboola-Gha a man is presentable on occasions of ceremony
if he have his abdomen painted a bright blue and wear a cow's tail; in
New York he may, if it please him, omit the paint, but after sunset he
must wear two tails made of the wool of a sheep and dyed black.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
My love is like an iron wand
That conks me on the head,
My love is like the valium
That I take before my bed,
My love is like the pint of scotch
That I drink when I be dry;
And I shall love thee still, my dear,
Until my wife is wise.
-- Love's Drug
%
My job is to push people into the future.
-- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN
%
SATAN, n.  One of the Creator's lamentable mistakes, repented in
sashcloth and axes.  Being instated as an archangel, Satan made
himself multifariously objectionable and was finally expelled from
Heaven.  Halfway in his descent he paused, bent his head in thought a
moment and at last went back.  "There is one favor that I should like
to ask," said he.
    "Name it."
    "Man, I understand, is about to be created.  He will need laws."
    "What, wretch! you his appointed adversary, charged from the dawn
his laws?"
    "Pardon; what I have to ask is that he be permitted to make them
himself."
    It was so ordered.
-- of eternity with hatred of his soul you ask for the right to make
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it
 ceases to be serious when people laugh.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
We make war that we may live in peace.
-- Aristotle
%
If you lose your temper at a newspaper columnist,
he'll get rich or famous or both.
-- James C. Hagerty
%
It's better not to date anyone than to date someone who treats you like a
pair of slippers.
-- little 'e'
%
What is a magician but a practising theorist?
-- Obi-Wan Kenobi
%
These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be
yours too.
-- DISCLAIMER
-- Dave Haynie
%
To dance attendance on their lordships' pleasures.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%

-- Microsoft motto "We're the leaders, wait for us!"
%
        Deck Us All With Boston Charlie

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower, alleygaroo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
-- Walt Kelly
%
And what is your bureau doing about bonsai?
-- Harrison Chase, SEEDS OF DOOM
%
Do not put your spoon into the pot which does not boil for you.
-- Romanian proverb
%
:terminal illness: n. 1. Syn. {raster burn}.  2. The `burn-in'
   condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
Double your intelligence or no money back!
-- Gary Larson
%
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act i, Sc. 4
%
It is cheaper to borrow the mistakes of others than to pay for your own.
-- Palmer Styles -8/94
%
There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man.
The true nobility is in being superior to you previous self.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary,
although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
At lovers' perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
 Please leave a message.  However, you have the right to remain
 silent.  Everything you say will be recorded and will be used by
 us.
-- Answering machine madness - you're in big trouble
%
A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky:
There eke the soft delights that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures always hover'd nigh;
But whate'er smack'd of noyance or unrest
Was far, far off expell'd from this delicious nest.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Castle of Indolence, Canto i, Stanza 6
%
NOT A DESK PERSON: Did not go to college.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
:net.god: /net god/ n. Accolade referring to anyone who satisfies
   some combination of the following conditions: has been visible on
   USENET for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone
   sites, moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news software, or
   knows Gene, Mark, Rick, Mel, Henry, Chuq, and Greg personally.  See
   {demigod}.  Net.goddesses such as Rissa or the Slime Sisters
   have (so far) been distinguished more by personality than by
   authority.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
DICTATOR, n.  The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of
despotism to the plague of anarchy.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I'm in a bad mood.
-- WinError #3
%
Stimpy, your wealth of ignorance astounds me.
-- Ren Hoek
%
Why be a man when you can be a success?
-- Bertolt Brecht
%
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "The Poet"
%
1970's (New Math)
A farmer exchanges a set P of potatoes with a set M of money.  The cardinality
of the set M is equal to $10 and each element of M is worth $1.  Draw 10 big
dots representing the elements of M.

The set C of production costs is comprised of 2 big dots less than the set M.
Represent C as a subset of M and give the answer to the question: What is the
cardinality of the set of profits? (Draw everything in red).
-- from: The evolution of mathematics education during the last 30 years.
%
Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.
-- Mae West
%
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it
worse.
-- Finagle's Fourth Law
%
There is no room for death,
Nor atom that his might could render void;
Thou--Thou art Being and Breath
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
-- Emily Bronte
%
C-In-C: "The Klingon Empire has roughly fifty years of life left to it."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9521.6
%
    keyboardists
Only one, but if you wait until next month, Yamaha will have
a new model bulb out which is much better.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
You believe that there is one God.  Good!  Even the demons believe
that - and shudder.
-- James 3:19 (The Bible, New International Version)
%
    workers at Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapon
components plant in Golden, Colo., should it take to change a
light bulb?
Sixteen--and that's no joke:
An internal memo written by a manager at the U.S. Department
of Energy plant recommended a new safety procedure for "the
replacement of a light bulb in a criticality beacon." The
beacon, similar to the revolving red lamp atop a police car,
warns workers of nuclear accidents. The memo said the job
should take at least 16 people over 60 hours to replace the
light. It added that the same job used to take 12 workers
4.15 hours.
The memo called for a planner to meet with six others at a
work-control meeting; talk with other workers who have done
the job before; meet again; get signatures from five people
at that work-control meeting; get the project plans approved
by separate officials overseeing safety, logistics, waste
management and plant scheduling; wait for a monthly
criticality-beacon test; direct electricians to replace the
bulb; and then test and verify the repair. Mark Obmascik in
Denver Post (reprinted in Reader's Digest)
-- How many
%
Not entirely stable?  I'm glad you're here to tell us these things!  Chewie,
take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive!
-- Han Solo (Star Wars)
%
He learned almost too late that man is a _feeling_ creature...
-- Mystery Science Theatre 3000
%
Try to appreciate sex with your knees tied together.  (This may be
slightly more challenging if you are female.)
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not
 wave in a vacuum.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
%
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
-- Henrik Tikkanen
%
He who covets what belongs to another deservedly loses his own.
-- Phaedrus (c. 8 A.D.)
-- Book i, Fable 4, 1
%
Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Timon of Athens
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated.
-- F. R. Scott
%
Spock: "We will be able to follow the captain's movements."
Valeris: "How did you achieve this, sir?"
Spock: "Time is precious, Lieutenant."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Authority and liberty are two incompatible ideas.... Liberty diminishes
in proportion as man progresses and becomes civilized.
-- Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970)
%
I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to
war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but
men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest
of one's life.
-- John Fowles, The Magus
%
Conservatives are the enemy. Destroy by any means.
-- Liberal Rule #19
%
 (Imitating Mr.  Rogers:)  Hello.  I'm in the Neighborhood of
 Make Believe right now, so I can't come to the phone.  Can you
 leave your name and number when you hear the sound of the tone?
 Sure...  I knew you could.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
:IWBNI: // [abbreviation] `It Would Be Nice If'.  Compare {WIBNI}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Can you cook? Can you sew?    Well, I don't want to know, cause that's not
  what you need on the inside to make the time go.
-- Ian Anderson
%
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.
-- Edmund Burke
%
When a banker jumps out of a window, jump after him --
 that's where the money is.
-- Robespierre
%
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back
to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
-- Edward O. Wilson
%
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethern, and to do good is
my religion.
-- Thomas Paine
%
REDUNDANT, adj.  Superfluous; needless; _de trop_.

    The Sultan said:  "There's evidence abundant
    To prove this unbelieving dog redundant."
    To whom the Grand Vizier, with mien impressive,
    Replied:  "His head, at least, appears excessive."
                                                       Habeeb Suleiman

    Mr. Debs is a redundant citizen.
                                                    Theodore Roosevelt
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
We're only in it for the volume.
-- Black Sabbath
%
There *are* standards.  If you can't see one, you *make* one and
-- stick to it come Hell or high water until you see a BETTER one.
-- John Gaunt, aka GRIMJACK
%
MATERNIER GHERMEZ AHLEIEH, GHORBAN.
The red blindfold will be lovely, excellency.
-- Useful phrases to know when traveling in moslem areas
%
 When you've got them by the balls, their hearts
 and minds will follow.
-- Colson's Law
%
:PDP-20: n. The most famous computer that never was.  {PDP-10}
   computers running the {{TOPS-10}} operating system were labeled
   `DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11.
   Later on, those systems running {TOPS-20} were labeled
   `DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit
   brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called
   `system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a
   `PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the
   operating system and the color of the paint.  Most (but not all)
   machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted `Basil Blue', whereas
   most TOPS-20 machines were painted `Chinese Red' (often mistakenly
   called orange).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Sex is dirty only if it is done right.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
%
The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million.
(Note: Debs received one million votes in 1920 as candidate for
US President, while serving a 10-year jail sentence for having said
in June 1918:
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and
plunder...the master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles.")
-- Eugene V. Debs, US labor leader.
%
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Locksley Hall, Line 182
%
If you put your supper dish to your ear you can hear the sounds
 of a restaurant.
-- Snoopy
%
I gotta go - I'm expecting another call from you any minute.
-- SLR
%
There is no security on this earth.  There is only opportunity.
-- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), 1955
%
Come close to me Klingon, let me die with my hands at your throat.
There is a substance within my cells which you need to survive.
Then you've come to make me beg for my life?
No.
I would rather die than pollute my body with Klingon filth.
-- Patahk and Worf, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2
%
I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
And, for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet, Act I Sc. 4
%
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for
yourself-that is my doctrine.
-- Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
%
An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.
-- Cato
%
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do
 not cease to be insipid.
-- Nietzsche
%
And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man
-- A. E. Housman
%
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
 (:-... heart-broken
-- SMILEY
%
MVS AIRLINES
The passengers all gather in the hanger, watching hundreds of
technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft.
This plane has at least 10 engines and seats over 1,000 passengers.
All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the necessary complement of
200 technicians.  The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit.
He guns the engines, only to realise that the plane is too big to get
through the hangar doors!
-- if Operating Systems were Airlines...
%
Sometimes when you look in his eyes you get the feeling that someone else
  is driving.
-- David Letterman
%

-- Hey These are my own ideas, not my employer's.  Don't blame them...
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Batton down the hatches, several thousand Zulus approaching from the north.
-- Christopher Commission report of LAPD car-to-car computer message, 7/91
%
It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal
intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he
is entering the town.
-- A law to reduce crime states
-- real standing law in Washington, United States of America
%
Our wrangling lawyers... are so litigious and busy here on earth,
that I think they will plead their clients' causes hereafter,--some
of them in hell.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader
%
Marc Bolan:
What a place to plant a f%*king tree
-- Famous people swearing...
%
The wife you save may be your own.
     a notorious womanizer, during the son's first congressional race
-- Unofficial slogan of supporters of one of FDR's sons,
%
And if you believe that one, I have a cheap IBM mini to sell you
-- The sales man
%
If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Love is the gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and
everyone else.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Computers in future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
-- Popular Mechanics, 1949
%
Lesson #1 in becoming more human. You must observe all human customs.
-- Lore to Data, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4
%
Cupid kissed God and that got the ball rollin'.
-- Concerning the origins of love
-- Julio, age 9
%
And feel that I am happier than I know.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book viii, Line 282
%
RELIQUARY, n.  A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces of the
true cross, short-ribs of the saints, the ears of Balaam's ass, the
lung of the cock that called Peter to repentance and so forth.
Reliquaries are commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent
the contents from coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable
times.  A feather from the wing of the Angel of the Annunciation once
escaped during a sermon in Saint Peter's and so tickled the noses of
the congregation that they woke and sneezed with great vehemence three
times each.  It is related in the "Gesta Sanctorum" that a sacristan
in the Canterbury cathedral surprised the head of Saint Dennis in the
library.  Reprimanded by its stern custodian, it explained that it was
seeking a body of doctrine.  This unseemly levity so raged the
diocesan that the offender was publicly anathematized, thrown into the
Stour and replaced by another head of Saint Dennis, brought from Rome.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
-- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
%
The gym teacher's name was Mr. Caruso. Mr. Caruso did not speak English. He
 spoke "Gym." One day I was playing basketball and Mr. Caruso told me I
 would have to get an athletic supporter. He didn't express himself exactly
 that way, though. He said, "Hey, you, one day you're gonna go up for a
 rebound and the family jewels aren't gonna go with ya." I had no idea what
 he was talking about. Next day I showed up for practice without my watch
 and my mezuzah. He said, "Did ya take care of the family jewels?" I said,
 "I left 'em in my locker." Took us a half hour to revive Mr. Caruso.
-- Gabe Kaplan
%
Marta says the interesting thing about fly-fishing is that it's two lives
 connected by a thin strand.  Come on, Marta.  Grow up.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in
 everything.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
APOSTATE, n.  A leech who, having penetrated the shell of a turtle
only to find that the creature has long been dead, deems it expedient
to form a new attachment to a fresh turtle.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last
judgment, it takes place every day.
-- Albert Camus
%
Nonsense, no man I know can do it that way.
-- O'Brien
%
The most patient man in loss, the most coldest that ever turned up ace.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
And swans seem whiter if swart crowes be by.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, First Week, First Day
%
The world goes up and the world goes down,
  And the sunshine follows the rain;
And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown
        Can never come over again.
-- Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
-- Dolcino to Margaret
%
Valeris: "We must inform Starfleet Command."
Scott: "Inform them of what?  A new weapon, that is invisible?  'Raving
  lunatics', that's what they'll call us.  They'll say that we're so desperate
  to exornerate the captain, that we'll say anything."
Spock: "And they would be correct.  We have no evidence.  Only a theory, which
  happens to fit the facts."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
What worth has beauty if it be not seen?
-- Proverb
%
I have many CHARTS and DIAGRAMS..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Q: "As a fellow Klingon, if you would speak to the captain on my behalf,
I would
  be *eternally* grateful.  Which doesn't mean as much as it used to, I admit."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel
 myself infinitely the happier for it.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
The one truly unforgiveable sin for a man in the relation between the sexes, is
to take a woman for granted.
-- Charles McCabe
%
Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.
-- Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
-- Meeting Troubles Half-way
%
If it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid.
-- Amphibious Warfare Review, June 1992
%
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
%
but the kind of man that the country turns out.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Flight Reservation systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information
 isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.
-- Arthur Miller
%
The good man is the friend of all living things.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
%
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already
three parts dead.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)
%
Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy: we do not easily
believe beyond what we see.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
%
Agitation is the marshalling of the conscience of a nation to mold its
laws.
-- Robert Peel
%
"You think you've got problems," said Marvin, the paranoid human-hating
robot, as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are you supposed
to do if you ARE a manically depressed robot?  No, don't bother to answer that,
I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the
answer.  It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
Free curiosity is of more value than harsh discipline.
-- Saint Augustine (354-430), Confessions (397-398)
%
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness, and lend us thine aid.
-- Reginald Heber (1783-1826)
-- Epiphany
%
:Easter egg: [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in
   the U.S. and many parts of Europe] n. 1. A message hidden in the
   object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons
   disassembling or browsing the code.  2. A message, graphic, or
   sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in
   response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,
   intended as a joke or to display program credits.  One well-known
   early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond
   to the command `make love' with `not war?'.  Many
   personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM,
   including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations,
   snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire
   development team.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Those that know, do.  Those that understand, teach.
-- Aristotle
%
Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give
the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
-- Dinah Shore
%
A Liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument.
-- Robert Frost
%
If I could live my life again
That'll be the thing to be
A man who put stumbling blocks
In the lives of the likes of me
-- Momus "I was a Maoist intellectual in the music industry".
%
Hell, if you understand everything I said, you'd be me!
-- Miles Davis
%
"`This Snow Crash thing
  Juanita shrugs. `What's the difference?'"
-- is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?'
-- Neal Stephenson "Snow Crash"
%
Luck has nothing to do with it....
-- Avon
%
BABE or BABY, n.  A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or
condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and
antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.
There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose
adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries
before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being
preserved on a floating lotus leaf.

            Ere babes were invented
            The girls were contended.
            Now man is tormented
    Until to buy babes he has squandered
    His money.  And so I have pondered
            This thing, and thought may be
            'T were better that Baby
    The First had been eagled or condored.
                                                               Ro Amil
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Rogers: "For me?"
Riker: "It's all yours."
Rogers: "It's so...*big*."  [Laughs]
Riker: "For honors students, only the best."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
That corner over by the fireplace looks kind of bare. I'd like to see
 something hanging there--you.
-- Lou Costello
%
>consult guide about intelligence
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:

Thirty million generations of philosophers have debated the definition of
intelligence. The most popular definition appears in the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation android manuals: "Intelligence is the ability to reconcile
example, having a stomach ache and not having a stomach ache at the same
time, holding a hole without the doughnut, having good luck and bad luck
simultaneously, or seeing a real estate agent waive his fee."
-- totally contradictory situations without going completely bonkers for
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Ace: Doctor, we did good, didn't we?
       Doctor: Perhaps.   Time will tell.  Always does.
-- Remembrance of the Daleks
%
I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very
close, personal,loyal relationship. I'm not, as they say, a potted
plant in these meetings.
     (Tampa Tribune-Times  1/7/90)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle defending himself
%
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to
 wonder whether you are happy or not.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
There is something in the pang of change
More than the heart can bear,
Unhappiness remembering happiness.
-- Euripides
%
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all
considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally
false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
-- Edward Gibbon (1734-1794)
%
Add one little bit on the end...  Think of 'potatoe,' how's it spelled?
You're right phonetically, but what else...?  There ya go... all right!
-- Vice President Dan Quayle correcting a student's
-- correct spelling of the word "potato"  during
-- a spelling bee at an elementary school in Trenton.
%
As a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxiii, 37
%
He that is strucken blind cannot forget
The precious treasure of his eyesight lost.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately,
 Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer,
 you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.
-- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update
%
There is only one group which would ever call for the banning of 'The
 Diary of Ann Frank', and I don't care what they happen to be calling
 themselves these days.
-- Alan Moore 1/87
%
Jane Fonda doing the "tomahawk chop" at ballgames.
-- Liberal hypocrisy
%
        Oh Lady of Blessed Acceleration don't fail me now!
-- The Blues Brothers
%
Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore;
not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or
graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
-- Amiel
%
All trails have more uphill sections than they have downhill sections.
-- Shedenhelm's Law of Backpacking
%
It is not the quality of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests,
that makes the feast.
-- Lord Clarendon
%
Sarah Jane, you keep thinking I'm DEAD!
-- Fourth Doctor.
%
The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.
-- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary
-- to Queen Victoria 1873.
%
"The Church doesn't have problems with sex; the world does"
-- Vatican official
%
A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
  Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!
-- H. F. Chorley (1831-1872)
-- The Brave Old Oak
%
The basis for optimism is sheer terror.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
A bending reed does not break.
-- Confucius
%
An error is simply a failure
 to adjust immediately
 from a preconception to an actuality.
-- John Cage, composer
%
A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing: for there is not a more
fearful wild-fowl than your lion living.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
I do remember an apothecary,--
And hereabouts he dwells.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.
-- Woodrow Wilson
%
Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by
Michael Angelo!
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "The Innocents Abroad"
%
:I didn't change anything!: interj. An aggrieved cry often heard as
   bugs manifest during a regression test.  The {canonical} reply to
   this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before,
   doesn't it?"  See also {one-line fix}.  This is also heard from
   applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications
   problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a
   divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network.
   Usually, their statement is found to be false.  Upon close
   questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the
   program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion,
   but which actually {hosed} the code completely.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on
Tue Nov  5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch).
-- Andy Tannenbaum
%
Kent: "What is this??!?"
Chris: "This is ice, this is what happens to water when it gets too cold."
Mitch: "Who was that?"
Chris: "That was Kent, that's what happens to a man when he gets too sexually
        frustrated."
-- "Real Genius"
%
WOMAN:   I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous
         collective.
DENNIS:  You're fooling yourself.  We're living in a dictatorship.  A
         self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN:   Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS:  That's what it's all about if only people would--
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
Those who will be able to conquer software will be able to conquer the world.
-- Tadahiro Sekimoto, president, NEC Corp.
%
"Yes, I've met Hillary Clinton.  I was in Florida helping those poor Hurricane
victims, and SHE came down for a photo opportunity."
-- Marilyn Quayle on "McLaughlin"
%
(reading from tombstone) '...William Greaves, born 1513 in Chelmsford
  with the love of Christ...died 1563...in agony...with a spike up his
  bottom'.
-- Edmund : Money
%
My uncle Murray conquered Egypt in 53 B.C.  And I can prove it too!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear 't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the
people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to
take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820
%
Data: "Ambassador Spock, may I ask a personal question?"
Spock: "Please."
Data: "As you examine your life, do you find that you have missed your
  humanity?"
Spock: "I have no regrets."
Data: "'No regrets.'  That is a human expression."
Spock: "Yes.  Fascinating."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Orange--its not only a symptom, its a crime.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
...no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness.
-- William Carlos Williams
%
It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
-- Larry Wall
%
Are Russian leaders overweight and out of shape? The new national symbol is
 the hammer and fudgesicle.
-- Carl Wolfson
%
Hell
Grew darker at their frown.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 719
%
A word to the wise is enough.
-- Miguel de Cervantes
%
...desire cracks open the gates.  If you're ready it will take you
through.  But nothing lasts forever, time is the destroyer, the wheel
turns again and again, watch out it will take you through.
-- Starhawk
%
Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday be
 noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the
 greatest works of genius ever created by Man.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
if you have a civil war chess set & play checkers.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Fundamentalists are to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.
-- Robin Tyler
%
If you get gloomy, just take an hour off and sit and think how much better
 this world is than hell. Of course, it won't cheer you up if you expect to
 go there.
-- Don Marquis
%
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.
-- Ecclesiastes 9:11
%
 ,:-) David Ogden Stiers' toupee
-- SMILEY
%
Carefully stage all "impromptu" town meetings.
-- Liberal Rule #32
%
The capitalist system is the best, 'cause we can go somewhere else.
 Communism is one big phone company.
-- Lenny Bruce
%
 (Theme music from Peter Gunn:)  My name is David.  What people
 call me is something else entirely.  I'm a P.I.  It says so on
 my door.  I would have been here to take your call, but then...
 she walked in.  She was the kind of dame that could make Mr.
 Spock speak French.  Her baby blues wouldn't let me turn her
 case down, so leave me a clue of your identity after the tone
 and I'll track you down.  Here's lookin' at you, kid.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
 =) variation on a theme...
-- SMILEY
%
Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream.
-- 1864 Abraham Lincoln Re-Election Slogan
%
Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but
man needs both.
-- Fritjof Capra
%
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave
him, and inflame; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so, that the past
becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them, that he would give all
his life to possess them. What is the fond love of dearest friends compared to
treasure? Is memory as strong as expectancy, fruition as hunger, gratitude as
desire?
-- Thackeray
%
I am a greedy, selfish bastard.  I want the fact that I existed to
mean something.
-- Harry Chapin
%
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman,
but believing what he read made him mad.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic
credentials
(out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence
to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve
but appeared "abruptly."
-- Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23
%
How's YOUR Endless Project coming?
-- Mark Diekhans
%
:whacker: [University of Maryland: from {hacker}] n. 1. A person,
   similar to a {hacker}, who enjoys exploring the details of
   programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.
   Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends
   up whacking the system or program in question.  Whackers are often
   quite egotistical and eager to claim {wizard} status,
   regardless of the views of their peers.  2. A person who is good at
   programming quickly, though rather poorly and ineptly.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
-- Old Testament
-- Daniel xii, 4
%
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
Allow me to sell you a couple?"
-- By the use of this ointment one shilling the box --
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are
wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask.
-- John Keble (1792-1866)
-- Morning
%
bearing, true: opposite of bearing, false.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock,
no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
-- Virginia Woolf
%
The way to live longer is to fall in love with what you're doing, then
 you've got it made. Then you can't wait to get out of bed in the morning
 and get to work. Unless ... unless you got someone in bed with you.
-- George Burns
%
Let me state that programming is not the science of coding but the art of
finding solutions of non-formalized problems and expressing these solutions in
explicit and clear way.
-- Vadim Antonov (avg@hq.demos.su)
%
"All pitchers are liars and crybabies."
-- Yogi Berra
%
Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and
climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
Brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel.
-- New Testament
-- Acts xxii, 3
%
I have heard of the Vulcan integrity and personal honor.  There is a
   well-known saying, or is it a myth, that Vulcans are incapable of lying.
-- Romulan Commander, "The Enterprise Incident," stardate 5027.3.
%
Hey OJ! Is that A KNIFE in your hand?
-- Famous Last Words
%
I have to thaw some karate chops for dinner.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 90 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
My mother drinks to forget she drinks.
-- Crazy Jimmy
%
They're funny things, Accidents.  You never have them till you're having them.
inspired by A. A. Milne
-- Eeyore, Pooh's Little Instruction Book,
%
He who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
His [Burke's] imperial fancy has laid all Nature under tribute, and
has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk
of art.
-- Robert Hall (1764-1831)
-- Apology for the Freedom of the Press
%
   There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness
and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken
English, but with not one recognizable syllable.  There is no way you can
tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and
done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
-- Annie Dillard, _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_
%
We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around
here.
-- Edward Abbey
%
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iii, Stanza 32
%
To love is the great Amulet that makes this world a garden.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
I was no hero, but an undisciplined, opinionated, loud-mouthed young man
 who was far out of his league. It was a great and painful lesson, and I
 learned it well. I only hope you won't need to learn it as I did.
-- Picard to Wesley, "Samaritan Snare", stardate 42779.1
%
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.
-- Edward Abbey
%
When povertie comes in at doores, love leapes out at
windowes.
-- John Clark, "Paroemiologia"
%
 oo somebody's head-lights are on
-- SMILEY
%
I have too much guilt.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 66 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
We Came, We Scanned, We Assimilated.
-- Caesar Borg
%
Never underestimate the power of the Internet, Luke.
-- O W Kenobi
%
EMOTION, n.  A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the
heart to the head.  It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge
of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Perrin: "Mint tea.  It's been years since I had any.  Vulcans have some kind of
  strange concoction they call 'mint'.  You'd never recognize it."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45235.4
%
A mere madness, to live like a wretch and die rich.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsect. 12
%
A skunk walked by and my odor eaters went berserk with blood lust.  They
tripped me, escaped from my loafers, and chased the skunk up
a tree.  My feet were still hot and sweaty, so I bought wind socks.
-- Steve Connelly
%
:lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj. Used to describe a person who is
   technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human
   beings effectively.  Technically it describes a machine that has
   lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output (in
   1991, the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent
   example).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There are three kinds of people you will have to deal with in life,
fools, damn fools, and sons of lady dogs.
-- N. G. Herreschoff (Designer of six America's Cup defenders)
%
To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
%
Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window.
-- S. Hunt
%
Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the blink again.
-- Marvin The Paranoid Android
%
This man, I say, is most perfect who shall have understood everything
for himself, after having devised what may be best afterward and unto
the end.
-- Hesiod (c. 700 BC)
-- Works and Days, Line 293
%
Close call.
Too close, Number One. Brinksmanship is a dangerous game.
-- Riker and Picard, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2
%
The hair ball blocking the drain of the shower reminded Laura she would
never see her little dog Pritzi again.
-- 1988 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest, runner up
%
Why you say you no bunny rabbit when you have
 little powder-puff tail?
-- The Tasmanian Devil
%

-- Similar sire, similar scion.   <----like father, like son
%
Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done
as the fear of the consequences.
-- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims" 1665
%
The scientist is at the moving edge of what's happening.
-- Dr. Gerald M. Edelman
%
I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- All Fools, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait.
-- Frank Tyger
%
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
%
Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves
to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way
to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the
cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in
fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a
lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of
the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
-- Dave Barry, Why Humor is Funny
%
To Berkeley every virtue under heaven.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue ii, Line 73
%
PRO:  No more fights with your girlfriend.
CON:  No more meat when you want it.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
You cannot determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.
-- The Law of the Perversity of Nature
%
When you are right be logical, when you are wrong be-fuddle.
-- Gerard E. McKenna
%
On the whole human beings want to be good,
but not too good and not quite all the time.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), collected essays
%
 The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and
 receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when
 he is already in the company of:
 (1) a date
 (2) his wife
 (3) a better looking and richer male friend.
-- Beifeld's Principle
%
If noted figures don't say what needs to be said, we'll say it for them.
-- Axiom 1, Corollary 1D
-- Ralph Keyes, The Rules of misquotation
%
Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
Sic Biscuitus Disintegrat.
-- Adrian Ogden
%
Engineering majors: we don't get laid much, but we're building the future.
-- Robin Williams
%
    gay rights activists
None: The bulb shouldn't have to change for society to accept it.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
To kill an enterprise, pay your dues as late as possible.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
%
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim
Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame,
Obtained with labor, for mankind employed,
And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
%
Saavik: "May I speak, sir?"
Kirk: "Self-expression doesn't seem to be one of your problems.
Saavik: [Looks at Kirk quizzingly]
Kirk: "You'r  bothered by your performance on the Kobayashi Maru."
Saavik: "I failed to resolve the situation."
Kirk: "There's no correct solution.  It's a test of character."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
PANDA MATING FAILS; VETERINARIAN TAKES OVER
-- Real Newspaper Headline
%
Nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 7
%
Data: "Sir, drop the shields."
Riker: "That's suicide, Data."
Data: "Captain, *drop* the shields."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
...Veloz is indistinguishable from hundreds of other electronics businesses
in the Valley, run by eager young engineers poring over memory dumps late
into the night.  The difference is that a bunch of self-confessed car nuts
are making money doing what they love: writing code and driving fast.
-- Electronics puts its foot on the gas, IEEE Spectrum, May 88
%
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
-- Robert Lewis Stevenson
%
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
%
A love that took an early root,
  And had an early doom.
-- Thomas K. Hervey (1799-1859)
-- The Devil's Progress
%
Translations from the Saleslady, part 1 of 2:

 "I'm afraid we really don't have anything quite like that."
 You're a $19.95 girl prepared to spend $29.95 in an $89.95 store.

 "Just look at the detailing."
 The seams are sewed with thread.

 "Just feel the body of that cloth."
 It's thick material.

 "Just see how that material drapes."
 It's thin material.
-- Robert Paul Smith
%
In death a hero, as in life a friend!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xvii, Line 758
%
Was that that 'that that' that that teacher complained about?
-- Rob Robinson
%
That's a super-conducting magnet isn't it?
-- Salia, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8
%
 :-< real sad smiley
-- SMILEY
%
Without a sign his sword the brave man draws,
And asks no omen but his country's cause.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xii, Line 283
%
Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely
survive in the face of doubt.
-- Robert Lindner
%
Did not Jupiter transforme himselfe into the shape of Amphitrio to
embrace Alcmaena; into the form of a swan to enjoy Leda; into a Bull
to beguile Io; into a showre of gold to win Danae?
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues, 1579 (Arber's reprint), Page 93
%
Prizes are for children.
-- Charles Ives, [upon being given, but refusing, the Pulitzer prize]
%
Everybody wants to peel their own banana.
-- Young's Principle of Individuality
%
The other day he woke up with a headache. I felt sorry for him. I would
 like to help him but I can't. I told him so many times; when he jumps out
 of bed--feet first.
-- Jean Carroll
%
Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.
-- Matthew Browne, "Lilliput Levee"
%
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how
powerful they are.
-- Clive James
%
Ignorance of the law is no defense, and since
they'll never tell you what the law is, you're defenseless.
Every business must pay protection money to lawyers.
-- Nicholas von Hoffman
%
And they've overthrown Nicolas the Second, who used to be bizarre...
Used to be _the_ Tzar, Baldrick...
-- Baldrick and Edmund : Major Star
%
You can learn a lot about people by their wallet.
-- Daniel Will-Harris
%
Days that need borrow
No part of their good morrow
From a fore-spent night of sorrow.
-- Richard Crashaw (c. 1616-1650)
-- Wishes to his Supposed Mistress
%
Values are caught, not taught.
-- Dobson
%
 (After a power outage:)  Hi, this is Ralph.  The good news is
 that my power is back on.  The bad news for you is, so is my
 answering machine.  So, leave a message.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
America wasn't founded so that we could all be better.  America was
founded so we could all be anything we damn well please.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
%
The simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately,
following
an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by
summoning up contrary instances, organizing one's time and one's thought for
study- all these arts cannot be taught in the air but only through the
difficulties of a defined subject; they cannot be taught in one course on one
year, but must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections.
-- Jacques Barzun
%
:leaky heap: [Cambridge] n. An {arena} with a {memory leak}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Books are for use.
-- First law of library science
%
When arguments fail, use a blackjack.
-- Ed "Spike" O'Donnell
%
To live in an evolutionary spirit means to engage with full ambition
and without reserve in the structure of the present,
and yet to let go and flow into a new structure
when the right time has come.
-- Erich Jantsch
%
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
-- Norman Mailer
%
    American standup comedians
You know what bugs me about light bulbs? The other night I was
flying cross country and the f****** stewardess started telling
me about her cat. Man, I f****** hate people who don't use
their turn signals. F***. Hey, how about an impression. Here's
Jack f****** Nicholson doing Tony Curtis in drag imitating
Marlon Brando screwing in a light bulb. FEEEEEELINGS....
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 7
%
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is
obtained only from facts.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
%
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-- Seymore Cray, on virtual memory
%
Did an Italian CRANE OPERATOR just experience uninhibited sensations
 in a MALIBU HOT TUB?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
    software engineers
Only one, but she's not available. She's the only programmer
we have who can get the <insert name here> software ready to
ship to customers, and that's higher priority, you know.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%

-- Credit card owner Member of the debt set.
%
If I can't give my brave boys a kind word and a big smile, what
  _can_ I give them?
Well, one or two ideas do suggest themselves, but you'd probably
  think they were unhygienic.
-- Nurse Brown and Edmund : General Hospital
%
A general leading the State Department resembles  a dragon commanding
ducks.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%
Solutions are obvious if one only has the
optical power to observe them over the horizon.
-- K. A. Arsdall
%
To know how to refuse is as important as to know how to consent.
-- Baltasar Gracian
%
He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks
democracy itself.
-- William S. Paley, chairman of CBS
%
A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose to
the grindstone.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
-- Maxims prefixed to Poor Richard's Almanac, 1757
%
:bit twiddling: n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see
   {tune}) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to
   produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that
   the code becomes incomprehensible.  2. Aimless small
   modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal.
   3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of
   frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt
   to get it back to a known state.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write
faster than anybody who can write better.
-- A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
%
The socialist or anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is
to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization
itself rests... One who studies this subject will soon be brought face
to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property
dollars in the saving bank, and equally the legal right of the
millionaire to his millions.
-- civilization itself depends the right of the laborer to his hundred
-- Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)
%
If they ever give you a brief ... attack the medical evidence. Remember,
 the jury's full of rheumatism and arthritis and shocking gastric troubles.
 They love to see a medical man put through it.
-- John Mortimer
%
The fear of some divine and supreme powers keeps men in obedience.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2
%
A great many people mistake opinions for thoughts.
-- Herbert Prochnow
%
All things considered, life is 9 to 5 against.
-- Nick the Greek's Law of Life
%
Homeowner Envy:
 Feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the
disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly,
which has no ears.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Marcus Cato
%
 Hello, this is Rip van Winkle.  I'm not awake to take your call
 right now.  Please leave your message at the sound of the snore.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true.
 It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking
 responsibility for what they know.
-- Brooks Atkinson
%
Omag: "Can't somebody get me a napkin?!"
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Cowards take hostages. Klingons do not.
-- Worf to Yar, "Heart of Glory", stardate 41503.7
%
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless
manner, you have learned how to live.
-- Lin Yutang
%
We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our
self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon - this is where we should
look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
Troi: "Timothy's a boy feeling a great deal of pain.  But, he is a boy again.
  Is this difficult for you, Data?"
Data: "'Difficult'?"
Troi: "To watch him, moving away from being like you."
Data: "That would require an emotional context which I cannot provide."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Who knows a fool, must know his brother; for one will recommend another.
-- Poor Richard
%
Please, don't make me treat you like dogs.  I don't want to
treat you like common dogs.
-- Miss Firecracker
%
I found out why cats drink out of the toilet. My mother told me it's
 because it's cold in there. And I'm like: How did my mother know that?
-- Wendy Liebman
%
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived
Know one false step is ne'er retrieved
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
Not all that glisters gold.
-- Tomas Gray
-- Elegy To A Favourite Cat Drowned In A Bowl Of Goldfishes
%
 :-X A big wet kiss!
-- SMILEY
%
Never trust a tall dwarf. He's lying about something.
-- Solomon Short
%
:poll: v.,n. 1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an
   input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular
   external event has been registered.  2. To repeatedly call or check
   with someone: "I keep polling him, but he's not answering his
   phone; he must be swapped out."  3. To ask.  "Lunch?  I poll for
   a takeout order daily."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
True knowledge lies in knowing how to live.
-- Gracian
%
We give them the love we can spare, the time we can spare.  In return
dogs have given us their absolute all.  It is without a doubt the best
deal man has ever made.
-- Roger Caras, "A Celebration of Dogs"
%
AUSTRALIA, n.  A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and
commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate
dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an
island.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be
invented so he could hate that too.
-- Peter De Vries
%
A high hope for a low heaven.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
Time eases all things.
-- Sophocles (406 BC)
%
Trying to explain MUDDLE to an uninitiate is somewhat like
trying to untie a Gordian knot.
-- Greg Pfister
%
Did you exchange a walk-on part in the world for a lead role in a cage?
-- David Gilmour
%
I got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches. It's either very new cheese or
 very old meat.
-- Neil Simon (The Odd Couple)
%
Yet [white] men [of South Africa] were afraid,
with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart,
a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, ...
They were afraid because they were so few.
And fear could not be cast out, but by love.
-- Alan Paton, "Cry, The Beloved Country", 1948
%
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self,
for what we wish, that we readily believe.
-- Demosthenes
%
My mother buried three husbands, and two of them were just napping.
-- Rita Rudner
%
Him thus intent Ithuriel with his spear
Touch'd lightly; for no falsehood can endure
Touch of celestial temper.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 810
%
When you are down, there is only one way to go ... up.
-- Gordon Wong
%
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
-- Mile's Law
%
Let us not confuse stability with stagnation.
-- Mary Jean LeTendre
%
The phone will not ring until you leave your desk and walk to the
other end of the building.
-- Linda A. Lawyer
%
God never sends th' mouth but he sendeth meat.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. iv
%
Tri-weekly, try weekly, and try weakly - but do try.
-- The three stages of sexual activity
%
I had absolutely no knowledge of any corruption in the Queensland
Police Force.
-- Ex Qld Police Commissioner, Sir Terrence Lewis, 3/7/89
%
 Hi, this is Jim.  Welcome to my Fun Phone Line, where you can
 talk to my answering machine for only $0.95 per minute!  Please
 leave your credit card number at the tone...
-- Answering machine madness - you're in big trouble
%
Variety 's the very spice of life.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Line 606
%
All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which
train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers.  No nation
has ever sued its way to greatness.
-- Richard Lamm
%
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four.  Unless
 there are three other people.
-- Orson Welles
%
watershed: small, rustic shed used to store water.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
    Canadians
Twelve. Four to form a Parliamentary study committee to
decide how to solve the problem, one Francophone to complain
that I didn't translate this joke into French, one Native
Canadian to protest that the interests of Native Canadians
have been overlooked, one woman from the National Action
Committee On the Status Of Women to say that women have been
underrepresented in the process, one to go over the border to
the Niagara Falls Factory Outlet Mall and buy a new bulb and
not pay duty on it on the way back, one to actually screw it
in, one to collect taxes on the whole procedure so the
government can afford it, one to buy a case of Molson for
everybody to drink, and one to drop the puck.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
What happened to the kaboom?
 There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
-- The Martian
%
At least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand.
-- J. B. White
%
BODY:        I'm not dead!
CART DRIVER: 'Ere.  He says he's not dead.
LARGE MAN:   Yes he is.
BODY:        I'm not!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
I am a firm believer in socialism and I know that the quicker you
have monopoly in this country the quicker you will have socialism.
-- Charles P. Steinmetz
%
If you don't care where you are, you ain't lost.
-- Rune's Rule.
%
All American cars are basically Chevrolets.
-- Herb Caen
%
Fame-induced Apathy:
 The attitude that no activity is worth pursuing unless one can
become very famous pursuing it. Fame-induced Apathy mimics laziness,
but its roots are much deeper.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
There is something very suspicious about a man who keeps
his booze under lock and key....
-- Vila
%
Find a need and fool it!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
A library serves no purpose unless someone is using it.
-- Mr. Atoz of Sarpeidon, "All Our Yesterdays," stardate 5943.7.
%
I like life. It's something to do.
-- Ronnie Shakes
%
Money is not the measure of a man, but it will do quite nicely if
you don't have any other yardstick handy.
-- Charles Merrill Smith
%
They caution pregnant women not to drink alcohol. It may harm the baby. I
 think that's ironic. If it wasn't for alcohol most women wouldn't be that
 way.
-- Rita Rudner
%
There was an item in the paper today. A lion got loose in the Central Park
 Zoo. And was severely mauled.
-- Bob Newhart
%
if your mailbox is in the shape of any farm animal.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage
Which God and Nature do with actors fill.
-- Thomas Heywood (c. 1574-1641)
-- Apology for Actors (1612)
%
Examine your environment.
-- Miyamoto Musashi
%
The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired
warranty.  Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by
changing the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped
marker.
-- Dave Barry, The Taming of the Screw
%
Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
Committee: a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.
-- Milton Berle
%
 :<| attends an Ivy League school
-- SMILEY
%
It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for
the faith that is within him.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 53
%
I believe in reincarnation. I've had other lives. I know. I have clues.
 First of all, I'm exhausted.
-- Carol Siskind
%
She did not seduce, she ravished.
-- George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways
%
Never have yourself tattooed with any woman's name, not even her initials.
-- P. G. Wodehouse
%
Never been better.  Just once I'd like to be better.
-- Norm Peterson
%
...you hear your alarm, but can't seem to get fully awake until you
successfully page your left arm back in from swap space.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
He who conceals a useful truth is equally guilty with the propagator
of an injurious falsehood.
-- Augustine
%
An empty bag cannot win in New York.
-- Poor Jimmy's Almanac
%
The crux... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe
 seems to be missing.
-- William J. Broad
%
Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%
That good diffused may more abundant grow.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Conversation, Line 443
%
There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual
labour.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smil'd!
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 249
%
It is good to see you again.
You are still too fat, K'mpec.
-- K'mpec and Kahlest, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2
%
Actually, we were going shopping.
-- Dr. Crusher
%
Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%
"     "
"     "
"     "
"Ack, phfftt"
-- Charlie Chaplin
-- Harpo Marx
-- Marcel Marceau
-- Bill the Cat
%
It ain't no sin if you crack a few laws now and then.  As long as you don't
 break any.
-- Mae West
%
In the one hand he is carrying a stone, while he shows the bread in the other.
-- Plautus (254-184 BC)
-- Aulularia, Act ii, Sc. 2, 18, (195.)
%
Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop
 some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees.
-- Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989
%
:write-only code: [a play on `read-only memory'] n. Code so
   arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or
   even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even
   by him/her.  A {Bad Thing}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare
Aristotle with Plato.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) p. 238
%
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
%
Friday afternoon, I'm walking home from school and I'm watching some men
 building a new house. And the guy hammering on the roof calls me a paranoid
 little weirdo. In Morse code.
-- Emo Philips
%
Riker: "The rules on this ship do not change just because Ro Laran decides they
  do."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
The more data I punch in this card, the lighter it becomes, and the
lower the mailing cost.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Devil's DP Dictionary
%
With tooth and nail.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Day
%
America!!  I saw it all!!  Vomiting!  Waving!  JERRY FALWELLING into
 your void tube of UHF oblivion!!  SAFEWAY of the mind --
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better
to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, i
%
LaForge: "Just plain old Barclay, huh?"
Barclay: "It always seems to come back to that, doesn't it?"
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44721.9
%
I must say that I have a very good reason for bein' loaded tonight. I been
 drinkin' all day!
-- Foster Brooks
%
 (:0
-- SMILEY
%
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act. v, Sc. 1
%
With the first link, a chain is forged. The first speech censured, the
first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all
irrevocably.
-- Picard, ST:TNG, quoting a fictional judge, The Drumhead
%
Just as the prisoner was being strapped into the electric chair, the priest
 said, "Son, is there anything I can do for you?" The prisoner said, "Yeah,
 when they pull the switch, hold my hand."
-- Dick Gregory
%
Don't fight it - It's bigger than both of us.  In your case
that verges on the incredible.
-- Cerebus
%
It is better to have lobbed and lost than never to have lobbed at all.
-- Volley Theory
%
First Play. We have reformed that indifferently with us, sir.
Ham. O, reform it altogether.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the
later only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit:  and its methods
differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and
thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
%
SORCERY, n.  The ancient prototype and forerunner of political
influence.  It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was
punished by torture and death.  Augustine Nicholas relates that a poor
peasant who had been accused of sorcery was put to the torture to
compel a confession.  After enduring a few gentle agonies the
suffering simpleton admitted his guilt, but naively asked his
tormentors if it were not possible to be a sorcerer without knowing
it.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
"Avoid revolution or expect to get shot.  Mother and I will grieve, but
we will gladly buy a dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you."
-- Dr. Paul Williamson, father of a Kent State student
%
It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the
best you very often get it.
-- William Maugham
%
The dynamic principle of fantasy is play.
-- C.G.Jung
%
Life itself is the proper binge.
-- Julia Child
%
"But now I am what I am today!  A responsible
 citizen, and besides that... I packs a rod!"
-- BULLET CROW discusses gun control
%
We are in such a slump that even the ones that aren't drinkin' aren't
hittin'.
-- Casey Stengel
%
Technologie don't transfer.
-- Conrad's Conundrum
%
By thunders of white silence.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861)
-- Hiram Powers's Greek Slave
%
:crayola: /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that
   provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance
   for an unreasonably low price.  Might also be a {killer micro}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Beware! Your brain may no longer be the boss.
-- Firesign Theatre, Everything you know is Wrong
%
Life is a disease; and the only difference between one another is the
stage of the disease at which he lives.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%

-- I hated Rush Limbaugh until I got my lobotomy.
%
Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to Royalty you should lay it
on with a trowel.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
No house should ever be on any hill or anything. It should be of the hill,
 so hill and house can live together each the happier for the other.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
%
Experiments should be reproducible. They should all fail in the same way.
-- Finagle's Fifth Rule
%
Even the worthy Homer sometimes nods.
-- Horace (65-8 BC)
-- Ars Poetica, 359
%
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
-- Pat Hein
%

-- Leave me a torch I like to see what I'm scared of....
-- Vila
%
All art is quite useless.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
-- Hill's Fourth Commentary on Murphy's Law
%
The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
blow, is to learn something.     That's the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only
love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.  There is only
wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust,
never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never
dream of regretting.  Learning is the only thing for you.  Look what a
lot of things there are to learn.
-- one thing for it then to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what
-- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
%
Has the world always been like this, or have I been too wrapped up in myself
to notice?
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Have you ever built
... an Altair?
... a Heath/Zenith computer?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.
-- Elizabeth Bowen
%
    Mensans
None. The bulb isn't bright enough.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
The opinions expressed are mine, wholly mine, and nothing but mine.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Give it an understanding, but no tongue.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
When Israel was from bondage led,
  Led by the Almighty's hand
  From out of foreign land,
The great sea beheld and fled.
-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
-- Davideis, Book i, Line 41
%

-- I've seen the light the smog is clearing.
%
SANTA CLAUS comes down a FIRE ESCAPE wearing bright
 blue LEG WARMERS..  He scrubs the POPE with a mild
 soap or detergent for 15 minutes, starring JANE FONDA!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
If you can't remember, then the claymore is pointed at you.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #10
%
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements
document for a new application.  The manager asked the master: "How long
will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner!  How long will it take
if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The master programmer frowned.
"In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The master programmer shrugged.
"Then the design will never be completed," he said.
-- The Tao of Programming
%
No Resources...
Use the Force. - Obi-Wan Kenobi
-- ...understanding How To Combine Budget Cuts, Extra Projects, And
%
Thou art notified that thy kind hath infiltrated the galaxy too far
  already. Thou art directed to return to thine own solar system
  immediately.
-- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7
%
Never have a friend that's poorer than yourself.
-- Douglas Jerrold
%
"Now, for the LAST TIME, old man, WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?"
  "And as I told you *already*, sir, I'm SELF-EMPLOYED and PROUD OF IT!"
-- A beauracratic villain and Uncle Max from ZOT!
%
Teacher:  "Bart, give us an example of a modern-day paradox."
Bart:  "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
-- Bart the Genius   "The Simpsons"
%
Only Amiga used to make it possible
-- found in an EMail by Christian Stieber
%
Thank goodness modern convenience is a thing of the remote future.
-- Pogo, by Walt Kelly
%
I was lying in the street moaning and groaning from an attack of asthma
 when the driver of a library truck stuck his head out of the window and
 said, "Shh! Shh!"
-- Stanley Myron Handelman
%
I'm encased in the lining of a pure pork sausage!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.  If you
flatter all the company you please none; if you flatter only one or two,
you affront all the rest.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
%
A thing devised by the enemy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
They communicated by tap-dancing and farting.
-- _Breakfast_of_Champions_
%
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted
armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
%
Between those who use their neighbors, and those who use a cane.
Between those in constant power, and those in constant pain.
Between those who run to evil, and those who cannot run.
Tell me which ones are the cripples, and which ones touch the sun.
-- Ceili's Muse "What you do with what you've got"
%
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up
for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
Inside every complex and unworkable program is a useful routine
struggling to be free.
-- Rhode's Corollary to Hoare's Law
%
When he is best, he is a little worse than a man; and when he is worst,
he is little better than a beast.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
It was a' for our rightfu' King
  We left fair Scotland's strand.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- A' for our Rightfu' King
%
He that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xv, 15
%
This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets
 are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood, and when the
 drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
-- Rorschach's Journal, The Watchmen
%
Great let me call him, for he conquered me.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- The Revenge, Act i, Sc. 1
%
I don't pretend to understand the universe--it's much
bigger than I am.
-- Einstein
%
Physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up,
they keep their curiosity.
-- I. I. Rabi
%
Rimmer: How about: breaking your leg hurts like hell, right?  'Hel'.  They
Cat:    I wouldn't like to be around when one of these suckers is making a
        speech!
-- do it beLOW the knee lo 'Hello'; get it?  They do it twice --
-- two 'Hello to', and the jigsaw must mean 'you': 'Hello to you'!
-- Red Dwarf - 'Thanks for the Memory'
%
Sometimes I get the feeling that the two biggest problems
-- in America today are making ends meet and making mettings end.
-- Robert Orben
%
The drinking age should be 18. When you're 18 years old you're old enough
 to vote. You should be old enough to drink. Look at who we have to vote
 for! You need a drink.
-- Marc Price
%
Social groups are generally in disarray. To protect themselves from other
groups, especially the groups just below them, groups will attempt to
convey an appearance of interior order and purpose they do not possess.
-- Arthur Herzog
%
I've known fellers like that.
-- Fire Chief
%
:has the X nature: [seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the
   form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker
   construction for `is an X', used for humorous emphasis.  "Anyone
   who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it
   truly has the {loser} nature!"  See also {the X that can be Y
   is not the true X}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
%
I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.
-- Adolph Hitler
%
Every one can master a grief but he that has it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
 Hi, you've reached 340-2359.  We're not peeb eht retfa egassem
 ruoy evael esaelp os ,won thgir emoh.  gnillac rof uoy knahT.
-- Answering machine madness - befuddle the caller
%
K'Ehleyr, I will not be complete without you.
-- Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
With a little inner pirouette of excitement I realised just how much there
was to look forward to tomorrow. The thought of being all day naked in the
sun was delicious enough in itself, but there was the whole of our new
world to explore.
-- Lucy Irvine, Castaway
%
Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case,
the thought is quite staggering.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
%
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes
 you.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
%
Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read.
I have been eighty years at it, and have not reached my goal.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
-- Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), Trees and Other Poems (1814) "Trees"
%
    soccer players
15 - One to put the bulb in, 10 to kiss him afterwards,
and the other side's back four to all stand around and
put their hands up.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with.
-- Adam Richardson
%
"Plus and minus?? What kind of a stupid name is that? You guys are a
 constant source of embarrassment."
-- Dash X, "The Loyal Order of Corn", Eerie Indiana
%
Never underestimate the power of a platitude.
-- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
Others made a virtue of necessity.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. xxii
%
Tonight, when we were eating dinner, Marta said something that really knocked
 me for a loop.  She said, "I love carrots."  "Good," I said as I gritted my
 teeth real hard. "Then maybe you and carrots would like to go into the bedroom
 and have sex!"  They didn't, but maybe they will sometime, and I can watch.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
A Tale of Two Zities
-- Dickens's cookbook
%
The length of debate varies inversely with the complexity of the issue.
-- Robert Knowles
%
Hayden: "Jean-Luc, I don't have to tell you the Federation is not
prepared for a
  new sustained conflict.  You *must* preserve the peace, no matter what the
  cost."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44429.6
%
 { a psycho
-- SMILEY
%
The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
Where'er she lie,
Locked up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of destiny.
-- Richard Crashaw (c. 1616-1650)
-- Wishes to his Supposed Mistress
%
I play in the low 80s. If it's any hotter than that, I won't play.
-- Joe E. Lewis
%
if you have a bumper sticker on your bowling ball.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,
With his back to the field and his feet to the foe,
And leaving in battle no blot on his name,
Look proudly to heaven from the death-bed of fame.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Lochiel's Warning
%
    software engineers
Four. One to design the change, one to implement it, one to
document it, and one to maintain it afterwards.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
%
I never lie when I have sand in my boots
-- LaForge
%
Leave no stone unturned.
-- Euripides (431 BC)
%
She was good as she was fair,
None--none on earth above her!
As pure in thought as angels are:
To know her was to love her.
-- Samuel Rogers (1763-1855)
-- Jacqueline, Stanza 1
%
There is properly no history; only biography.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "History"
%
Did you ever feel like the whole world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of
 brown shoes?
-- George Gobel
%
. . is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt
to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
%
It was an amiable weakness.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- School for Scandal, Act v, Sc. 1
%
The saddest thing of word or pen,
 To know the things that might have been.
-- John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807-1892, U.S. poet
%
When voting on appropriations bills, more is not necessarily better.  It
is as wasteful to have a B-1 bomber in every garage as it is to have a
welfare program for every conceivable form of deprivation.
-- Pierre S. du Pont
%
Schwiggle, n.:
        The amusing rotation of one's bottom while sharpening a
pencil.
-- Rich Hall, Sniglets
%
The sun never sets on the British Empire.  But it rises every morning.  The sky
 must get awfully crowded.
-- Steven Wright
%
The Devil was sick,--the Devil a monk would be;
The Devil was well,--the devil a monk was he.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book iv, Chap. xxiv
%
Delegates? The last time I saw something like that, it was being served
  on a plate.
-- Lwaxana Troi about the Antedians, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2
%
As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time
more complete, or putatively less buggy.  The replacement of a working
component by a new version requires the same systematic testing
procedure that adding a new component does, although it should require
less time, for more complete and efficient test cases will usually be
available.
-- appear, bearing hot new versions of their pieces faster, smaller,
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
%
After they make styrofoam, what do they ship it in?
-- Steven Wright
%
:lose: [MIT] vi. 1. To fail.  A program loses when it encounters
   an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
   2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky.  3. Of people, to
   be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to ignorant).  See
   also {deserves to lose}.  4. n. Refers to something that is
   {losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What
   a lose!"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I have a dream that my four little children
 will one day live in a nation
 where they will not be judged
 by the color of their skin,
 but byt the content of their character.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%
For 't is the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel plows air.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Who battled for the True, the Just.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- In Memoriam, lvi, Stanza 5
%
A novice went into the master's cubicle and saw a new computer sitting upon
the master's desk.
"What is that computer?" asked the novice.
The master placed his hand upon a small box that was connected to the computer
by a wire.  "Behold," said the master, "This device controls what we see on the
screen.  The screen simulates a desk.  For example, here is a filing cabinet
and a trash depository.  Here also is a typewriter and a calculator."
"This is a wonderful invention," whispered the novice in awe.
"It is not as wonderful as it seems," said the master. "Can you see the two
desks?"
The novice nodded.  "One is on the floor, the other is on the screen," he
remarked.
"Just so.  Now, is there something missing on one of the two desks?"
The novice pondered for a moment.  "One of the desks does not have a computer
on it," he said.
The master shook his head.  "Neither of the desks has a computer on it."
-- The Zen of Programming
%
Buy land.   They've stopped making it.
-- Mark Twain
%
    Asians
Three. One to change it and two to go to the cash & carry.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst
of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
-- Joseph Conrad
%
The problem of narcotics is dreadfully serious. You'd be surprised at the
 people you see in your everyday life who use drugs. I knew a fellow who had
 a habit. Very bad habit. In fact, his habit got so bad I stopped selling to
 him.
-- Flip Wilson
%
You killed someone he loved. . . . Dayne (to Shrinker)
And there aren't many of them about. Avon's not a very
loveable man....
-- Vila
%
Cost consciousness and sophisticated design are basically incompatible.
-- Richard F. Moore
%
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery
than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick
%
No matter what we are talking about, we are talking about ourselves.
-- Prather
%
Alexander said, "I assure you I had rather excel others in the knowledge
of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Alexander
%
If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
%
proof by cumbersome notation:
   Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special
   symbols.

proof by exhaustion:
   An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.

proof by omission:
   'The reader may easily supply the details'
   'The other 253 cases are analogous'
   '...'
-- How to Prove It, Part 2
%
A lover's like a hunter- if the game be got with too much ease he
cares not for't.
-- Mead
%
They must have the defects of their qualities.
-- Balzac
%
Hand me a pair of leather pants and a CASIO keyboard
-- I'm living for today!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Ever judge of men by their professions. For though the bright moment
of promising is but a moment, and cannot be prolonged, yet if sincere
in its moment's extravagant goodness, why, trust it, and know the
man by it, I say,--not by his performance; which is half the world's
work, interfere as the world needs must with its accidents and circumstances:
the profession was purely the man's own. I judge people by what they
might be,--not are, nor will be.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- A Soul's Tragedy, Act ii
%
Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.
-- Thoreau
%
Talent in staff work or sales will recurringly be interpreted as
managerial ability.
-- Charles P. Boyle
%
Chekov: "Khan!" Khan: [To Terrell]  "I don't know you."  [To Chekov]
 "But you, I never forget a  face, Mister Chekov, isn't it?  I never
thought to see your face again."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
McCoy: "What kind of creature is this?  Last night, you two were--"
Kirk: "Don't remind me."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
I can give you a definite perhaps.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
%
A brute kills for pleasure.  A fool kills from hate.
-- Lazarus Long
%
If you can't be trusted with a gun, you need a keeper.
-- Dafydd ab Hugh, quoted by J. Neil Schulman, Self-Control, Not Gun Control
%
Tarmin: "I have rarely encountered such squeamish people!"
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
  Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to mis'ry (all he had) a tear,
  He gained from Heav'n ('t was all he wish'd) a friend.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- The Epitaph
%
Absolutely. I certainly hope I am.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle on whether he is still on the
-- Republican ticket. (Newsweek, August 10, 1992.)
%
And, like another Helen, fir'd another Troy.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Alexander's Feast, Line 154
%
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
A pretty foot is one of the greatest gifts of nature... please send me your
last pair of shoes, already worn out in dancing... so I can have something of
yours to press against my heart.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut
up about it.
-- Tom Lehrer
%
Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 1073
%
Some people think a horseshoe's gonna bring 'em luck.
 A horseshoe is a lucky sign of course.
 For every set of horseshoes human beings use for luck.
 Somewhere in this world's a barefoot horse.
-- Allan Sherman
%
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not
understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
I love football ... Football's a fair sport for my people. Only sport in
 the world a Negro can chase a white man and 40,000 people stand up and
 cheer him.
-- Dick Gregory
%
:email: /ee'mayl/ (also written `e-mail') 1. n. Electronic mail
   automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems
   over common-carrier lines.  Contrast {snail-mail},
   {paper-net}, {voice-net}.  See {network address}.
   2. vt. To send electronic mail.

   Oddly enough, the word `emailed' is actually listed in the OED; it
   means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or arranged in a net work".
   A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived from French
   `emmailleure', network.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Let's send the Russians defective lifestyle accessories!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
RADICAL: A person whose left hand does know what his other left hand is doing.
-- Bernard Rosenberg
%
This is the short and the long of it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merry Wives of Windsor
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Some men become proud and insolent because they ride a fine horse,
wear a feather in their hat or are dressed in a fine suit of clothes.
Who does not see the folly of this? If there be any glory in such
things, the glory belongs to the horse, the bird and the tailor.
-- St. Frances de Sales
%
I'm not going to be anybody's puppet, particularly not my own.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
Beware of the man who will not engage in idle conversation; he is planning
 to steal your walking stick or water your stock.
-- William Emerson
%
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without
 individual responsibility.
-- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of
reason to speak up against pathological science and its
purveyors.
-- John A. Wheeler
%
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men
have mediocrity thrust upon them.
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
%
Never say "The White House wants"- buildings don't "want."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
%
 &:-) curly hair
-- SMILEY
%
    Pisceans
What light bulb?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
:mouse droppings: [MS-DOS] n. Pixels (usually single) that are not
   properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a
   particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that
   the mouse pointer has left droppings behind.  The major causes for
   this problem are programs that write to the screen memory
   corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without
   hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite
   support the graphics mode in use.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I come not
To hear such flattery now, and in my presence.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
Evaporation Allowance: The volume of alcohol that the graduate students
   can drink in a year's time.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
I think it's pretty sad that someone can take $300 million and try to
buy the presidency of the United States.
     she said this (May 29), had spent less than $2
     million, versus Bush and Clinton's $15m+ apiece
-- Marilyn Quayle, on Ross Perot, who, as of the time
%
If everything seems to be going well, you have
obviously overlooked something.
-- Murphy's Eighth Law
%
Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I. When I was at home I was in
a better place; but travellers must be content.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
  Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
  They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 19
%
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
:syntactic sugar: [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a
   language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans,
   features which do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism
   (compare {chrome}).  Used esp. when there is an obvious and
   trivial translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs
   already present in the notation.  C's `a[i]' notation is
   syntactic sugar for `*(a + i)'.  "Syntactic sugar causes

   The variants `syntactic saccharin' and `syntactic syrup' are
   also recorded.  These denote something even more gratuitous, in
   that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more
   acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or syrup serve no
   purpose at all.  Compare {candygrammar}, {syntactic salt}.
-- cancer of the semicolon." -Alan Perlis.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Men are conservative after dinner.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
You watch a talk show recently?  They're doing one next month on a normal,
happy heterosexual couple, assuming they can find one.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly
 deceived.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the
 wrong direction.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%
...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or
writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious
floor.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
%
I vent, therefore I am.
-- Dennis Miller
%
We all say so, so it must be true.
-- the Bandar-log (monkey tribe), in Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book_
%
diaper seat: article of climbing used by novices who are still learning
self-control.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
It seems, Admiral, that I've got all his marbles.
-- McCoy
%
A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.
-- Hoover
%
The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old
fools.
-- Doug Larson
%
I was right where the bullets were the thickest! Underneath the ammunition
 truck.
-- Lou Costello
%
All tends irreversibly towards Chaos.
-- Second Law of Thermodynamics
%
Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some
 pretty good questions.
-- Woody Allen
%
 ;>)
-- SMILEY
%
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
-- Murphy's Law Corollary  9
%
"Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think
of it again."
-- Johann von Goethe
%
Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco. ...Luckily,
there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
I think college administrators should encourage students to urinate on walls
 and bushes, because then when students from another college come sniffing
 around, they'll know this is someone else's territory.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
Some play for gain; to pass time others play For nothing; both play
the fool I say: Nor time nor coin I'll lose, or idly spend; Who gets
by play, proves loser in the end.
-- Heath
%
 "Highrise Ups and Downs" by L. E. Vader
-- Booktip of the month
%
Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle?
-- Alan Shepherd [the first man into space, Gemini program]
%
Puff up!  Puff up!  They hate that!
-- Batty
%
There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by
which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be,
not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup!  Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
What is true is what I can't help believing.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
%
Life always sucks.   It's just that sometimes that feels very good.
-- Kevin Ryan
%
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never
  kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.
-- Red Cloud
%
We want to see three things in the 1988 Republican Party Platform...   First,
 a constitutional amendment banning all abortions in the United States.
 Second, increased funding for law enforcement and a mandatory death penalty
 for drug dealers.  Third, LESS GOVERNMENT.
-- Speaker at a 1988 Republican Straw Poll in Iowa
%
And as an ev'ning dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order rang'd
Of tame villatic fowl.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Samson Agonistes, Line 1692
%
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another
man's oration,--nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better
in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of Hearing, 6
%
Cheese and salt meat should be sparingly eat.
-- Benjamin Franklin
%
ARTHUR:  Shut up!  Will you shut up!
DENNIS:  Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR:  Shut up!
DENNIS:  Oh!  Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
         HELP! HELP!  I'm being repressed!
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
If your opponent calls you a liar, call him a thief.
-- "Big Bill" Thompson
%
They get together all day long and say to each other, "What can we
 postpone next?" The only thing they don't postpone, of course, is their
 bill, which arrives regularly. You've heard about the man who got the bill
 from his lawyer which said, "For crossing the street to speak to you and
 discovering it was not you ... twelve dollars."
-- George S. Kaufman
%
It's Not A Message.  I Think It's A Warning
-- Ripley, Alien.
%
A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, will tell you.
-- Bert Leston Taylor, "The So-Called Human Race", (1922-)
%
Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars,
White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iii, Line 474
%
        You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the
Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the
parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.
-- Sherlock Holmes
%
Mardon DeMichele
-- ICS Publicity
%
One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair hair remover,
 just to see what it looked like.   And it looked beautiful.
-- David Lynch
%
familiarity * lots = warm-fuzzies;
warm-fuzzies + magic = fall in love.
-- Stewart Tansley  (Nov 17, 1992)
%
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a
pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
-- Seng-Ts'an
%
When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
It's not what you say, but how you say it that makes all the difference in
human relationships.
-- Hughes Mearns
%
There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to
enforce a law not supported by the people.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
%
What 's not devoured by Time's devouring hand?
Where 's Troy, and where 's the Maypole in the Strand?
-- James Bramston (-1744)
-- Art of Politics
%
Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George
the Third ["Treason!" cried the Speaker]--may profit by their example.
If this be treason, make the most of it.
-- Patrick Henry (1736-1799)
-- Speech in the Virginia Convention, 1765
%
"And Dinsdale's there in the conversation pit with Doug, and Charles
Paisley, the baby crusher, and a couple of film producers, and a man
they called `Kierkegaard,' who just sat there biting the heads off
whippets."
-- Monty Python
%
We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some
criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble
part.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
%
Oh, that sound of male ego.  You travel halfway across the galaxy
  and it's still the same song.
-- Eve McHuron, "Mudd's Women," stardate 1330.1.
%
The truly generous is the truly wise; And he loves not others, lives unblest.
-- Horace
%
If you encounter these negroes shoot first, ask questions later.
-- LAPD squad-car computer message, as quoted in the Christopher Report, 7/91
%
Kor: "You, Barona.  You're the man."
Kirk: "Me?  I don't want the job."
Kor: "Have I *asked* whether or not you want it?"
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3201.7
%
The grey mare is the better horse.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. iv
%
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are
worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them
against all attacks.
-- Samuel Adams
%
I'm the head waiter.  This is a vegetarian restaurant only.
We serve no animal flesh of any kind.  We're not only proud
of that, we're ... smug about it.
-- Monty Python
%
Hey, Dragon  got a light?
-- Famous Last Words
%
Philosophy is the discipline where you kick up a lot of dust and then
complain you can't see.
-- Leibniz
%
Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is
between strangers.
-- Lazarus Long
%
    Tauruses
One. But only if they can celebrate afterwards with a
ten course meal and some great sex.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
ADMIRAL, n.  That part of a war-ship which does the talking while the
figure-head does the thinking.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%

-- Insanity a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
-- R. D. Lang
%
Never eat crackers in bed.
-- Anonymous
%
No one move a muscle as the dead come home.
-- Shriekback "Nemesis"
%
For simplicity, the word 'complex' is sometimes used ... to refer to any
 of these IBM IBM Products.
-- IBM publication SA22-7098-0  p. 1
%
It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.
-- Willie Sutton
%
Love is deaf as well as blind... and walks with a limp.
-- SLR
%
There is only one thing worse than a president without a backbone...
a president without a backbone with a wife that pulls his strings.
Yeah! I sure am glad that Ronnie's outta there!
-- Article from alt.president.clinton
%
Without feeling there's no reason to live.
-- Andre Kertesz, photographer, 1894-1985
%
Men take only their needs into consideration--never their abilities.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
%
Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.
-- Thomas Fuller
%
What is a stealth bomber? It's a bomber that doesn't show up on radar and
 you can't see it. Then we don't need one.
-- Robin Williams
%
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.
-- H. R. Haldeman
%
Hemingway's remarks are not literature.
-- Gertrude Stein
%
Nine megs for the secretaries fair,
Seven megs for the hackers scarce,
Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs,
Three megs for system source;

One disk to rule them all,
One disk to bind them,
One disk to hold the files
And in the darkness grind 'em.
-- Lord of the Disks
-- signature file of Andrew Cole, csed3cp@hatfield.ac.uk
%
:funky: adj. Said of something that functions, but in a slightly
   strange, klugey way.  It does the job and would be difficult to
   change, so its obvious non-optimality is left alone.  Often used to
   describe interfaces.  The more bugs something has that nobody has
   bothered to fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it is.
   {TECO} and UUCP are funky.  The Intel i860's exception handling is
   extraordinarily funky.  Most standards acquire funkiness as they
   age.  "The new mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky;
   if it bounces your mail for no reason, try resubmitting it."
   "This UART is pretty funky.  The data ready line is active-high in
   interrupt mode and active-low in DMA mode."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 %-) drunk with laughter
-- SMILEY
%
Half-done:
crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor.  The difference
between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like
the difference between life and death.
 You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill
there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the
airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough
Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on
Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk
about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop.  Say to the
man, Let me have a nice half-done.
       Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
-- This is the best way to eat a kosher dill when it's still
-- Arthur Naiman, Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish
%
Yes, we're all different!
I'm not.
Shh!
-- Monty Python
%
What's so troublesome about not having died?
-- Admiral Leonard McCoy
%
This deal keeps getting worse all the time.
-- Landau Calrissian
%
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or
cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.  We need
men who can dream of things that never were.
-- John F. Kennedy
%
>consult guide about Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is a mind-bogglingly stupid animal.
It has almost no capacity for learning from experience and is therefore
surprised by virtually everything that happens to it. Here is an example of
how stupid it is: it thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you.
Its behavior would be quite endearing if it wasn't spoilt by this one
thing: it is the most violently carnivorous creature in the Galaxy. Avoid,
avoid, avoid.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Ah, Dr. Crusher, I see Starfleet has shipped you back into exile.
-- Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
fully.
-- We have engaged in a very a very an extraordinarily broad
-- exercise of diplomacy here ... I don't know what what it means
-- President George Bush
%
It works better if you plug it in.
-- Sattinger's Law
%
Dress impressively like the French, speak with authority like the Germans,
 have blond hair like the Scandinavians, and speak of no American presidents
 except, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy.
-- Sylvaine Rouy Neves
%
All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Hot and cold, and moist and dry.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Day
%
I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and
butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. xi
%
For hope is but the dream of those that wake.
-- Matthew Prior (1664-1721)
-- Solomon on the Vanity of the World, Book iii, Line 102
%
  And topples round the dreary west
A looming bastion fringed with fire.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- In Memoriam, xv, Stanza 5
%
    loggers
One, but he uses a chainsaw.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Terrell: "Get on the com-pick to Doctor Marcus.  Listen, maybe it's
something we
  can transplant, hmm?"
Chekov: "You *know* what she'll say."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
You cannot have a science without measurement.
-- R. W. Hamming
%
"There's no garbage in California."
"That's because they turn it into television shows."
-- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"
%
One that would have the fruit must climb the tree.
-- Thomas Fuller
%
I want to get a tattoo of myself on my entire body, only 2" taller.
-- Steven Wright
%
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.
-- Henrik Ibsen, "An Enemy of the People", 1882
%
My god!  But I was only away two minutes!
            was dead in Red Dwarf 'Kryten'
-- Kryten, on being told that the Nova 5 crew
%
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children.
All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can -
and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function.  As racial
survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible.  Attempts
to formulate a "perfect society" on any other foundation other than "Women and
children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal.
Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly-
and no doubt will keep on trying.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
If you can dream it, you can become it.
-- William Arthur Ward
%
If man does his best what else is there?
-- George S. Patton (1885-1945)
%
Data: "We would use a Romulan signal as a carrier for our own, thus disguising
  its origin."
K'Vada: "It will work?"
Data: "I believe it would.  During the last hour, I have conducted a systematic
  review of the entire Romulan subspace grid.  I have compared my findings with
  the specifications of your own transmission array.  They appear to be
  compatible."
K'Vada: "Cha."
Data: "Thank you for your coorporation."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
 Don't use question marks inappropriately?
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
Barclay: "I'm sorry, Captain.  I was only trying to help."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
If it were not for the presents, an elopement would be preferable.
-- George Ade
%
if your house warming involves removing the tires.
-- You may be redneck...
%
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of
nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
-- Charles Darwin
%
When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean
conversation.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
Parents: People who bear infants, bore teenagers, and board newlyweds.
-- "Laughs Unlimited"
%
 <|-)= Chinese
-- SMILEY
%
Picard: "Benjamin Maxwell *earned* the loyalty of those who served with him.
  You know in war, he was twice honored with the Federation's highest citation
  for courage and valor.  And if he could not find a role for himself in peace,
  we can pity him, but we shall not dismiss him."
Macet: "You are welcome to your opinion, Captain.  I, for one, am grateful that
  he is under lock and key."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44431.7
%
        Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness.
        The great human struggles are played out in silence and in
        the ability to express oneself.
-- Franz Xavier Kroetz
%
TOTAL
  The sum or entire amount of a number of things, which if added by
  hand tends not to relate in any way shape or form to the values or
  attributes of those things. Oh bugger, where's the calculator got
  to?
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
:error 33: [XEROX PARC] n. 1. Predicating one research effort upon
   the success of another.  2. Allowing your own research effort to be
   placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a research
   effort or not).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"He seems to think that posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
You routinely find yourself buying (male or female) exactly one less
item of bathing apparel than you have previously.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
"Let thine occupations be few," saith the sage,
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iv, 24
%
There has been some discussion in the court on the subject of your best
  man...and I thought it might be the moment to...bring the subject to
  a...conclusion.
Ah yes, Percy. I would like _you_...
Oh! I'm so proud!
...Please let me finish. I would like _you_ to take this letter to
  Dover...
-- Percy and Edmund : Bells
%
He has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
-- The Whistle, November, 1779
%
Arm th' obdur'd breast
With stubborn patience as with triple steel.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 568
%
A mid-air collision can seriously erode climb performance.
-- Barry Schiff
%
...nothing is so unhealthy or unstable as the reputation for power that
is not based on one's own power.
-- Machiavelli
%
The world is very different now.  For man holds in his
mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty...
-- John F. Kennedy
%
Be England what she will,
With all her faults she is my country still.
-- Charles Churchill (1731-1764)
-- The Farewell, Line 27
%
In the broad and final sense all institutions are educational in the sense that
they operate to form the attitudes, dispositions, abilities and disabilities
that constitute a concrete personality...Whether this educative process is
carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes,
therefore, a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself
but for its final effect upon all the interests and activites of a society that
is committed to the democratic way of life.
-- John Dewey
%
It is with books as with men:  a very small number play a great part,
the rest are lost in the multitude.
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)
%
Communication is equal to the square root of the mistakes times
confusion times contradictions.
-- Borklund's Law
%
    keyboardists
"Oh, just one. But this bulb won't do. You want to use a
3-way bulb, but if you can afford it, I hear that next month
GE will be coming out .... "
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
As if the world and they were hand and glove.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Table Talk, Line 173
%
Kirk: "Captain, where's Doctor Marcus?  Where're the Genesis materials?"
Terrell: "He couldn't find them.  Even the databanks were empty."
Kirk: "Erased?"
Terrell: "He tortured those people.  But none of them would tell him anything.
  He went wild, he slit their throats.  He wanted to tear the place apart.  But
  it was late.  He had to get back to the Reliant in time to blow you to bits."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
:cycle: 1. n. The basic unit of computation.  What every hacker
   wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a
   "cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so
   many `clock cycles'.  Often the computer can access its memory
   once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of `memory
   cycles'.  These are technical meanings of {cycle}.  The jargon
   meaning comes from the observation that there are only so many
   cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the cycles
   get divided up among the users.  The more cycles the computer
   spends working on your program rather than someone else's, the
   faster your program will run.  That's why every hacker wants more
   cycles: so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to
   respond.  2. By extension, a notional unit of *human* thought
   power, emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical
   hacker's think time.  "I refused to get involved with the Rubik's
   Cube back when it was big.  Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if
   I let myself."  3. vt. Syn. {bounce} (sense 4), {120 reset};
   from the phrase `cycle power'. "Cycle the machine again, that
   serial port's still hung."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Waiting is.
-- R.A. Heinlein, 'Stranger in a Strange Land'
%
:Ob-: /ob/ pref. Obligatory.  A piece of {netiquette}
   acknowledging that the author has been straying from the
   newsgroup's charter topic.  For example, if a posting in alt.sex is
   a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing
   particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or
   `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual
   erotic act.  It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when
   one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It is Maya! Dost thou not know her?
But, to the wise, Maya is more.
-- Illusion dreams phantoms.
-- Holst, Savitri
%
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
-- Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)
-- Despatch, 1815
%
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
-- Sir Isaac Newton
%
Paranoids tend to persecute free men.
-- Solomon Short
%
The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
-- J. Paul Getty
%
if you know how to milk a goat.
-- You may be redneck...
%
    graduate students
Two and a professor to take credit.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Ran on embattled armies clad in iron,
And, weaponless himself,
Made arms ridiculous.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Samson Agonistes, Line 129
%
McCoy: "For twenty-seven years, I've been the ship's surgeon aboard the U.S.S.
  Enterprise.  In three months I stand down."
Chang: "Ahh.  You know, I believe that you consumed rather a generous amount of
  ...Romulan ale in the Officer's Mess on the night in question.  Am I right,
  Doctor?"
Worf: "Objection!"
Judge: "Sustained."
McCoy: "We all did!  All of us!  That doesn't mean--"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
:purple wire: [IBM] n. Wire installed by Field Engineers to work
   around problems discovered during testing or debugging.  These are
   called `purple wires' even when (as is frequently the case) their
   actual physical color is yellow....  Compare {blue wire},
   {yellow wire}, and {red wire}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Quemadmoeum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.
[A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killers hands.]
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the younger" ca. 4 BC - 65 AD
%
Je plie et ne romrs pas.
(I bend and do not break.)
-- Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)
%
American culture is based on the automobile, and any young man of promise is
going to own one and want to travel great distances in it.  Consequently, any
young woman of aspiration should expect to spend most of her vacations in a
car, probing into unfamiliar corners.  She is not required to know how to drive
but she will certainly be expected to read the road map while her husband
drives, and if she can't, or if she's abnormally slow in giving him help, she's
bound to cause trouble.  Therefore, you'd think that colleges which train the
bright young women who're going to marry the bright young men who are going to
own the Cadillacs that roar back and forth across this continent would teach
the girls to read maps.  None do. They teach a hundred other useless things,
but never a word about the one that will cause the greatest friction.
-- James Michener, "Space"
%
Credentials are not the same thing as accomplishments.
-- Robert Half
%
The Pledge of Allegiance says 'liberty and justice for all'.
Which part of 'all' don't you understand?
-- Rep. Pat Schroeder (D) Colo.
%
Genteel in personage,
Conduct, and equipage;
Noble by heritage,
Generous and free.
-- Henry Carey (1663-1743)
-- The Contrivances, Act i, Sc. 2
%
Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.
-- Will Rogers, "The Illiterate Digest", 1924
%
The probability that a given program will perform to expectations is
inversely proportional to the programmer's confidence in his ability to
do the job.
-- Pennington's Observation
%
GUEST:        He's killed the best man!
SECOND GUEST: (holding a limp WOMAN) He's killed my auntie.
FATHER:       No, please!  This is supposed to be a happy occasion!  Let's
              not bicker and argue about who killed who ...
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
But on and up, where Nature's heart
  Beats strong amid the hills.
-- Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) (1809-1885)
-- Tragedy of the Lac de Gaube, Stanza 2
%
We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of.
-- George Chapman
%
Gentleman, include me out.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
%
One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected
should have been expected.
-- Augustine's Law Number XLV
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
my bathroom tiles need grouting.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 73 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Studies
%
Who could imagine
That they could freak out in Kansas
Who could imagine
That they could freak out in Washington D.C.
Everybody's clean, it can't happen here, no, no
And they thought it couldn't happen here
They were so sure it couldn't happen here
It can't happen here
-- Frank Zappa
%
Own only what you can always carry with you; know languages, know
 countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
%
Went to a party at the county jail.
-- Elvis
%
saw was so much more real than the reality of paper, office and
commission.  He could not understand what made others blind to it,
and what made their indifference possible.  He looked at the paper
before him.  He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its
say.  He had never known that.  And the reality which permitted it
could never become quite real to him.
-- ... But the pain remained and a helpless wonder.  The thing he
%
:nonlinear: adj. [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic
   and unpredictable fashion; unstable.  When used to describe the
   behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or
   program is being forced to run far outside of design
   specifications.  This behavior may be induced by unreasonable
   inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the
   computation far off from its expected course.  2. When describing
   the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a {flame}.
   "When you talk to Bob, don't mention the drug problem or he'll go
   nonlinear for hours."  In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes
   `blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What, after all, is a halo?  It's only one more thing to keep clean.
-- Christopher Fry
%
There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
-- Edward Abbey
%
We have a sluggish economy ... That's why I favor this deficit so much.
-- President George Bush
%
You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels
in the machine.
-- Flip Wilson
%
 :} What should we call these? (what?)
-- SMILEY
%
If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?
-- Benjamin Franklin
%
You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in
defeat.
-- _The Boys of Summer_
%
Nothing is impossible for the man who will not listen to reason.
-- Blutarsky's Axiom
%

-- Why can't you be a non-conformist like everone else?
%
We saw a knot of others, about a baker's dozen.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. xxii
%
BASILISK, n.  The cockatrice.  A sort of serpent hatched form the egg
of a cock.  The basilisk had a bad eye, and its glance was fatal.
Many infidels deny this creature's existence, but Semprello Aurator
saw and handled one that had been blinded by lightning as a punishment
for having fatally gazed on a lady of rank whom Jupiter loved.  Juno
afterward restored the reptile's sight and hid it in a cave.  Nothing
is so well attested by the ancients as the existence of the basilisk,
but the cocks have stopped laying.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
-- Will Durant
%
A jury is a group of twelve people of average ignorance.
-- Herbert Spencer
%
The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.
-- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985
%
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order
of space and time.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%
...Although there is something lurking at the back of my head that
  bothers me...
It's probably a flea.
-- Ploppy and Edmund : Head
%
You have no friends among the ambitious.
-- Ron Randall
%
I bet when the neanderthal kids would make a snowman, someone would always end
 up saying, "Don't forget the thick, heavy brows."  Then they would all get
 embarrassed because they remembered they had the big hunky brows too, and
 they'd get mad and eat the snowman.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
...you start doing stuff like THIS:  emacs a.out
(an even worse version of this is "cat >a.out" and then start typing in
your code.  It hits rock bottom when a.out runs on the first attempt.)
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and
a hell only to find it ridiculous.
-- George Santayana
%
If your facts are wrong but your logic is perfect, then your
conclusions are inevitably false. Therefore, by making
mistakes in your logic, you have at least a random chance of
coming to a correct conclusion.
-- Christie-Davies' Theorem
%
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.  We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the
Sermon on the Mount.
-- General Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981)
%
You don't drown by falling into water.   You drown by staying there.
-- Robert Allen
%
 :-i semi-smiley
-- SMILEY
%
What light is to the eyes - what air is to the lungs - what love is to the
heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
-- R.G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
%
If we don't know life, how can we know death?
-- Confucius
%
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely
unhappen.
-- Edward de Bono
%
Ro: "Hi."
Riker: "I know I didn't get the wrong room."
Ro: "I just didn't like the way my quarters were decorated.  Besides, I have
  this funny feeling that maybe I spend most of my off hours here."
Riker: "Really."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest
and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
-- Michel de Montaigne
%
'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Hee must have a long spoone, shall eat with the devill.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. v
%
One of the top songs of the year certainly should be dedicated to our
 Savings and Loan institutions
-- "Don't Worry, Be Happy!"
%
Well, honour is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Moviemaking is not about politically correct people - Fuck politically
 correct.
-- Paul Verhoeven
%
Some scholars are like donkeys, they merely carry a lot of books.
-- Folk saying
%
Advertising is the life of trade.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
%
I said, an elder soldier, not a better:
Did I say "better"?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
No, I'm not going to explain it.   If you can't figure it out, you
didn't want to know anyway...  :-)
-- Larry Wall in <1991Aug7.180856.2854@netlabs.com>
%
One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those
have I not found.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes vii, 28
%
 [:-) listening to walkman
-- SMILEY
%
REALLY, adv.  Apparently.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
While there's life, there's hope.
-- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)
%
"In what he called the 'great tradition of warnings
 in presidential farewells,' Reagan reproached the
 movies, television and young parents for failing
 to indoctrinate American youth in 200-proof
 patriotism, the way they did in his day.  'If we
 forget what we did,' said the man who still can't
 remember trading arms for hostages, 'we won't know
 who we are.'  The section ended with this weird
 passage: 'And children, if your parents haven't
 been teaching you what it means to be an American,
 let 'em know and nail 'em on it.  That would be a
 very American thing to do.'"
-- Hendrik Hertzberg
%
About sentence fragments.
-- Writing Rule 10
%
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did
  succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
    And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
    And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled --
    Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world --
    And I wish I'd never met him.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
Who are you to take away others' angels, just because
you think it's in their best interest?
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
%
The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is
 enough until we know what is more than enough.
-- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
%
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
-- of choice and the alternative his nature offers him is:  rational
-- being or suicidal animal.  Man has to be man by choice; he has
-- to hold his life as a value by choice; he has to learn to sustain
-- it by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and
-- practice his virtues by choice.
-- John Galt
%
I've always wondered about that taping equipment, but I'm damn glad we have
 it.   Aren't you?
-- President Richard Nixon, to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, April 25, 1973
%
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
-- Mae West
%
It is true that I was born in Iowa, but I can't speak for my twin
 sister.
-- Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby)
%
Once the trust goes out of a relationship, it's no fun
lying to them anymore.
-- Cheers
%
Picard: "Perrin, do you know why I've come to Vulcan?  I must talk to you about
  Spock."
Perrin: "He didn't even say, 'Good-bye' to his father before he left!"
Picard: "Is it possible he could've been abducted?"
Perrin: "No!  He wrapped up all of his affairs carefully.  He knew he was
  going."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45235.4
%
There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are
also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.
-- Augustine's Law Number XIII
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
The sex is ever to a soldier kind.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xiv, Line 246
%
The final twitch of Political Correctness grand peur has to do with the
 age-old fear of antinomian beastliness, lesbians holding black masses over
 copies of Derrida and so forth.
-- Alexander Cockburn
%
O last regret, regret can die!
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- In Memoriam, lxxviii, Stanza 5
%
 If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this
 country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation.   If
 truth be not diffused, error will be; If God and His Word are not know
 and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendancy; If the
 evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt
 and licentious literature will; If the power of the Gospel is not felt
 throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule,
 degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without
 mitigation or end.
-- Daniel Webster
%
Oh sure, this costume may look silly, but it lets me get in and out of
crime. Look, here's my ID, and here's a number you can call, that will put you
I am... Unless, of course, the Astro-Zombies have destroyed it.
-- dangerous situations I work for a federal task force doing a survey on urban
-- through to our central base in Atlanta. Go ahead, call they'll confirm who
-- Captain Freedom, "Hill Street Blues"
%
Good Lord! Captain Blackadder! I thought you were...
...Playing tennis?
-- Cpt. Darling and Edmund : Private Plane
%
 :-I thinking
-- SMILEY
%
How'm I flyin'?  Dial 1-800-BORG-YOU.
-- Borg
%
Chang: "Under Article Number 184 of your...Interstellar Law, I am placing you
  under arrest, for the charge of assassinating...the Chancellor of the High
  Council."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
There are so many bugs in our embassy in Moscow it is time for us to send
-- over a new ambassador the Orkin man.
%
We have had a number of discussions and, believe me, if I thought I was
hurting the ticket, I'd be gone.
                   if he'd offered to remove himself from the ticket,
                   (CNN, July 22, 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle on Larry King Live when asked
%
As good luck would have it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merry Wives of Windsor
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
George Bush shot JFK.
-- Liberal history revision
%
:hand-roll: [from obs. mainstream slang `hand-rolled' in
   opposition to `ready-made', referring to cigarettes] v. To
   perform a normally automated software installation or configuration
   process {by hand}; implies that the normal process failed due to
   bugs in the configurator or was defeated by something exceptional
   in the local environment.  "The worst thing about being a gateway
   between four different nets is having to hand-roll a new sendmail
   configuration every time any of them upgrades."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"I've been married and divorced three times," the young man lamented.
"I can't hold a job for more than six months at a time, and I'm in
debt up to my ears. Dad, tell me,  where did you and Mom go wrong?"
-- Edward Stevenson, Wall Street Journal, 9/19/83
%
The National Bummer.
-- Government Euphemism for Recession
%
:time T: /ti:m T/ n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood
   time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1.
   "We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at
   time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner:
   "We can meet on campus and go to Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's
   itself a bit later."  (Louie's was a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto
   that was a favorite with hackers.)  Had the number 30 been used instead
   of the number 1, it would have implied that the travel time from
   campus to Louie's is 30 minutes; whatever time T is (and
   that hasn't been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at
   Louie's than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time.
   See also {since time T equals minus infinity}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver, the mind
cannot use its wings- the clearest proof that it is out of its element.
-- Hare
%
O you much partial gods! Why gave ye men affections, and not power
to govern them?
-- Ludovick Barry
%
Data: "I am afraid we cannot allow you to warn your guards."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
:octal forty: /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm
   drawing a blank."  Octal 40 is the {{ASCII}} space character,
   0100000; by an odd coincidence, {hex} 40 (01000000) is the
   {{EBCDIC}} space character.  See {wall}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    Bill Clintons
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
-- None He'll only promise "change."
%
ALERT TO COMPANY DEVELOPMENTS: An office gossip.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
MOUSE
  Computer input device, named by some scientists at Xerox when they
  were pissed out of their brains. They also labelled the computer's
  display screen a Vole, but were less successful in spreading of
  this term.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Kirk: "You are about to remind me that logic alone dictates your actions?"
Spock: "I would not remind you of that which you know so well.  If I may be so
  bold, it was a mistake for you to accept promotion.  Commanding a starship is
  your first, best destiny.  Anything else is a waste of material."
Kirk: "I wouldn't have presumed to debate you."
Spock: "That is wise."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Quayle stumbled in response to a question about his opinion of the
Holocaust. He said it was "an obscene period in our nation's history."
Then, trying to clarify his remark, Quayle said he meant "this century's
history" and added a confusing comment.  "We all lived in this century,
I didn't live in this century," he said.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
-- (reported in Esquire, 8/92, The New Yorker, 10/10/88, p.102)
%
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
-- H. L.Mencken's Law
-- Those who cannot teach administrate.
-- Martin's Extension
%
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes
explicable.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
Airstrikes always overshoot the target, artillery always falls short.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #44
%
   If the check is truly in the mail,
    it is surely made out to someone else.
-- Armstrong's Collection Law
%
apostrophy:  when your apostrophe atrophies.
-- David Bedno, drseuss@gorn.santa-cruz.CA.US
%
It's great to hear your voice, Captain. We're a little busy right now.
  I'll get right back to you.
-- Geordi, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2
%
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-- Isaac Asimov
%
That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Vol. iii, p. 332
%
Picard: "Thank you, Mister Barclay."
Barclay: "You're welcome, Captain.  Barclay out."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44704.2
%
I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time".  So I ordered
 French Toast during the Renaissance.
-- Steven Wright
%
Moral failure. Core dumped.
-- Dave Mark Voorhis
%
Any country with "democratic" in the title isn't.
-- Murray's Rule
%
if you've named one of you kids after a good dog.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I explain to the ogre that it was an honest mistake.
-- Famous Last Words
%
So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop
Into thy mother's lap.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book xi, Line 535
%
:hose: 1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in
   performance.  "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the
   system."  See {hosed}.  2. n. A narrow channel through which
   data flows under pressure.  Generally denotes data paths that
   represent performance bottlenecks.  3. n. Cabling, especially
   thick Ethernet cable.  This is sometimes called `bit hose' or
   `hosery' (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'.  See also
   {washing machine}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
O fair undress, best dress! it checks no vein,
But every flowing limb in pleasure drowns,
And heightens ease with grace.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Castle of Indolence, Canto i, Stanza 26
%
Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.
-- Gypsy Rose Lee
%
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.
-- Ecclesiastes, i, 7
%
The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar
sort of voluntary thinking.
-- William James
%
Guinan: "Did he ever tell you why we're so close?"
Riker: "No."
Guinan: "Oh.  Then let me just say that...our relationship...is beyond
  friendship, beyond family.  And I *will* let him go.  And you must do the
  same."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Kirk: "How does he know that?"
Aelborne: "Oh, our friend Trefayne is really quite intuitive.  You can rest
  assured that what he says is absolutely correct."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3198.4
%
You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step in it.
-- Miller's Law
%
I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.
-- W. C. Fields (1890-1946)
%
QUOTATION, n.  The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
The words erroneously repeated.

    Intent on making his quotation truer,
    He sought the page infallible of Brewer,
    Then made a solemn vow that we would be
    Condemned eternally.  Ah, me, ah, me!
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"             Stumpo Gaker
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
There are occasions when it is undoubtedly better to incur loss than
to make gain.
-- Plautus (254-184 BC)
-- Captivi, Act ii, Sc. 2, 77, (327.)
%
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to
the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing
to people.
-- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King
%
 Starship Enterprise, Uhura here, can you hold please?  --
 Captain, there is a transmission coming in on hailing frequency
 seven, do you want it on screen?
-- Answering machine madness - science fiction
%
A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center.
-- Homer in "Tell-Tale Head", from The Simpsons
%
'T is not the whole of life to live,
  Nor all of death to die.
-- James Montgomery (1771-1854)
-- The Issues of Life and Death
%
:mockingbird: n. Software that intercepts communications
   (especially login transactions) between users and hosts and
   provides system-like responses to the users while saving their
   responses (especially account IDs and passwords).  A special case
   of {Trojan Horse}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The people of Nebraska are for free silver. Therefore, I am for free
silver. I'll look up the reasons later.
-- U.S. Representative William Jennings Bryan
%
Now this is the Law of the Jungle-
 as old and as true as the sky;
 And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
 but the Wolf that shall break must die.
-- Rudyard Kipling, "The law of the jungle"
%
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
If you don't take it out and use it
its going to rust.
-- Highlander
%
That old man eloquent.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- To the Lady Margaret Ley
%
VAULT
  Like a basement, but more sinister.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
    ___           ___               _|||_             /_\
   <#,#>         <o-o>              <*,*>            <*,*>
   [`-']         [`-']              [`-']            [`-']
  T-V owl   owl with glasses   owl with top-hat   owl with fez
-- "-"-         -"-"-              -"-"-            -"-"-
%
Law expands in proportion to the resources available for its enforcement.
-- Dalin B. Oaks
%
    Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead
of me.  That means nothing.  People like us, who believe in
physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and
future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
-- Albert Einstein
%
In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings
of pretension.
-- Horatio Greenough
%
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!
-- Earl of Mansfield
%
From Dan even to Beer-sheba.
-- Old Testament
-- Judges v, xx, 1
%
An untimely grave.
-- Thomas Carew (1589-1639)
-- On the Duke of Buckingham
%
What did the Caspian sea?
-- Saki
%
"Leaving a trail of slime wherev-"
       >CLICK!<
-- "Bloom County"
%
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your
 living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
-- David Frost
%
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member
 of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others ...
 over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
-- John Stuart Mill 'On Liberty' 1859
%
Every room
Hath blazed with lights and bray'd with minstrelsy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Timon of Athens
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
    musicians it takes to screw in a light bulb?
Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to stand around
and say, "Man, if I'd had his studio time, I could have done
that."
-- How many
%
Obviously, if you join the National Guard, you have less of a chance of
going to Vietnam.  I mean it goes without saying.
-- Senator Dan Quayle discussing his draft record on NBC's
-- "Meet the Press," 9/20/92 (reported in the Houston Chronicle 9/21/92)
%
Just because it's hard doesn't
mean it's worth the effort.
-- Goebel's Law of Useless Difficulty
%
O, wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fallen.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Antony and Cleopatra
-- Act iv, Sc. 15
%
Learn to read slow: all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.
-- William Walker (1623-1684)
-- The Art of Reading
%
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things
he can afford to leave alone.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Isn't it strange that the same people that laugh at gypsy fortune
tellers take economists seriously?
-- Cincinnati Enquirer
%
 (:-) wearing bicycle helmet
-- SMILEY
%
Physical fitness is in. I recently had a physical fit myself.
-- Steve Allen
%
    furfen
Three. One to climb up the ladder and change the light bulb.
One to complain that there was too much erotica in the
previous answer and this one, and that people should come up
with more non-erotic answers because of the impact on public
negativity towards furriness. And the third to explain about
their erotic dreams involving furry light bulb jokes.
Note: furfen = fans of furries. "fen" is a long-used plural
for "fan".
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
-- New Testament
-- Mark iv, 9
%
ARTHUR:    It could grip it by the husk!
GUARD #1:  It's not a question of where he grips it!  It's a simple question
           of weight ratios!  A five ounce bird could not carry a 1 pound
           coconut.
-- GUARD #1:  What a swallow carrying a coconut?
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
I'm glad you asked me that. This gives me the perfect
opportunity to talk about the problems with this Congress...
                   questions about his use of Air force 2 to
                   go on golf trips at the cost of $26,000/hour
-- Vice President Dan Quayle responding to reporter's
%

-- FSU Seminoles 1993 Orange Bowl Champions!!!!!!!!
%
They demen gladly to the badder end.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- The Squieres Tale, Line 10538
%
All the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still.
-- Pascal
%
The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment
to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
-- Vincent T. Lombardi
%
He who gives while he lives
 Also knows where it goes.
-- Percy Ross
%
Truth is never pure and rarely simple.   Modern life would be
tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
If a camel flies, no one laughs if it doesn't get very far.
-- Paul White
%
:fortune cookie: [WAITS, via UNIX] n. A random quote, item of
   trivia, joke, or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or
   (less commonly) at logout time.  Items from this lexicon have often
   been used as fortune cookies.  See {cookie file}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"I'll maim, but no killing."
  "It isn't even human! It's just a filthy,
   smelly demon from another dimension."
"Oh, well, that's different!"
-- The Badger and Ham
%
 He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
-- Swipple's Rule of Order
%
An oyster may be crossed in love.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- The Critic, Act iii, Sc. 1
%
No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on
 the alert.
-- Henry Thoreau
%
Escaping through the lily fields, I came across an empty space
 It trembled and exploded, left a bus stop in its place...
-- unknown
%
Hold still while I flame you.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Reflections on the Revolution in France,
-- Letter i, On a Regicide Peace, Vol. v, p. 331
%
Never apologize for showing feeling.  When you do so you apologize for
truth.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
The only people who do not make mistakes are dead people.
I saw a man last week who has not made a mistake in four thousand years.
He was a mummy in the Egyptian department of the British Museum.
-- Herman Lincoln Wayland
%
my palm reader advised against it.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 94 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of
the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.  Blessed is he who, in the name
of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of
darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost
children.  And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and
furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.  And
you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee
-- Jules, on "Pulp Fiction", quoting Ezekiel 25:17
%
    Pisceans
Huh? The light's out?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks
 to us we're schizophrenic?
-- Lily Tomlin
%
A winy vapour melting in a tear.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xix, Line 143
%
Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting
itself from one place to another.
-- Tom Robbins
%
Named after the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene
DesCartes, RENE is a language used for artificial intelligence.  The
language is being developed at the Chicago Center of Machine Politics
and Programming under a grant from the Jane Byrne Victory Fund.  A
spokesman described the language as Just as great as dis [sic] city of
ours.

The center is very pleased with progress to date.    They say they have
almost succeeded in getting a VAX to think. However, sources inside the
organization say that each time the machine fails to think it ceases to
exist.
-- THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #2: RENE
%
 (Owner is a hard-to-reach person:)  Yes, I finally got an
 answering machine.  (To Handel's Messiah:)  Alleluia!  Alleluia!
 Alleluia!  Alleluia!  All-e-lu-ia!  Please leave a message at
 the tone.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.
-- Bonnie Prudden
%
A man is accepte  into a church for what he believes and he is turned out
for what he knows.
-- Mark Twain
%
...the Pro-Life Action League opposes *all* forms of contraception...
      from The Wanderer, August 10, 1989, as quoted in The Far Right, Speaking
     For Themselves, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
-- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro-Life Action League,
%
Sweet sorrow
-- Oxymoron
%
It's as bad as you think and they are out to get you.
-- Bumper Sticker
%
... I should explain that I was wearing a black velvet cape that was
supposed to make me look like the dashing, romantic Zorro but which
actually made me look like a gigantic bat wearing glasses ...
              Points in l'Amour
-- Dave Barry, The Wet Zorro Suit and Other Turning
%
Kirk: "This is the Starship Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk commanding."
Gorkon: "This is Kronos One.  I am Chancellor Gorkon."
Kirk: "Chancellor, we've been ordered to escort you through Federation space to
  your meeting on Earth."
Gorkon: "Thank you, Captain."
Kirk: "Would you and your party care to dine this evening aboard the Enterprise
  with my officers...as guests of the United Federation of Planets?"
Gorkon: "We would be delighted to accept your gracious invitation."
Kirk: "We'll make arrangements to have you beamed aboard at nineteen-hundred
  hours."
Gorkon: "I shall look forward to that."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
I'm not different--you all are just the same.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
:dehose: /dee-hohz/ vt. To clear a {hosed} condition.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I'm not like other people.  You see, pain hurts me.
-- Darkwing Duck
%
Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate.
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
-- John Fletcher (1576-1625)
-- Upon an "Honest Man's Fortune"
%
:orphaned i-node: /or'f*nd i:'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] A
   file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories
   of a filesystem.  2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no
   longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp.
   {lion food} without subordinates.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
This ought to be easy for someone written up in bio-mechanical texts.
-- Riker to Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2
%
    French farmers
Three. Farmer #1 goes away and gets a new light bulb. Farmer
#2 notices that it has been imported from Britain and
promptly sets fire to it, so farmer #1 has to go and get
another one, and then farmer #3 changes it.
Note: Topical to French farmers setting fire to imported
British sheep.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
If the people don't want to come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop them.
-- Yogi Berra
%
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good
place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
No major project is ever installed on time,
  within budgets, with the same staff that started it. Yours will not be the
  first.
-- Laws of Project Management #1
%
If we have nothing to lose by change, relax.
-- Hill's Second Commentary on Murphy's Law
%
Coffee is for people who feel they aren't irritable enough on their own.
-- John Wagner
%
Confession is not necessarily communication.
-- Rita Mae Brown
%
Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.
-- Ford Prefect,in Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
%
As long as the world is turning and spinning we're gonna be dizzy and we're
 gonna make mistakes.
-- Mel Brooks
%
Have you ever decorated with magnetic tape or punched cards?
Do you have a disk platter or a naked floppy hanging in your home?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
    survivors of a nuclear war
None, because people who glow in the dark don't need
light bulbs.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Atoms are made up of electrons and protons (protons are also nothing).
Fifty billion electrons placed side by side in a straight line would
stretch across the period at the end of this sentence. Protons are
heavier but take up less space. Such an idea is incapable of being
absorbed by the human mind.
-- John Lardner and Thomas Sugrue
%
The big theives hang the little ones.
-- Czech Proverb, regarding capital punishment
%
Luma: "You are not Morg...you are not Imorg."
-- "Spock's Ban", Stardate unknown
%
:for free: adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or
   hardware equipment that is available by its design without needing
   cleverness to implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations for
   free."  "And owing to the way revisions are stored in this
   system, you get revision trees for free."  The term usually refers
   to a serendipitous feature of doing things a certain way (compare
   {big win}), but it may refer to an intentional but secondary
   feature.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
VMS isn't an operating system, it's a playpen for DEC system programmers.
-- Herb Blashtfalt
%
When you're young, try to be realistic; as you get older, become idealistic.
 You'll live longer.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
What a strange thing is man! and what a stranger
Is woman!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto ix, Stanza 64
%
Always pull up survey stakes.
-- George Hayduke
%
You just wait, I'll sin till I blow up!
-- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
%
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself
-- Miles Davis
%
Life is made up of marble and mud.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
%
I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for
the time with reality.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
Never do today what you can do tomorrow.
Something may occur to make you regret your premature action.
-- Aaron Burr
%
It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be
privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to
corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xix, 10
%
"Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so,
that's why)"
-- Apple's MPW C compiler Error Message
%
Things that are expensive are good.
-- Di
%
Horrible bug encountered. God knows what has happened!
-- WindowError: 009
%
The thing that impresses me the most about America is they way parents
 obey their children.
-- King Edward VIII
%
Many a writer seems to thing he is never profound
except when he can't understand his own meaning.
-- George D. Prentice
%
Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity
except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you
must also resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
I liked morphine from the start. It made me graciously tolerant of every
 form of human imbecility, including my own.
-- Alexander King
%
Mental power tended to corrupt, and absolute intelligence tended to
corrupt absolutely, until the victim eschewed violence entirely in
favor of smart solutions to stupid problems.
-- Piers Anthony
%
Diogenes lighted a candle in the daytime, and went round saying, "I
am looking for a man."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric,
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 790
%
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
-- Cyril Connolly
%
The reverence of a man's self is, next to religion, the chiefest bridle
of all vices.
-- Lord Bacon
%
"Bah!  You can't make a sow's ear out of a cheap thug!"
-- Ham re-iterates one of Circe's old complaints in "The Badger"
%
RESPECTABILITY, n.  The offspring of a _liaison_ between a bald head
and a bank account.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the
the philanthropist to over-look the circumstances of
economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength to Love", 1963
%
Knowledge is the only fountain both of the love and the principles
of human liberty.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Completion of Bunker Hill Monument, June 17, 1843, p. 93
%
Anything is easier to take apart than to put together.
That which cannot be taken apart will fall apart.
-- Washlesky's Law
-- Rucnicki's Rule
%
Nobody HAS to do anything.
-- McCabe's law
%
...you regularly sit up and stare at your (ringing (loudly!)) alarm clock
thinking, "I can't shut it off because if I do the error message will scroll
off the screen and then I won't be able to figure out what went wrong."
Other times you scrabble around looking for the mouse to click on the alarm
clock window to focus input so that you can enter the snooze button keypress.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Kisses may last for as much as, but no more than, five minutes.
-- real standing law in Iowa, United States of America
%
I 've stood upon Achilles' tomb,
And heard Troy doubted: time will doubt of Rome.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto iv, Stanza 101
%
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it
certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of
generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it
is perhaps also in ours.
-- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
%
If you would be remembered,
do one thing superbly well.
-- Saunders Norvell
%
Kirk: "I assume you're loitering around here to learn what efficiency rating I
  plan to give your cadets."
Spock: "I am understandably curious."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.3
%
This method is, to define as the number of a class the class of all classes
similar to the given class.
-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967), "Principles of Mathematics"
%
You make the bed, you do the dishes, and six months later
you have to start all over again.
-- Joan Rivers
%
A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is someone who
talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is one who
talks to you about yourself.
-- Lisa Kirk
%
The Mintakans are beginning to believe in a god, and the one they've
  chosen is you.
-- Riker to Picard, "Who Watches the Watchers", stardate 43173.5
%
If the situation were reversed, would you not die to avoid capture?
I don't know, I might. If I thought it was necessary, if the stakes
  were high enough, but they'd have to be pretty damn high. I guess
  I'd make a pretty lousy Romulan.
I no more wish to die than you do.
Bochra, there are times when its necessary to die for one's ideals. Do
  you believe this is one of those times?
-- Bochra and Geordi, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2
%
The faster the plane, the narrower the seats.
-- John H. Durrell
%
And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
There are several ways to apportion the family income, all of them
 unsatisfactory.
-- Robert Benchley
%
Will I dream?
-- HAL-9000
%
 O-&-< doing nothing
-- SMILEY
%
I guess I began to doubt the existence of God after I had been married
 about three years.
-- Brian Savage
%
Code of Honor: Never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief
 as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that
 sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she's really attractive.
-- Bruce Jay Friedman
%
Democracy is good.  I say this because other systems are worse.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru
%
He is the MELBA-BEING...  the ANGEL CAKE...
  XEROX him...  XEROX him --
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who
believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
%
    alchemists
Into what?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
For every vision, there is an equal and opposite revision.
-- Thal's Law
%
:mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet
   containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a
   room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine.  After the emergence of
   smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the
   traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe
   computers' and eventually just as mainframes.  The term carries the
   connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive
   use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating
   system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built
   by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from
   computing's {Stone Age}.

   It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that
   the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside
   of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers (see
   {cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC
   technology and low-cost personal computing.  As of 1993, corporate
   failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers
   have certainly provided sufficient omens (see {dinosaurs
   mating}).
-- America is just beginning to figure this out -the wave of
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Prince George is shy, and just _pretends_ to be bluff and crass,
  and unbelievably thick and gittish.
-- Edmund to Amy : Amy and Amiability
%
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for
everything you gain, you lose something else.
-- Emerson
%
LaForge: "You were saying it's as big as life.  You mean the Dyson sphere."
Scott: "Aye, a natural Dyson sphere!  Can you imagine the engineering skills
  needed to design such a structure?"
LaForge: "Yeah, I know, it's pretty amazing."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
The Guide is definitive.  Reality is frequently inaccurate.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
    WASP Princesses
Note: WASP Princess = spoilt rich girl.
Three: Two to bitch about it, one to call the building
superintendant.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Moral Majority
-- Oxymoron
%
Tell ya what--You just start your countdown and ol' Buck'll be back
 before you can say 'blast-off!'
-- Gen. Buck Turgidson, from Dr. Strangelove
%
Got a complaint about the Internal Revenue Service?  Call the
convenient toll-free _IRS_Taxpayer_Complaint_Hot_Line_ number,
1-800-AUDITME.
-- Dave Barry
%
...Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans...
-- John Lennon in "Beautiful Boy"
%
:pilot error: [Sun: from aviation] n. A user's misconfiguration or
   misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results
   (compare {UBD}).  "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that
   causes it to generate bogus headers."  "That's not a bug, that's
   pilot error.  His `sendmail.cf' is hosed."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A light supper, a good night's sleep and a fine morning have often
made a hero out of the same man, who, by indigestion, a restless
night and a rainy morning would have proved a coward.
-- Chesterfield
%
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxxi, 6
%
That's about like jumping out of an airplane, planning to sew your
parachute on the way down.
-- Dwayne Foley
%
If you don't read news.groups, the net appears to be a rather tranquil place.
-- Karl Lehenbauer, about Usenet
%
I mean, it's a great story.  It's got some great things in it.  I mean,
there's something like eight violent deaths in it.
-- Mel Gibson promoting the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet
-- in a special video to be shown to public school students.
%
    Poles
Just one, but you need 6000 Russian troops in case he goes on
strike!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Brave men were living before Agamemnon.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto i, Stanza 5
%

-- Invisible tagline send money for special glasses!
%
Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
You're taking me to the promised land?"

What are friends for?"
   The Search for Spock," stardate 8210.3
-- McCoy and Kirk, "ST III:
%
Every great or original writer in proportion as he is great or original,
must himself create the taste by which he must be relished.
-- Wordsworth
%
The laboring people found the prisons always open to receive them,
but the courts of justice were practically closed to them.
-- John Peter Altgeld (1847-1902)
%
"No, not really.  But I'll mention it to my Aunt." - Vogon guard.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
An I thought he had been valiant and so cunning in fence, I 'ld have
seen him damned ere I' ld have challenged him.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Freedom begins between the ears.
-- Edward Abbey
%
 );}
-- SMILEY
%
If there's one pitch you keep swinging at and keep missing, stop swinging
 at it.
-- Yogi Berra
%
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
-- Robert Frost
%
"We're all given some sort of skill in life.  Mine
 just happens to be beating up on people."
-- Sugar Ray Leonard
%
They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
I could have more fun in a cat litter. - Ford.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
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 (1469-1527), "The Prince"
%
My goal is simple.   It is complete understanding of the universe, why it
 is as it is and why it exists at all.
-- Stephen Hawking
%
    . . . it is certain that the real function of art is to
increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what
we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live
really is.  And since mathematics, in its own way, also
performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming
but profoundly significant.  It is an art, and a great art.
-- John W.N. Sullivan
%
PRO:  No more school.
CON:  No more beautiful asses gallivantin down the hall.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
Lal: "I am genter neuter, inadequate."
-- "The Offspring", Stardate unknown
%
See how the world rewards its votaries.
-- Gesta Romanorum
-- Tale xxxvi
%
:blivet: /bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term
   meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] n. 1. An
   intractable problem.  2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be
   fixed or replaced if it breaks.  3. A tool that has been hacked
   over by so many incompetent programmers that it has become an
   unmaintainable tissue of hacks.  4. An out-of-control but
   unkillable development effort.  5. An embarrassing bug that pops up
   during a customer demo.  6. In the subjargon of computer security
   specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed by hogging
   limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared
   spool space on a multi-user system).

   This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among
   experimental physicists and hardware engineers of various kinds it
   seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to
   hackish use of {frob}).  It has also been used to describe an
   amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that
   appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes
   that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.
-- Louis Nizer
%
What I gave, I have; what I spent, I had; what I kept, I lost.
-- old epitaph
%
Aerodynamics are for people who cannot build engines.
-- Enzo Ferrari
%
Have you not heard it said full oft,
A woman's nay doth stand for naught?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- The Passionate Pilgrim, xiv
%
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,--
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee,--are all with thee!
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- The Building of the Ship
%
    software engineers
Two. One always leaves in the middle of the project.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Hypochondria is the one disease I have not got.
-- Oxymoron
%
Do you have your own fortune-cookie file?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards
himself as qualified to talk about them.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
 ... it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of
suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be
accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's
view of existence.
-- John Galt
%
I am Jean-Luc...Picard.
-- Picard to Nuria, "Who Watches the Watchers, stardate 43173.5
%
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,
do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew vii, 12
%
Any given program costs more and takes longer each time it is run.
-- The Second Law of Computer Programming
%
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
-- Walt Whitman
%
The Dolphin, ne'er has anything been more divine
-- Oppian
%
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of
taking pretty frequent holidays.
-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
%
We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated
risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to
be effective and bring happiness.
-- Maxwell Maltz
%
The honeymoon is not actually over until
we cease to stifle our sighs and begin to stifle our yawns.
-- Helen Rowland
%
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying
 of nothing.
-- Redd Foxx
%
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
-- Grandpa Charnock's Law
%
The early bird catches the worm as a rule, but the guy who comes along
later may be having lobster Neuburg and crepes suzette.
-- Charles Merrill Smith
%
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas
[and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself
accepted in the competition of the market.
-- Oliver W. Holmes (dissent, Abrams v. United States, 1919)
%
Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face.
     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old;
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Prospice
%
Claudius Aelianus, a gossiping bachelor writer, whose 'Variae
Historiae' are filled with anecdotes, relates that Socrates in his
wisdom, in order to check some symptoms of a swelled head in
Alcibiades regarding what he boastfully considered his large estates,
brought him to a place where a map of the world was exhibited and
rather witheringly asked him to point out on it where his estates
where situated.
-- A.L. Humphreys, 'Antique Maps and Charts'
%
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World
War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
    maths students
20. One to change it and the rest to watch and discuss how
exciting it is.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The analogy to athletics must be pressed until all recognize that in the
exercise of intellect those who lack the muscles, coordination, and will power
can claim no place at the training table, let alone on the playing field.
-- Jacques Barzun
%
The young disease, that must subdue at length,
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle ii, Line 135
%
In giving advice seek to help, not to please, your friend.
-- Solon
%
Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.
-- Augustine
%
The following is not for the weak of heart or
Fundamentalists.
-- Dave Barry
%
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one
program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
-- instruction from which, by induction, one can deduce that every
%
:SCSI: [Small Computer System Interface] n. A bus-independent
   standard for system-level interfacing between a computer and
   intelligent devices.  Typically annotated in literature with `sexy'
   (/sek'see/), `sissy' (/sis'ee/), and `scuzzy' (/skuh'zee/) as
   predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their
   marketing people.  One can usually assume that a person who
   pronounces it /S-C-S-I/ is clueless.
-- pronunciation guides -the last being the overwhelmingly
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to
be, most valued.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iv, Chap xi
%
Gosheven: "Here we will stand."
Data: "Then here you will die."
-- "The Ensigns Of Command", Stardate unknown
%
Lion at the Circus of Rome: Burp..
-- Famous Last Words
%
Nothing can be done in one trip.
-- Snider's Law
%
My responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us
to occupy the land until Jesus returns.
-- James Watt, in "The Washington Post", 24 May 1981
%
And I suppose the little things are harder to get used to than the big ones.
The big ones you get used to, you make up your mind to them.  The little
things come along unexpectedly, when you aren't thinking about them, aren't
braced against them.
-- Marion Zimmer Bradley, "The Forbidden Tower"
%
It was the calm and silent night!
  Seven hundred years and fifty-three
Had Rome been growing up to might,
  And now was queen of land and sea.
No sound was heard of clashing wars,
  Peace brooded o'er the hushed domain;
Apollo, Pallas, Jove, and Mars
  Held undisturbed their ancient reign
      In the solemn midnight,
          Centuries ago.
-- Alfred Domett (1811-)
-- Christmas Hymn
%
Impartial, adj.: Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from
espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting
opinions.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
APRIL FOOL, n.  The March fool with another month added to his folly.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd.
-- Allen Goldfein
%
Till then, we've got bugger all to do except sit and wait.
Oh, I dunno sir, we could have a jolly game of charades? Or a
  sing-along to musical hits such as 'Birmingham Bertie'...and
  'Whoops, Mrs Miggins, you're Sitting on my Artichokes!'...
Yes...I think 'bugger all' might be rather more fun...
-- Edmund and George : Goodbyeee...
%
Avoid running at all times.
-- Satchel Paige
%
Excuse me, but didn't I tell you there's NO HOPE for the
 survival of OFFSET PRINTING?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
There must be some kind of way out of here...
-- the joker to the thief
%
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect
and joy in each other's life.  Rarely do members of one family grow
up under the same roof.
-- Richard Bach, Illusions [1977]
%
       In war we're tough and able.
       Quite indefatigable
       Between our quests
       We sequin vests
       And impersonate Clark Gable
       It's a busy life in Camelot.
       I have to push the pram a lot.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had
been dead for two years.
-- Tom Lehrer
%
 Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
-- Renning's Maxim
%
Beware of the man who has no enemies.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Lookit that li'l bunny sittin' on the stump.
-- Famous Last Words
%
He used to define justice as "a virtue of the soul distributing that
which each person deserved."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Aristotle, xi
%
On the subject of C program indentation:

    In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
         indented six feet downward and covered with dirt.
-- Blair P. Houghton
%
HANDKERCHIEF, n.  A small square of silk or linen, used in various
ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals
to conceal the lack of tears.  The handkerchief is of recent
invention; our ancestors knew nothing of it and intrusted its duties
to the sleeve.  Shakespeare's introducing it into the play of
"Othello" is an anachronism:  Desdemona dried her nose with her skirt,
as Dr. Mary Walker and other reformers have done with their coattails
-- in our own day an evidence that revolutions sometimes go backward.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Oh man, this is a WUSSY dungeon!
-- Famous Last Words
%
Error recording error codes - Additional errors will be lost.
-- WindowError: 020
%
:PM: /P-M/ 1. v. (from `preventive maintenance') To bring down
   a machine for inspection or test purposes.  See {provocative
   maintenance}; see also {scratch monkey}.  2. n. Abbrev. for
   `Presentation Manager', an {elephantine} OS/2 graphical user
   interface.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Riker: "They couldn't have adapted that quickly."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate Unknown
%
Ask a toad what is beauty?...a female with two great round eyes coming out
of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)
%
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone:
the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
 Congratulations!  By correctly dialing 123-4567, you have become
 eligible to leave a message!  (Applause.)  Join the lucky few
 that have advanced to the next level!  (Cheers.)  And now, at
 the sound of the tone, leave your name, number, the time you
 called, and a brief message.
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
"Are there many fires in Norway?"
"Oh Good Lord yes.  The place is a constant blaze!"
-- Monty Python
%
A man of sovereign parts he is esteem'd;
Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms:
Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
In war there is no substitute for victory.
-- General Douglas MacArthur
%
Look before you leap.
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
%
The Emperor's New mall:
       The popular notion that shopping malls exist only on the
insides and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief
engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that large,
cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Picard: "Mister Data, your resourcefulness never ceases to amaze me."
Data: "Thank you, sir."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.1
%
The first example of permanent press was an Egyptian mummy.
-- Shelby Friedman
%
Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
-- T. S. Eliot
%
Good tea. Nice house.
-- Worf, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4
%
History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge,
periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them
asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at
intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another. Truly the imago
state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every molt is a step gained.
-- Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species
%
Never fly under a sea gull - they'll shit on your airplane.
-- Gordon Cooper
%
It is strangely in keeping with the manner of our courtship that the
  maid of honour should be a man.
Oh! Thank you very much, my lord.
...And I use the word 'man' in its broadest possible sense.
-- Edmund to Kate and Baldrick : Bells
%
It is a deere collop
That is cut out of th' owne flesh.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. x
%
Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, so don't kid yourself...
-- Frank Zappa
%
I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake.
-- _A_Man_for_All_Seasons_ by Robert Bolt
%
    field service engineers
Two. One to hold the bulb and one to pound it in (etc)
-- How many
-- does it take to replace a dead light bulb?
%
   I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, / I
understand equations, both the simple and quadratical, / About
cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.
-- binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot of news/ With many
-- Gilbert & Sullivan - The Pirates of Penzance
%
We are, after all, professionals.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
%
    paranoids
JUST EXACTLY DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? HUH? HUH?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Careful planning is the key to safe and swift travel.
-- Odysseus
%
Religion frightens me; spirituality enlightens me.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
 "Chinese Golfing Techniques" by Ho Lin Wun
-- Booktip of the month
%
BROTHER MAYNARD: Armaments Chapter Two Verses Nine to Twenty One.
ANOTHER MONK:    And St.  Attila raised his hand grenade up on high saying O
                 Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest
                 blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. and the Lord
                 did grin and people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and
                 carp and anchovies and orang-utans and breakfast cereals and
                 fruit bats and...
BROTHER MAYNARD: Skip a bit brother ...
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
When working toward the solution of a problem, it always
helps if you know the answer.
-- Rule of Accuracy
%
Applause, n. The echo of a platitude.
-- Ambrose Bierce
%
:gritch: /grich/ 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a {glitch}).
   2. vi. To complain.  Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch".  3. A
   synonym for {glitch} (as verb or noun).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The clinching proof of my reasoning is that I will cut anyone who
argues further into dogmeat.
-- Sir Geoffery de Tourneville (ca. 1350)
%
... The stars seem very different today.
-- David Bowie
%
(1)  If a tarpaulin can flap, it will.
(2)  If a small boy can get dirty, he will.
(3)  If a teenager can go out, he will.
-- Three Rules of Immutability
%

-- Save the planet from disaster Replicate
%
...the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is
before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet
it.
-- Thucydides
%
Meanwhile, let it be clear what we do: we fight contraception-sterilization-
 abortion on six continents...
      Human Life International Explained, as quoted in The Far Right, Speaking
     For Themselves, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
-- Fr. Paul Marx, President, Human Life International, in his brochure,
%
Weak and beggarly elements.
-- New Testament
-- Galatians iv, 9
%
To man the earth seems altogether
No more a mother, but a step-dame rather.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Third Day
%
Never fear [the public] or despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it,
 stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it
 cry, but above all ... never, never, never bore the hell out of it.
-- Noel Coward
%
The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly-branch shone on the old oak wall.
-- Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839)
-- The Mistletoe Bough
%
O to be self-balanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms,
hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as trees and animals do!
-- Walt Whitman
%
Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing
 losses on.
-- Robert Frost
%
The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not.
-- Albert Einstein
%
I moving to fast for you?
No, I'm moving to fast for me.
I like that better.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about you all day.
You must have had a nice day.
Anticipation is fun.
-- Devinoni Rai and Troi, "The Price", stardate 43385.6
%
Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone's following you.
-- Henry Gilmer
%
Pompey bade Sylla recollect that more worshipped the rising than the
setting sun.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Pompey
%
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
Wot's on the television?
 It looks like a penguin.
 I mean the programme.
-- Monty Python
%
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions"
%
...[T]he lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any
rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that
exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those
who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and
that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be
concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a
'secret identity'.
-- Salman Rushdie
%
'If you could take all the laughter this man has given us, it would
reach to the universe and fill up the black hole in space.'
-- Tony Orlando on Bob Hope
%
AFFIANCED, pp.  Fitted with an ankle-ring for the ball-and-chain.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Do not be deceived. Revolutions do not run backwards.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), railsplitter, lawyer, imperialist
%
Long live the Klingon Empire.
A wise decision, Captain.
-- Captain K'Temoc and Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness;
genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
-- Chesterfield
%
They are perfect; how else?--they shall never change:
  We are faulty; why not?--we have time in store.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Old Pictures in Florence, xvi
%
SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler.
Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they
compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the
coffee.  Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom
sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to
compile.  Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but
infinitely faster) language, COCAINE.
-- THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL
%
REVOLUTION, n.  In politics, an abrupt change in the form of
misgovernment.  Specifically, in American history, the substitution of
the rule of an Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the
welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch.
Revolutions are usually accompanied by a considerable effusion of
beneficiaries whose blood had not the mischance to be shed.  The
French revolution is of incalculable value to the Socialist of to-day;
when he pulls the string actuating its bones its gestures are
inexpressibly terrifying to gory tyrants suspected of fomenting law
and order.
-- blood, but are accounted worth it this appraisement being made by
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Never kiss in front of other people. It's a big embarrassing thing if
anybody sees you....If nobody sees you, I might be willing to try it
with a handsome boy, but just for a few hours.
-- When is it okay to kiss someone??
-- Kally, AGE 9
%
Always be nice to secretaries.  They are the real gatekeepers in the world.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
Numerical superiority is of no consequence.  In battle, victory will go to the
best tactician.
-- G. A. Custer
%
I got up one morning and couldn't find my socks, so I called Information.  She
 said, "Hello, Information."  I said, "I can't find my socks."  She said,
 They're behind the couch."  And they were!
-- Steven Wright
%
Deriving sustenance from emotion is not unknown in the galaxy.  And fear
  is among the strongest and most violent of the emotions.
-- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4.
%
When you doubt, abstain.
-- Zoroaster
%
A warning message should not be funnier than the joke.
-- Rule #624
%
Alas! regardless of their doom,
  The little victims play;
No sense have they of ills to come,
  Nor care beyond to-day.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Stanza 6
%
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended, civilizations are
built up, excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong.
Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then
it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems
to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.
-- C. S. Lewis
%
Duke. And what 's her history?
Vio. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew vi, 34
%
We cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with
certainty the guilt of all. Every man testifies to the crime of all
the others - that is my faith and hope.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
-- The Fall (1957)
%
No changes of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
-- Emerson
%
Security, get that floozy off my bridge.
-- Picard
%
You shouldn't change his code to be self consistently wrong.
-- Alan Johnson 4:54pm 4/16/93
%
These types are not "abstract"; they are as real as int and float.
-- Doug McIlroy
%
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
-- Maimonides
%
Yow!  I want my nose in lights!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
...all the good computer designs are bootlegged; the formally planned products,
if they are built at all, are dogs!
-- David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men From Univac, MIT Press, 1987
%
Don't try to describe the ocean if you've never seen it,
... you might end up being wrong.
-- Jimmy Buffett
%
Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love
you knowing nothing?
-- Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
%
You don't have to wine and dine beer.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
ARTHUR: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot.
        King of all Britons, defeator of the Saxons, sovereign of all England!
   [Pause]
SOLDIER: Get away!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
DAMN, v.  A word formerly much used by the Paphlagonians, the meaning
of which is lost.  By the learned Dr. Dolabelly Gak it is believed to
have been a term of satisfaction, implying the highest possible degree
of mental tranquillity.  Professor Groke, on the contrary, thinks it
expressed an emotion of tumultuous delight, because it so frequently
occurs in combination with the word _jod_ or _god_, meaning "joy."  It
would be with great diffidence that I should advance an opinion
conflicting with that of either of these formidable authorities.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who
can write know anything.
-- Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) Literary Studies
%
Do you have a copy of Dec Wars?
Do you have the Canonical Collection of Lightbulb Jokes?
Do you have a copy of the Hacker's dictionary?
... Did you contribute to it?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The comfort of turning 49 is the realization that you are
now too old to die young.
-- Diskson's Rule of 49
%
 Waitress:       You want fries with that shit?
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Fear is only another form of awareness
-- Charlie Manson
%
It is most true, stylus virum arguit,--our style bewrays us.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader
%
Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection
must finish him.
-- John Locke
%
Hence these tears.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Act i, Sc. 1, 99, (126.)
%
To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
-- Hippocrates
%
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all
they know and then stop.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
:box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box'
   where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or
   the name of an OS (thus, `UNIX box', `MS-DOS box', etc.)  "We
   preprocess the data on UNIX boxes before handing it up to the
   mainframe."  2. [IBM] Without qualification but within an
   SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end
   processor or FEP /F-E-P/.  An FEP is a small computer necessary
   to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the limits of
   the {dinosaur pen}.  Typically used in expressions like the cry
   that goes up when an SNA network goes down: "Looks like the
   {box} has fallen over." (See {fall over}.) See also
   {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {fepped out}, {Blue
   Glue}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
MANNA, n.  A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the
wilderness.  When it was no longer supplied to them they settled
down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies
of the original occupants.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
When are you going to grow up?
-- One of the world's worst questions
-- Jane Goodsell
%
I don't like people who speak French in public
 places.  This includes the French.
-- Ian Shoales
%
I'm afraid I've finally become what I had merely intended to seem.
-- Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1831
%
:highly: [scientific computation] adv. The preferred modifier for
   overstating an understatement.  As in: `highly nonoptimal', the
   worst possible way to do something; `highly nontrivial', either
   impossible or requiring a major research project; `highly
   nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; `highly
   nontechnical', drivel written for {luser}s, oversimplified to the
   point of being misleading or incorrect (compare {drool-proof
   paper}).  In other computing cultures, postfixing of {in the
   extreme} might be preferred.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed.
-- James Hurdis (1763-1801)
-- The Village Curate
%
In order not to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that
 child's parent or grandparent.
-- Don Marquis
%
If a program isn't working, expand it.
-- Taylor's 2nd Law of Administration
%
Turn on, tune in, and take over.
-- Tim Leary
%
What does education often do?
It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
if you refer to paper plates as "the good china."
-- You may be redneck...
%
Tester I 'll have in pouch, when thou shalt lack,
Base Phrygian Turk!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merry Wives of Windsor
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
-- George Eliot
%
Gibble, Gobble, we ACCEPT YOU ---
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The pessimist complains about the wind;
The optimist expects it to change;
The realist adjusts the sails.
-- William Arthur Ward
%
Do you need me for anything, or shall I just sit here and rust?
-- Marvin, the paranoid android
%
Tarmin: "I have been accused of putting people to sleep with one too many
  stories, Captain.  But this is the first time it's ever been suggested that I
  might be the cause of someone's coma."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45431.7
%
To the atheist, death is the end; to the believer, the beginning; to
 the agnostic, the sound of silence.
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter
%
"Ah, you know the type.  They like to blame it all on the Jews or the
Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact
that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately
up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
-- unfathomable crapshoot and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep
-- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic
%
Bureaucratic Cop-Out Number 1: You should have seen it when I got it!
-- Marshall L. Smith
%
If you can't be funny, be interesting.
-- Harold Ross
%
The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communication between
different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of
misunderstanding.
-- Thomas L. Martin
-- Law of Communications
%
Sendmail can safely be made setuid to root.
-- Eric Allman, "Sendmail Install & Operation Guide"
%
Never do a thing concerning the rectitude of which you are in doubt.
-- Pliny the Younger (61-105 AD)
-- Letters, Book i, Letter xviii, 5
%
Scott: "Perhaps we are looking at something of that future...here?"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that
you won't have to work.
-- Ogden Nash
%
I was walking through the park. I had a very bad asthmatic attack. These
 three asthmatics attacked me. I know ... I should've heard them all hiding.
-- Emo Philips
%
crime?    Who enjoys his job today?  You?  Me?  Anybody?  The only satisfying
part of any job is coffee break, lunch hour and quitting time.     Years ago
important jobs to come.  Once you can be sold the myth that you may make
president of the company you'll hardly ever steal stamps.  But nobody
believes he's going to be president anymore.  The more people change jobs
the more they realize that there is a direct connection between working for
a living and total stupefying boredom.    So why NOT take revenge?  You're not
going to find ME knocking a guy because he pads an expense account and his
home stationery carries the company emblem.  Take away crime from the white
collar worker and you will rob him of his last vestige of job interest.
-- All this big deal about white collar crime what's WRONG with white collar
-- there was at least the hope of improvement eventual promotion more
-- J. Feiffer
%
    Geminis
Two. Plus a portable phone, an Internet link and a copy
of the 'Bluffer's Guide to Changing Light Bulbs.'
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Before I judge my neighbor, let me walk a mile in his moccassins.
-- Sioux proverb
%
Picard: "Mister LaForge...I would like *you* to accompany Captain Scott.
LaForge: "Me, sir."
Picard: "Yes.  Look, this is not an order.  It's a request, and it's one that
  you must feel perfectly free to decline.  You see, one of the most important
  things in a person's life is to feel *useful*.  Now, Mister Scott is a
  Starfleet officer, and I would like him to feel useful again."
LaForge: "I'll go with him, sir."
Picard: "Thank you."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?
-- John Mendoza
%
:Flyspeck 3: n. Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be
   unreadable (by analogy with names like `Helvetica 10' for
   10-point Helvetica).  Legal boilerplate is usually printed in
   Flyspeck 3.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
ARTHUR:  How do you do, good lady.  I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
         Who's castle is that?
WOMAN:   King of the who?
-- WOMAN:   Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here.  Oh how d'you do?
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- The Soldier's Dream
%
LaForge: "Are you feeling all right?"
Scott: "Well, never get drunk unless you're willing to pay for it the next day.
  I'll manage."
LaForge: "Okay..."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
My opinions are my own, not my company's or my employer's or my cat's
(Well, maybe my cat's....)
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
-- Aldous Huxley, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", 1956
%
"Now I've got the bead on you with MY
 disintegrating gun. And when it disintegrates, it
 disintegrates. [pulls trigger] Well, what you do
 know... it disintegrated."
-- DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24-1/2 CENTURY!!
-- Looney Tunes, Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century (1953, Chuck Jones)
%
If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Here on earth I'll have my cake Gonna eat it too, make no mistake 'Cause if
it's a question of to be or not to be I'll put on my boots and go see what
I can see.
-- Crash Test Dummies
%
It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.
-- L. Sprague de Camp
%
It's a good rule to follow the first law of holes: if you are in one, stop
 digging.
-- Denis Healey
%
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than
to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
80% of the final will be on the one lecture you missed and about the one
book you didn't read.
-- 1st LAW OF TESTS
%
I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
:bit bashing: n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term
   used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming
   characterized by manipulation of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble},
   and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these
   include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum
   and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of
   graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and assembler/compiler code
   generation.  May connote either tedium or a real technical
   challenge (more usually the former).  "The command decoding for
   the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the
   control registers still has bugs."  See also {bit bang},
   {mode bit}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The things we see more frequently are more frequent:
1) because there is some physical reason to favor certain states or
2) because there is some mental reason.
-- The Generalized Thermodynamic Law (Systems Theory)
%
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
-- Benjamin Franklin
%

-- J.F.K. The Man and the Airport
-- Suggested book title
%
Guilty consciences always make people cowards.
-- Pilpay (or Bidpai)
-- The Prince and his Minister, Chap. iii, Fable iii
%
... freedom ... is a worship word...
It is our worship word too.
-- Cloud William and Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown.
%
It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore,
 I have to beat somebody.
-- Richard M Nixon
%
PRO:  Not having to see others bad taste on the same wall.
CON:  Not painting your favorite groups on a large white wall.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
 (Loud sounds of a massive battle; calm voice:)  Hello!  Due to
 the breakdown in the 452nd truce, the inhabitants of village
 286-3589 are cowering in their bomb shelters.  However, if you
 leave your name, number, and a message, any survivors will get
 back to you when the 453rd truce begins.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
 :n) funny-looking right nose
-- SMILEY
%
Not this little mammal! Fly a human? I'd rather suck wax fruit!
-- Batty
%
Where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 65
%
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann
speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies
sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan
Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether
machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about
as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
%
ASPERSE, v.t.  Maliciously to ascribe to another vicious actions which
one has not had the temptation and opportunity to commit.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
honda seatcovers
winter warm and summer cool
little lambs no more
-- Damon Koronakos and Brian Roberts: HI-TECH HAIKUS
%
I've seen the forgeries I've sent out.
    about forging net news articles
-- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US),
%
American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective
employees be honest and hardworking.  It has even stopped hoping for
employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference
between the men's room and the women's room without having little
pictures on the doors.
-- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"
%
We shouldn't have to be burdened with all the technicalities that
come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting
what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.
                    academy in Knoxville, Tennessee in August 1992
                    (from the AP wire)
-- Vice-President Dan Quayle, addressing a police
%
The police are not there to create disorder.    The police are there to
 preserve disorder.
-- The late Richard J. Daly, Mayor of the city of Chicago
%
>consult guide about Zaphod Beeblebrox
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
Zaphod Beeblebrox is the current President of the Galaxy.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
    copyeditors
The last time this question was asked, it involved art
directors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the
other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
What constitutes a state?

Men who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.

And sovereign law, that state's collected will,
    O'er thrones and globes elate,
Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill.
-- Sir William Jones (1746-1794)
-- Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus
%
The difference between the Laws of Nature and Murphy's Law
is that with the Laws of Nature you can count on things
screwing up the same way every time.
-- The Reliability Principle
%
When stars are in the quiet skies,
  Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
  As stars look on the sea.
-- Edward Bulwer Lytton (1805-1873)
-- When Stars are in the quiet Skies
%
Why, the public love me! Only the other day I was out in the street
  and they sang, 'We hail Prince George! We hail Prince George!'
'We _hate_ Prince George', sir. 'We _hate_ Prince George'.
-- George and Edmund : Dish and Dishonesty
%
This article says our congressman has taken money under the table. His name
 has been linked romantically with a lot of different ladies, and he enjoys
 a frequent nip. I'd say he's doing a terrific job representing my
 interests!
-- Thaves ("Frank and Ernest")
%
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.   If your ideas are any
good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-- Howard Aiken
%
A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one
believes individually.
-- Abba Eban
%
Famous actress bragging about her husband:
Look at him, isn't he beautiful I have kept him for seven years now

Dorothy Parker:
Don't Worry--he'll come back in style
-- Dorothy Parker
%
The judge ought to give 'em a chance to tell what evolution is.   Course we
 got them licked anyhow, but I believe in being fair and square and American.
 Besides, I'd like to know what evolution is myself.
    author of the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Law, during the Scopes Monkey Trial
-- Tennessee State Representative John Washington Butler,
%
Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto ii, Stanza 73
%
The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since;
but I think now 't is not to be found.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Look, it's trying to think.
-- Agent Albert Rosenfield, _Twin Peaks_  (in reference to Sheriff Truman)
%
 <:>== a turkey emoticon
-- SMILEY
%
A little more moderation would be good. Of course,
my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation.
-- Donald Trump, in "Time", 16 January 1989
%
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep
his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes xii, 13
%
Lamb Wham Bam
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
YES, I checked the water for throat leeches.
-- Famous Last Words
%
shock: large fish that can bite your leg off. chiefly of concern to
sea cliff climbers.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Life's greatest tragedy is to lose God and not to miss Him.
-- F.W. Norwood
%
Win her with gifts, if she respect not words; Dumb jewels often,
in their silent kind, More quick than words do move a woman's mind.
-- William Shakespeare
%
The idea of male and female are universal constants.
-- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8.
%
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy,
and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
-- Frost
%
A poor compromise is better than a costly litigation.
-- Proverb
%
Once they go up, who cares where they come down?   That's not my department.
-- Werner von Braun
%
One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct
tape to make them stop.
-- G. Weilacher
%
Khan: "Kill him, Terrell, *now*!"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
GALAHAD: No look, really, this isn't nescess ...
PIGLET:  We must examine you.
GALAHAD: There's nothing wrong with ... that.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Kirk: "Captain's Log, Stardate 9522.6  I've never trusted Klingons...and
I never  will.  I can never forgive them for the death of my boy.
 It seems to me that  our mission to escort the Chancellor of the...Klingon
High Council to a *peace  mission*...is problematic at best.  Spock
says this could be an historic  occasion.  Now, I'd like to believe
him...but how on Earth can history get  past people like me?"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
Giving honour unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel.
-- New Testament
-- 1 Peter iii, 7
%
To think contrary to one's era is heroism.
But to speak against it is madness.
-- Eugene Ionesco
%
if your brake lights are covered with red tape.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Fame then was cheap, and the first comer sped;
And they have kept it since by being dead.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- The Conquest of Granada, Epilogue
%
:Communication Style:

See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of
this File.  Though hackers often have poor person-to-person
communication skills, they are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of
language and very precise in their use of it.  They are often better at
writing than at speaking.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A dog will look up on you;
a cat will look down on you;
however, a pig will see you eye to eye
and know it has found an equal.
-- Churchill
%
CONSOLATION, n.  The knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate
than yourself.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 Hello.  You are talking to a machine.  I am capable of receiving
 messages.  My owners do not need siding, windows, or a hot tub,
 and their carpets are clean.  They give to charity through the
 office and don't need their picture taken.  If you're still with
 me, leave your name and number and they will get back to you.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
A friendship that like love is warm;
  A love like friendship, steady.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- How shall I woo?
%
When we jumped into Sicily, the units became separated, and I couldn't
find anyone.  Eventually I stumbled across two colonels, a major,
three captains, two lieutenants, and one rifleman, and we secured the
bridge.  Never in the history of war have so few been led by so many.
-- General James Gavin
%
Self-discovery is useless unless I discover I am somebody else.
-- Dan Goodman
%
I am not a crook.
-- from The Best-Loved Quotes of Richard Milhouse Nixon
%
Logic:  The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with
the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
%
Weakened and wasted to skin and bone.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Week, Fourth Day, Book iv
%
In you can't measure output, then you can't measure input.
-- Charles Schultz
%
Fascinate: There were nine buttons on her nightgown, but she could only
 fascinate.
-- Homer Haynes
%
My mother says to look for a man who is kind....That's what I'll
do....I'll find somebody who's kinda tall and handsome.
-- How does a person decide whom to marry??
-- Carolyn, AGE 8
%
Don't fall before you're pushed.
-- English Proverb
%
if your wife has "ammo" on her Christmas list.
-- You may be redneck...
%
A German soldier in Paris, 1940. He takes the first girl he sees to a hotel
 room, has his way with her, and says arrogantly, "In nine months, you'll
 have a baby. Call him Adolf."

 She replies sweetly, "In two weeks you'll have a rash. Call it what you
 like."
-- Marty Brill
%
Sanity (in the everyday sense of the word) is not an essential quality of
great art.
-- Gerald Abraham
%
It depends on your definition of asleep.  They were not stretched out.
They had their eyes closed.  They were seated at their desks with
their heads in a nodding position.
-- John Hogan, Commonwealth Edison Supervisor of News Information,
-- responding to a charge by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector
-- that two Dresden Nuclear Plant operators were sleeping on the job
%
'I Love Hamburgers, I Like You!'
-- Titles of the love ballads you can sing to your beloved
-- Eddie, age 6
%
Will. Honeycomb calls these over-offended ladies the outrageously virtuous.
-- Sir Richard Steele (1671-1729)
-- Spectator, No. 266
%
  vlds - very long drum solo (musical term)
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
I have commanded a widow woman there to sustain thee.
-- Old Testament
-- 1 Kings xvii, 9
%
Dark with excessive bright.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iii, Line 380
%
For after all what is man in nature?  A nothing in relation to infinity, all
in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and
infinitely far from understanding either.  The ends of things and their
beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret.  He
is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and
the infinite in which he is engulfed.
-- Blaise Pascal
%
Rien n'est si dangereux qu'un ignorant ami; Mieux vaudrait un sage ennemi.
(Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; better a wise enemy)
-- Jean de la Fontaine
%
Martia: "He wants your obediance to the Brotherhood of Aliens."
Kirk: "He's got it!"
Martia: "And your coat."
Kirk: "I'm afraid not.  Besides, it wouldn't fit him."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that
  doesn't require my presence.
-- Gary Trudeau
%
There is no such thing as a nonracial society in a multiracial country.
-- F. W. de Klerk, President of South Africa,
-- quoted in "Time", 11 September 1989
%
The US has a vital interest in that area of the country.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle Referring to Latin America.
%
But oh for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
  And the sound of a voice that is still!
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Break, break, break
%
I remember being upset once and telling my dad I wasn't following through
 right, and he replied, "Nancy, it doesn't make any difference to a ball
 what you do after you hit it."
-- Nancy Lopez
%
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
-- Butler
%
GEOGRAPHER, n.  A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between
the outside of the world and the inside.

    Habeam, geographer of wide reknown,
    Native of Abu-Keber's ancient town,
    In passing thence along the river Zam
    To the adjacent village of Xelam,
    Bewildered by the multitude of roads,
    Got lost, lived long on migratory toads,
    Then from exposure miserably died,
    And grateful travelers bewailed their guide.
                                                        Henry Haukhorn
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.
-- Wiker's Law
%
A Clerk ther was of Oxenforde also.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 287
%
Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator.

Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist.
-- Claude Shouse (shouse@macomw.ARPA)
-- Joseph C. Wang (joe@athena.mit.edu)
%
The moon looks
On many brooks,
"The brook can see no moon but this."
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- While gazing on the Moon's Light
%
Happy who in his verse can gently steer
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.
-- Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711)
-- The Art of Poetry, Canto i, Line 75
%
We believe he wanted to win in the worst way.
     challenger charged with attempted murder of his opponent
-- Seminole County, Fla., Sheriff Don Eslinger on a state representative
%
The amount of time required to complete a government
project is precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
-- Chism's Law of Completion
%
I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.
-- John Lennon
%
Oh would I were dead now,
Or up in my bed now,
To cover my head now,
  And have a good cry!
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- A Table of Errata
%
...or I'll fill you so full of lead we could sharpen your head
  and call you a pencil!
-- Amy to Edmund : Amy and Amiability
%
We are convinced that ... foreign capital will fulfill the role that
Marx predicted for it ... with every additional shovel of coal, with
every additional load of oil that we in Russia obtain through the help
of foreign technique, capital will be digging its own grave.
-- L. B. Kamanev
%
Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we 'll die with harness on our back.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 5
%
The only reason so many people came to his funeral
is that they wanted to make sure he was dead.
-- Sam Goldwyn on Louis B. Mayer
%
 :-R has the flu
-- SMILEY
%
TIE
  Useless piece of clothing, usually worn by men. For this reason the
  tie is often seen as a phallic symbol, but in fact it was devised
  as a substitute to prevent men being irritated by not being able to
  rub their own chest hair. The tie is therefore seen as the symbol
  of sophisticated man, an evolving species, with no time for the
  troglodytes of yesterday. "Ug, me no fondle chest hair. Me fondle
  tie instead. Tie good. Me fiddle with knot."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Out-did the meat, out-did the frolick wine.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- Ode for Ben Jonson
%
1) Your share of the market is really lower than you think.
2) Never delay the end of a meeting or the beginning of lunch hour.
3) The combined market position goals of all competitors always
totals at least 150%.
4) The existence of a market does not ensure the existence of a
customer.
5) Beware of alleged needs that have no market.
6) The competition really can have lower prices.
7) The number of competitors never declines.
8) Secret negotiations are usually neither.
9) If the customer wants vanilla, give him vanilla.
10) If the customer buys lunch, you've lost the order.
-- Robin's Rules of Marketing
%
Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt and cannot last;
and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little
out of countenance; but if it light well, it makes virtue shine and vice
blush.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks,
love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
-- Edward Abbey
%
If you want to make a song more hummy, add a few tiddely poms.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
%
Asking a group of scientists to revise their theory is like
asking a group of cops to revise the law.
-- Barr's Inertial Principle
%
Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.
-- In a Tokyo bar
%
Want of prudence is too frequently the want of virtue; nor is there
on earth a more powerful advocate for vice than poverty?
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
Resistance is futile.
-- First Mate, Enlightenment
%
Their strength is to sit still.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xxx, 7
%
If appearances are deceitful, then they do not deserve any confidence
when they assert what appears to them to be true.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Pyrrho, xi
%
It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than
to have an opportunity and not be prepared.
-- Whitney Young, Jr.
%
*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues.
-- Quentin Johnson (quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu)
%
At present I would prefer not to be a little bit reasonable.
-- Bartleby the Scrivener
%
:well-behaved: adj. 1. [primarily {{MS-DOS}}] Said of software
   conforming to system interface guidelines and standards.
   Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such
   as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphics.  Oppose
   {ill-behaved}.  2. Software that does its job quietly and
   without counterintuitive effects.  Esp. said of software having
   an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can
   be used as a {tool} by other software.  See {cat}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You are not your opinion of yourself.
-- John Lilly
%
:smoke and mirrors: n. Marketing deceptions.  The term is
   mainstream in this general sense.  Among hackers it's strongly
   associated with bogus demos and crocked {benchmark}s (see also
   {MIPS}, {machoflops}).  "They claim their new box cranks 50
   MIPS for under $5000, but didn't specify the instruction mix ---
   sounds like smoke and mirrors to me."  The phrase has been said to
   derive from carnie slang for magic acts and `freak show' displays
   that depend on `trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind
   the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for
   whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were
   regularly cut out.  Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another
   round of fantasy-based marketing promises, hackers often feel
   analogously disheartened.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is a frustrating as reading sex
 manuals without the software.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
%
Knocked, you weren't in.
-- Opportunity
%
Old and well stricken in age.
-- Old Testament
-- Genesis xviii, 11
%
18. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
-- One of 21 Thoughts to Get You Through Almost Any Crisis
%
'T is impious in a good man to be sad.
 - Night Thoughts, Night iv, Line 676
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Violent, more violent, his hands cracks the chair
 Moves on reaction, and slumps in despair
-- Joy Division "I Remember Nothing"
%
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
  Men were deceivers ever,--
One foot in sea and one on shore,
  To one thing constant never.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
Slurm, n.: The slime that accumulates on the underside of a soap bar when it
sits in the dish too long.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%
I represent no one.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
The bird let loose in Eastern skies,
  Returning fondly home,
Ne'er stoops to earth her wing, nor flies
  Where idle warblers roam;
But high she shoots through air and light,
  Above all low delay,
Where nothing earthly bounds her flight,
  Nor shadow dims her way.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Oh that I had Wings
%
It had to be said: the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice.
-- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_
%
Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.
-- Augusto Pinochet
%
Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
A lot of my countrymen say rude things about England because it has the
 lowest standard of living in the world, and I don't think that's fair. I
 think that's mean and horrid. Because I know England will rise again. It
 will--say, to the level of Sicily or Ethiopia.
-- Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries)
%
Gon. Here is everything advantageous to life.
Ant. True; save means to live.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-- Andy Finkel
%
A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
-- Patton's Law
%
Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage
of Abi-ezer?
-- Old Testament
-- Judges v, viii, 2
%
For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who
 was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it.   Talking
 a woman out of having an abortion is not news.  But tracking her down using
 a private detective is.
      99 Ways to Stop Abortion, 1985, as quoted in The Far Right, Speaking For
      Themselves, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
-- Joseph Scheidler, Executive Director, Pro Life Action League, Closed:
%
No matter what happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.
-- Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, December 5, 1941
%
...your radio is playing, and you're starting a big compile on your home
box, and it occurs to you that the music will begin to get a bit jerky,
because you think it's playing through the computer and you're not quite
sure how well it'll multitask with the compile.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
If one has not given everything, one has given nothing.
-- Georges Guynemer
%
Any sufficiently advanced feature is indistinguishable from a bug.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
-- Rich Kulawiec
%
Chekov: "[Scotch] was invented by a little old lady from Leningrad."
-- "The Trouble With Tribbles", Stardate 4525.6.
%
Every moment of pleasure in life has to be purchased by an equal moment
  of pain.
-- Danilo O'Dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
Another lesson I learned was not to give pieces of my company away when
 it was small in exchange for investment capital.   In the first place,
 those shares would be worth millions today.  Even more important, when
 you bring in shareholders, the government can start looking around at
 your business and telling you what to do, and let me tell you, the
 government knows *nothing* about running a business!
-- John McCormack, _Self-Made in America_
%
PROOF-READER, n.  A malefactor who atones for making your writing
nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Amarie: "A new face."
Riker: "Same one I've always had."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something
then you have the time to do something about it.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly,
it's the highway that is ugly.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!
-- Kermit the frog
%
 (Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit":)
 Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello,
 No one's here, no one's home,
 Leave a message, at the tone.
 Don't feel stupid, it's no big fuss,
 Leave a message, you can reach us.
-- Answering machine madness - mainly musical theme
%
 I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means.    It means we
  get to keep all our old mistakes.
-- Dennie van Tassel
%

-- Ross Perot mighty mite speaks!
%
Down at the drug-store lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups
of coffee and a melted cheese sandwhich with two slivers of ersatz
bacon embedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a
drained pool.
-- Raymond Chandler
%
:plonk: [USENET: possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for
   cheap booze, or `plonker' for someone behaving stupidly] The sound
   a {newbie} makes as he falls to the bottom of a {kill file}.
   Used almost exclusively in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre,
   this term (usually written "*plonk*") is a form of public
   ridicule.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
If you ever have an accident, I hope you have on clean underwear. You're
 driving a truck--right into another truck. Now comes your mother to the
 hospital: "Did he have clean underwear?" "Yes, we found it in the glove
 compartment."
-- Bill Cosby
%
My religion is to live - and die - without regret.
-- Milarepa
%
You should never challenge "worse." Don't ever say, "Things couldn't get
 worse." Worse is rough ... I was down to my last two hundred dollars. I
 mean, not to my name, but I lost all I could sign for. And I said, "I'm
 gonna win something! It can't get worse!"

 I went over to the roulette wheel. And got two hundred dollars' worth of
 quarter chips. Covered the table--I mean, covered the table! Red and black,
 even up. I'm going to win something before I go to sleep. And the guy spun
 the ball and it fell on the floor.
-- Bill Cosby
%
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to
be struck.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard,
 the first thing typed would be a UNIX command.
-- Bill Lye
%
Ros:  Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
 Guil: No, no, no...Death is...not.  Death isn't.  You take my meaning.  Death
       is the ultimate negative.  Not-being.  You can't not-be on a boat.
 Ros:  I've frequently not been on boats.
 Guil: No, no, no---what you've been is not on boats.
-- Tom Stoppard
%
He will laugh thee to scorn.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiasticus xiii, 7
%
Development is the realization of human potential.
-- Ghandi
%
The numerical factor by which experimental results
must be multiplied to be in agreement with theory.
-- Fudge Factor
%
What more felicity can fall to creature,
Than to enjoy delight with liberty.
-- Spenser, Fate of the Butterfly
%
The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
-- Old Testament
-- Ezekiel xviii, 2; (Jeremiah xxxi, 29.)
%
Reply to her editor who was bugging her for
her belated work while she was on her honeymoon:
"Too fucking busy, and vice versa."
-- Dorothy Parker
%
SENSE: from a past time.  "It's a are sense ah had a RC!"
-- Texan Dictionary
%
Anything but history, for history must be false.
-- Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745)
-- Walpoliana, No. 141
%
Misery no longer loves company.  Nowadays it insists on it.
-- Russell Baker (Baker's Law)
%
The past few years have seen a steady increase in the number of people
 playing music in the streets. The past few years have also seen a steady
 increase in the number of malignant diseases? Are these two facts related?
 One wonders.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
Rimmer, real dumplings, proper dumplings, when they're properly cooked
to perfection, proper dumplings do not bounce!
-- Lister in Red Dwarf 'Thanks for the Memory'
%
...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is
the practice of truth.
-- George Jacob Holyoake
%
    surrealists
Two. One to change it and one to throw a bucket of water
out the window. (An interesting story about this joke -
it was once being told at a party or something, and the
person being asked correctly made up a completely
irrelevant answer, and was promptly corrected by a loud
chorus of "No, it's a fish !")
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The enormous faith of many made for one.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle iii, Line 242
%
snow bridge: card game played on a glacier. as in other alpine endeavors,
tricks are common, and there is always a dummy.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Truth can be a dangerous thing. It is quite patient and relentless.
-- R. Scott Richards
%
QWERT (kwirt), n. [MW < OW qwertyuiop, a thirteenth]:
 1. a unit of weight equal to 13 poiuyt avoirdupois (or 1.69
kiloliks), commonly used in structural engineering; 2.  [colloq.] one
thirteenth the load that a fully grown sligo can carry; 3. [anat.] a
painful irritation of the dermis in the region of the anus; 4. [slang]
person who excites in others the symptoms of a qwert.
-- Webster's Middle World Dictionary, 4th ed.
%
A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent
 to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact
 remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one
 reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell.
 It is for this group of beings that the magician learns the subtleties
 of using indirect spells. It also does no harm, in dealing with these
 matters, to carry a large club near your person at all times.
-- "The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII"
%
No sooner is a temple built to God, but the Devil builds a chapel hard by.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- Jacula Prudentum
%
The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk
on the earth.
-- Chinese proverb
%
Sorry, I don't date outside my species.
-- Bumper Sticker
%
And oftentimes, excusing of a fault,
Doth make a fault the worse by the excuse;
As patches set upon a little breach,
Discredit more in hiding of the fault,
Than did the fault before it was so patch'd.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
The look, the textures... it's like a movie it's so real.
-- Michael J. Fox,  The Hard Way
%
To seek permission is to seek denial.
-- Steve Jobs
%
I don't want no foo-foo haircut
Standing over my head!
-- Mojo Nixon
%
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder,
a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he
hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to
travel.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Travel
%
The basic building blocks of matter do not occur in nature.
-- Second Law of Particle Physics
%
"No reward is worth this." -Han Solo
-- ...understanding Work Satisfaction...
%
In the elder days of Art,
  Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
  For the gods see everywhere.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- The Builders
%
During the Middle Ages, probably one of the biggest mistakes was not putting on
 your armor because you were "just going down to the corner."
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
if Goodwill declines your mattress.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Some people are paid to be good, but we're good for nothing.
-- Peter Campbell
%
The Faith that stands on authority is not faith.
-- Emerson
%
Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 872
%
You really know you have gotten a good and just revenge whe your prey makes
useless hand motions before being plowed under by the steamroller of destiny!
-- From the tales of dale turbo
%
I find you lack of faith in the forth dithturbing.
-- Darse ("Darth") Vader
%
A phaser is the universal communicator.
-- Worf
%
Ye banks and braes o' bonny Doon,
  How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
  And I sae weary fu' o' care?
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- The Banks of Doon
%
A body on vacation tends to remain on vacation unless acted upon by an outside
 force.
-- Carol Reichel
%
Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to
 your regular duties.
-- Doug Larson
%
During this past Christmas while I was on a shopping spree in a department
 store I heard a little five-year-old talking to his mother on the down
 escalator. He said, "Mommy, what do they do when the basement gets full of
 steps?"
-- Hal Linden
%
The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart."
-- Mencius
%
Kirk: "We must do this again sometime."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
What you own is your own kingdom What you do is your own glory What you
love is your own power What you live is your own story... You don't get
something for nothing You can't have freedom for free You won't get wise
with the sleep still in your eyes No matter what your dream might be.
-- N. Peart
%
    SAS programmers
How many?
It depends : - If they are applications programmers, it
takes exactly twice as many as are currently available.
If they are host programmers, it takes one for each
variant of Unix and/or MicroSoft Windows. If they are
core programmers, it only takes one. He just holds the
bulb to the socket and waits for the world to revolve
around him.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
If a thing cannot be fitted into something smaller than itself some
dope will do it.
-- Eric Frank Russell
%
He was the Word, that spake it:
He took the bread and brake it;
And what that Word did make it,
I do believe and take it.
-- Dr. John Donne (1573-1631)
-- Divine Poems, On the Sacrament
%
"A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing, clanging loudly and
vainly as the train goes by."
-- Christopher Morley
%
What is it in you humans that requires an overwhelming display of
  emotion in a situation such as this?  Two men pursue the only reasonable
  course of action indicated, and yet you feel that something else is
  necessary.
-- Spock, "That Which Survives," stardate unknown.
%
Lister: Well, if you've got some amazing secret plan up your sleeve, Kryten,
        now's the time to mention it.
-- Kryten: No plan, sir no sleeves.
-- Red Dwarf - 'Inquisitor'
%
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
-- H.L. Mencken
%
Though old the thought and oft exprest,
'T is his at last who says it best.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- For an Autograph
%
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
I put one in each eye and two up each nostril.
-- Agent Cooper
%
To surpress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to
freeze society and prevent progress ... Now more than ever, we must
keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take
away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of
liberty for those we love.
-- Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), Republican candidate for President, 1940
%
I've learned my lesson Q.
Remember who you're talking to. All knowing, all seeing.
-- Q and Q2, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
My lips pressed themselves involuntarily to hers- a long, long kiss, burning
intense-concentrating emotion, heart, soul, all the rays of life's light...
into a single focus.
-- Bulwer
%
I was walking down the street and all of a sudden the prescription
for my eye-glasses ran out.
-- Steven Wright
%
Throw away that vibrator device that is supposed to take fat off
your thighs.  Admit it, the thing never worked, did it?
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
The vile are only vain; the great are proud.
-- Byron
%
Give you a reason on compulsion! If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries,
I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
Ha!  I NEVER pay income tax!
-- Famous Last Words
%
Today I met with a subliminal advertising executive for
just a second.
-- Steven Wright
%
Teacher: "Dara and her brother found themselves in the land of Targus,
where the
  ruler, Eliamos the Magnificent, had proclaimed his law, 'No children will be
  tolerated within the great kingdom.'  When Dara saw the proclamation she just
  laughed, and said, 'How magnificent a ruler, to be frightened by the likes of
  us!'"
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Spock: "Mister Sulu, you may...indulge yourself."
Sulu: "Aye, sir!"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
-- Seneca
%
    No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
-- Sir Frederick G. Banting
%
Elektra.  Over there.  It's a flying dwarf.
-- Strange doings in ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN
%
no wagering.
-- Remember, this is only an exhibition, this is NOT a competition please,
-- Late Night with David Letterman
%
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.)
%
A computer is just a toy if it cannot run GNU Emacs
-- Steven L. Baur
%
My nearest
And dearest enemy.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- Anything for a Quiet Life, Act v, Sc. 1
%
Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.
-- Lavater
%
          EARTH
      smog  |  bricks
soda water  |  tequila
          WATER
-- AIR    mud    FIRE
%
When you're lo-oo-oony then you just don't give a fig
 Man's so pu-uu-uuny and the universe so big-
 If you hurt inside, get certified, and if life should treat you bad

 Don't get ee-ee-eeven
 Don't get ee-ee-eeven
 Don't get ee-ee-eeven
 Get MAD!
-- The Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke
%
All right, go lie upon the beach, To bake beyond the water's reach;
But if you're blistered when you quit, Remember that you basked for it.
-- Anthony B. Lake
%
Bereavement leave is limited to 3 days immediately following the death
of the family member and must be scheduled in advance.
-- from an employee handbook of a Pittsburgh (Oakland area) hospital.
%
 No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be
someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it
happened according to his own pet theory.
-- Finagle's Second Law
%
He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.
-- Jesus Christ
%
Once is not enough.
-- Jacqueline Suzanne
%
I know a lot of people without brains who do an awful lot of talking.
-- The Scarecrow, Wizard of Oz
%
DEPENDENT, adj.  Reliant upon another's generosity for the support
which you are not in a position to exact from his fears.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Never hate you enemies, it affects your judgment.
-- Michael Corleone
%
I'm doomed to wander around here aimlessly for eternity...or until they
 demolish the mill for a mini-mall, whichever comes first.
-- Grungy Bill, Hole in the Head Gang, Eerie Indiana
%
:macro-: pref. Large.  Opposite of {micro-}.  In the mainstream
   and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people)
   this competes with the prefix {mega-}, but hackers tend to
   restrict the latter to quantification.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It's the most unhappy people who most fear change.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
%
Athletic fields and golf courses excepted, the out-of-doors wears
an evil aspect, dominated as it is by insects and the brainless
proliferation of vegetable forms.
-- John Updike (from "A month of Sundays")
%
Marriage, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the most wonderful,
 heartwarming, satisfying experiences a human being can have. I've only been
 married seventeen years, so I haven't seen that side of it yet.
-- George Gobel
%
Some hae meat and canna eat,
  And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
  Sae let the Lord be thankit.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Grace before Meat
%
You are uneasy; you never sailed with me before, I see.
-- Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)
-- Life of Jackson (Parton), Vol. iii, p. 493
%
an art.
-- Art is almost always a political statement and politics is almost always
-- Solomon Short
%
:cookbook: [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small
   code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic}
   things in programs.  One current example is the
   "{{PostScript}} Language Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe
   Systems, Inc (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3), also known as
   the {Blue Book} which has recipes for things like wrapping text
   around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts.  Cookbooks, slavishly
   followed, can lead one into {voodoo programming}, but are useful
   for hackers trying to {monkey up} small programs in unknown
   languages.  This function is analogous to the role of phrasebooks
   in human languages.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
1776 - 1984
There Is No Middle Ground
-- a button from the Libertarian Party
%
rockies: very small stones.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
The rules which govern craps are not generally applicable to reality.
-- Spock
%
 "Urinary Tract Infections" by I. Pease Eldom
-- Booktip of the month
%
Wisdom consists of knowing when to avoid perfection.
-- Horowitz' Rule
%
What! canst thou say all this and never blush?
-- William Shakespeare
%
..  If I had heart failure right now, I couldn't be a more fortunate man!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
For never, never, wicked man was wise.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book ii, Line 320
%
McCoy: "We've got a full confession."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Said Scopas of Thessaly, "We rich men count our felicity and happiness
to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of the Love of Wealth
%
If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and you friends
are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend
you were swimming.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
    Paul Daniels
None. "And that's magic !"
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
"Odious! in woollen! 't would a saint provoke,"
Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Moral Essays, Epistle i, Line 246
%
The greater the number of professionals (advanced degrees preferred)
assigned to a project, the greater the progress.
-- Richard F. Moore
%
PEGGY FLEMING is stealing BASKET BALLS to feed the babies in VERMONT.
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
    Christians
Three, but they're really only one.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
"Einstein is an analytical mathematician seeking to give a physical
interpretation to the conclusions of his mathematical process.  In
this he is hampered by a load of contradictory and absurd assumptions
of the school that he follows, which throws him into all manner of
difficulty.  Einstein has such a faculty for embracing both sides
of a contradiction that one would have to be of the same frame of
mind to follow his thought, it is so peculiarly his own.  The whole
Relativity theory is as easy to follow as the path of a bat in the
air at night."
-- Father Jeremiah Joseph Callahan,
-- President of Duquesne University,
-- Einstein or Euclid:
-- A Proof of the Parallel Theory and a Critique of Metageometry, 1931
%
Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.
-- William Collins, "Hassan"
%
While I was at home with father, he used to tell me his opinions,
and I held the same opinions.  If I had others, I concealed them,
because he wouldn't have liked it.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) (Nora, in "A Doll's House")
%
    Arians
Just the one. You want to make something of it, eh?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Have you noticed that your body is playing little tricks on you lately? If
 you are a boy, you may have noticed your legs, face, arms, and chest are
 becoming covered with thick, black hairs and your voice may be beginning to
 sound like a phonograph needle ruining your favorite stack of platters. If
 you are a girl, you may have noticed a painful swelling up here and some
 more funny business going on down there.

 These dramatic changes can mean only one thing: cholera. If you are not
 among the lucky ones, then it simply means you are becoming a young man or
 a young woman, depending on how much fluoride they dumped in your parents'
 drinking water. I know that such changes can often be difficult for growing
 teens, but try to weather the storm and "grin and bear it." There is always
 impotence and menopause.
-- Doug Kenney
%
YOU PICKED KARL MALDEN'S NOSE!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
If a guy tells me the probability of failure is
 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap.
-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
-- "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
%
:job security: n. When some piece of code is written in a
   particularly {obscure} fashion, and no good reason (such as time
   or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the
   programmer was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by
   making himself indispensable for maintenance).  This sour joke
   seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some
   code together and one points at a section and says "job security",
   the other one may just nod.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions
or its officeholders.  The country is the real thing, the substantial
thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for,
and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere
clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be
comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
Then came the churches,
 then came the schools,
 then came the lawyers,
 then came the rules.
-- Mark Knopfler
%
Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned
people.
-- Richard M. Nixon
%
The Woody Allen virus
  Bypasses the mother board to corrupt the daughter boards.
-- New viruses on the block.
%
 d:-( Baseball player on strike...
-- SMILEY
%
Talk to fish.  Sooner or later, they will talk back.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
A breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
McCoy: "I'm a doctor, not an escalator."
-- "Friday's Child", Stardate 3497.2.
%
The Opinions expressed here are my own -
I managed to form them without *Any* help from my employers.....
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Throw strikes. Home plate don't move.
-- Satchel Paige
%
Flower People don't you cry; it's not too late.
-- Spinal Tap
%
    DBMS engineers
ALL. Two to support the backend, one to support the frontend, an interface
engineer to screw it up, and the rest to turn the base.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
When all candles bee out, all cats be gray.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. v
%
:stoppage: /sto'p*j/ n. Extreme {lossage} that renders
   something (usually something vital) completely unusable.  "The
   recent system stoppage was caused by a {fried} transformer."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to
people you could not possibly have met.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
:line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the
   wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this).  On a display
   terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen.
   "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line
   feed."  (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line
   above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.)
   2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to
   perform this action.  ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z,
   was one common line-starve character in the days before
   microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard.  Unlike `line
   feed', `line starve' is *not* standard {{ASCII}}
   terminology.  Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly.
   3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well
   as {{nroff}} and {{troff}}) that suppresses a {newline} or
   other character(s) that would normally be emitted.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.
-- Frederick Crane
%
While your friend holds you affectionately by both your hands you are
safe, for you can watch both of his.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), "The Devil's Dictionary", 1911
%
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
%
Programmer:
Red eyed mumbling mammal, capable of communicating with inanimate objects.
-- Computing Definition
%
    Alaskan men
Oh, none ... they just have one of their girlfriends do it.
[bitter laugh]
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that
every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be
submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality.  All proffered 
samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to 
common tests.  It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that
any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse.  The characteristic
of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually
secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known; 
authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary 
ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is
conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists,
there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in
religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics
where the method of free inquiry has made its way.  The "religious"
would be the last to be willing that either the history of the
content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those
to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device,
but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against
its being taught in any other spirit.
-- John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher,
-- from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908
%
:topic drift: n. Term used on GEnie, USENET and other electronic
   fora to describe the tendency of a {thread} to drift away from
   the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject
   header of the originating message), or the results of that
   tendency.  Often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has
   strayed off any useful track.  "I think we started with a question
   about Niven's last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual
   habits of the common marmoset.  Now *that's* topic drift!"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 It's what we know.
-- We're going to do it the way we always have the super-dumbass way...
-- The Lone Contractor
%
The spectacles of books.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Essay on Dramatic Poetry
%
Truth fears no questions.
-- favorite philosophical motto of the Stilt Man
%
Thank you, good sir, I owe you one.
-- George Colman, the Younger (1762-1836)
-- The Poor Gentleman, Act i, Sc. 2
%
The highest of all our laws states your world is yours and will
  always remain yours.
-- Kirk, "Friday's Child," stardate 3497.2.
%
 :-D talking too much
-- SMILEY
%
I spend money with reckless abandon. Last month I blew five thousand
 dollars at a reincarnation seminar. I got to thinking, what the hell, you
 only live once.
-- Ronnie Shakes
%
Those who in quarrels interpose
Must often wipe a bloody nose.
-- John Gay (1688-1732)
-- Fables, Part i, The Mastiffs
%
...For 'tis better to die poor than to live in shame and ignominy.
No, it isn't.
-- Kate and her father : Bells
%
If you're traveling in a time machine, and you're eating corn on the cob, I
 don't think it's going to affect things one way or the other.  But here's the
 point I'm trying to make: Corn on the cob is good, isn't it.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 256
%
In the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty
land is seldom seen.
-- Luke Rhinehart
%
A new broom sweeps clean, but never trust an old saw.
-- James Thurber
%
What IS a `moderate Iranian', anyway? Someone who takes hostages but doesn't
eat them?
-- Mark Russell
%
Here comes Mr. Bill's dog.
-- Narrator, Saturday Night Live
%
Be suspicious of anything that works perfectly --
it's probably because two errors are canceling
each other out.
-- Dave Bartley
%
Our characters are the result of our conduct.
-- Aristotle
%
I've heard of a football team getting into a telephone kiosk, but
this was ridiculous.
-- Scobie, Time-Flight
%
You can do this in a number of ways.   IBM chose to do all of them.
Why do you find that funny?
-- D. Taylor, Computer Science 350
%

-- Disk space the final frontier!
%
I don't feel good.
-- The last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
%
:blow out: [prob. from mining and tunneling jargon] vi. Of
   software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as {crash and
   burn}.  See {blow past}, {blow up}, {die
   horribly}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day
will take care of itself.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
-- Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law
%
Anything you do can get you shot, including nothing.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #15
%
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.
-- Aristotle Onassis
%
Indifference is the only sure defence.
-- Jody Powell
%
A child of five would understand this.
-- Send someone to fetch a child of five.
-- Groucho Marx
%
She pays him in his own coin.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue iii
%
NASA Announces New Deck Chair Arrangement For Space Station Titanic.
-- Tom Neff
%
There's the commercial on TV where the woman is smelling her clothes. She
 says, "They smell as fresh as all outdoors!" Is that ridiculous? Do you
 realize what all outdoors smells like? If she lived in New York, she'd
 cough for twenty-two minutes.
-- Larry Wilde
%
I used to smoke marijuana, but that was when I was in college, before it
was a drug.
-- J. Danforth Quayle
%
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in
silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all
persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to
the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive
persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser
persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep
interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the
changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the
world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.  Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the
grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things
of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do
not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and
loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a
child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to
be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is
unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive
Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of
life, keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.
-- Max Ehrman (1872-1945) - "Desiderata" (1927)
%
Loveliness
Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Seasons, Autumn, Line 204
%
Sorry 'bout that sweat, honey.  That's just holy water.
-- Little Richard
%
Fabricius finds certain spots and clouds in the sun.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part ii, Sect. 2, Memb. 3
%
Obedience.  A religion of slaves.  A religion of intellectual death.  I like
has been conveniently brought to you by a man in a Rolls with a heavy Rolex
on his wrist.  I like that job!  Where can I sign up?
-- it.  Don't ask questions, don't think, obey the Word of the Lord     as it
-- Oleg Kiselev,oleg@CS.UCLA.EDU
%
    Republican Presidential candidates from 1988
(Bush) None. (Bush in an earnest lap dog voice) I resent
that question. I've answered it before, and I think the
media are keeping this thing alive. I think the American
people are TIRED of light bulb jokes.
-- How many
-- did it take to change a light bulb?
%
One item could not be deleted because it was missing.
-- Mac System 7.0b1 error message
%
Hark! to the hurried question of despair:
"Where is my child?"--an echo answers, "Where?
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Bride of Abydos, Canto ii, Stanza 27
%
Marriage is not merely sharing the fettucine, but sharing the burden
of finding the fettucine restaurant in the first place.
-- Calvin Trillin
%
Sorry I'm late!
Oh, don't bother apologising. I'm sorry you're alive.
-- Percy and Edmund : Bells
%
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
-- Abraham Lincoln
%
Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your
double, and after that, your friend or your foe, depending on his bringing up.
-- Hasdai Ibn Shaprut
%
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
 Plagiarize,
 Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
 Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
 So don't shade your eyes,
 But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize-
 Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-- Advice from Nicholai Ivanovich Lobachevsky
-- Tom Lehrer
%
It warms me, it charms me, To mention but her name; It heats me,
it beats me, And set me a' on flame.
-- Burns
%
And do you think (fop that I am) that I could be the Scarlet Pumpernickel?
-- Looney Tunes, The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950, Chuck Jones)
%
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
-- Edith Sitwell
%
if taillight covers on your car are made of tape.
-- You may be redneck...
%
It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon.  Which
 raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody
 not to.
-- Franklin P. Jones
%
I made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply says...'Bugger'.
-- Cpt. Darling : Goodbyeee...
%
If we had no defects ourselves, we should not take so much pleasure
in noting those of others.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
May you never meet a mouse in your cupboard with tears in his eyes!
-- J. C. Furnas
%
Her angels face,
As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place.
-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
-- The Faerie Queene, Book i, Canto iii, St. 4
%
HOURI, n.  A comely female inhabiting the Mohammedan Paradise to make
things cheery for the good Mussulman, whose belief in her existence
marks a noble discontent with his earthly spouse, whom he denies a
soul.  By that good lady the Houris are said to be held in deficient
esteem.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
How ridiculous and unrealistic is the man who is astonished at anything
that happens in life.
-- Marcus Aurelius
%
        God built a compelling sex drive into every creature, no
matter what style of fucking it practiced.   He made sex irresistibly
pleasurable, wildly joyous, free from fears.  He made it innocent
merriment.
        Needless to say, fucking was an immediate smash hit.   Everyone
lambs, rhinoceroses and gazelles, skylarks and lobsters, even insects,
innocently and merrily for hundreds of millions of years.  Maybe they
were dumb animals, but they knew a good thing when they had one.
-- agreed, from aardvarks to zebras.  All the jolly animals lions and
-- though most of them fuck only once in a lifetime fucked along
-- Alan Sherman, The Rape of the A*P*E*
%
Security is mostly a superstition. Security does not exist in nature, nor do
the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in
the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or
nothing.
-- Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957)
%
Executives who do not produce successful results hold on to their jobs only
about five years. Those who produce effective results hang on about half a
decade.
-- Augustine's Law Number XXIX
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
United Nations
-- Oxymoron
%
I'm a living saint, but you can just call me Sister Cindy.
-- Sister Cindy
%
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Annajanska"
%
The early village cock
Hath twice done salutation to the morn.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
The cream rises to the top.
So does the scum.
-- Wellington's Law of Command
%
 That ready wit, which you so partially allow me, ... may create
many admirers; but, take my word for it, it makes few friends.  It
shines and dazzles like the noonday sun, but, like that, too, it is
very apt to scorch, and therefore is always feared.  The milder
morning and evening light and heat of that planet soothe and calm our
minds.  Never seek for wit; if it present itself, well and good; but
even then, let your judgement interpose, and take care that it be not
at the expense of anybody.
-- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield, 1749
%
In the end, one or the other will triumph.  A funeral dirge will be sung
over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism.
-- Vladimir I. Lenin, 1920
%
Life is too important to take seriously.
-- Corky Siegel
%
Troi: "How do you feel now?"
Barclay: "Smaller."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44721.9
%
The advice you give a kid is considered dumb until he gets the same advice
from another kid.
-- Doug Larson
%
PRO:  You won't be around to get bothered by kids in a nursing home.
CON:  You can't go to your local nursing home and bother the old people.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to
establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.
-- Charles Burchfield
%
'T is strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto xi, Stanza 59
%
A system tends to grow in terms of complexity rather than of simplification,
until the resulting unreliability becomes intolerable.
-- Tom Gibb
%
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right;
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Present Crisis
%
Chivilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect
for all men.
-- Jane Addams
%
A dinner lubricates business.
-- Lord Stowell (1745-1836)
-- Life of Johnson (Boswell), Vol. viii, p. 67, note
%
It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good
 than to be ugly.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
    university students
Two. One to fuse all the electrics while doing something
silly, and one to phone the landlord to ask for the
light bulb to be changed.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I majored in nursing. I had to drop it. I ran out of milk.
-- Judy Tenuta
%
Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xviii, 22
%
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xix, 2
%
When a liar gets pharyngitis, he loses his vice.
-- Alan F. G. Lewis
%
Love is not without fears.
-- Proverb
%
Must we force ourselves to forget the anguish and the wounds of the past
 so we can look to the future and move forward?    And by forgetting these
  wounds let them fester in our souls?
-- Ba Jin
%
Actions speak louder than words.
-- Proverb
%
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless
 you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
-- Dave Barry
%
People are either born hosts or born guests.
-- Max Beerbohm
%
The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
%
:off the trolley: adj. Describes the behavior of a program that
   malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually {crash} or
   abort.  See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I'm a nuclear submarine under the polar ice cap and I need a Kleenex!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
It helps a little if you review Alice in Wonderland immediately before
examining the export regulations.
-- Prof. Jerry Saltzer, in 1988
%
YANKEE, n.  In Europe, an American.  In the Northern States of our
Union, a New Englander.  In the Southern States the word is unknown.
(See DAMNYANK.)
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
-- George Santayana
%
Rabble: In a republic, those who hold supreme power tempered by
       fraudulent elections.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
-- Juvenal, Satires
%
 :-: mutant smiley
-- SMILEY
%
Luck is the residue of design.
-- Branch Rickey, Hall of Fame-er
%
I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been
  told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman
  getting ready to arrest her.
-- New York City detective
%
There is a cunning which we in England call "the turning of the cat
in the pan;" which is, when that which a man says to another, he lays
it as if another had said it to him.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Cunning
%
Riker: "Barclay!  Barclay?  What's going on?  Barclay!"
Barclay: "Yes, Commander, it's me."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two
great outrages upon its naive self-love.  The first was when it realized that
our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in
a world-system
of a magnitude hardly conceivable...  The second was when biological research
robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created, and
relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
-- Sigmund Freud
%
Lister: Look at what he's given me for dinner: a pea on toast.  One pea.
        I tell you, I'm that far from cracking.  (goes to squish the pea;
        it snaps away) I've lost my pea! Oh, that's it! I've cracked.
Rimmer: He's just doing this to destroy your morale.
Lister: Is he?  Well, I want my pea back. It's my pea. I earned that pea.
        Where is it?  I don't care if it's on the floor all covered in fluff,
        if it's under the bed with my toenail clippings, I don't care where
        what!
Rimmer: It flew off into your dirty-sock basket.
Lister: I'll just have the toast.
-- it is it's my pea, I earned it, and I'm going to eat it no matter
-- Red Dwarf - 'Queeg'
%
After Bart has been beat up by the bully, his family walks by and Lisa puts a
cupcake on his forehead ...
Bully: "Hey!  They even have food at this thing!  Here's one for the road ..."
-- "Bart the General", from The Simpsons
%
There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.
-- Russian proverb
%
:cd tilde: /C-D til-d*/ vi.  To go home.  From the UNIX C-shell
   and Korn-shell command `cd ~', which takes one to
   one's `$HOME' (`cd' with no arguments happens to do the
   same thing).  By extension, may be used with other arguments; thus,
   over an electronic chat link, `cd ~coffee' would
   mean "I'm going to the coffee machine."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Data: "Intriguing.  You have devised a completely unanticipated response to a
  classic attack.  You will checkmate my king in seven moves."
Troi: "Data, chess isn't just a game of plays and gambits.  It's a game of
  intuition."
Data: "Hmm."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in
students.
-- John Ciardi
%
For every organisation, there is an equal and opposite
reorganisation.
-- Pickett's First Law of the Company
%
If God had intended us not to masturbate he would've made our arms shorter.
-- George Carlin
%
 (-E: wearing bifocals
-- SMILEY
%
Do you imagine that the universe is agitated? Go out into the desert at
night and look up at the sky. This practice should answer the question
-- Lao Tzu
%
The day of individual happiness has passed.
-- Adolf Hitler
%
You've really worked out your banter, haven't you.
Not really - this is a different thing. It's spontaneous and it's
called 'wit'.
-- Mr Pants and Edmund : Money
%
What's the use of computers? They'll never play chess, draw art or
make music.
-- Jean Genet
%
Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
As the breeches-buoy swing towards the rocks,
Its occupant cried, "Save my socks!
    I could not bear the loss,
    For with scarlet silk floss
My mama has embroidered their clocks."
-- Edward Gorey
%
Riker: "Are you saying you think there're people living in there?"
Data: "Possibly a great number of people, Commander.  The interior surface area
  of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two-hundred and fifty
  million Class-M planets."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
Data, I'm only going to tell you this just once. It never happened.
-- Yar to Data, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2
%
Nice guys finish last.
-- Leo Durocher
%
Conversational Slumming:
 The self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely
for its lack of intellectual rigor. A major spin-off of Recreational
Slumming.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
...truth belongs to wine and children.
-- Erasmus
%
I didn't know it then, but looking back, in hind-sight, I realize that
when I was younger I could see into the future.  Now I'm getting all
my premonitions as flashbacks!
-- Steven Wright
%
Subject to a kind of disease, which at that time they called lack of money.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book ii, Chap. xvi
%
This is no time for consensus government.  It's a time for leadership.  The
average citizen doesn't know what the stakes are in Vietnam.
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, February 11, 1965
%
Philosophy:  unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
-- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
%
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and
I dare a little the more as I grow older.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap ii, Of Repentance
%
In handling a stinging insect, move very slowly.
-- Lazurus Long
%
The eftest way.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
-- Eugene Delacroix
%
Here is the devil-and-all to pay.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iv, Chap. x
%
Ah well, they say its not as bad as they say it is.
-- Oxymoron
%
"Poor deer," quoth he, "thou makest a testament
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more
To that which had too much."
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Make a bet everyday,
otherwise you might walk around lucky and never know it.
-- Jimmy Jones
%
Think lucky. If you fall in a pond, check your pockets for fish.
-- Darrell Royal
%
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
-- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
%
Laws don't work, unless they merely codify generally accepted behavior,
 in which case they are probably unnecessary.
-- tom@genie.slhs.udel.edu
%
The Svengali Defense
-- Female-Only Defense 11
%
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is
experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
-- Marshall McLuhan
%
'T is greatly wise to talk with our past hours,
And ask them what report they bore to heaven.
 - Night Thoughts, Night ii, Line 376
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
It is rather to be chosen than great riches, unless I
have omitted something from the quotation.
-- Robert Benchley (1889-1945)i
-- see Proverbs xxii, 1
%
    West Virginians
None, they don't have Eeeeelextrisssity in West Virginia.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Sir, this mans crazy, you can't let him out of the army.
-- Frank, M*A*S*H
%
"Instead of all of this energy and effort directed at the war
to end drugs, how about a little attention to drugs which will
end war?"
-- Albert Hofmann
%
Couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
-- Common in Australia
%
There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's,
than in all 'Tom Jones.'
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
Looking as like... as one pea does like another.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. ii
%
Its important to use apostrophe's right.
-- Writing Rule 13
%
A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick
in his mouth.
-- Trischmann's Paradox
%
Be Yourself. Who else is better qualified?
-- Frank J. Giblin II
%
Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go
outdoors.
-- Norman Cousins
%
"We've got company."
"Police?  How many?"
"All of them I think."
-- Terminator II
%
  Varsh: That's not Alzarius.
  Romana: No, it's still Gallifrey.  If the Doctor's theory's right
         we'll need a local image translator to see what's out there.
  Adric: Or we could just look out through the door.
-- Full Circle
%
PRO:  No more stupid inner city people.
CON:  No more cool local people.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
An atheist is but a mad ridiculous derider of piety; but a hypocrite
makes a sober jest of God and religion; he finds it easier to be
upon his knees than to rise to a good action.
-- Alexander Pope
%
A Rose is sweeter in the budde than full blowne.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues and his England, Page 314
%

-- <---The information went data way ----->
%
A man's good breeding is the best security against another's bad manners.
-- Chesterfield
%
    pot growers
None, they use fluorescent bulbs instead.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
:deep space: n. 1. Describes the notional location of any program
   that has gone {off the trolley}.  Esp. used of programs that
   just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some
   output is expected.  "Uh oh.  I should have gotten a prompt ten
   seconds ago.  The program's in deep space somewhere." Compare
   {buzz}, {catatonic}, {hyperspace}.  2. The metaphorical
   location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some
   esoteric form of {bogosity} that he or she no longer responds
   coherently to normal communication.  Compare {page out}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"Captain Kirk.  It's a pleasure to welcome you to Noldicia.
More fun than humans should be allowed to have."
-- Late Night with David Letterman
%
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
%
Far from gay cities and the ways of men.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xiv, Line 410
%
Kissing is a custom in France. We kiss a man we haven't seen in five
 years--or a woman we haven't seen in five minutes.
-- Maurice Chevalier
%
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Conduct of Life", 1860
%
No one minds what Jeffrey says:... it is not more than a week ago
that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 17
%
The relative importance of files depends on their cost
in terms of the human effort needed to regenerate them.
-- T. A. Dolotta
%
ARTHUR: What are you going to do. bleed on me?
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
%
KLU KLUX KLAN
  People without a Klu. See Wanker.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
No, some men just don't like to be taken for a ride.
-- James Bond
%
A true friend is forever or fiend.
-- Proverb
%
  Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Obedience Training, DOGO
heralds a new era of computer-literate pets.  DOGO commands include SIT,
STAY, HEEL, and ROLL OVER.  An innovative feature of DOGO is "puppy
graphics", a small cocker spaniel that occasionally leaves a deposit as
he travels across the screen.
-- THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17 DOGO
%
History has shown us that strength may be useless when faced with
  terrorism.
-- Picard, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7
%
The intensity of movie publicity is in inverse ratio to the quality
of the movie.
-- Gene Shalit
%
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book vi, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 96
%
The burden which is well borne becomes light.
-- Ovid
%
We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around
and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.
-- Alan Chadwick
%
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any
hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
-- Carl Sagan, Contact
%
little more supportable than the one and a little more intolerable
than the other.  Sometimes it is conferred by an unfriendly and
inconsiderate hand.

    I touched the harp in every key,
        But found no heeding ear;
    And then Ithuriel touched me
        With a revealing spear.

    Not all my genius, great as 'tis,
        Could urge me out of night.
    I felt the faint appulse of his,
        And leapt into the light!
                                                        W.J. Candleton
-- RENOWN, n.  A degree of distinction between notoriety and fame a
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Who in life's battle firm doth stand
Shall bear hope's tender blossoms
  Into the silent land!
-- J. G. Von Salis (1762-1834)
-- The Silent Land
%
You must grow like a tree, not like a mushroom.
-- Janet Erskine Stewart
%
I do everything for a reason,
most of the time the reason is for money.
-- Suzy Parker
%
An employee with nothing to hide may well be an employee with
nothing to offer.
-- Robert Ellis Smith, Publisher of the 'Privacy Journal'
%
 Bullwinkle:  Hey, Rocky, somebody called while we weren't home.
              Watch me pull their message out of this machine!
 Rocky:       Again?
 Bullwinkle:  Nuthin' up my sleeve...  PRESTO!  (Sound of vicious
              dog barking, stops abruptly.)
 Bullwinkle:  Must have been a wrong number.
 Rocky:       Here's a chance for you to REALLY leave your message.
-- Answering machine madness - miscellaneous
%
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand
to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished
at how much he had learned in seven years.
-- Mark Twain
%
Mathematicians stand on eaach other's shoulder,
Computer Scientists stand on each other's toes.
-- someone on the net (please email attribution), about look&feel lawsuits
%
Have you ever used
... TPU?
... TECO?
... Emacs?
... ed?
... vi?
... Xedit (in VM/CMS)?
... SOS?
... EDT?
... Wordstar?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Happiness is in direct proportion to the distance from the home office.
Contradictory Corollary: The diner who is furthest from the kitchen
is a nervous eater.
-- Al Blanchard
%
Love?   What is love?  I want existence.
-- Marriner, Enlightenment
%
Beauty is everlasting
And dust is for a time.
-- Marianne Moore
%
It was a saying of Demetrius Phalereus, that "Men having often abandoned
what was visible for the sake of what was uncertain, have not got
what they expected, and have lost what they had,--being unfortunate
by an enigmatical sort of calamity."
-- Athenaeus (c. 200 AD)
-- The Deipnosophists, vi, 23
%
The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing
with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic
with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing
toward their own problems.
-- S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire, 1947
%
6/ Movie related foods do not contain calories (ie Buttered Popcorn
   Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Red Hots, Smarties etc.). These are
   considered as part of the entire Entertainment Package, not part
   of the diet.
-- DIETING RULES & CALORIE COUNTER
%
Whoe'er she be,
That not impossible she,
That shall command my heart and me.
-- Richard Crashaw (c. 1616-1650)
-- Wishes to his Supposed Mistress
%
... people do not attempt to mate with cats, and frogs do not
attempt to mate with scientist (although the latter possibility
might result in a researcher who jumps to conclusions).
-- "Genetic Algorithms" by David E. Goldberg
%
LaForge: "Looks like we're all in the same boat."
Riker: "Make that 'the same starship'."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
 (Loud heavy-metal music in background; raspy voice:)  Hello,
 this is the executioner.  Joe can't come to the phone right now
 because he's DEAD!  Leave a name and number and IF we decide to
 resurrect him, he'll call you back.
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
Ya gotta be subtle!
-- Mike Hammer
%
"How often does the train go by?"
"So often you don't even notice it."
-- The Blues Brothers
%
Buy my flowers,--oh buy, I pray!
  The blind girl comes from afar.
-- Edward Bulwer Lytton (1805-1873)
-- Buy my Flowers
%
 <:-I dunce
-- SMILEY
%
:Moof: /moof/ [MAC users] 1. n. A semi-legendary creature, also
   called the `dogcow', that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh
   Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story
   of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the particular Moof
   illustrated is properly named `Clarus').  Option-shift-click will
   cause it to emit a characteristic `Moof!' or `!fooM' sound.
   *Getting* to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover how to
   do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a hackerly
   eye.  Clue: {rot13} is involved.  A dogcow also appears if you
   choose `Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on
   the `Options' button.  2. adj. Used to flag software that's a hack,
   something untested and on the edge.  On one Apple CD-ROM, certain
   folders such as "Tools & Apps (Moof!)" and "Development
   Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to indicate that they contain
   software not fully tested or sanctioned by the powers that be.
   When you open these folders you cross the boundary into
   hackerland.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour 's at the stake.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 4
%
I am prepared for the fact that he may have lost some weight.
Yes....and some _height_.
-- Lady Farrow and Percy : Head
%
If your mind changes itself fast enough,
the result is vertigo.
-- Jim Harrison
%
And so it was, later, as the miller told his tale,
 that her face, at first just ghostly,
 turned a whiter shade of pale.
-- Procol Harum
%
As soon as the stewardess serves the coffee, the airliner
encounters turbulence.
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.
-- Rogers' Law
-- Davis' Explanation of Rogers' Law
%
 :-0 No Yelling! (Quiet Lab)
-- SMILEY
%
A bunch of girly-men.
-- Bush supporter Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the
-- Democratic presidential candidates,
-- one of whom had won the Medal of Honor.
-- (I'm not a hero, but I play one on TV.)
%
Apollo: "I am Apollo.  I've chosen you."
Palamas: "I'm sure that's very flattering..."
-- "Who Mourns For Adonais?", Stardate 3468.1.
%
Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always
proud of himself as the source of it.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
Yes, well, according to classical aerodynamics, it is
    impossible for a bumblebee to fly.
-- 3rd Doctor, THE DAEMONS
%
Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it.
Some can avoid it.  Geniuses remove it.
-- Perlis's Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept.  1982
%
:oriental food:: n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards
   oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier
   varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan.  This phenomenon (which has
   also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with
   hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been
   satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can
   assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best
   local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four.
   See also {ravs}, {great-wall}, {stir-fried random},
   {laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}.  Thai, Indian,
   Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%

-- Send Hillary where she truly belongs in prison.
%
if your wife has a beer belly and you find it cute.
-- You may be redneck...
%
RIGHTEOUSNESS, n.  A sturdy virtue that was once found among the
Pantidoodles inhabiting the lower part of the peninsula of Oque.  Some
feeble attempts were made by returned missionaries to introduce it
into several European countries, but it appears to have been
imperfectly expounded.  An example of this faulty exposition is found
in the only extant sermon of the pious Bishop Rowley, a characteristic
passage from which is here given:

        "Now righteousness consisteth not merely in a holy state of
    mind, nor yet in performance of religious rites and obedience to
    the letter of the law.  It is not enough that one be pious and
    just:  one must see to it that others also are in the same state;
    and to this end compulsion is a proper means.  Forasmuch as my
    injustice may work ill to another, so by his injustice may evil be
    wrought upon still another, the which it is as manifestly my duty
    to estop as to forestall mine own tort.  Wherefore if I would be
    righteous I am bound to restrain my neighbor, by force if needful,
    in all those injurious enterprises from which, through a better
    disposition and by the help of Heaven, I do myself restrain."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxiii, 24
%
Riker: "Mister Data, Mister Worf, I have a special mission for you."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short.  Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "The Cyberiad"
%
The amount of time saved by your plane arriving early
at your destination is equal to the amount of extra time
you have to wait for your luggage.
-- The Second Law Of Air Travel
%
It is simple to make things complex, but complex to make things simple.
-- Meyer's 3rd Law
%
When will I embrace this life I see? I've been wondering for so long
Thinking back, the truth may be I've been unaware but I've been living it
all along...
-- Blues Traveler
%
When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason--there's a reason.
-- Molly McGee (Marion Jordan)
%
He that goes far to marry, will either deceive or be deceived.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Work 'em hard, play 'em hard, feed 'em up to the nines, and send 'em to
 bed so tired that they are asleep before their heads are on the pillow.
-- Frank L. Boyden (Headmaster, Deerfield Academy)
%
A cult is a religion with no political power.
-- Tom Wolfe
%
Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?

It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food,
right?
-- MacNelley, Shoe
%
JEALOUS, adj.  Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which
can be lost only if not worth keeping.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
If we die, we want people to accept it.   We're in a risky business...
 The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.
-- Gus Grissom
%
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
-- Cornelius Tacitus
%
C is the assembly language of Tcl.

Assembly language is also available.
-- Karl Lehenbauer (karl@hackercorp.com)
-- Jordan Henderson      (jordan@hackercorp.com)
%
I have a rock garden.  Last week three of them died.
-- Richard Diran
%
    Communists
One, but it takes him about 30 years to realize that the old
one has burnt out.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), Prejudices, Third Series", 1922
%
The green button, gentlemen!
-- Doctor 4, FULL CIRCLE
%
...computer hardware progress is so fast.  No other technology since
civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price
gain in 30 years.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
%
PRESUMABLY AT LONGER TIME
I didn't take time to found out
-- Research definitions
%
The wife serves, the brother inherits
-- Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #137
%
If Christine and Mandy were convicted of anything, it was probably
perjury or some such. I don't remember the legal details; I was only
interested in the smut at the time.
-- anonymous usenetter on the details of the Profumo affair
%
A book is like a mirror:  If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an
apostle to look out.
-- G. C. Lichtenberg
%
14. Wipe thine ass with what is written and grin like a ninny at what is
Spoken. Take thine refuge with thine wine in the Nothing behind Everything,
as you hurry along the Path.
-- THE PURPLE SAGE, HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19
%
As this is not a real signature,
the opinions above may not even be mine.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
To us, violence is unthinkable.
-- Ayleborne of Organia, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3201.7.
%
God knows that a mother needs fortitude and courage and tolerance and
 flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect
 of the human soul. But because I happen to be a parent of almost fiercely
 maternal nature, I praise casualness. It seems to me the rarest of virtues.
 It is useful enough when children are small. It is important to the point
 of necessity when they are adolescents.
-- Phyllis McGinley
%
if your boat has not left the driveway in 5 years.
-- You may be redneck...
%
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods
of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity
of inquiry.
-- Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes"
%
For Time will teach thee soon the truth,
  There are no birds in last year's nest!
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- It is not always May
%
Shall I, like an hermit, dwell
On a rock or in a cell?
-- Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
-- Poem
%
There's a new organization being formed. It's called Feminists, Homeless,
and Blacks for Limbaugh. And they're meeting in a phone booth in Wichita.
-- Larry King
%
I may tell all my bones.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xxii, 17
%
Plots are like girdles.  Hidden, they hold your interest; revealed,
they're of no interest except to fetishists.  Like girdles, they
attempt to contain an uncontainable experience.
-- R. S. Knapp
%
I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute: and who but
I? Now, he that is absolute can do what he likes; he that can do what
he likes can take his pleasure; he that can take his pleasure can
be content; and he that can be content has no more to desire. So the
matter 's over; and come what will come, I am satisfied.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iv, Chap. xxiii
%
In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything
 done, ask a woman.
-- Margaret Thatcher
%
... [concerning quotation marks] even if we *did* quote anybody in this
business, it probably would be gibberish.
-- Thom McLeod
%
Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the
Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning."
-- The Official MBA Handbook on business cards
%
...after a large C program, you can't stop making algorithms.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step toward
something better.
-- Wendell Phillips
%
if you cut your toenails in front of company.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Why do I have to have a bag on my head?
In order, nin-com-poop, that she should believe you're her husband!
Why..did he use to wear a bag on his head?
-- Baldrick and Edmund : Head
%
Tomorrow's computers some time next month.
-- DEC
%
One that feared God and eschewed evil.
-- Old Testament
-- Job i, 1
%
A boss creates fear, a leader confidence.
A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes.
A boss knows all, a leader asks questions.
A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting.
A boss is interested in himself or herself,
a leader is interested in the group.
-- Ewing, Russel H.
%
My views and opinions do not reflect
the same for my employer or my country,
and definitely not the president!
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Take a straw and throw it up into the air,--you may see by that which
way the wind is.
-- John Selden (1584-1654)
-- Libels
%
Laugh, and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.
-- Anthony Burgess
%
Jean, are you busy at 5 o'clock? I need a girl pretty desperatly.
-- Ben Woodard
%
Gee, there must be hundreds of em!
-- Carl Sagan
%
Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some
sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him...
-- Monty Python "Ripping Yarns"
%
It takes money to waste money
-- Jon Benton
%
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have
  to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on
  their television screens.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)
%
Always tell her she's beautiful, especially if she isn't.
-- Lazarus Long
%
Wait and hope.
``There isn't one.''
-- A White House official,
-- describing the president's economic plan, November 1990.
-- On the backup plan
%
Breakpoint:
The point at which programmer increments past last bit available.
-- Computing Definition
%
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government
and business.
-- Tom Robbins
%
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
-- Victor Hugo
%
Most men employ the first part of their life, to make the rest miserable.
-- de La Bruyere
%
Fortune is a woman. It is necessary, if you wish to master her, to
take her by force before she has a chance to resist.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
%
Is there life before coffee?
-- Bumper Sticker
%
:\begin: // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used
   humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the
   surrounded text.  For example:

     \begin{flame}
     Predicate logic is the only good programming
     language.  Anyone who would use anything else
     is an idiot.  Also, all computers should be
     tredecimal instead of binary.
     \end{flame}

   The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in
   an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe).  On USENET,
   this construct would more frequently be rendered as `<FLAME
   ON>' and `<FLAME OFF>', or `#ifdef FLAME' and `#endif FLAME''.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The Joy of Sux - The History of the Electric Vacuum.
-- SLR
%
The name of the slough was Despond.
-- John Bunyan (1628-1688)
-- Pilgrim's Progress, Part i
%
You should've heard me before you got here.
-- Ro
%
Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from
 procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and
 then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia.   Furthermore,
 homosexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,'
 the venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates
 mount, and the family swiftly disintegrates.
     Contraception's Legacy, as quoted in The Far Right, Speaking For
     Themselves, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
-- Valerie Riches, Family Planning Educator, in her brochure,
%
Love tells us many things that are not so.
-- Ukranian Proverb
%
Being powerful is like being a lady.
If you have to tell people you are, you aren't!
-- Margaret Thatcher.
%
No man is a hero to his valet.
-- Anne-Marie Bigot de Cornuel
%
Old men are dangerous; it does not matter to them what is going to
happen to the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
 ("If I Only Had A Brain":)
 I might be in the shower,
 I might be gone for hours,
 I can't come to the phone.
 So, please leave your name and number,
 If I miss you it'd be a bummer,
 Leave your message at the tone...
-- Answering machine madness - mainly musical theme
%
:WAITS:: /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a
   handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990.  There was never an
   `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived
   at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as
   `West-coast Alternative to ITS'.  Though WAITS was less visible
   than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between
   the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted
   enormous indirect influence.  The early screen modes of {EMACS},
   of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time
   editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where
   one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting.  The modern
   style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there,
   and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in
   the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the
   Sun workstations.  {Bucky bits} were also invented there ---
   thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy.  One notable
   WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface
   that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI
   dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a
   still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia'
   computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched
   to programming terminals.
-- for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor -one
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It is no act of common passage, but
A strain of rareness.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew
he never would be found out.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay
%
[I promise to] mount a comprehensive effort to reduce the cost of
health care in America.
The best prescription for better health
in America is a strong, daily dose of personal responsibility.
-- George Bush, campaigning in 1988.  In February 1990 he said:
%
O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou
hast perswaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all
the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
despised. Thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse,
all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over
with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!
-- Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
-- Historie of the World, Book v, Part 1
%
In a mature society, "civil servant" is semantically equal to "civil master."
-- Lazarus Long
%
Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
-- Antony and Cleopatra
%
When men are arrived at the goal, they should not turn back.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of the Training of Children
%
Heroic, stoic Cato, the sententious,
Who lent his lady to his friend Hortensius.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto vi, Stanza 7
%
:grok: /grok/, var. /grohk/ [from the novel "Stranger in
   a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word
   meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one
   with'] vt. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense.  Connotes
   intimate and exhaustive knowledge.  Contrast {zen}, which is similar
   supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash.  See also
   {glark}.  2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient
   understanding.  "Almost all C compilers grok the `void' type
   these days."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
   Mark Goodier: What's the name of the company you work for?
   Listener:     Mining and Engineering Services.
   Mark Goodier: So, what kind of work do they do: is it mining and
                 engineering services?
-- BBC Radio 1
%
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star!
-- Paul Dirac
%
Mein Hund hat keine nase. Wie Riecht er?    Furchtbar!
-- Hitler's Pre-War Joke
%
Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Contented wi' Little
%
If the earth had waited for a precedent,
it would never have turned on its axis.
-- Maria Mitchell
%
Cynic, n.: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are,
not as they
ought to be.  Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's
eyes to improve his vision.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
You deliver a good argument, but speaking personally, I'd rather have an
exhibitionist nymphomaniac, especially one who looked like Julie Newmar.
-- Jerry Boyajian
%
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no
better than dreams.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother's side.
-- Archie Bunker
%
Father Abbot there are some Vikings to see you.
-- Famous last words
%
To me, there's no better symbol for the world than a grasshopper lying dead on
 a gravel road, and maybe there's a globe lying next to him.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
-- William H. Blake (1757-1827)
%
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have
more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want,
so they will be happier.  The way it actually works is the reverse.
 You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do,
in order to have what you want.
-- Margaret Young
%
We always admire the other fellow more
after we have tried to do his job.
-- William Feather, author and publisher
%
The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm lv, 21
%
Your eyes are so sharpe that you cannot onely looke through a Milstone,
but cleane through the minde.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues and his England, Page 289
%
It was the saying of Bion, that though the boys throw stones at frogs
in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Which are the most crafty, Water or Land Animals? 7
%
He NEVER said "Abandon Ship! All hands abandon Ship!
-- Why Kirk is better
%
:fine: [WPI] adj. Good, but not good enough to be {cuspy}.  The word
   `fine' is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit
   comparison to the higher level implied by {cuspy}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Ludlow Bean was arrested the other day for stealing a woman's change purse.
 He told the judge that he hadn't been feeling well, and he thought the
 change would do him good.
-- Charley Weaver (Cliff Arquette)
%
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"
%
:holy wars: [from {USENET}, but may predate it] n. {flame
   war}s over {religious issues}.  The paper by Danny Cohen that
   popularized the terms {big-endian} and {little-endian} in
   connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled
   "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace".  Other perennial Holy
   Wars have included {EMACS} vs. {vi}, my personal computer
   vs. everyone else's personal computer, {{ITS}} vs. {{UNIX}},
   {{UNIX}} vs. {VMS}, {BSD} UNIX vs. {USG UNIX}, {C}
   vs. {{Pascal}}, {C} vs. FORTRAN, etc., ad nauseam.  The
   characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical
   disputes is that in a holy wars most of the participants spend
   their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural
   attachments as objective technical evaluations.  See also
   {theology}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The biggest bore is the person who is bored by everyone and everything.
-- Frank Tyger
%
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a
fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience,
conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal
experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the
experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of
Spencer, of Austin, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.
-- C. S. Lewis
%
Paradise was the place where everything was known but where nothing was
explained. The universe before sin - before commentary...
-- E.M. Cioran
%
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization.  It was greater
before there was any civilization.
-- Sigmund Freud
%

-- There isn't a lock I can't open if I'm scared enough....
-- Vila
%
:room-temperature IQ: [IBM] quant. 80 or below.  Used in describing the
   expected intelligence range of the {luser}.  "Well, but
   how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature IQ
   crowd?"  See {drool-proof paper}.  This is a much more insulting
   phrase in countries that use Celsius thermometers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
1.  When in doubt, mumble.
2.  When in trouble, delegate.
3.  When in charge, ponder.
-- Boren's Laws of Bureaucracy
%
Although it is tempting to resent disaster, there is not much use in doing
so... Whether we remain ash or become the phoenix is up to us.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched
 delusion now.
-- Brian Kantor (brian@ucsd.edu)
%
Give me but that, and let the world rub; there I 'll stick.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. vii
%
For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first,
and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it.
-- Luke 14:28
%
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to
 make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
 As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.   If
 we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for
 personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make
 computing a part of our lives?
-- Alan Kay, Computer Software, Scientific American, September 1984
%
I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's
happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm.
-- William Shakespeare
%
if your wife has ever worn a tube top to a funeral.
-- You may be redneck...
%
:mailbomb: (also mail bomb) [USENET] 1. v. To send, or urge
   others to send, massive amounts of {email} to a single system or
   person, esp. with intent to crash or {spam} the recipient's
   system.  Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious
   offense.  Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious
   innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even
   at upstream sites.  2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar
   effect.  3. n. The mail sent.  Compare {letterbomb},
   {nastygram}.
-- offense -it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
TALL KNIGHT: We are now no longer the Knights Who Say Ni!
ONE KNIGHT:  Ni!
OTHERS:      Sh!
ONE KNIGHT:  (wispers) Sorry.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
To save the state the expense of a trial, your honor, my client has
 escaped.
-- Chon Day
%
    hookers
None. "Who needs lights?"
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Some guy came running in the other night and said, "Somebody stole my car!"
 I said, "Did you see him?" He said, "No, but I got his license plate."
-- Bill Barner
%
We think we are on the right road to improvement because we are making
experiments.
-- Benjamin Franklin
%
The effective limitation of power is the most important problem of
social order.
-- Friedrich A. Hayek
%
You stand in your owne light.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. iv
%
My play was a complete success.  The audience was a failure.
-- Ashleigh Brillian
%
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting 
shells than to be born a millionaire.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
Data: "It is Captain Picard himself who has somehow managed to intiate
contact."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness,
and the power of contemplation
rather than upon mere survival.
-- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
%
Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything.
-- Russell Baker
%
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
%
When I finished school I took one of those career aptitude tests and, based
 on my verbal ability score, they suggested I become a mime.
-- Tim Cavanagh
%
There are also a lot of nice buildings in Haiphong.  What their
contributions are to the war effort I don't know, but the desire to
bomb a virgin building is terrific.
-- Commander Henry Urban Jr.
%
Rapid transit
-- Oxymoron
%
Was my SOY LOAF left out in th'RAIN?  It tastes REAL GOOD!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%

-- FINAL WARNING SYSTEM GOING DOWN IMMEDIATELY
%
Sir, he is reading as fully human.
What is there, an echo in here?
I am sensing an emotional presence, Captain. I would normally describe
  it as being terrified.
How rude.
-- Data, Q, and Troi, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
:deadlock: n. 1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more
   processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of
   the others to do something.  A common example is a program
   communicating to a server, which may find itself waiting for output
   from the server before sending anything more to it, while the
   server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling
   program before outputting anything.  (It is reported that this
   particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a `starvation
   deadlock', though the term `starvation' is more properly used for
   situations where a program can never run simply because it never
   gets high enough priority.  Another common flavor is
   `constipation', in which each process is trying to send stuff to
   the other but all buffers are full because nobody is reading
   anything.)  See {deadly embrace}.  2. Also used of deadlock-like
   interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow
   corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the
   other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without
   making any progress because they always move the same way at the
   same time.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish historian
-- Letter to R. W. Emmerson (May 13, 1853)
%
Never try to keep up with the Joneses, drag them down to your own level. It
 is eversomuch cheaper.
-- Quentin Crisp
%
Where do your SOCKS go when you lose them in th' WASHER?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things,
man will not himself find peace.
-- Albert Schweitzer
%
If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
-- Charles F. Kettering
%
All things are in common among friends.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
   ``After all, 13 years of being battered, pushed and otherwise
tormented is a long, long time. On the other hand ... you can't expect
me just to run away,'' he said.
-- L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, as quoted in the UPI story,
-- L.A. police chief rejects suggestion of retirement, 7/9/91
%
Everyone talks about documentation, but nobody ever does anything about it.
-- Weinberg's Programming Principle #8
%
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself.
-- Leo Tolstoy
%
Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a
Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.
-- Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939), journalist
-- A Letter to The Champion: a publication of the National Assoc.
-- of Criminal Defense Lawyers (July 1990)
%
Once a python weighs more than half the weight of his keeper, the
potential of dangerous constriction becomes very real; snakes of this size
should not be handled alone. Once a python outweighs his keeper, fatal
constriction is at the discretion of the python.
-- "Big Snake Bites, Part II," The Vivarium, quoted in "LA Times"
%
The amount of time you have to wait for a bus is directly proportional
to the inclemency of the weather.
-- John Corcoran
%
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat
does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
%
I was dating this girl for two years--and right away the nagging starts: "I
 wanna know your name."
-- Mike Binder
%
Is it better to be the lover or the loved one?  Neither, if your
cholesterol is over six hundred.  By love, of course, I refer to
mother and child, or a boy and his dog, or two headwaiters.
-- romantic love the love between man and woman, rather than between
-- Woody Allen
-- Without Feathers
%
It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
If a block is moved, then it is no longer where it was, and it
is now where it is.
-- Ben Aveling - Planning for conjunction goals - CS Hons 1992
%
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
-- Don Vonada
%
I learned the difference between a cactus and a caucus.  A cactus has
its pricks on the outside.
-- Morris Udall, Former U.S. Rep. on his education in public life.
%
Observe your enemies, for they first find your faults.
-- Greek proverb
%
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
%
Picard: "And I would appreciate an explantion."
Barclay: "I think I can help you with that, Captain."
Riker: "Mister Barclay!  I thought it would be fatal if you left the Holodeck."
Barclay: "The Cytherians have reintegrated me, sir."
Cytherian: "'Cytherians', mmm-hmm."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Oh for a forty-parson power!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto x, Stanza 34
%
I just got my PRINCE bumper sticker..
 But now I can't remember WHO he is...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
In his '90 Usenix presentation, Dennis Ritchie reminded the audience that
Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that
X-windows was brain-dead and would soon die.  "He was half-right.
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."
-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of UNIX, from an article in UNIX Today
%
New Jersey is not the armpit of the nation;
it's the asshole of the universe.
-- Jonathan Michael Smith
%
Where is an elephants sex organ?
-- In his feet if he steps on you, you're fucked.
%
We are born with wisdom, stupidity is acquired.
-- Confucius Says
%
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers.  What they
really hate is lousy programmers.
-- Larry Niven and Jerry E. Pournelle "Oath of Fealty" (1981)
%
We like to praise birds for flying.  But how much of it is actually flying, and
 how much of it is just sort of coasting from the previous flap?
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
McCoy: "I'd give real money if he'd shut up!"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder
archbishops there.
-- Michael Powell
%
Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the
sport of men.
-- Byron
%
Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events
of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination.
-- Robert Machol
%
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that Nothing is
worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing
to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a
miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so
by the exertions of better men than himself.
-- John Stuart Mill
%
To go forth and experience the myriad things is delusion.  That the
myriad things spring forth and experience themselves is enlightenment.
-- Dogen
%
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from
one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70%
discipline, like learning Latin.  But the good parts are, of course,
simply amazing.
God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He's good, nobody can touch Him.
-- John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983
%
The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
-- Edward Abbey
%
 :u) funny-looking left nose
-- SMILEY
%
Data: "Sir, what command shall I attempt to plant?"
Riker: "Something straightforward, like 'Disarm your weapons systems.'"
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
Modesty is of no use to a beggar.
-- Homer
%
I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever.  All I need to know is
that a man is a member of the human race.  That's bad enough for me.
-- Mark Twain
%
Four-wheel-drive just means you can get stuck in even more
inaccessible places.
-- Phillips' Law
%
Americans are so enamoured of equality they would rather be equal
in slavery than unequal in freedom.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
%
NANCY!!  Why is everything RED?!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Some also deny that the earth is in the middest of the world, and
some affirme that it is mouable, as also Copernicus by way of supposition,
and not for that he thought so in deede:  who affirmeth that the earth
turneth about, and that the sunne standeth still in the midst of the
heauens, by help of which false supposition he hath made truer demonstrations
of the motions and reuolutions of the celestiall Spheares, than euer
were made before...
-- Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundeville His Exercises, 1594
%
Women should be obscene and not heard.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
%
Brave politician
-- Oxymoron
%
    Mac owners
Just one, but the new light bulbs aren't compatible with the
old sockets, so he has to buy a complete upgrade or a new
light.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
-- Lichtenburg
%
Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.
-- Lazarus Long
%
Hang sorrow! care 'll kill a cat.
-- Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
-- Every Man in his Humour, Act i, Sc. 3
%
Virtue is not left to stand alone.
He who practices it will have neighbors.
-- Confucius
%
Man's rich with little, were his judgment true; Nature is frugal,
and her wants are few; These few wants, answer'd bring sincere delights;
But fools create themselves new appetites.
-- Young
%
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a
fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a
cat.
-- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London
%
Why, you barfly, I'll stick a wick in your mouth and use you for an alcohol
 lamp!
-- Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen)
%
 It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that
 encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice
 witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
                   speaking of the Equal Rights Amendment
-- televangelist Marion "Pat" Robertson,
%
Data: "The captain and many of the crew are not yet convinced he is truly
  human."
Guinan: "Really?"
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
    Oregonians
Nine. One to change the bulb, and eight to protest the
nuclear power plant that generates the electricity that
powers it.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
He who edits least edits best.
-- Arnold Gingrich
%
Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
%
R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer.
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures
of the Government are directed to the purpose of making the rich
richer and the poor poorer.
-- William Henry Harrison
%
I gave up believing in God for Lent.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
:desk check: n.,v. To {grovel} over hardcopy of source code,
   mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching bugs.
   No longer common practice in this age of on-screen editing, fast
   stoutly that it ought to be.  Compare {eyeball search},
   {vdiff}, {vgrep}.
-- compiles, and sophisticated debuggers -though some maintain
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The key is not the "will to win" ... everybody has that. It is the will to
 prepare to win that is important.
-- Bobby Knight
%
Our trick, Rush - not a trick, our challenge - our challenge is to make the
American people comfortable with the leadership George Bush will offer in
the next four years.
                   (Reported in the NY Times, 7/8/92 - from the Quayle
                   Quarterly, Summer/Fall 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, on the Rush Limbaugh show.
%
Yow!  It's a hole all the way to downtown Burbank!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
You can do *anything* once!
-- Paul Mavrides
%
We are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as
we behave as independent, rational free-enterprisers.
-- Garrett Hardin
%
And to think that only this morning I mistook you for an idiot only because
your views were different to mine. One could have a real talk with you, though
perhaps it would be wiser not to.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Idiot
%
A God all mercy is a God unjust.
 - Night Thoughts, Night iv, Line 233
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Mastering the lawless science of our law,--
That codeless myriad of precedent,
That wilderness of single instances.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Aylmer's Field
%
Barbie says, Take quaaludes in gin and go to a disco right away!
 But Ken says, WOO-WOO!!  No credit at ``Mr. Liquor''!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Often it is fatal to live too long.
-- Racine
%
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that
is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as time.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish historian
-- Memoirs of the Life of Scott, London and Westminister Review,
-- Nos. XII and LV (1838)
%
Kor: "He will be examined.  If he is lying, he will die.  If he is telling the
  truth, he will find that business has taken a turn for the worse."
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3201.7
%
Admirable, they died at their posts.
-- Worf, "Booby Trap", stardate 43205.6
%
Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.
-- Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
-- Agamemnon, 584
%
Hog Weighing Method:
 (1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse.
 (2) Put the hog on one end of the plank.
 (3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly
     balanced.
 (4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
-- Robert Burns
%
Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get
used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to
change existing forms and to make new ones like them.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iv, 36
%
  protect her.
-- A princess should not be afraid not with a brave knight to
-- McCoy, "Shore Leave," stardate 3025.3.
%
    SAS programmers
One, once the documentation for the procedure is found
in one of the 15 manuals on the shelf.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Saavik: "Where's Reliant's crew?  Dead?"
Terrell: "Marooned on Ceti Alpha V.  He's completely mad, Admiral.  He blames
  you for the death of his wife."
Kirk: "I know what he blames me for."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Show me a guy who's afraid to look bad, and I'll show you a guy you can
 beat every time.
-- Rene Auberjonois (from Lou Brock)
%
How dare you! I am Rondon! You despicable Melonoid slime worm! Liar!
-- Rondon to Wesley, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2
%
I think they will be very effective in keeping Catholic legislators away
 from the Communion rail.
      politicians
-- Idaho Senator Mike Blackbird, about ecclesiastical sanctions against
%
Fills
The air around with beauty.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 49
%
You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
-- Eldridge Cleaver, 1968
%
Laugh-a while you can-a, monkey-boy!
-- John Whorfin
%
[May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated,
or, if beetles and wasps, in cow-dung, or if butterflies, locusts,
shellfish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied
matter, which is to receive the form of that creature to which it
is by formative power disposed[?]  To question this is to question
reason, sense, and experience.  If he doubts this, let him go to
Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot
of the mud of the Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants.
-- A seventeenth century opinion quoted by L. L. Woodruff,
-- in "The Evolution of Earth and Man", 1929
%
The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
 as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
 The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
 the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in
 twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.
 "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached
 everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
 fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one --
 and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city."
 "How?" demanded Fafhrd.
 Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know."
-- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"
%
Here, let me show you.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Are we THERE yet?  My MIND is a SUBMARINE!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Tennyson is a beautiful half of a poet.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
Tofu--what is that stuff? It's like spackling compound. It's like chickpeas
 and grout. Food should not caulk windows.
-- Billiam Coronel
%
Hasty climbers have sudden falls.
-- Proverb
%
If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong.
-- Mo Udall
%
From birth to age eighteen a girl needs good parents; from eighteen to
 thirty-five she needs good looks; from thirty-five to fifty-five she needs
 a good personality; from fifty-five on, she needs good cash.
-- Sophie Tucker
%
 Attention, attention, there are monkey-boys in the complex.
-- Buckaroo Banzai (the film)
%
Canada: a few acres of snow.
-- Voltaire
%
For himself doth a man work evil in working evils for another.
-- Hesiod (c. 700 BC)
-- Works and Days, Line 265
%

-- http://www.linux.org Escape the Gates of Hell
%
Rather than be less,
Car'd not to be at all.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 47
%
Oh, weep for the hour
When to Eveleen's bower
The lord of the valley with false vows came.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Eveleen's Bower
%
 :~( nose put out of joint
-- SMILEY
%
Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing
degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own
defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our
own possession and under our own direction, and having them under
the management of Congress? If our defense be the _real_ object
of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with
more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
-- Patrick Henry
%
The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty.
-- William Mason (1725-1797)
-- Heroic Epistle
%
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and
esteem of ages through which they have passed.
-- Sir William Temple (1628-1699)
-- Ancient and Modern Learning
%
The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life,
the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic
attention in adolescence.
-- Susan Jacoby
%
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN
 1. Share everything.                2. Play fair.
 3. Don't hit people.                4. Put things back where you found them.
 5. Clean up your own mess.
 6. Don't take things that aren't yours.
 7. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
 8. Wash your hands before you eat.  9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life--learn some and think some and draw and paint
    and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands,
    and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup:
    The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why,
    but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the
    Styrofoam cup--they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned
    --the biggest word of all--LOOK.
-- Robert Fulghum
%
if your 9x9 living room has a Spanish decor.
-- You may be redneck...
%
TALK, v.t.  To commit an indiscretion without temptation, from an
impulse without purpose.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
It's plain, nobody's perfect.
-- Fee Waybill
%
If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parentheses.
-- Steven Wright
%
Talking Pinhead Blues:
 Oh, I LOST my ``HELLO KITTY'' DOLL and I get BAD reception on
  channel TWENTY-SIX!!
 Th'HOSTESS FACTORY is closin' down and I just heard ZASU PITTS
  has been DEAD for YEARS..  (sniff)
 My PLATFORM SHOE collection was CHEWED up by th'dog, ALEXANDER
  HAIG won't let me take a SHOWER 'til Easter.. (snurf)
 So I went to the kitchen, but WALNUT PANELING whup me
  upside mah HAID!! (on no, no, no..  Heh, heh)
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Sen. Danforth:  There is nothing on the face of the album which would
                 notify you if the record has pornographics material or
                material glorifying violence?
Tipper Gore:     No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me.
Frank Zappa:       I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy's
           legs on the album cover is good indication that it's
          not for little Johnny.

                 lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985
-- The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock
%
No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours.
-- Jonathan M. Sewall (1748-1808)
-- Epilogue to Cato
%
Spirituality is not a transaction with the universe.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
... And may God bless Chocolate City and its vanilla suburbs.
-- George Clinton in Parliament's "Chocolate City"
%
The kiss, snatch'd hasty from the sidelong maid.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Seasons, Winter, Line 625
%

-- He's a SOB but at least he's *our* SOB.
%
:microfloppies: n. 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch
   {vanilla} or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety.
   This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out
   of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy
   standard.  See {stiffy}, {minifloppies}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly."
-- ...understanding GUIs...
%
Picard: "I will be the first to cheer when the Neutral Zone is abolished."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built,
everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But by then the investment
was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it has
cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing.
There are at present no plans to replace it, since it was never
really needed in the first place.
I expect every installation has its own pet software which is
analogous to the above.
-- Kenneth E. Iverson commenting on the Leaning Tower of Pisa
%
:Missed'em-five: n. Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V UNIX,
   generally used by {BSD} partisans in a bigoted mood.  (The
   synonym `SysVile' is also encountered.)  See {software bloat},
   {Berzerkeley}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 %-) long bangs
-- SMILEY
%
Coffee, ice cream, beer and pizza.
-- The four food groups
%

-- :$FATAL ERROR ILLEGAL ERROR$
%
Joy of Sox - Boston and Chicago Baseball Players.
-- SLR
%
Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
When policy fails try thinking.
-- American Business Maxim
%
Always helping;
-- Edward A. Dains
%
:rotary debugger: [Commodore] n. Essential equipment for those
   late-night or early-morning debugging sessions.  Mainly used as
   sustenance for the hacker.  Comes in many decorator colors, such as
   Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage.  See {pizza, ANSI standard}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There's little in taking or giving,
   There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
      Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
 The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
      And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
    And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle --
  Would you kindly direct me to hell?
-- Dorothy Parker
%
A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one
had as a child, at play.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
Murphy Brown is doing better than I am.  At least she knows she still
has a job next year.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/18/92, (reported on KRXX News)
%
Lithium is no longer available on credit.
-- "Buckaroo Banzai"
%
BC dodging draft/BC wishing he experienced D-Day.
-- Liberal hypocrisy
%
I enjoy being a highly overpaid actor.
-- Roger Moore
%
'T is all men's office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man's virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Government is the agency of coercion that has
flags in front of its offices.
-- Harry Browne
%
So scented the grim Feature, and upturn'd
His nostril wide into the murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry from so far.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book x, Line 279
%
A mosquito was heard to complain
That a chemist had poisoned his brain
The cause of his sorrow
Was para-dichloro-
diphenyltrichloroethane

-- From the Seattle Food Garden Newsletter,
-- put out by the Washington State University's
-- Extension Service and King County
%
 You guys know Minnie The Moocher?
 --I knew a hooker once named Minnie Mizola.
-- The Blues Brothers
%
Chill penury weighs down the heart, itself; and though it sometimes
be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.
-- Mrs. Jameson
%
The child is father of the man
-- Wordsworth
%
This is a celebration of individual freedom, not of homosexuality. No
government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The
only queer people are those who don't love anybody.
-- Rita Mae Brown
-- Gay Olympics, 1982
%
All go down the hooooooole.
-- Baby Plucky.
%
Diligence is the mother of good fortune.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iv, Chap. xliii
%
An enterprise employing more than 1000 people
becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work
that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.
-- Parkinson's Law of 1000
%
Women are not much, but they are the best other sex we have.
-- Herold
%
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle, not women.
-- Rita Mae Brown
%
The Tenth Commandment for C programmers:
Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth
that All the world's a VAX, and have no commerce with the benighted
heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may
be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.
-- Harry Spencer
%
NON-COMBATANT, n.  A dead Quaker.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Carol: "Actually, he's a lot like you...in many ways.  Please tell me what
  you're feeling."
Kirk: "There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to
  kill me.  You showed me your son'd be happy to help.  My son...my life that
  could've been...and wasn't.  What am I feeling?  Old...worn out."
Carol: "Let me show you something...that'll make you feel...*young* as when the
  world was new."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
If an hour has been spent amending a sentence, someone will
move to delete the paragraph.
-- Kim's Rule of Committees
%
Larchmont is so tiny there's a mirror at one end.
-- Joan Rivers
%
McCoy: "Hold it right there, boy!  What about my age?"
Data: "Sorry, sir.  If that subject troubles you--"
McCoy: "What's so damned troublesome about not having died?"
-- "Encounter At Farpoint", Stardate unknown
%
APPETITE, n.  An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a
solution to the labor question.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 =:-#} smiley punk with a mustache....
-- SMILEY
%
Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender,
for tomorrow we may have to eat them.
-- Morris Udall, quoted in "Sierra", May/June 1989
%
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled
 to the utterly bewildered.
-- Al Capp
%
You can lead a yak to water but you can't teach an old
dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke.
-- Opus
%
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
Speaking for myself ...
-- DISCLAIMER
%
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing
 to do is die at once.
-- Samuel Butler
%
Someone wants to see me at four in the morning...What is he, a giant
  lark?
-- Edmund : Money
%
The Korean War must have been fun.
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Mystery Meat
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
Yow!  Now I get to think about all the BAD THINGS I did to a BOWLING BALL
 when I was in JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
"I left the tri-corder on `The Wild, Chunky, Spunky Planet of Mary Lou Retton
 Clones.'"
  "Spock, you are SUCH a putz."
-- "Bloom County"
%
In short, a German spy is giving way every one of our battle plans.
You look surprised, Blackadder.
I cerainly am, sir. I didn't realise we _had_ any battle plans.
-- Cpt. Darling, Melchett and Edmund : General Hospital
%
AND NOW, HERE IS THE NEWS FOR SMILEYS             :-)
  - Well known smiley personality Guy Smiley (see artist's impression,
above) of Sesame Street fame has been arrested on obscenities charges.
  - A network committee will look into the recently high population growth of
smileys on Internet. They will in particular be looking at the high migration
of smileys into NetNews, and the alarming incidence of homeless smileys in
rec.humor.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
A chicken doesn't stop scratching just because the worms are scarce.
-- John Peers
%
Who cannot give good counsel? 'T is cheap, it costs them nothing.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part ii, Sect. 2, Memb. 3
%
You are to be congratulated, my friend. We live in an age where illness
  and deformity are commonplace, and yet Ploppy, you are without a
  doubt the most...repulsive individual I've ever met. I would shake
  your hand, but I fear it would come off.
-- Edmund : Head
%
:tube time: n. Time spent at a terminal or console.  More inclusive
   than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of
   one's environment one uses most heavily.  "I find I'm spending too
   much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
So you think *I'm* the murderer?  What do I have to do to convince you
 that I'm not, be the next victim? Well that would be a start.
-- Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn in "Charade", 1963
%
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith.  Like medicine, the test
of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
-- J. W. Fulbright
%
:rave: [WPI] vi. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject.
   2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows
   very little.  3. To complain to a person who is not in a position
   to correct the difficulty.  4. To purposely annoy another person
   verbally.  5. To evangelize.  See {flame}.  6. Also used to
   describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly
   bullshitting.  `Rave' differs slightly from {flame} in that
   `rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the
   person speaking that is annoying, while {flame} implies somewhat
   more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Maid of Athens
%
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in
heaven.
-- George Sand
%
I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after
  they're dead.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
%
There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs,
wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a
wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a
good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not
learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own
life.
-- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
%
Time does not relinquish its rights, either over human beings or over
mountains.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for
tomorrow morning, sleep late.
-- Henny Youngman
%
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
%
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
The more we study mind and matter scientifically the more
we see that all things follow a natural sequence, a sequence
as liable to work for our disadvantage as for our advantage.
It flows like the water of a river, it falls like rain, it is
as impartial as the sea.  It is as innocent of malice as it is
of compassion.
-- Llewelyn Powys
-- The Pathetic Fallacy
%
"OW!  Rubber spider venom!  That's not fair!"
-- The Firesign Theatre movie, J-Men Forever
%
To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
%
You realize you've been rooting for the wrong side in _Creature from the
Black Lagoon_.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
 Don't never use no triple negatives.
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears
And slits the thin-spun life.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Lycidas, Line 70
%
I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of
 like dogs.  Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
If you do not wish a thing heard, do not say it.
-- Klingon
%
and the deeper in sinks into the mind.
-- Advice is like snow the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon,
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes
infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in
which he was born.
-- Francois Fenelon
%
A mad puppeteer, a full grown kzin, and me.  Our fourth crew member
had better be a psychiatrist.
-- Louis Wu "Ringworld"
%
As full-blown poppies, overcharg'd with rain,
Decline the head, and drooping kiss the plain,--
So sinks the youth; his beauteous head, deprest
Beneath his helmet, drops upon his breast.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book viii, Line 371
%
There is no happiness where there is no wisdom.
-- Sophocles
%
The superiority of some men is mere local.  They are great because their
associates are little.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
-- Charles F. Kettering
%
Nobody loves life like him that's growing old.
-- Sophocles (496-406 BC)
-- Acrisius, Frag. 63
%
:slopsucker: /slop'suhk-r/ n. A lowest-priority task that
   waits around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine
   resources.  Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the
   task allowed to `suck up the slop'.  Also called a `hungry puppy'
   or `bottom feeder'.  One common variety of slopsucker hunts for
   large prime numbers.  Compare {background}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself.
 Mankind.  Basically, it's made up of two separate words---"mank" and "ind".
 What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
I think somehow, we learn who we really are
and then live with that decision.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
%
You cannot push anyone up the ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.
-- Andrew Carnegie
%
Nothing succeeds like success.
-- Alexandre Dumas, Pere
%
    Mensans
66. Eleven philosophers to ponder whether it is possible
to actually do anything; ten semanticists to debate the
various possible meanings of each phrase, word, and
syllable; nine columnists to write about it from
radically different viewpoints; eight letter writers to
respond vehemently with opposing points of view; seven
Quibblers who delight in pointing out others' mistakes
(_what_ is said is not as important as saying it
correctly); six conservatives who believe things should
stay the way they are; five liberals who believe that
action should be taken immediately to form a committee
to study possible actions; four ornery SOBs who disagree
on principal with anything anyone else has suggested;
three peacemakers who believe it's more important to
work it out without showing any more emotions than
necessary to get it done; two statisticians who maintain
that numbers are more important than facts; and one
pragmatist to ignore the BS and replace the bad bulb
with a good one. Whilst all this is going on, all the
Mensans are keeping count in their heads just to make
absolutely sure that it really does add up to 66.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
...you see a sign near the elevator that says "out of order" and you think
"sort elevator > elevator.new; mv elevator.new elevator"
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Any facts which, when included in the argument, give the
desired result, are fair facts for the argument.
-- Fairfax's Law
%
It should be that simple, Wesley. Judging by her appearance, it is likely
  you and Salia are biologically compatible. Of course, there could be a
  difference in the histocompatibility complex if the cell membrane, but-
Data, I want to meet her, not dissect her.
-- Data and Wesley, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8
%
It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and
failed.
-- motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere
%
It is immoral to parent irresponsibly. . . And it doesn't help matters
any when prime time TV, like 'Murphy Brown', a character who is
supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the
importance of the father by bearing her child alone, claiming that this
is simply another lifestyle choice.
~
(Rebuttal:) If Mr. Quayle feels that single parenthood is immoral
and that a woman cannot adequately raise a child by herself,
then he should see to it that abortion remains safe and legal in
this country.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
-- Diane English, producer of 'Murphy Brown'
%
The brilliant chief, irregularly great,
Frank, haughty, rash,--the Rupert of debate!
-- Edward Bulwer Lytton (1805-1873)
-- The New Timon, (1846), Part i
%
The best simple-minded test of expertise in a particular area is the
ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area.
-- Graham Allison
%
Using GTF is like programming your VCR to tape
that important show while you're at the bowling league.
It takes some time and planning to set it up right, but
hey, you get to see your show!
-- MVS/ESA: Diagnosis: Tools and Service Aids LY28-1813-03
-- 9.0 Chapter 9.  The Generalized Trace Facility (GTF)
%
... we must move from ... the primacy of technology toward
considerations of social justice and equity, from the dictates of
organizational convenience toward the aspirations of self-realization
and learning, from authoritarianism and dogmatism toward more
participation, from uniformity and centralization toward diversity and
pluralism, from the concept of work as hard and unavoidable, from life
as nasty, brutish, and short toward work as purpose and
self-fulfillment, a recognition of leisure as a valid activity in
itself.
-- Warren Bennis
%
I get no kick from champagne...
-- Cole Porter
%
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a
blunt ax.  It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes
instead.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
But one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part which
shall not be taken away from her.
-- New Testament
-- Luke x, 42
%
"In the world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting
 what one wants and the other is getting it."
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
Beans come from the place where beans are.
-- Timeworn Bondei Proverb
%
Penalty - 2 minutes for Cross Dressing
-- Hockey can be like Sex
%
What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
:meta: /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ [from
   analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. One level of description up.  A
   metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe
   syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language.
   This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor turns
   on deliberate confusion between meta-levels.  See {{Humor,
   Hacker}}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Romeo wasn't bilked in a day.
              Pogo
-- Walt Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With
%
A flower, when offered in the bud,
  Is no vain sacrifice.
-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
-- Divine Songs, Song xii
%
:channel hopping: [IRC, GEnie] n. To rapidly switch channels on
   {IRC}, or a GEnie chat board, just as a social butterfly might hop
   from one group to another at a party.  This term may derive from the TV
   watcher's idiom, `channel surfing'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:winner: 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer,
   or person.  2. `real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used as
   high praise (see also the note under {user}).  "He's a real
   an example."
-- winner -never reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the bible
 were used to beat plowshares into swords...
-- Alan Watts
%
No poems can please nor live long which are written by water-drinkers.
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.)
%
COMMERCE, n.  A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the
goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money
belonging to E.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The bigger the theory, the better.
-- Maier's First Corollary
%
Nature is fine in love, and where 't is fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 5
%
I hold you as a thing ensky'd and sainted.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act i, Sc. 4
%
His eye was blue and calm, as is the sky in the serenest noon.
-- Willis
%
Liberal - a power worshiper without power.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950)
%
I'm never through with a girl until I've had her three ways.
-- J. F. Kennedy
%
If you ride a horse, sit close and tight; if you ride a man, sit easy and
 light.
-- Ben Franklin
%
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly
is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer
%
There are times, Sir, when men of good conscience cannot blindly follow
  orders. You acknowledge their sentience, but you ignore their personal
  liberties...and freedom. Order a man to hand his child over to the
  state. Not while I'm his Captain.
-- Picard to Admiral Haftel, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
The trouble with 'normal' is it always gets worse.
-- Bruce Cockburn
%
Life is like an ice-cream cone, you have to lick it one day at a time.
-- Charles Schultz, as Charlie Brown
-- Peanuts, cartoon strip
%
And love the offender, yet detest the offence.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Eloisa to Abelard, Line 192
%
Some errors will always go unnoticed until the book is in
print.
    Block's Corollary:
The first page the author turns to upon receiving an advance
copy will be the page containing the worst erorr.
-- Jones' Law of Publishing
%
Ah! the youngest heart has the same waves within it as the oldest;
but without the plummet which can measure the depths.
-- Richter
%
To be frank, I find these people anything but deep. I was in Birmingham,
 Alabama, working in a small comedy club called I Don't Get It.
-- Dennis Miller
%
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "Heretics"
%
Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold
her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; to love her was a liberal
education.
-- Sir Richard Steele (1671-1729)
-- Tatler, No. 49
%
    male chauvinistic pigs
None. They have the girls do it.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
At these prices, I lose money--
but I make it up in volume.
-- Peter G. Alaquon
%
When Fortune is on our side, popular favour bears her company.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 275
%
I is the first letter of the alphabet, the first word of the language,
the first thought of the mind, the first object of affection.  In
grammar it is a pronoun of the first person and singular number.  Its
plural is said to be _We_, but how there can be more than one myself
is doubtless clearer the grammarians than it is to the author of this
incomparable dictionary.  Conception of two myselfs is difficult, but
fine.  The frank yet graceful use of "I" distinguishes a good writer
from a bad; the latter carries it with the manner of a thief trying to
cloak his loot.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 ]:-> The Devil
-- SMILEY
%
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands:  not merely to grasp the
world, but to change it.
-- Colin Wilson
%
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
-- William Saroyan
%
Farmer who cannot keep his hands off his wife ------> better fire them
-- Confucius Says
%
There was all the world and his wife.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue iii
%
    Federal employees
Sorry, that item has been cut from the budget!
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I have no luck. I have a ten-dollar check and the only guy who would cash
 it for me was a guy I owed nine dollars to.
-- Gene Baylos
%
It makes us or it mars us.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Any Use of This Product, in Any Manner
 Whatsoever, Will Increase the Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No
 Liability Is Implied Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will
 Ultimately Lead to the Heat Death of the Universe.
-- PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW
%
:Nathan Hale: n. An asterisk (see also {splat}, {{ASCII}}).  Oh,
   you want an etymology?  Notionally, from "I regret that I have only
   one asterisk for my country!", a misquote of the famous remark
   uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hanged.  Hale was a
   (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Who invented cottage cheese? And how did they know when they were done? It
 looks like it's already been eaten.

 Never buy anything you have to order by the size of its curd.

 Of course it's a perfect diet food. Look at it. Do you have an appetite
 now?
-- Carol Siskind
%
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 1070
%
 (On a male's answering machine, otherwise reverse genders:)
 BEEP.  (Female voice:)  Hi Tony, this is Sheila.  I can't stop
 thinking about you.  When can we get together?  I want to grab
 you and undress you and then BEEP
-- Answering machine madness - befuddle the caller
%
The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and
has no watchmaker.
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)
%
I decline to accept the end of man.
-- William Faulkner
%
A deal is a deal.
-- Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #16
%
An aphorism is never exactly true;
it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.
-- Karl Kraus
%
But why do I need a gun license? It's only for use around the house.
-- Charles Addams
%
Certainly.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Kirk: "Couldn't you have waited two seconds?
Spock: "Captain?"
Kirk: "He was about to explain the whole thing!"
Chekov: "You want to go back?"
McCoy: "Absolutely not!"
Kirk: "It's cold!"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
if you own more television sets than books.
-- You may be redneck...
%
So just tell me to 'Shut up, Wesley' and I will.
-- Wesley, "Datalore", stardate 41242.4
%
In one recent accounting, [the] Bureau of Indian Affairs financial
wizards valued three chain saws at $99 million each.
-- U.S. News & World Report, 2/22/93
%
Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick
education in the basis of industrial society.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Barclay: "Our computer was too slow to compensate for the overload
on the array,
  so I created an interface that communicated my thoughts directly to the
  central processing unit."
Riker: "Exactly what does that mean?"
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
-- Walt West
%
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
-- Edward Abbey
%
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you
can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon
the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but
the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices.
-- Beecher
%
Duct Tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it
 holds the universe together. The only difference is that "May The Force be
 with you" sounds a lot nicer than "May you be covered in duct tape."
-- Carl Swanzig
%
Gray hair is God's graffiti.
-- Bill Cosby
%
Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool
in the middle of a field in hope that the cow will back up to them.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen than it inspires
an impulse to practise.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Pericles
%
and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned
all hope of ever behaving "normally."
-- He had that rare weird electricity about him that extremely wild
-- Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939), journalist
-- Fear and Loathing '72
%
All these woes shall serve
For sweet discourses in our time to come.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
You make 'em, I amuse 'em. [children]
-- Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel
%
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
  "Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
  And things are not what they seem.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- A Psalm of Life
%
The Spanish fleet thou canst not see, because--it is not yet in sight!
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- The Critic, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus.
[The true paradises are the lost paradises.]
-- Marcel Proust
%
You hear what she said Mordock? She said I was cute.
"Is that good, Wesley?"
Yes...I think.
-- Wesley and Mordock about Oliana, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2
%
New York--in the event of a nuclear attack it'll look the same as it did
 before.
-- Billy Connolly
%
What a COINCIDENCE!  I'm an authorized ``SNOOTS OF THE STARS'' dealer!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Data enjoys a lot of confusion, Jean-Luc.
-- Deanna
%
Let me do my TRIBUTE to FISHNET STOCKINGS...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most
people are far behind theirs.
-- Edgard Varese
%
Don't try this at home, kids. This should only be done by
trained, professional idiots.
-- Plucky Duck
%
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray, and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is a quantization error.
-- Jef Poskanzer, from the doc to his oh-so-cool program
-- that converts color bitmaps to greyscale ones.
%
     Either I've gone nuts, or all this is really happening. If I'm nuts,
       I'll be the last to know. So I might as well act as if everything is
      just the way it looks.
-- Keith Laumer, _The Ulitmax Man_
%
When you talk to the half-wise, twaddle; when you talk to the ignorant,
 brag; when you talk to the sagacious, look very humble and ask their
 opinion.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
%
In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one
must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
Suicide Alley is the better of the roads.
-- MA Driving #6
%
When somebody's been dating for a while, the boy might propose to
the girl. He says to her, 'I'll take you for a whole life, or at least
until we have kids and get divorced, but you got to do one particular
thing for me.' Then she says yes, but she's wondering what the thing is
and whether it's naughty or not. She can't wait to find out.
-- What Exactly is marriage??
-- Anita, AGE 9
%
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work
he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
-- Robert Benchley
%
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
-- Margaret Mead
%
The wrong sow by th' eare.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. ix
%
Knowledge is power.--Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Meditationes Sacrae, De Haeresibus
%
Why are manhole covers round? How many gas stations are there in the US?
-- Interview questions asked by Microsoft, 1992
%
Children are our most valuable national resource.
-- Herbert Hoover
%
The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe.  But
 the stupid man will just lie down on some seaweed and roll around until he's
 completely draped in it.  Then he'll stand up and go, "Hey, I'm Vine Man."
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
    women
(It's a very simple task, so...) None. "It's a man's
job."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
There is a natural aristocracy among men.  The grounds of this are
virtue and talent.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
%
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
 finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of
 murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
 their ignorance the hard way.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"
%
It's too bad that whole families have to be torn apart by something as simple
 as wild dogs.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
  A wind that follows fast,
And fills the white and rustling sail,
  And bends the gallant mast.
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
  While like the eagle free
Away the good ship flies, and leaves
  Old England on the lee.
-- Allan Cunningham (1785-1842)
-- A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea
%
if you paint your car with cans of spray paint.
-- You may be redneck...
%
We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids?
-- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
%
Gozer the Gozerian:   As the duly appointed representative of the city,
 county and state of New York, I hereby order you to cease all supernatural
 activities at once and proceed immediately to your place of origin or
 the nearest parallel dimension, whichever is nearest.
-- Ray (Dan Akyroyd, _Ghostbusters_
%
That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,--
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- Sonnet lxxiii
%
Never say without qualification that your activity has sufficient
space, money, staff, etc.
-- Douglas Evelyn
%
Well, it just seemed wrong to cheat on an ethics test.
-- Calvin
%
Everything thought out to the nth degree.
Steeped in arcane ritual.
-- BSD Unix, and the Vulcans
%
Bradyism:
 A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in
large families. A rarity in those born after approximately 1965,
symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional
withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a
well-defined personal space.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Always sort the small file first.
-- Dick Munroe
%
All women grow up to be like their mothers.
That is their tragedy.  No men do.  That is theirs.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in
 the street and frighten the horses.
-- Mrs. Patrick Campbell
%
In our century, we've learned not to fear words.
-- Uhura, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4.
%
You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow
where your thoughts take you.
-- James Allen
%
Now morn, her rosy steps in th' eastern clime
Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl,
When Adam wak'd, so custom'd; for his sleep
Was aery light, from pure digestion bred.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book v, Line 1
%
DISOBEDIENCE, n.  The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.
-- Edward Abbey
%
"Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple
and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false,
and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.  What
could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious
a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by
granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but
calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an
enterprise?
-- commodity in our entire intellectually heritage good teaching than
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer", Vol. 12, page 186
%
People think love is an emotion.   Love is good sense.
-- Ken Kesey
%
A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end
of a cow.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Poets are born, not paid.
-- Wilson Mizner
%
Metaphasia:
 An inability to perceive metaphor.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when
you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even
worse.
-- Avery
%
        Barney Theme Song

    I love you, you love me,
 I brainwash your kids with TV
Buy my stuff, spend spend spend,
 I just want to be your friend
-- Karl Rademacher, gsu0010@ecn.uxa
%
It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country
because food isn't available.
-- Ronald Reagan
%
They have a big drive on now to rehabilitate prisoners. I think it's a
 great idea. They even bring in the wives of the prisoners to spend the
 weekend. In fact, the other day I read that a judge in Philadelphia
 suggested this, word for word: "Normal sexual relations should be provided
 in prison as long as they are properly supervised." What do you call this
 kind of a supervisor? A night watchman?
-- Lou Alexander
%
It is a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
-- J. de La Fontaine (1621-1695)
-- The Cock and the Fox, Book ii, Fable 15
%
A theory is better than its explanation.
-- H. P. Woodward
%
'T is true, 't is certain; man though dead retains
Part of himself: the immortal mind remains.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xxiii, Line 122
%
Q: "Data may have sacrificed himself for me.  Why?" Picard: "That
is his special nature...to learn the lessons of humanity well." Q:
"When I ask myself if I would've done the same for him, and I am forced
to  answer, 'No', I feel...I feel ashamed." Picard: "Q, I am not your
father-confessor.  You will receive no absolution from  me."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.   One
path leads to despair and utter helplessness.  The other, to total
extinction.  Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly...
-- Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates
%
Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.
-- New Testament
-- James i, 19
%
The temple of our purest thoughts is- silence!
-- Mrs. Hale
%
As long as I have you there is just one other thing I'll always need
-- tremendous self control.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%
GRATEFUL DEAD    The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero's
coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of
a man who had died without paying his debts.  He gives his last penny either
to pay the man's debts or to give him a decent burial.  Within a few hours he
meets with a travelling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets
him a fortune, saves his life, etc.  The story ends with the companion's
disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.
-- FUNK & WAGNALLS
-- NEW PRACTICAL STANDARD DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
-- BRITANNICA WORLD LANGUAGE EDITION, VOL.1, 1955
%
'T is well said again,
And 't is a kind of good deed to say well:
And yet words are no deeds.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
If you steal a hundred dollars you're a crook, but if you steal a billion
dollars you're a multinational business genius.
-- Peter McWilliams
%
ILLUMINATI, n.  A sect of Spanish heretics of the latter part of the
sixteenth century; so called because they were light weights --
_cunctationes illuminati_.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Poor man... he was like an employee to me.
-- The police commissioner on Sledge Hammer laments the death of his bodyguard
%
:aliasing bug: n. A class of subtle programming errors that can
   arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via
   `malloc(3)' or equivalent.  If several pointers address
   (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the
   storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias
   and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
   possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
   allocation history of the malloc {arena}.  Avoidable by use of
   allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of
   higher-level languages, such as {LISP}, which employ a garbage
   collector (see {GC}).  Also called a {stale pointer bug}.
   See also {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack},
   {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash},
   {overrun screw}, {spam}.

   Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with
   C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the
   Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Street clowns--if you've got a white face, a red nose, and baggy trousers,
 you're supposed to be funny. It didn't work for Mussolini, did it?
-- Alexei Sayle
%
The worlds worst children
 always live next door, even if you move!
-- Confucius Says
%
:hat: n. Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII
   1011110) character.  See {ASCII} for other synonyms.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:Macintoy: /mak'in-toy/ n. The Apple Macintosh, considered as a
   {toy}.  Less pejorative than {Macintrash}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
CALIFORNIA:  From Latin 'calor', meaning "heat" (as in English
'calorie' or Spanish 'caliente'); and 'fornia', for "sexual
intercourse" or "fornication." Hence:  Tierra de California, "the land
of hot sex."
-- Ed Moran, Covina, California
%
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything.
Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
-- Robert Heinlein
%
WALL
  Structure of astounding simplicity. In terms of building and
  design, you can't get much simpler than a wall. Actually, no, I'm
  wrong, a floor is simpler to build. Because you don't have to worry
  about it falling over. Because it already has. Floors generally
  have very little job satisfaction, because it entails letting
  people walk all over them.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Valeris: "Four-hundred years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their
  livelihood threatened by automation flung their wooden shoes, called 'sabot',
  into the machines to stop them."
Uhura and Chekov: [Look at each other dumbfoundedly]
Valeris: "Hence the word...'sabotage'."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I
think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves
you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried,
you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-
stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets
and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into
rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then
hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.
                --Denis Leary
-- five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive
-- one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get
%
Everybody worships me, it's nauseating.
-- Sir Noel Coward
%
Love can never grow old,
Locks may lose their brown and gold,
Cheeks may fade and hollow grow,
But the hearts that love will know
Never winter's frost and chill,
Summer's warmth is in them still.
-- Eben Eugene Rexford
%
Adventure is not outside a man; it is within.
-- David Grayson
%
:heavyweight: adj. High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive;
   featureful, but costly.  Esp. used of communication protocols,
   language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum
   generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the
   expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory
   utilization, and startup time.  {EMACS} is a heavyweight editor;
   {X} is an *extremely* heavyweight window system.  This term
   isn't pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another's
   {elephantine} and a third's {monstrosity}.  Oppose
   `lightweight'.  Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in
   the compound `heavyweight process'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I went into this bar and sat down next to a pretty girl.  She looked at me and
 said, "Hey, you have two different colored socks on."  I said, "Yeah, I know,
 but to me they're the same because I go by thickness."
-- Steven Wright
%
Of all of the delights in this world man cares most for sexual
intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
-- Mark Twain
%
Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may
be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty
may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end
for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
%
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 23
%

-- Modeming or new baby either way, dear, not tonight!
%
The Fifth Commandment for C programmers:
Thou shalt check thy array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for
surely where thou typest foo someone someday shall type
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
-- Harry Spencer
%
How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks
of ignorance.
-- Petrarch
%
It 's wiser being good than bad;
  It 's safer being meek than fierce;
It 's fitter being sane than mad.
  My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
  That after Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
  That what began best can't end worst,
  Nor what God blessed once prove accurst.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Apparent Failure, vii
%
    roadies/sound men
None. "I don't do lights. That's the light crew's job."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
To think is to differ.
-- Clarence Darrow
%
:rot13: /rot ther'teen/ [USENET: from `rotate alphabet
   13 places'] n., v. The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that
   replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back
   along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur
   ohgyre qvq vg!"  Most USENET news reading and posting programs
   include a rot13 feature.  It is used to enclose the text in a
   posting things that might offend some readers, or {spoiler}s.  A
   major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is
   that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding
   and decoding.
-- sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open -e.g., for
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Never ask a streetside entertainment center if it wants to be turned on.
-- Pete Barlow
%
When one is painting one does not think.
-- Raphael
%
My name is Marshall Teller, and I've learned an important lesson about
 Reality.  In this life you can either follow the script they give you,
 or demand a rewrite.  Here in Eerie, Indiana, _Weirdness Central USA_,
 you've gotta be ready to improvise.
-- "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana
%
Orthodoxy is not thinking -
not having to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984"
%
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate
  Full on thy bloom.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- To a Mountain Daisy
%
BAIT, n.  A preparation that renders the hook more palatable.  The
best kind is beauty.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Numbers are hard to keep straight.
-- Axiom 1, Corollary 1B
-- Ralph Keyes, The Rules of misquotation
%
Whatever happens in government could have happened differently and
it usually would have been better if it had.
-- Prof. Charles Frankel
%
We have here other fish to fry.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. xii
%
Do I have a lifestyle yet?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
It's not often that you get so much class entertainment outside your bedroom
window or outside your bedroom, period.
-- Groucho Marx
%
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone
 is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be
 created in the form of computer programs.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, _Computer Power and Human Reason_
%
I would 't were bedtime, Hal, and all well.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Rest is for the weary, sleep is for the dead.
-- Colin Baker, ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN
%
FOREORDINATION, n.  This looks like an easy word to define, but when I
consider that pious and learned theologians have spent long lives in
explaining it, and written libraries to explain their explanations;
when I remember the nations have been divided and bloody battles
caused by the difference between foreordination and predestination,
and that millions of treasure have been expended in the effort to
prove and disprove its compatibility with freedom of the will and the
awful facts in the history of the word, I stand appalled before the
mighty problem of its signification, abase my spiritual eyes, fearing
to contemplate its portentous magnitude, reverently uncover and humbly
refer it to His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons and His Grace Bishop Potter.
-- efficacy of prayer, praise, and a religious life, recalling these
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
People who can least afford to pay rent pay rent.
-- Perlweig's First Law
%
Ah, the life of a frog; that's the life for me.
-- Bart in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons
%
In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought.
-- Louis Kronenberger
%
:devo: /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A person in a
   development group.  See also {doco} and {mango}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:muddie: n. Syn. {mudhead}.  More common in Great Britain, possibly
   because system administrators there like to mutter "bloody
   muddies" when annoyed at the species.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
All things are possible to him that believeth.
-- Mark 9:23
%
The low'ring element
Scowls o'er the darken'd landscape.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 490
%
out how he feels about astrology.
-- A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" find
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
A beautiful woman is a blessing from Heaven, but a good cigar is a smoke.
-- Rudyard Kipling
%
 Hello, this is David.  I don't live here, so if you were trying
 to call me, you've dialed the wrong number.  On the other hand,
 if you were trying to call John, Jim, or Eric, please leave your
 name and number at the tone.  I don't guarantee that one of them
-- will call you back only that I won't.
-- Answering machine madness - befuddle the caller
%
I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
The choice of a system of numeration is a mere matter of convention.
-- Blaise Pascal
%
His nature is too noble for the world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for 's power to thunder.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Coriolanus
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Good at a fight, but better at a play;
Godlike in giving, but the devil to pay.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- On a Cast of Sheridan's Hand
%
There are some things that are impossible to do,
but it is impossible to know what they are.
-- Corollary to Murphy's Law
%
 "I Dare You" by Hugo Furst
-- Booktip of the month
%
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other
bastard die for his.
-- General G. C. Patton (1885-1945)
%
Pardek: "I am Pardek.  You are among friends, Captain."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
Opening night ... you will find a sizable number of people with severe
 respiratory infections who have, it appears, defied their doctors, torn
 aside oxygen tents, evaded the floor nurses at various hospitals, and
 courageously made their way to the theater to enjoy the play--the Discreet
 Choker and the Straight Cougher.
-- Mike Nichols
%
A lot of the stuff I do is so minimal, and it's designed to be minimal.
The smallness of it is what's attractive.  It's weird, 'cause it's so
intellectually lame.  It's hard to see me doing that for the rest of
my life.  But at the same time, it's what I do best.
-- Chris Elliot, writer and performer on "Late Night with David Letterman"
%
Not eating meat is a decision,
but eating meat is an instinct!
-- Denis Leary
%
All is well that endes well.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. x
%
Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty
discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.
-- Edmund Burke
%
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
-- Samuel Butler
%
There is no such thing as military 'intelligence'.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #39
%
1. Always state motions in as complex a fashion as humanly possible.
2. Allow 3 minutes to count the ayes, and one second the noes.
-- Robert's Rules of Order for Bureaucrats
%
Enforced recreation live on stage in London
...
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
-- Frank Zappa, "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore"
%
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal
experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
-- Edith Wharton
%
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we
please to charity;  but as members of Congress we have no right so to
appropriate a dollar of public money.
-- Colonel David Crockett, Member of Congress from 1827-1835
%
"Rhett, Rhett!  What shall I do?  Where shall I go?"
"Frankly, my dear Scarlett, I don't give a damn."
-- Gone with the wind
%
No evil can happen to a good man.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)
%
Valeris: "It is of endings that I wish to speak.  Sir, I address you
as a  kindred intellect.  Do you not recognize that a turning point
has been reached  in the affairs of the Federation?" Spock: "Hmm.
 History is replete with turning points, Lieutenant.  You must have
 faith." Valeris: "'Faith'?" Spock: "That the universe will unfold
as this ship." Valeris: "But if that is logical, surely we must--"
Spock: "Logic, logic, logic...  Logic is the beginning of wisdom,
Valeris, not  the end."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
How does a program become incredibly bloated?  One feature at a time!
-- Fred Brooks
%
I have bad luck with plants. I bought me a philodendron ... and I put it in
 the kitchen and it drank my soup.
-- Joan Rivers
%
The iceman wins again.
-- Riker about Worf, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
I know Karate, and several other Japanese words.
-- Famous Last Words
%

-- Sentence first verdict afterwards.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
:cascade: n. 1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output
   produced by a compiler with poor error recovery.  Too frequently,
   one trivial syntax error (such as a missing `)' or `}') throws the
   parser out of synch so that much of the remaining program text is
   interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed.  2. A chain of USENET
   followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the text
   of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message;
   an {include war} in which the object is to create a sort of
   communal graffito.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I remember that one fateful day when Coach took me aside.  I knew
what was coming.  "You don't have to tell me," I said.  "I'm off the
team, aren't I?" "Well," said Coach, "you never were really ON the
team.  You made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels,
and your helmet is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and
then either steal the ball and make us chase you to get it back, or
you try to tackle people at inappropriate times."  It was all true
what he was saying.  And yet, I thought something is brewing inside
the head of this Coach.  He sees something in me, some kind of raw
talent that he can mold.  But that's when I felt the handcuffs go
on.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
To kill an enterprise, say you have no opinion on the subject if
the chair asks for it. After the meeting, say you have learned nothing,
or tell everyone what should have happened.
-- Jean-Charles Terrassier
%
There is an historic opportunity here.
-- Spock/STVI
%
You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of ju-jitsu.  You must learn to
tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you
can live with it.  You must absorb its force and convert it to your users
as best you can.  Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are
not faster than the river, nor stronger, and you can beat it only by
understanding it.
-- Strung, Curtis and Perry, _Whitewater_
%
Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-- W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
%
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is boring without it.
-- Pearl S. Buck
%
FIRST SOLDIER:  So they wouldn't be able to bring a coconut back anyway.
SECOND SOLDIER: Wait a minute! Suppose two swallows carried it together?
FIRST SOLDIER:  No, they'd have to have it on a line.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
-- George Eliot
%
If I can catch him once upon the hip
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
He hates our sacred nation, and he rails,
Even there where merchants most do congregate.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
And live like Nature's bastards, not her sons.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 727
%
 )8-) scuba smiley big-face
-- SMILEY
%
The Street finds its own uses for technology.
-- William Gibson
%
    It's an experience like no other experience I can
describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist,
realizing that something that's happened in his or her mind
exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature.  It's
startling every time it occurs.  One is surprised that a
construct of one's own mind can actually be realized in the
honest-to-goodness world out there.  A great shock, and a
great, great joy.
-- Leo Kadanoff
%
Jesus said love one another.  He didn't say love the whole world.
-- Mother Teresa
%
 ... the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated
to the exaltation of man's self-esteem and the sacredness of his
possible.  The majority of mankind spend their lives and psychological
energy in the middle, swinging between these two, struggling not to allow
the issue to be named.  This does not change the nature of the issue.
-- happiness on earth and those determined not to allow either to become
-- Ayn Rand
%
Crazy way to travel.  Spreading a man's molecules all over the universe.
-- McCoy, "Obsession," 3620.7.
%
"Can you give me a lift back?"
-- "Ah can do.  But won't."
-- Monty Python
%
 We can't get to the phone right now because we were killed in
 the earthquake.  Tragic, isn't it?  But, leave a message anyway,
 someone is sure to get it eventually.
-- Answering machine madness - can't answer right now because...
%
:menuitis: /men`yoo-i:'tis/ n. Notional disease suffered by software
   with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape.
   Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the
   flexibility of command-line or language-style interfaces,
   especially those customizable via macros or a special-purpose
   language in which one can encode useful hacks.  See
   {user-obsequious}, {drool-proof paper}, {WIMP environment},
   {for the rest of us}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 ~~~c___ beach
-- SMILEY
%
:dangling pointer: n. A reference that doesn't actually lead
   anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't
   actually point at anything valid).  Usually this happens because it
   formerly pointed to something that has moved or disappeared.  Used
   as jargon in a generalization of its techspeak meaning; for
   example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to
   the other coast is a dangling pointer.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A woman was out driving with her husband. She was speeding along at about
 fifty. Suddenly a motorcycle cop appeared alongside and told her to pull
 over. The cop looked at her. "Hmmm!" he said, "I'm going to put you down
 for fifty-five." She turned to her husband. "See! I told you this hat makes
 me look old."
-- Joe Laurie, Jr.
%
One time the power went out in my house and I had to use the flash on my camera
 to see my way around.  I made a sandwich and took fifty pictures of my face.
 The neighbors thought there was lightning in my house.
-- Steven Wright
%
Have you ever hit the emergency power switch?
... Intentionally?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
And thought the nation ne'er would thrive
Till all the whores were burnt alive.
-- Matthew Prior (1664-1721)
-- Paulo Purganti
%
Ever submit an entry to the Obfuscated C code contest?
... Did it win?
... Did your entry inspire a new rule?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
-- Gustav Mahler
%
"Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona."
(Crime is honest in a good cause.)
-- Publilius Syrus (1st cent. B.C.)
%
What experience and history teach is this - that nations and
governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon
any lessons they might have drawn from it.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Philosophy and History"
%
Musick is almost as dangerous as Gunpowder; and it may be requires
looking after no less than the Press or the Mint. 'Tis possible
a publick Regulation might not be amiss.
-- Jeremy Collier (1650-1726)
%
GUARD #1:  What, ridden on a horse?
ARTHUR:    Yes!
GUARD #1:  You're using coconuts!
ARTHUR:    What?
GUARD #1:  You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em
           together.
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
 (Noisy pick-up of phone.)  Hi, I'm a burglar and I was just
 about to steal Troy's answering machine.  If you give me your
 name and number I'll...  Uh, I'll post it on the fridge where
 he'll see it.  Uh...  By the way, where did you say you live?
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.
-- Steven Wright
%
Rigor Mortis Tortoise
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
    Now, that the sovereign power and deity, whatsoever it is,
should have regard of mankind, is a toy and vanity worthy to
be laughed at.
-- Pliny The Elder
%
Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an
 important source of protein.
-- Guindon cartoon caption
%
And all to leave what with his toil he won
To that unfeather'd two-legged thing, a son.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Absalom and Achitophel, Part i, Line 169
%
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a
 smile and a gun.
-- Al Capone
%
 Bob here.  I'm home right now, I'm just screening my calls.  So
 start talking and if you're someone I want to speak with I'll
 pick up the phone.  Otherwise, well, what can I say?
-- Answering machine madness - can't answer right now because...
%
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-- Theodore Roethke
%
When you go to a party at somebody's house, don't automatically assume that the
 drinks are free.  Ask, and ask often.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Beer never expects you to sleep in the wet spot.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
In God's wildness lies the hope of the world x the great fresh unblighted,
unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and
wounds heal ere we are aware.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.
-- Woody Allen
%
When looks were fond and words were few.
-- Allan Cunningham (1785-1842)
-- Poet's Bridal-day Song
%
Vain was the chief's the sage's pride!
They had no poet, and they died.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Odes, Book iv, Ode 9
%
Somebody hits me, I'm going to hit him back.  Even if it does look like he
 hasn't eaten in a while.
                  opponent in the Olympics
-- Charles Barkley, after blatantly elbowing an Angolan basketball
%
Alcohol kills brain cells. Brain cell: "Did you bring the oxygen?" Blood
 cell: "The oxygen? Oh boy, let's see. I was in the lungs. I headed toward
 the head. And ... I stopped to party with friends ... I just forgot." We
 take the only organ in our body that won't grow back and we kill it for
 fun!
-- Carey Odes
%
Hinc quam sic calamus saevior ense, patet. The pen worse than the sword.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 4, Subsect. 4
%
O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for
Thou knowest we will never change our minds.
-- Old Scottish Prayer
%
Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman.
-- Dave Millman
%
Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else,
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book ii, The Timepiece, Line 17
%
The territory behind rhetoric is too often mined with
equivocation.
-- Dunne's Law
%
BOUNDARY, n.  In political geography, an imaginary line between two
nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary
rights of the other.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
-- Horace Greeley (1811-1872)
%
We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.
-- Margaret Mead
%
FORTRAN - Your grey-haired grandmother.  People make fun of her just because
she is old, but if you take the time to listen, you can learn from her
experiences and her mistakes.  During her lifetime she has acquired many
useful skills in sewing and cooking (subroutine libraries) That no younger
women can match, so be thankful she is still around.  She has a notoriously
bad temper and when angered will start yelling and throwing dishes.  It was
mostly her bad temper that made grandad search for another wife.
-- Daniel J. Salomon
%
In 1962 the expression "safe sex," all that meant then was you just move
 the bed from against the wall so you won't bang your head.
-- David Letterman
%
For too much rest itself becomes a pain.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xv, Line 429
%
A mutated, superior man could also be a wonderful thing ... the
  forerunner of a new and better kind of human being!
-- Dr. Elizabeth Dehaver, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," stardate 1312.9.
%
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:
At which the universal host up sent
A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 540
%
I was five years old before I realized there was no such thing as
ALPO baby food.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
%
The other day, I was walking my dog around my building...on the ledge.  Some
 people are afraid of heights.  Not me, I'm afraid of widths.
-- Steven Wright
%
In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one
aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy
3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made
available to the Marines for the extra day.
-- Augustine's Law Number XVI
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading.  Then I said
 to the guy, "Let me ask you a question.  If you are in a spaceship that is
 traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything
 happen?"  He said, "I don't know."  I said, "I don't want your job."
-- Steven Wright
%
A kiss:  To a young girl, faith; to a married woman, hope; to an old maid,
charity.
-- V.P. Skipper
%
Riker: "What's wrong?"
Troi: "Everything.  Every time I think about this war, our mission, I feel a
  sense of panic like a hand is closing around my throat."
Riker: "You're never going to feel good about this war, none of us will.  But
  we've got to complete our mission."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
Dweller in yon dungeon dark,
Hangman of creation, mark!
Who in widow weeds appears,
Laden with unhonoured years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
Baited with many a deadly curse?
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Ode on Mrs. Oswald
%
:kill file: [USENET] n. (alt. `KILL file') Per-user file(s) used
   by some {USENET} reading programs (originally Larry Wall's
   `rn(1)') to discard summarily (without presenting for reading)
   articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted)
   patterns of subject, author, or other header lines.  Thus to add
   a person (or subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that
   person to be ignored by one's newsreader in future.  By extension,
   it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in
   other media.  See also {plonk}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand.
The less of either people have, the less they want.
-- Charlotte Observer, 1897
%
:hand-hacking: n. 1. The practice of translating {hot spot}s from
   an {HLL} into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to
   coerce the compiler into generating better code.  Both the term and
   the practice are becoming uncommon.  See {tune}, {bum}, {by
   hand}; syn. with v. {cruft}.  2. More generally, manual
   construction or patching of data sets that would normally be
   generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another
   program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by
   humans.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxix, 105
%
Four Stages of Acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
-- J.B.S. Haldane
%
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my
nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
-- Dickens
%
Inside every small problem is a larger problem struggling to get out.
-- The Schainker Converse to Hoare's Law of Large Problems
%
But oars alone can ne'er prevail
  To reach the distant coast;
The breath of heaven must swell the sail,
  Or all the toil is lost.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Human Frailty
%
if the UFO Hotline limits you to one call per day.
-- You may be redneck...
%
 "Stained Ceilings" by I.B. Yakinov, foreward by Jack Knauf
-- Booktip of the month
%
Life's the same, except for the shoes.
-- The Cars
%
Rambo is a pussy.
-- Stalone: Tango & Cash.
%
I've got no deeds to do, no promises to keep. I'm dappled and drowsy
 and ready to sleep.
-- Paul Simon
%
It shew'd discretion, the best part of valour.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- A King and No King, Act iv, Sc. 3
%
I'm a soldier, not a diplomat.  I can only tell the truth.
-- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy," stardate 3198.9.
%
LaForge: "I'm talking to the wrong crowd."
-- "New Ground", Stardate unknown
%
2/ Drink diet soda with candy bars (the calories in the candy bars
   are canceled out by the diet soda)
-- DIETING RULES & CALORIE COUNTER
%
Before you marry, keep your two eyes open; after you marry, shut one.
-- Jamaican proverb
%
I think a man can have two, maybe three affairs while he is married. But
 three is the absolute maximum. After that, you are cheating.
-- Yves Montand
%
Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.
-- William Penn
%
- Does anybody know how to do the damnable 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube?  can you
- give me some hints?  I can get two sides opposite to each other
- completed, but that's it.
-

Just take all the little stickers off, and place the thus denuded cube
in your microwave.  Set the timer to seven minutes, right about at the
end of which you will greater worries than your inability to solve
your cube.  Trust me I have done this.
-- Asim.
%
Doesn't it make you feel good to be wanted? . . .Avon
I've been a wanted man all my life. What I need now is to
be unwanted....
-- Vila
%
Get learning with a great sum of money, and get much gold by her.
-- Ecclesiastes, The Bible
%
:scream and die: v. Syn. {cough and die}, but connotes that an
   error message was printed or displayed before the program crashed.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
WE ARE OPEN LABOR DAY!
-- Sign in a maternity clothes store
%
When you jump for joy, beware that no one
moves the ground from beneath your feet.
-- Stanislaw Lem
%

-- It's okay I'm a CS student.  We're supposed to smell bad.
%
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really".
-- Dave Parnas
%
Unfortunately I already have a servant.
The word is...that your servant is the worst servant in London.
Mmm..that's true. Baldrick, you're fired. Be out of the house in
  ten minutes.
-- Kate and Edmund : Bells
%
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
-- Lily Tomlin
%
Opinion, the blind goddess of fools, foe To the virtuous, and only
friend to Undeserving persons.
-- Chapman
%
MONARCH, n.  A person engaged in reigning.  Formerly the monarch
ruled, as the derivation of the word attests, and as many subjects
have had occasion to learn.  In Russia and the Orient the monarch has
still a considerable influence in public affairs and in the
disposition of the human head, but in western Europe political
administration is mostly entrusted to his ministers, he being
somewhat preoccupied with reflections relating to the status of his
own head.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent.
-- Evan Leibovitch
%
Let us make an honourable retreat.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Nobody, including the Supreme court, knows what obscenity is.
-- Norman Dorsen
%
One need not fear superior numbers if the opposing force has been properly
scouted and appraised.
-- Sitting Bull
%
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
-- George Eliot
%
Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe
a man from the career of his humour? No, the world must be peopled.
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live
till I were married.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its
own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates
the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of
reality.  It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little
of this mystery every day.  Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein
%
Early Deaths
-- Glass Cellar of Male Disposibility, 10
%
If you can pick it up or drink it in one sitting, take it.
-- James Srodes
%
The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will
be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we
breathe.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Exactly what Adam and Eve were ashamed of is never clearly explained,
 anywhere. And why did they cover their loins? Why not their noses or elbows
 or big toes? And what does God wear--a Pierre Cardin suit? (And why fig
 leaves? Fig leaves were intended to cover up figs.) The mind boggles: If I
 accept the anti-nude morality, I must be ashamed of my own body. But where
 can I go without it? Personally, I think God is losing a lot in
 translation. I can't imagine him being ashamed of anybody's nude body. On
 the contrary, he must think it's pretty peculiar when he sees us killing
 other animals and wearing their skins.
-- Allan Sherman
%
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 69
%
The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy
 breathing again.
-- Erma Bombeck
%
 Seek into the Chao if thou wouldst be wise
 And find ye delight in Her Great Surprise!
 Look into the Chao if thou wantest to know
 What's in a Chao and why it ain't so!
-- HBT; The Book of Advise, 1:1
%
Republican activist Dana Reed said he was amused recently when he received
an unsolicited certificate of commendation signed by Vice President
Dan Quayle.  The honor was awarded to Reed as "a champion of the traditional
American values of family, faith, hard work and morality."  Reed quipped,
"I'm twice-divorced and "Murphy Brown" is my favorite TV show"
-- reported July, 92 by the Orange County Register
%
    executives
A roomful - they have to hold a meeting to discuss all the
ramifications of the change.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
That is as well said as if I had said it myself.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue ii
%
A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.
-- The Tao of Programming
%
Always think of something new; this helps you forget your last rotten idea.
-- Seth Frankel
%
True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said,
not all that could be.
-- Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld
%
Every man shall bear his own burden.
-- New Testament
-- Galatians vi, 5
%
Never give your money away to your children in your lifetime. Always keep
 control. If you don't, if you listen to the lawyers and the accountants,
 you'll find yourself being led up the steps of the nursing home.
-- John D. Spooner
%
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is
identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a
collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then
I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as
plentiful as blackberries...
-- Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), literary essayist, author
%
The most interesting results happen only once.
-- Tenenbaum's Law of Replicability
%
Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes, and feel with their
own hearts.
-- Albert Einstein
%
 Bicycles don't care if you buy Bicycle magazines.
-- Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 10
%
The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond
their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and
things far outside their own self-centeredness.
-- Stephen Spender
%
Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight:
always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
-- J. M. Barrie
%
The ACLU has stood foursquare against the recurring tides of hysteria that
from time to time threaten freedoms everyhere... Indeed, it is difficult
to appreciate how far our freedoms might have eroded had it not been for the
Union's valiant representation in the courts of the constitutional rights
of people of all persuasions, no matter how unpopular or even despised
by the majority they were at the time.
-- former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
%
The road to ruin is always in good repair,
and the travellers pay the expense of it.
-- Josh Billings
%
Old Grimes is dead, that good old man
  We never shall see more;
He used to wear a long black coat
  All buttoned down before.
-- Albert G. Greene (1802-1868)
-- Old Grimes
%
Data: "And Captain Picard has been a role model in my quest to be
more human." Spock: "'More human'?" Data: "Yes, Ambassador." Spock:
"Fascinating.  You have an efficient intellect, superior physical
skills,  no emotional impediments.  There are Vulcans who aspire all
their lives to  achieve what you've been given, by design." Data:
"Hm."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper
 is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew's Passion' on a ukelele.
-- Bagdikian's Observation
%
Working on custom(ADM) is a lot like being drummer for Spinal Tap.
-- an anonymous SCO employee
%
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,...
-- Nursery rhyme
%
Zippy's brain cells are straining to bridge synapses...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Thus she stood amid the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- Ruth
%
The doughnut is...not unlike the ideal lover - rich, sensual,
irresistibly desirable, and available 24 hours a day.
-- David Hoffman
%
If you choose not to live in a cluster, uh, dorm...
-- Jim Zelenka
%
:P-mail: n. Physical mail, as opposed to {email}.  Synonymous
   with {snail-mail}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:infant mortality: n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the
   electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by
   now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off
   exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until
   the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O
   devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated
   for the machine to start going senile).  Up to half of all chip and
   wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such
   failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems
   (or, occasionally, as `sudden infant death syndrome').  See
   {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what
   they think, not what they see.
-- Huang Po
%
Exceeding fair she was not; and yet fair
In that she never studied to be fairer
Than Nature made her; beauty cost her nothing,
Her virtues were so rare.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- All Fools, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Two weeks after I was born my mother tried to have an abortion ... When
 you're not wanted they never like you. All I heard when I grew up was: "Why
 can't you be like your cousin Sheila? Why can't you be like your cousin
 Sheila?" Cousin Sheila died at birth.
-- Joan Rivers
%
"Some people don't see the advantages of combining Microsoft applications.
But then some people didn't see what would come of mixing nitro and
glycerin."
-- Recent Microsoft ad
%
Oh honey, this is just the beginning.   Stick with me and we'll claw our way
 to the top.
-- John Water's Hairspray
%
The best advice I've ever received was from my first editor, Paul C. Smith,
 as I began my column in July 1938: "For god's sake, kid, be entertaining.
 And remember, I have a short attention span."
-- Herb Caen
%
"If you are going to have doctors you had better have doctors well off; just as
if you are going to have a landlord you had better have a rich landlord.
Taking all the rounds of professions and occupations, you will find that every
man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man
when poor."
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Socialist Criticism
-- of the Medical Profession"
%
The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.
-- Edward Abbey
%
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
 The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because
of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional
weapons.  ...The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future
are frightening.  My own feeling was that in being the first to use
it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of
the Dark Ages.  I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and
wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.  We were the
first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use
it.  There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will have
it in the future and that atomic bombs will some
time be used against us."
-- Admiral William D. Leahy,
-- Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, I Was There, 1950
%
She walks the waters like a thing of life,
And seems to dare the elements to strife.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Corsair, Canto i, Stanza 3
%
I'm trying to think, but nothing happens.
-- Curly
%
Just Say No.
-- Nancy Reagan
%
When I get through making Benny eat his words he'll think he's been on a
 diet of dry alphabet soup.
-- Fred Allened Allen
%
Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, x, 5
%
And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens,"
replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax
%
What upsets me is not that you lied to me,
but that from now on I can no longer believe you.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
If hard work is so good for you, how come the rich don't keep it all for
themselves?
-- Jamaican saying
%
I see before me the gladiator lie.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 140
%
When there is an old maid in the house, a watch dog is unnecessary.
-- Balzac
%
How's it going in those MODULAR LOVE UNITS??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Riker: "Your memories are gone as well?"
Data: "The databanks that identify who I am...are not functioning."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
my subconscious says no.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 44 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
He just kept rushing through the lovemaking. Which is the part I like, the
 beginning part. Most women are like that. We need time to warm up. Why is
 this hard for you guys to understand? You're the first people to tell us
 not to gun a cold engine. You want us to go from zero to sixty in 5.5.
 We're not built like that. We stall.
-- Anita Wise
%
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge
which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
-- Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 536
%
And put
My clouted brogues from off my feet.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Cymbeline
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
Uhura: "Is this enough excitement for you?"
-- "STIII:TSFS", Stardate 8210.3
%
We are all ready to be savage in some cause.  The difference between a
good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
-- William James
%
Cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and
 then thrown out, as good for nothing.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
    VMM members
Note: VMM=Vegetarian Matchmakers, a singles group where nobody
ever puts their foot down and demands that anyone should do
anything.
None. They don't turn up for anything any more. (A
little bit of bitterness there from Brian.)
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I have considered the pension list of the republic a roll of honor.
-- Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)
-- Veto of Dependent Pension Bill, July 5, 1888
%
"NEIGHBOURS"
  Australia's revenge on Britain for constant royal tours.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Whenever a man seeks your advice he generally seeks your praise.
-- Lord Chesterfield
%
:banana label: n. The labels often used on the sides of {macrotape}
   reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended
   bananas.  This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current
   but visibly headed for obsolescence.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%

-- I am only a rat in a maze, like you only the dead go free.
%
    frat guys
Five: One to hold the bulb, and four to guzzle beer
until the room spins.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I'm giving up flying. I was at the airport and I saw a sign: "Take out
 insurance." I thought: If the lobby's that dangerous, imagine what it's
 like in the plane.
-- Corbett Monica
%
You cannot learn to swim until you get into the water and drown.
-- Brother Theodore
%
Maybe you should stay with yo' mama
She could do your laundry 'n' cook for you
Maybe you should stay with yo' mama
You're really kinda stupid 'n' ugly too
You ain't really made for bein' out in the street
Ain't much hope for a fool like you
'Cause if you play the game, you will get beat
-- Frank Zappa
%
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger
can. Old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans.
-- Zymurgy (Conrad Schnieker)
-- Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics
%
A dentist's waiting room is a smartly furnished chamber of horrors.
-- Shelley Berman
%
    Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought, / But
Genius must be born; and can never be taught.
-- John Congreve
%
Stan and I thought that this experiment was so stupid, we decided to finance
it ourselves.
-- Martin Fleischmann, co-discoverer of room-temperature fusion (?)
%
Some mistakes we must carry with us.
-- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld"
%
Which would you rather have,
a bursting planet or an earthquake here and there?
-- John Joseph Lynch
%
We need greater virtues to sustain good than evil fortune.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 25
%
The decent moderation of today will be the least human of things
tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of
good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought
not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable
opinion obviously demanded that they burn none at all.
-- Maurice Maeterlinck
%
Riker: "Let me explain what'll happen to you if you don't tell me about the
  Vulcan ship.  Your rite of passage though this sector will be revoked, and
  more than that, I will be *very* unhappy."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Beer won't expect you to cook dinner.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and
obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics;i.e., it always increases.
-- Augustine's Law Number XVII
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
:enhancement: n. {Marketroid}-speak for a bug {fix}.  This abuse
   of language is a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence
   into increased revenue.  A hacker being ironic would instead call
   the bug itself to be a feature.
-- the fix a {feature} -or perhaps save some effort by declaring
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.
-- Cornelia Otis Skinner
%
You know what would make a good story?  Something about a clown who makes
 people happy, but inside he's real sad.  Also, he has severe diarrhea.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Set thine house in order.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xxxviii, 1
%
So typical of the Doctor's predilection for the third rate.
-- Master, Time-Flight
%
Everything is always done for the wrong reasons.
-- O'Brian's Law
%
Spock: "Doctor, would you care to assist me in performing surgery
on a torpedo?"
McCoy: "'Fascinating.'"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
-- Kahlil Gibran
%
TO MANKIND And the hope that the war against folly may someday be won, after
 all.
-- Dedicatory note of The Gods Themselves
%
If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make
 a wonderful living
-- Yiddish proverb
%
Nothing will dispel enthusiasm like a small admission fee.
-- Kim Hubbard
%
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
-- Woody Allen
%
I've never professed to be anything but an average student.
                   VP debate in Omaha, Nebraska (10/88)
-- Senator Dan Quayle during the
%
 Beauty times brains equals a constant.
-- Beckhap's Law
%
A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings
shall tell the matter.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes ix, 20
%
I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, "That which
is everybody's business is nobody's business."
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- The Complete Angler, Part i, Chap. ii
%
A funeral eulogy is a belated plea for the defense delivered after the
 evidence is all in.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
%
Jealousy has often been a motive for murder.
-- Kirk, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3614.9.
%
The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse
proportion to his mental capacity, and may therefore be regarded as a
pretty fair measure of it.... Noise is a torture to all intellectual
people.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
%
With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has
found the weapon of its dreams.
-- Edward Abbey
%
In the busy haunts of men.
-- Felicia D. Hemas (1794-1835)
-- Tale of the Secret Tribunal, Part i
%
If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a
lever to get a fix of something, to its own detriment, then I would
conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.
-- Rob Stampfli
%
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
RETURN
  An experience of sheer terror. Here's some advice for when you want
  to return goods to their place of purchase.
  - When you get to the shop, radiate confidence. For some reason,
      whenever I'm in this situation I get pangs of guilt going
      through my mind... "You don't really need to return it! It
      works okay if you hold it at a 30 degree angle! Don't be so
      petty! It only singed a bit of the carpet! Only the garden shed
      burnt down! It didn't fry the whole family! You've got a nerve,
      daring to declare the manufacturers to have failed in their
      goal of trying to bring you the perfect product X! They'll
      probably shed jobs over this! And you'll be personally
      responsible for the decline of dozens of families, and the
      eventual joint suicide of the workers at the ruined site of the
      bankrupt factory."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
MATADOR
  Spaniard who kills bulls. Somewhere, probably in Bull Heaven,
  there's a place where Spaniards get mercilessly taunted, then
  knifed by a bull to the cheering of hundreds of other bulls.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
In hollow murmurs died away.
-- William Collins (1720-1756)
-- The Passions, Line 68
%
 :-y said with a smile
-- SMILEY
%
On the road, ZIPPY is a pinhead without a purpose, but never
 without a POINT.
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted to the love of glory.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
%
When have the Prophets not been stoned, from Christ down to Wagner?  Crazy,
enthusiastic, or madmen all of them.... Why, my dear friend, what do you mean
by complaining of neglect, abuse, scorn? These are the precious rewards of the
teachers of mankind.
-- Andrew Carnegie, 1897
%
Some asked how pearls did grow, and where?
  Then spoke I to my girl
To part her lips, and showed them there
  The quarelets of pearl.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- The Rock of Rubies, and the Quarrie of Pearls
%
Nirvana: What do you do when you want to have sex?
Rimmer: We...go for runs? Watch gardening video's on the ship's vid?
-- Red Dwarf 'Holoship'
%
Does someone from PEORIA have a SHORTER ATTENTION span than me?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent,
and warn the opposed.
-- Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1921-1971)
%
Windows loaded.  System in danger.
-- WindowError: 001
%
When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Method of Nature"
%
Just as lexically words are put into sentences, conceptually concepts
are put into what we call conceptualizations.
-- R. C. Schank, "Conceptual Dependency Theory", p. 40
%
Kirk: "My friends, we've come home."
-- "STIV:TVH", Stardate 8390.
%
And truths divine came mended from that tongue.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Eloisa to Abelard, Line 66
%
Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxiv, 28
%
God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come;
for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless;
and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless.
-- Augustine
%
Insults are effective only where emotion is present.
-- Spock, "Who Mourns for Adonais?"  stardate 3468.1.
%
I HATE arbitrary limits, especially when they're small.
-- Stephen Savitzky
%
The greatness of a man can nearly always be measured by his
willingness to be kind.
-- G. Young
%
He died a hero's death, dying so his friends might live...
...And that his enemies might have something to go with their potatoes.
-- Percy and Edmund : Potato
%
Do not wish to be anything but what you are and try to be that perfectly.
-- St. Francis De Sales
%
You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You
 might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass"
%
    software vendors
None: You have to do it yourself, pay them $99 for the
privilege, and re-wire your sockets to suit the new bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
ABC
  Acronym for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Generally
  described as a bit like the better-known BBC, but with half the
  channels and twice the incompetence. But at least they don't
  broadcast "Neighbours". This definition can cause confusion amongst
  most of the world, who know the ABC as (a) the alphabet and (b) the
  American Broadcasting Company. We won't even begin to mention the
  Angolan Broadcasting Collective, the Alaskan Boiling Company, the
  Adelaide Buddist Church or the Amsterdam Bicycle Committee. The ABC
  was formed in 1932, and initially promoted itself as costing
  taxpayers only a ha'penny a day.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes iv, 12
%
Truman:  Lucy, you better bring Agent Cooper up to date.
Lucy:    Leo Johnson was shot, Jacques Renault was strangled, the mill burned,
         Shelley and Pete got smoke inhalation, Catherine and Josie are
         missing, Nadine is in a coma from taking sleeping pills.
Cooper:  How long have I been out?
Truman:  Six hours.
-- Sheriff Truman, Lucy Moran & Agent Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_
%
Most people ignore most poetry
   because
   most poetry ignores most people.
-- Adrian Mitchell
%
License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that must first be wise and good.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises
%
There is one picture on TV I'll never forget - the picture of a man
being pulled from his truck and being beaten to death.
                   tape showing 33-year-old Reginald Denny being beaten
                   unconscious.  Denny, however, did not die from the attack.
                   (Reported by AP 5/1/92, taken from the Quayle Quarterly,
                   Summer/Fall 1992)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle talking about a LA riot video
%
What's 'e matter w' that thing?
-- Scotty
%
I went to the bank and went over my savings. I found out I have all the
 money that I'll ever need. If I die tomorrow.
-- Henny Youngman
%
RICE-WATER, n.  A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular
novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the
conscience.  It is said to be rich in both obtundite and lethargine,
and is brewed in a midnight fog by a fat which of the Dismal Swamp.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
    NASA managers

"That's a known problem... don't worry about it."
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
%
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art,
because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn, ... tired of
common sense and civilization.
-- F. L. Lucas
%
At any one time, thousands of borough councilmen, school board members,
attorneys, and businessmen, as well as congressmen, senators, and governors,
are all dreaming of the White House, but few, if any of them, will make it.
-- Mark B. Cohen
%
The Universe is populated by stable things.
-- Richard Dawkins
%
"A certain person may have, as you say, a wonderful
 presence: I do not know. What I do know is that he
 has a perfectly delightful absence."
-- Idries Shah
%
To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Winter's Tale
-- Act iv, Sc. 4
%
Without you my world would be less than real.
-- lmy
%
Many people think that history is a dull subject.  Dull?  Is it "dull" that
 Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn't
 seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a
 doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited,
 and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor,
 and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
-- Groucho Marx
%
We are all clever enough at envying a famous man while he is yet alive,
and at praising him when he is dead.
-- Mimnermus (Tragedian)
-- Frag. 1
%
The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
And when they've given you their all, some stagger and fall. After all
 it's not easy beating your heart up against some mad bugger's wall.
-- Roger Waters
%
Anger is like
A full-hot horse, who being allow'd his way,
Self-mettle tires him.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
How did the great rivers and seas gain dominion over the hundred
lesser streams?  By being lower than they.
-- Lao Tzu
%
The government that can protect you from your enemies
can be used as easily by your enemies to harm you.
-- Harry Browne
%
 Hi. I'm Johnny. I am five years old. I couldn't think of anything
 dirty to say, so I drew this fucking flower.
-- Toilet graffiti written under a picture of a crudely drawn flower
%
If you drink enough wine, it doesn't matter how bad it is.
-- Anonymous
%
In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes vii, 14
%
Cats start following you around even when you *aren't* carrying groceries.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
QUIVER, n.  A portable sheath in which the ancient statesman and the
aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments.

    He extracted from his quiver,
        Did the controversial Roman,
    An argument well fitted
    To the question as submitted,
    Then addressed it to the liver,
        Of the unpersuaded foeman.
                                                        Oglum P. Boomp
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Any expressed opinions are mine; but feel free to share.
I disclaim all responsibilities, all shapes, all sizes, all colors.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
An unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractised;
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Unix is not your mother.
-- The Tiger Team
%
The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a
composer is that he be dead.
-- Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
%
"I'm going to die". (...)
"I shall manage. Don't you worry about me,"
Jack said between clenched teeth.
Joy shook her head. "I think it can be better than that.
Better than just managing. What I'm trying to say is that
the pain, then, is part of the happiness, now."
(...)
"Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore,
only the life I've lived. Twice in that life I've been given
the choice, as a boy, and as a man.
The boy chose safety. The man chooses suffering.
The pain, now, is part of the happiness, then.
That's the deal."
Jack Lewis put his pen down and smiled, thinking of Joy.
He wished he could read her these words, but never mind.
Jack had a feeling she had heard them;
she was never far away from him now.
-- Leonore Fleisher, Shadowlands (Clive S. Lewis (Jack) and Joy Gresham)
%
The report that important decisions in the White House were based on
astrological advice is most disturbing. The results could undermine faith
in astrology.
-- Letter to the Editor, "New York Times", 1988
%
Thy freddled gorgonaut is crulish to the jello.
-- Vorgon Poet
%
Perverts the Prophets and purloins the Psalms.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Line 326
%
[T]he earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.  This
we know.  All things are connected like the blood which unites one
family.  All things are connected.  Whatever befalls the earth befalls
the sons of the earth.  Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely
a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
-- Chief Seattle, 1854 (c.1786-1866)
%
Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.
-- Jean Paul Richter
%
A great source of error is the judging of events by abstract calculations,
which though geometrically true are false as they relate to the concerns
of beings governed more by passions and prejudice than by an enlightened
sense of their interests.
-- Alexander Hamilton
%
It gives me a headache to think about that stuff. I'm just a kid.
I don't need that kind of trouble.
-- The great debate: is it better to be single or married??
-- Will, AGE 7
%
Why You Can't Run When There's Trouble in the Office:
 No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee,
when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your
direction, and almost none will be returned to the source.
-- John L.  Shelton
%
No, it's 'Blessed are the meek.'   I think that's nice, 'cause really they have
 a hell of a time.
-- someone in the crowd in The Life of Brian
%
 Usenet is distributed network anarchy at its best---or worst,
   depending on what is posted on any particular day.
-- David Fiedler
-- in _Byte_
%
To waft a feather or to drown a fly.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- Night Thoughts, Night i, Line 154
%
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The worst is the enemy of the bad.
-- MURPHY'S SAVING GRACE
%
Navy Interrogator: "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life!  Of
  course he's a Ruskie, but he's a *retard* or something!"
-- "STIV:TVH", Stardate 8390.
%
    Americans
Three. One to stand on the ladder, and two to carry enough
light bulbs until one is found that isn't defective.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Never play peek-a-boo with a child on a long plane trip. There's no end to
 the game. Finally I grabbed him by the bib and said, "Look, it's always
 gonna be me!"
-- Rita Rudner
%
What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?
-- The Doctor
%
Progress might be a circle, rather than a straight line.
-- Eberhard Zeidler, in "Contemporary Architects", 1980
%
:Objectionable-C: n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of
   an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the
   better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the
   NeXT machine).  Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but
   lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many
   such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right
   Thing} without actually doing so.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
TRUTH, n.  An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the
most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of
existing with increasing activity to the end of time.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Like the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi: for he driveth furiously.
-- Old Testament
-- 2 Kings ix, 20
%
fall: good time of year for climbing.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Gwon, Geoverer.
-- D-Roc as Scorpion
%
The leadership of the privileged has passed away; but it has not been
succeeded by the leadership of the eminent.  We have entered the region
of mass effects.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
 "The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live
 alone and smash his mirror."
-- Claude le Petite
%
What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from
such a trifling investment in fact.
-- Carl S. Gutekunst
%
Politics, n.  A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Living from hand to mouth.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Part iv
%
Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.
-- Murphy's Forty-Fourth Law
%
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to
betray my country.
-- E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy
%
Tell me about your ship, Riker. It's the Enterprise isn't it?
"No, the name of my ship is the Lollipop."
I have no knowledge of that ship.
"It's just been commissioned. It's a good ship."
-- Capt. Rice and Riker, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2
%
Bulls can make money and bears can make money, but hogs just get
 slaughtered.
-- Wall Street Adage
%
Live simply, that others might simply live.
-- Elizabeth Seaton
%
    Microsoft employees
One - but Bill Gates must inspect every single bulb and
socket before the operation is started.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
:wizard mode: [from {rogue}] n. A special access mode of a
   program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users
   godlike privileges.  Generally not used for operating systems
   themselves (`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used
   instead).  This term is often used with respect to games that have
   editable state.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"Ah, well, I attended Juliard.  I'm a graduate of the Harvard Business
School.  I travel quite extensively.  I live through the Black Plague and
had a pretty good time during that. I've seen THE EXORCIST about 167
times, and it keeps gettin' funnier EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT!!"
-- Beetlejuice
%
He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
:BUAG: // [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] n. Big Ugly
   ASCII Graphic.  Pejorative term for ugly {ASCII ART}, especially
   as found in {sig block}s.  For some reason, mutations of the
   head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in the least
   imaginative {sig block}s. See {warlording}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
  Shall be lifted--Nevermore!
-- Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849)
-- The Raven
%
Simonides calls painting silent poetry, and poetry speaking painting.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Whether the Athenians were more Warlike or Learned, 3
%
You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students
who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize
it in order to protect themselves.
-- Lenny Bruce
%
Learn to type and take some kind of shorthand notes. Read everything to do
 with history, biography, English, art, music. Absorb culture. Study human
 nature. Develop and maintain your sense of humor and irony. And don't be
 too ridiculous because your name over the column isn't really so important.
-- Liz Smith
%
CUSTOMER:     Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes?  He won't be
              long.
CUSTOMER:     Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN:    Thursday.
DEAD PERSON:  I think I'll go for a walk.
-- MORTICIAN:    Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's they've lost nine today.
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
G M:    So, Mrs. Smith, do you have any children?
 S:      Yes, thirteen.
 G M:    Thirteen!  Good lord, isn't that a burden?
 S:      Well, I love my husband.
 G M:    Lady, I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.
-- Groucho Marx, on _You Bet Your Life_
%
 /8^{~ hair line, glasses, moustache, and goatee
-- SMILEY
%
"I only took the regular course."
"What was that?" inquired Alice.
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and
Uglification, and Derision."
"What else had you to learn?"
"Well, there was Mystery," the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects
week: HE taught us Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils. I never went to
the Classical master, though.  He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say."
-- then the different branches of Arithmetic Ambition, Distraction,
-- on his flippers, "Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then
-- Drawling the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
COBOL - A plump secretary.  She talks far too much, and most of what she says
can be ignored.  She works hard and long hours, but can't handle really
complicated jobs.  She has a short and unpredictable temper, so no one really
likes working with her.  She can cook meals for a huge family, but only knows
bland recipes.
-- Daniel J. Salomon
%
It's interesting to think that my ancestors used to live in the trees, like
 apes, until finally they got the nerve to head out onto the plains, where some
 were probably hit by cars.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
ZEALOUS ATTITUDE: Opinionated.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
The fallyng out of faithfull frends is the renuyng of loue.
-- Richard Edwards (c. 1523-1566)
-- The Paradise of Dainty Devices
%
There exist limitless opportunities in every industry.
Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
-- Charles F. Kettering
%
Manual, n.: A unit of documentation.  There are always three or more on a given
item.  One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need in
in the others.
-- Ray Simard
%
Thermal paper will run out before the calculation is complete.
-- John L. Shelton
%
 I am not home to talk to you,
 But please don't be a creep.
 Just leave your name and number,
 At the sound of the...
-- Answering machine madness - miscellaneous
%
Fancy gizmos don't work.
-- SECOND LAW OF GARDENING
%
The time to stop talking is when the other person
nods his head affirmatively and says nothing.
-- Henry Haskins
%
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter.  Had he run unopposed he
would have lost.
-- Mort Sahl
%
Never underestimate the power of the irate customer.
-- Joel E. Ross
%
By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior,
but the inclination to behave- the motives, the desires, the wishes...
we increase the feeling of freedom.
-- B. F. Skinner
%
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly
possible.  Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community
of thought, a rivalry of aim.
-- Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), "The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
%
REPEATS
  *Sigh*. Last week I finished watching the Countdown repeats. What a
  nostalgia trip. Back to the late-70s. Bit of a nightmare, actually.
  The memories came flooding back. I think that now I am ready to
  atone for my sins. Yes, it's true. I once had brown cords. I'm not
  proud. It's just something I did in the foolish years of my youth.
  One of many things, actually. On the other hand, when it comes to
  embarrassing fads of the Seventies, I do have several points on my
  side. To my knowledge, I never wore flares. I didn't like Kiss. Or
  Abba. Sometimes I think I was pretty smart, considering I was just
  a kid.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
One of these days I'm gonna have one of those days.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Deceive the rich and powerful if you will, but don't insult them.
-- Japanese Proverb
%
What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not
warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit
of resistance?  Let them take arms!"
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Letter to Colonel W. S. Smith, 1787
%
FORK, n.  An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead
animals into the mouth.  Formerly the knife was employed for this
purpose, and by many worthy persons is still thought to have many
advantages over the other tool, which, however, they do not altogether
reject, but use to assist in charging the knife.  The immunity of
these persons from swift and awful death is one of the most striking
proofs of God's mercy to those that hate Him.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Let no guilty man escape, if it can be avoided. No personal considerations
should stand in the way of performing a duty.
-- Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
-- Indorsement of a Letter relating to the Whiskey Ring, July 29, 1875
%
:-ware: [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms
   for classes of software.  For examples, see {careware},
   {crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware}, {fritterware},
   {guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware}, {payware},
   {psychedelicware}, {shareware}, {shelfware}, {vaporware},
   {wetware}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms.  The strongest
reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as
a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
He tried the luxury of doing good.
-- George Crabbe (1754-1832)
-- Tales of the Hall, Book iii, Boys at School
%
Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
  Less pleasing when possest;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
  The sunshine of the breast.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Stanza 5
%
We're immortal, we gods.  The Earth changed.  Your fathers changed.
  They turned away, until we were only memories.  A god cannot survive
  as a memory.  We need love, admiration, worship, as you need food.
-- Apollo, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1.
%
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
%
GARGOYLE, n.  A rain-spout projecting from the eaves of mediaeval
buildings, commonly fashioned into a grotesque caricature of some
personal enemy of the architect or owner of the building.  This was
especially the case in churches and ecclesiastical structures
generally, in which the gargoyles presented a perfect rogues' gallery
of local heretics and controversialists.  Sometimes when a new dean
and chapter were installed the old gargoyles were removed and others
substituted having a closer relation to the private animosities of the
new incumbents.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Two things are certain about science.  It does not stand still for long,
and it is never boring.  Oh, among some poor souls, including even
intellectuals in fields of high scholarship, science is frequently
misperceived.  Many see it as only a body of facts, promulgated from
on high in must, unintelligible textbooks, a collection of unchanging
precepts defended with authoritarian vigor.  Others view it as nothing
method: hidebound, linear, and left brained.
These people are the victims of their own stereotypes.  They are
destined to view the world of science with a set of blinders.  They
know nothing of the tumult, cacophony, rambunctiousness, and
tendentiousness of the actual scientific process, let alone the
creativity, passion, and joy of discovery.  And they are likely to
know little of the continual procession of new insights and discoveries
that every day, in some way, change our view (if not theirs) of the
natural world.
-- but a cold, dry narrow, plodding, rule-bound process the scientific
-- Kendrick Frazier, "The Year in Science: An Overview,"
-- in 1988 Yearbook of Science and the Future, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
%
Science is organized knowledge.  Wisdom is organized life.
-- Immanuel Kant
%
It's the most pointless book since 'How to Learn French' was translated
  into French.
-- Edmund : Ink and Incapability
%
Where do you place your hate?
-- Henry Goldblum
%
Is There Intelligent Life in the Universe?
-- ARCARC
%
Physicians, of all men, are most happy: whatever good success they
have, the world proclaimeth and what faults they commit, the earth
covereth.
-- Francis Quarles (1592-1644) Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man
%
"England no longer existed.  He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. 
He tried again.      America, he thought, has gone.  He couldn't grasp
it.  He decided to start smaller again.  New York has gone.  No reaction.
   He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway.  The dollar, he
thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there.  Every Bogart movie
has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock.
 McDonald's, he thought.  There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's
hamburger. He passed out.   When he came round a second later he found
he was sobbing for his mother."
Guide to the Galaxy"
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's
%
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire
existence.
-- Honore de Balzac
%
They asked me whether I wanted 20-year financing on my house and I said,
 'Make it 50!    The apocalypse is coming, so who cares!'
-- Jon Lewis
%
KITCHEN
  The kitchen has been statistically proven to be the room of a house
  that a man is least likely to die in. Because he's never in there.
  The laundry came a close second. So there you go guys - to
  statistically cheat death(*), just spend all your time in either
  the laundry or the kitchen. If you can find them.
                                               (*) A fairly stupid idea
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Wine is a turncoat; first a friend, and then an enemy.
-- Fielding
%
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xvii, 22
%
Use a mirror in difficult times: You will see both cause and resolution.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%

-- Acid better living through chemistry.
%
Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 't were in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act i, Sc. 4
%
Chicken Little only has to be right once.
-- Firestone's Law of Forcasting
%
One of your most ancient writers, a historian named Herodotus, tells
of a thief who was to be executed.  As he was taken away he made a
bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite
horse to sing hymns. The other prisoners watched the thief singing
to the horse and laughed. "You will not succeed," they told him. 
 "No one can."  To which the thief replied, "I have a year, and who
knows what might happen in that time.       The king might die.  The
horse might die.  I might die.  And perhaps the horse will learn to
sing.
-- The Mote in God's Eye
%
 That's the problem with tradition, it's always dated.
-- Curt George Siffert
%
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up,
And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?
No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets:
May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- A Death in the Desert
%
That practis'd falsehood under saintly shew,
Deep malice to conceal, couch'd with revenge.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 122
%
 B:-) sunglasses on head
-- SMILEY
%

-- That's like talking to Vila a complete waste of time....
-- Avon
%
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian
state.
-- Avram Noam Chomsky
%
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary
Americans...
-- President William Jefferson Clinton, USA TODAY 11 Mar 1993
%
WORRY
  Some things do worry me - like the balding bearded guy on the train
  this morning reading "The Problem of Population". He looked like in
  between stamp collecting he was seriously considering genocide.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to
overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its
apogee.
-- Edward Abbey
%
INFLUENCE, n.  In politics, a visionary _quo_ given in exchange for a
substantial _quid_.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
One reason why I don't drink is because I wish to know when I am having
 a good time.
-- Nancy Astor
%
 ,-) one eye ... and winking
-- SMILEY
%
...you send email to somebody who's three terminals down the lab.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
MACE, n.  A staff of office signifying authority.  Its form, that of a
heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from
dissent.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I told you I was ill.
-- Written on grave
%
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
 [:] robot
-- SMILEY
%
And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook, but delay'd to strike, though oft invok'd.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book xi, Line 491
%
Keep changing. When you're through changing, you're through.
-- Bruce Barton
%
   Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete
     and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and
    report: `There's a naked person outside!'
-- Mike Nichols
%
They're now desecrating the Christian Science churches. Little kids are
 running around writing Rx.
-- James Komack
%
How various his employments whom the world
Calls idle, and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler too!
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book iii, The Garden, Line 352
%
:PD: /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for `public domain', applied
   to software distributed over {USENET} and from Internet archive
   sites.  Much of this software is not in fact public domain in
   the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting
   reproduction and use rights to anyone who can {snarf} a copy.  See
   {copyleft}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There's too much beauty upon this earth for lonely men to bear.
-- Richard Le Gallienne
%
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
CAVILER, n.  A critic of our own work.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The problem that we face is a collective responsibility in order to
balance on the one hand the competitive enterprise system from which
innovation, entrepreneurship and new products and new processes come
and, on the other hand, a sensible series of restraints.  To try to wish
away one or the other, to say that government can produce the products
and services, or that the enterprise system can take care of the public
good, I think, is misreading the times.
-- J. Herbert Hollomon
%
There's one rich man in Chelsea who's so snobbish he won't even ride in the
 same car as his chauffeur.
-- David Frost
%
 The party you dialed is not available.  Your call is being
 diverted to an alternate number.  Please stand by...  (Ring...)
 The number you dialed must be dialed by your 0 operator.
 (Click, beep, dial tone.)
-- Answering machine madness - befuddle the caller
%
Truth needs no flowers of speech.
-- Alexander Pope
%
The farther away the future is, the better it looks.
-- Finnigan's Law
%
A very riband in the cap of youth.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 7
%
All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height.
-- Casey Stengel
%
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, but left the shield.
-- Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
-- To the Memory of the Americans who fell at Eutaw
%
Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul
And lap it in Elysium.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 256
%
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
-- Charles de Secondat Montesquieu
%
It is as useless to argue with those that have renounced the use
and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.
-- Thomas Paine
%
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- The Poet
%
And the Lord did grin. And the people did feed upon the lambs and sloths
 and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats...
-- The Holy Book of Armaments
%
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: Fish!
Food machine: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal!
Cat: I will!
-- Red Dwarf - 'Balance of Power'
%
The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the
blood of genius and generosity.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
%
Kor: "Would you like to try our little truth-finder?" Kirk: "I don't
understand it." Kor: "It's a mind-sifter...or mind-ripper, depeending
on how much force is used.  We can record every thought, every bit
of knowledge in a man's mind.  Of  course, when that much force is
used, the mind is emptied...permanently, I'm  afraid.  What's left
is more vegetable than human."  Kirk: "And you are proud of this?"
Kor: "It is a tool.  A weapon.  Somewhat drastic, but very efficient.
-- "Errand Of Mercy, Stardate 3201.7
%
When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions
of many men for the inattentions of one.
-- Helen Rowland
%
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,--
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- Delight in Disorder
%
You took my last chip, you could at least smile, Worf.
Smiling would break his concentration.
-- Pulaski and Geordi, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
-- Pablo Picasso
%
Statistics indicate that, as a result of overwork,
modern executives are dropping like flies on the nation's golf courses.
-- Ira Wallach
%
The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
-- William Safire
%
What is a war criminal?  Was not war itself a crime against God and
humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered,
and conducted wars, war criminals?  War criminals are not confined
to the Axis Powers alone.  Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war
criminals than Hitler and Mussolini.
...England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed
more or less red - not merely Germany and Japan.
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi,
-- interviewed by Ralph Coniston of Colliers Weekly, April, 1945
%
INFIDEL, n.  In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian
religion; in Constantinople, one who does.  (See GIAOUR.)  A kind of
scoundrel imperfectly reverent of, and niggardly contributory to,
divines, ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mollahs,
voodoos, presbyters, hierophants, prelates, obeah-men, abbes, nuns,
missionaries, exhorters, deacons, friars, hadjis, high-priests,
muezzins, brahmins, medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders,
primates, prebendaries, pilgrims, prophets, imaums, beneficiaries,
clerks, vicars-choral, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors,
preachers, padres, abbotesses, caloyers, palmers, curates, patriarchs,
bonezs, santons, beadsmen, canonesses, residentiaries, diocesans,
deans, subdeans, rural deans, abdals, charm-sellers, archdeacons,
hierarchs, class-leaders, incumbents, capitulars, sheiks, talapoins,
postulants, scribes, gooroos, precentors, beadles, fakeers, sextons,
reverences, revivalists, cenobites, perpetual curates, chaplains,
mudjoes, readers, novices, vicars, pastors, rabbis, ulemas, lamas,
sacristans, vergers, dervises, lectors, church wardens, cardinals,
prioresses, suffragans, acolytes, rectors, cures, sophis, mutifs and
pumpums.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool! he said to himself, and it
 became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. You
 aren't nearly through this adventure yet, he added, and that was pretty
 true as well.
-- Bilbo Baggins, _The Hobbit_ by J.R.R. Tolkien, Chapter XII
%
After working the crowd, the autograph hound lacked only the signature of
the vice-president's wife, so when he spotted her at the far edge of the
field, he called to his friend, 'Come on, it's a long way to Tipper, Harry!'
-- Barbara Stegman, California
%
Everybody has sex now. When I was a kid only women had sex and you had to
 get it from them. We got a battery-powered sexual aid. Actually, a
 flashlight. When I was performing she would wave it back and forth to
 create an illusion of motion.
-- Tony Stone
%
An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
-- Van Roy's Law
%
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
It takes everyone to make a happy day.
-- Marcy Kay Rumsfeld
%
Misery only LIKES company. It prefers loneliness.
-- Solomon Short
%
Good to the heels the well-worn slipper feels
  When the tired player shuffles off the buskin;
A page of Hood may do a fellow good
  After a scolding from Carlyle or Ruskin.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- How not to settle it
%
Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
Troi: "_Ode To Psyche_ by John Keats."
Riker: "Open it."
Troi: "'To Will.  All my love, Deanna.'"
Riker: "That may explain some of the familiar feelings we have."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares,
The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears.
-- John Gay (1688-1732)
-- The Beggar's Opera, Act ii, Sc. 1
%

-- Just what the country needs more insurgent teams.
-- From OUTLANDER
%
Planet earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.
-- Major Tom
%
The surest pledge of a deathless name
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- The Herons of Elmwood
%
Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin.
-- Proverb
%
BEDEVERE:        Why do you think she is a witch?
SECOND VILLAGER: She turned me into a newt.
BEDEVERE:        A newt?
SECOND VILLAGER: (After looking at himself for some time) I got better.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Unrecoverable error - System has been destroyed. Buy a new one.
            Old Windows licence is not valid anymore.
-- WindowError: 018
%
What does this "self-destruct" button do?
-- Famous Last Words
%
'T is a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
    liberals
One liberal and twenty eight delegates representing all the
social, economic, and ethnic communities.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Troi: "I'm proud of you, Reg.  I'm glad for you too."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he cast into the sea.
-- New Testament
-- Luke xvii, 2
%
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
-- William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778)
-- Case of Wilkes, Speech, Jan. 9, 1770
%
My business in this state
Made me a looker on here in Vienna.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
I'll bet the human brain is a kludge.
-- Attributed to Marvin Minsky
%
Great American sport.  Horseshoes is a very great game. I love it.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 4/5/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
%
MacDuff: "We may soon face a critical moment.  The success of our mission may
  hang on a split-second decision.  Hesitation would kill us all.  I know that
  they're counting on us would surely die as well.  We cannot let this happen.
  That'll be all."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
Am I not a man and a brother?
-- From a medallion by Wedgwood (1787), representing a negro in chains,
-- with one knee on the ground, and both hands lifted up to heaven.
-- This was adopted as a characteristic seal by
-- the Antislavery Society of London
%
 *<.'v (profile) wearing snow cap
-- SMILEY
%
Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come
before certain events.
-- Cicero (106-43 BC)
-- De Divinatione, i, 118
%
Our souls sit close and silently within,
And their own web from their own entrails spin;
And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such,
That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Mariage a la Mode, Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Bye-bye!
-- Famous Last Words
%
 and nine months later you wish you'd never come.
-- College is like a woman you work so hard to get in,
%
My sex life is very bad. If it wasn't for pickpockets I'd have no sex life
 at all.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
%
:hook: n. A software or hardware feature included in order to
   simplify later additions or changes by a user.  For example, a
   simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base
   10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what
   base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print
   numbers in base 5.  The variable is a simple hook.  An even more
   flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16
   or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the
   address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number.  This is
   a {hairy} but powerful hook; one can then write a routine to
   print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and
   plug it into the program through the hook.  Often the difference
   between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has
   useful hooks in judiciously chosen places.  Both may do the
   original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much
   more flexible for future expansion of capabilities ({EMACS}, for
   example, is *all* hooks).  The term `user exit' is
   synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid (43 B.C. - 17 A.D.)
%
Abra was ready ere I called her name;
And though I called another, Abra came.
-- Matthew Prior (1664-1721)
-- Solomon on the Vanity of the World, Book ii, Line 364
%
YESTERDAY, n.  The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire
past of age.

    But yesterday I should have thought me blest
        To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak
        Of middle life and look adown the bleak
    And unfamiliar foreslope to the West,
    Where solemn shadows all the land invest
        And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak
        Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak
    The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest.
    Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame
        To stay the shadow on the dial's face
    At manhood's noonmark!  Now, in God His name
        I chide aloud the little interspace
    Disparting me from Certitude, and fain
    Would know the dream and vision ne'er again.
                                                      Baruch Arnegriff

    It is said that in his last illness the poet Arnegriff was
attended at different times by seven doctors.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:jupiter: [IRC] vt. To kill an {IRC} {robot} or user and
   then take its place by adopting its {nick} so that it cannot
   reconnect.  Named after a particular IRC user who did this to
   NickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people from
   inadvertently using a nick claimed by another user.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It's a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll
 have the strength to break them when you're old.
-- Mark Twain
%
We didn't volunteer for this mission.  Kzinti and humans, we make poor
slaves.
-- Louis Wu "The Ringworld Engineers"
%
 RUNTIME ERROR IN REALITY.SYS - (R)EBOOT OR (A)BORT
-- Selective reincarnation
%
awards custody of a 3-month-old boy to a 6-week-old girl.
-- April 30 Following a lengthy and dramatic trial, a confused New Jersey jury
-- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987"
%
:non-optimal solution: n. (also `sub-optimal solution') An
   astoundingly stupid way to do something.  This term is generally
   used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person
   speaking looks completely serious.  Compare {stunning}.  See also
   {Bad Thing}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You can tell the difference between engineers, scientists, and
managers in today's high tech companies by the questions they ask.
        Engineering: "How will this work?"
            Science: "Why will this work?"
         Management: "When will this work?"
       Liberal Arts: "Do you want fries with that?"
-- Jesse N. Schell
%
America ... a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and
far- reaching in purpose.
-- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)
%
An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
-- Will Rogers
%
Shoes are getting full of sand. I just hate that, don't you.
-- Geordi to Bochra, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2
%
Every nation sincerely desires peace;
and all nations pursue courses which if persisted in,
must make peace impossible.
-- Sir Norman Angell
%
War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts
the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it.
-- Benito Mussolini
%
    Mahayana Buddhists
Four - One to screw in the light bulb, one to not screw in
the light bulb, one to not not screw in the light bulb, and
one to not do any of those.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
:TechRef: /tek'ref/ [MS-DOS] n. The original "IBM PC
   Technical Reference Manual", including the BIOS listing and
   complete schematics for the PC.  The only PC documentation in the
   issue package that's considered serious by real hackers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Live to learn... forget... and learn again.
-- Brian
%
The Reign of Terror that raged in America during the latter end of the
Washington Administration, and the whole of that of Adams, is enveloped
in mystery to me.  That there were men in the Government hostile to
the representative system, was once their oast, though it is now their
overthrow, and therefore the fact is established against them.
-- Thomas Paine, Third Letter to the Citizens of the United States, 1802
%
Borne the burden and heat of the day.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xx, 12
%
This is Usenet.  We're all masterbating in public places.
-- Dawn
%
And so I will live to see another sunset.
-- Speaker-to-Animals "Ringworld"
%
Boy and girl go camping together, sure to have naughty intent!
-- Confucius Says
%
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult
of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for
which all other work is but preparation.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
%
...before you call someone on the phone, you think:  'finger joe@his.house'
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil;
buy it by compromise with evil.
-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)
%
Ah...Worf. We are so much alike you and I. Both warriors, orphans who
  found ourselves this family. I hope I met death with my eyes wide open.
-- Yar, "Skin of Evil", stardate 41601.3
%
I was a pilot flying an airplane and it just so happened that <B>where<B>
I was flying made what I was doing spying.
-- Francis Gary Power
-- U-2 reconnaissance pilot held by the Soviets for spying,
-- in an interview after he was returned to the US.
%
 Moilanenism:    Smells like shit of finnish fish.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments: love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- Sonnet cxvi
%
Since computers do the sending, however, it's possible to address
a single package to a mailing list of recipients with a shared
pornography.
-- interest in the subject matter be it cold fusion or hot
-- Joe Abernathy <(C) 1990 Houston Chronicle>
%
"...and Keller is schedule to be executed on
 Friday...  I guess he won't be around, then, for
 the Patriots-Buffalo game this Sunday!"
-- A newscaster on CHEERS
%
    operating systems are required to screw in a light bulb?
Just one-Microsoft is making a special version of Windows for it.
-- How many
%

-- *?  < Grandpa Tribble with his cane
%
Projects progress quickly until they become 90%
  complete, then they remain at 90% complete forever.
-- Laws of Project Management #2
%
The sweet psalmist of Israel.
-- Old Testament
-- 2 Samuel xxiii, 1
%
    rednecks
Three, one to change the bulb, one to take care of the
sheep, and one to observe and try to think why he isn't
tending to the sheep's needs.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
thing he had got.
-- Every man has his follies and often they are the most interesting
-- Josh Billings
%
GALLOWS, n.  A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which
the leading actor is translated to heaven.  In this country the
gallows is chiefly remarkable for the number of persons who escape it.

    Whether on the gallows high
        Or where blood flows the reddest,
    The noblest place for man to die --
        Is where he died the deadest.
                                                            (Old play)
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I found this.  He says his name's Arthur, but I think he's harmless.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
"But Calvin is no kind and loving god!  He's one of
the _old_ gods!  He demands sacrifice!"
-- Calvin & Hobbes
%
"I'm not SURE that that makes sense, DM."
  "Well, it is a CARTOON, sir..."
-- Dangermouse
%
if you've been a snipe hunter more than once.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I'm afraid I'm not personally qualified to confuse cats.
-- Monty Python
%
The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose.
-- David Lardner
%
:dike: vt. To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire
   from a computer or a subroutine from a program.  A standard slogan
   is "When in doubt, dike it out".  (The implication is that it is
   usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing
   complexity than by increasing it.)  The word `dikes' is widely
   used among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal cutters',
   esp. the heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also refer to a
   kind of wire-cutters used by electronics techs.  To `dike
   something out' means to use such cutters to remove something.
   Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to attack with
   dikes".  Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended
   to informational objects such as sections of code.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    classical music singers
None - "Impossible. The altitude may put unnecessary strain on
my vocal chords. Have the bassist do it."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Good taste is always an asset.
-- Rudy Bakalov
%
OPERA, n.  A play representing life in another world, whose
inhabitants have no speech but song, no motions but gestures and no
postures but attitudes.  All acting is simulation, and the word
_simulation_ is from _simia_, an ape; but in opera the actor takes for
that howls.

    The opera performer apes and ape.
-- his model _Simia audibilis_ (or _Pithecanthropos stentor_) the ape
-- The actor apes a man at least in shape;
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Recursion: n. See Recursion.
-- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary
%
Troi: "I'm restless.  Mind if I visit for a while?"
Riker: "Please."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as
to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful
land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches
herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.
-- Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)
-- Supposititious Speech of James Otis, The Rebels, Chap, iv
%
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein
%
Those most opposed to serving on committees are made chairmen.
-- Third Law of Committo-dynamics
%
 Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it
beyond recognition.
-- Brooke's Law
%
(1) If someone says he will do something without fail, he won't.
(2) The more people talk on the phone, the less money they make.
(3) People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
(4) Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.
-- Ozman's Laws
%
 People will buy anything that's one to a customer.
-- Lewis' Law
%
Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes i, 18
%
ORTHOGRAPHY, n.  The science of spelling by the eye instead of the
ear.  Advocated with more heat than light by the outmates of every
asylum for the insane.  They have had to concede a few things since
the time of Chaucer, but are none the less hot in defence of those to
be conceded hereafter.

    A spelling reformer indicted
    For fudge was before the court cicted.
        The judge said:  "Enough --
        His candle we'll snough,
    And his sepulchre shall not be whicted."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our symptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly
  good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
We're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got
  himself stuck on a sticky bun.
-- Edmund : Major Star
%
My opinions are my own, or so I'm told.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
-- William Arthur Ward
%
    Unitarians
Three. One to write a solemn statement which will affirm that:
o This light bulb is natural, a part of the universe, and
evolved over many years by small steps,
o There must be no discrimination against dark bulbs in
any form, and means must be found for all dark bulbs to
take their place alongside light bulbs on a basis of
equality,
o We affirm the right of all bulbs to screw into the
sockets of their choice regardless of the bulb's
illumination preference, and
o We seek for each light bulb the fullest opportunity to
develop itself to its full electrical potential.
A second Unitarian to read this statement, even if he or she is
the only human being to do so, and then write the obligatory
criticism and dissent, and a third Unitarian to light a
single candle instead of cursing the darkness.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet.
-- Visionaries cartoon
%
If you keep your eyes so fixed on heaven that you never look at the earth,
you will stumble into hell.
-- Austin O'Malley
%
Riker: "How do we get him out of there?"
LaForge: "We don't.  Not without killing him."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your life paying for it.
-- Baskins
%
Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
-- John D. MacDonald.
%
  Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Oenone
%
:life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton
   Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner
   ("Scientific American", October 1970); the game's popularity
   had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably
   be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand.  Many
   hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at
   various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of
   this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented
   life in {TECO}!; see {Gosperism}).  When a hacker mentions
   `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the
   magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence.
   2. The opposite of {USENET}.  As in "{Get a life!}"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Arthritic bureaucracies don't tame new frontiers.
-- Paul A. Gigot, WSJ, on NASA
%
A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you
least expect it.  That would make you quite unpopular in what's left
of your unit.
-- In the August 1993 issue, page 9, of PS magazine,
-- the Army's magazine of preventive maintenance
%
It's so simple to be wise.  Just think of something stupid to say
 and say the opposite.
-- Sam Levenson
%
I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue i
%
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis
socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think
you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a
very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days,
though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to
crudeness.
-- Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson
%
I'm So Miserable Without You It's Almost Like Having You Around.
-- Kip Addotta
%
You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners.
-- Rita Mae Brown
%
"How can I tell...that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the
discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?"
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, step back and take
 a deep whiff. It may be that there is a lot more manure loose over there.
-- Schapiro's Explanation
%
The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets.
-- John Gay (1688-1732)
-- The Beggar's Opera, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
I love the lines the men use to get us into bed. Please, I'll only put it
 in for a minute. What am I, a microwave?
-- Beverly Mickins
%
    In political discussion heat is in inverse proportion to
knowledge.
-- J.G.C. Minchin
%
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxxxvii, 5
%
"The purpose of having the sun go low in the evenings, in the summer,
especially in parks," said the voice earnestly, "is to make girls' breasts
bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case.
"And I am certain that if one worked the argument through, one would find
that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic from everything," he
insisted, "that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This is
indisputable. And," he added, "I love it."
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
    Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this
flash is everything.
-- Henri Poincare
%
The Treasury virus
  Substitutes Keno for the Solitaire game
-- New viruses on the block.
%
 :-)' drooling
-- SMILEY
%
He who endeavors to serve, to benefit, and improve the world, is like
a swimmer, who struggles against a rapid current, in a river lashed
into angry waves by the winds.  Often they roar over his head, often
they beat him back and baffle him.  Most men yield to the stress of
the current...  Only here and there the stout, strong heart and vigorous
arms struggle on toward ultimate success.
-- Albert Pike (1809-1891)
%
The common curse of mankind,--folly and ignorance.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Troilus and Cressida
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social
 pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate
 woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without
 love, without virtue, without sex.
-- Balzac
%
The computer is the Proteus of machines.
-- Seymour Papert
%
Functionality; All the Functionality; And nothing but the Functionality.
-- Beck's Motto
%
"At 100,000 feet up, you're talking serious, _serious_ long underwear and
oxygen."
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
This is the part where Scott's head explodes.
-- SLR
%
PRO:  No 1'st day of school.
CON:  No last day of school.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
Life is already too short to waste on speed.
-- Edward Abbey
%
"There is no book so bad," said the bachelor, "but something good
may be found in it."
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. iii
%
:not ready for prime time: adj. Usable, but only just so; not very
   robust; for internal use only.  Said of a program or device.  Often
   connotes that the thing will be made more solid {Real Soon
   Now}.  This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast
   of "Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time
   Players".  It has extra flavor for hackers because of the special
   (though now semi-obsolescent) meaning of {prime time}.  Compare
   {beta}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Never pet a porcupine.
-- Anonymous Kid, Sesame Street
%
Every ordinary moment, every little detail should be a celebration of your
personal understanding. Your smallest act should be permeated with
reverence.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
To live with them is far less sweet
  Than to remember thee.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- I saw thy Form
%
    light bulbs
One, if it knows its own Goedel number.
(Could somebody please explain this one to me ! I think it's
something to do with the maths/logic theories of Kurt Goedel,
about it being impossible to prove things.)
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
"...and the world's smartest man means no more to
 me than its smartest termite."
-- Dr. Manhattan against Adrian Veidt, in WATCHMEN
%
To gain one's way is no escape from the responsibility for an inferior
solution.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
And thereby hangs a tale.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Taming of the Shrew
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
It's not called cocaine anymore. It's now referred to as "Crack Classic."
-- Biliam Coronel
%
Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no
substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better.
-- Pierre S. du Pont
%
The fact that it works is immaterial.
-- L. Ogborn
%
I've found my niche.  If you're wondering why I'm not there, there was
this little hole in the bottom ...
-- John Croll
%
There was nothing I hated more than to see a filthy old drunkie, a howling
 away at the sons of his father and going blurp blurp in between as if it were
 a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts.   I could never stand to
 see anyone like that, especially when they were old like this one was.
-- Alex in Clockwork Orange
%
Q: "Can I have a Starfleet uniform?"
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
"Green penguins are not red."
-- Dr. Michael Morgan, Instrumentation Physics lecture
%
ADOLESCENCE: The stage between puberty and adultery.
-- Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The rose of a world that never was has withered away.
-- Sir John Betjeman
%
Two may keep counsel, if two be away.
-- Heywood (1497-1580)
%
You always find something in the last place you look.
-- Boob's Law
%
A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
-- Butler
%
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.
-- Bill Hirst
%
At the working-man's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter!
nor will the bailiff or the constable enter; for industry pays debts,
but despair increaseth them.
-- Benjamin Franklin
%
The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil.
-- New Testament
-- James iii, 8
%
And, as in uffish thought he stood
 The Jabberwork, with eyes of flame
 Came wiffling through the tulgey wood
 And burbled as it came
-- _Jabberwocky_, by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)
%
16-inch rotary debugger:
     A highly effective tool for locating problems
     in computer software.  Available for delivery in most major
     metropolitan areas.  Anchovies contribute to poor coding style.
-- Amiga ROM Kernal Manual  (Glossary)
%
Input/Output.  All you computer people think about is sex.
-- SLR
%
It is only the benevolent man who is capable of liking or disliking
 other men.
-- Confucius, Analects, IV.3
%
My girlfriend and I went on a picnic.  I don't know how she did it,
but she got poison ivy on the brain.  When it itched, the only way
she could scratch it was to think about sandpaper.
-- Steven Wright
%
The road to Hades is easy to travel.
-- Bion
%
I 'll speak in a monstrous little voice.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
You must wear your rue with a difference. There 's a daisy; I would
give you some violets, but they withered.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 5
%
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many
regrets.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
%
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
-- Aristotle
%
A cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about.
-- Master, The Five Doctors
%
Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is
-- published around the world even if what is published is not true.
-- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
%
So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.
-- William of Baskerville, The Name of the Rose
%
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.
-- Johnson
%
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
-- Charles Reade
%
Riches certainly make themselves wings.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xxiii, 5
%
3 Fish. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
1 Fish. Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Pericles
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
You gotta be cruel to be kind...
-- Nick Lowe
%
It has been said that there are two theories of history: conspiracy
and blunder. If there is some truth to that, it is surely equally
true that blunder seldom receives all the credit due it as an explanation
of complex events.
-- Michael Scully
%
When spiders unite they can tie down a lion.
-- Ethiopian proverb
%

-- drop cable what I'm tempted to do when I get my bill for HBO.
%
..  Should I get locked in the PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE today --
 or have a VASECTOMY??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
To get really high is to forget yourself.  And to forget yourself is to
see everything else.  And to see everything else is to become an understanding
molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.  And I think every
human being should be a conscious tool of the universe.  That's why I think
it's important to get high.  I'm not talking about unconscious or zonked out.
I'm talking about being fully conscious.
-- Jerry Garcia
%
This world may be only illusion--but it's the only illusion we've got.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Veal-fattening Pen:
 Small, cramped office workstation built of fabric-covered
disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members.
named after the small preslaughter vubicles used by the cattle
industry.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die
under his care.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
If I should die before I wake up I pray the Lord my soul will take but My
-- body, my body that's your job.
-- Crash Test Dummies
%
Homelessness
-- Glass Cellar of Male Disposibility, 03
%
Here 's that which is too weak to be a sinner,--honest water, which
ne'er left man i' the mire.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Timon of Athens
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Rice a RONNIE.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
It is better to be defeated standing for a high principle than to run by
committing subterfuge.
-- President Grover Cleveland
%
There exist tasks which cannot be done by more than 10 men or fewer
than 100.
-- Steele's Law
%
America is the only country left where we teach languages so that
no pupil can speak them.
-- John Erskine
%
The danger of the past was that men became slaves.  The danger of the
future is that men may become robots.  True enough, robots do not rebel.
But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane.
-- Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
%
Tact is, after all, a kind of mind reading.
-- Sarah Orne Jewett
%
You little Temptress. I want to see you BEG!
-- Arnie Becker (L.A. Law)
%
    Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me,
but things vary, and adopt a new form.  The phrase "being
born" is used for beginning to be something different from
what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing to be the
same.  Though this thing may pass into that, and that into
this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
-- Ovid
-- Metamorphoses
%
:open switch: [IBM: prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved
   question, issue, or problem.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
One day the President and Mrs.  Coolidge were visiting a government
farm.  Soon after their arrival they were taken off on separate tours.
When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens she paused to ask the man
in charge if the rooster copulates more than once each day.  'Dozens of
times,' was the reply.  'Please, tell that to the President,' Mrs. Coolidge
requested.  When the President passed the pens and was told about the
roosters, he asked, 'Same hen every time?'  'Oh no, Mr. President, a
different one each time.'  The President nodded slowly, then said, 'Tell
that to Mrs. Coolidge.'
-- G. Bermant
%
Glance their many-twinkling feet.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- The Progress of Poesy, I, 3, Line 11
%
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse;
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
Look!  A ladder!  Maybe it leads to heaven, or a sandwich!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.
-- Davenant
%
Klag: "They are inquisitive.  They want to know how you would endure."
Riker: "Endure what?"
Klag: "Them."
Riker: [Pause]  "One, or both?"
-- "A Matter Of Honor", Stardate unknown
%
:Lasherism: [Harvard] n. A program that solves a standard problem
   (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the {life}
   algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way.  Distinguished from a
   {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on
   purpose as a mental exercise.  Such constructions are quite popular
   in exercises such as the {Obfuscated C contest}, and
   occasionally in {retrocomputing}.  Lew Lasher was a student at
   Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Testing
 a process for ensuring that the product will work in all
 circumstances that anybody other than the user can imagine
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
He gives twice who gives quickly.
-- Latin proverb
%
The most cooperative man in this world is a dead man.
-- Bela Oxmyx, "A Piece of the Action," stardate unknown.
%
Bring all you got.
-- Bob Gibson
%
:bitblt: /bit'blit/ n. [from {BLT}, q.v.] 1. Any of a family
   of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of
   bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or
   between two areas of either main or display memory (the requirement
   to do the {Right Thing} in the case of overlapping source and
   destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky).  2. Synonym
   for {blit} or {BLT}.  Both uses are borderline techspeak.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"What about you, you ever kill anything?"
  "No, I think killing animals for sport is wrong."
"So you wouldn't kill an animal, huh?... Would you kill a MOOSE that was
 molesting your WIFE?"
-- The Mountain Man, One of Dana Carvey's great SNL character
%
Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
-- Hoare's Law of Large Problems
%
"20 scared-out-of-their-gourds 3 or 4-year olds is an example of what I'd like
to do to some of you who are really getting on my nerves."
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
a = b
a*a = b*a
a*a - b*b = b*a - b*b
(a-b)*(a+b) = b(a-b)
a+b = b
b+b = b
2b = b
2 = 1
Hint: whatever number, multiplied by 0 gives 0...
-- Antonio
%
Always watch your step--especially when you're not going anywhere.
-- Genry Pinera [ME]
%
In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success
 because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its
 efforts.   Namely, the physical universe.
-- Ken Jenkins
%
A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty
and a boy forever.
-- Helen Rowland
%
Having a daughter is like riding a young horse
over an unknown steeplechase course.
You don't know when to pull up the reins,
when to let the horse have the head ... or what.
-- Princess Grace of Monaco
%
"YOU'RE WHAT!?"
-- The most common form of marriage proposal
%
Are we to mark this day with a white or a black stone?
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. x
%
Where there is much light there is also much shadow.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
Lord FINCHLEY tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
 It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
-- H. Belloc
%
:frink: /frink/ v. The unknown ur-verb, fill in your own meaning.
   Found esp. on the USENET newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs, where it is
   said that the lemurs know what `frink' means, but they aren't
   telling.  Compare {gorets}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My sister's asthmatic. In the middle of an asthma attack she got an obscene
 phone call. The guy said, "Did I call you or did you call me?"
-- John Mendoza
%
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-- Perelman
%
Kirk: "You're a great one for logic.  I'm a great one for rushing in where
  angels fear to tread.  We're both at extremes.  Reality is probably somewhere
  in between."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Do not go gently into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas
%
I have to rotate my crops.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 83 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those
who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed
copiously and secretly at any bad review.
-- Isaac Asimov, prolific American author
%
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Absalom and Achitophel, Part i, Line 156
%
My mother is NEVER on time!
-- Worf
%
So Mitch, are you going to miss your friends?
Umm, no.     You see, I don't really have any.  I'm afraid that I
intimidate them.
Good boy!
-- From Real Genius
%
Lie loud and long enough and someone may believe it.
-- Liberal Rule # 4
%

-- Your money's safe the S&L Regulators are watching it.
%
By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there!
-- William Collins (1720-1756)
-- Ode written in the year 1746
%
Speak the language of the country you are in; speak it purely, and
unlarded with any other.
-- Chesterfield
%
It's hard to decide if T.V. makes morons out of everyone or if it
mirrors Americans who really are morons to begin with.
-- Martin Mull
%
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchang'd
To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book vii, Line 24
%
"I suppose that everyone is familiar in outline with the theory of the
origin of species which Darwin promulgated.  Through the last fifty
years this theme of the natural selection of favored races has been
developed and expounded in writings innumerable.  Favored races certainly
can replace others.  The argument is sound, but we are doubtful of
its value.  For us that debate stands adjourned.  We go to Darwin
for his incomparable collection of facts.  We would fain emulate his
scholarship, his width and his power of exposition, but to us he speaks
no more with philosophical authority.  We read his scheme of evolution
as we would those of Lucretius or of Lamarck, delighting in their
simplicity and courage." "Modern research lends not the smallest encouragement
or sanction to the view that gradual evolution occurs by the transformation
of masses of individuals, though that fancy has fixed itself on popular
imagination."
-- William Bateson,
-- Address of the President of the British Association
-- for the Advancement of Science, August 14, 1914
%

-- Jamboree On The Air shortwave Scouting friendship.
%
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your
 shoes.
-- Mickey Mouse
%
If you wish me to weep, you yourself must feel grief.
-- Horace (65-8 BC)
-- Ars Poetica, 102
%
By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to
the lie, the more readily it will be believed.
-- make people believe that heaven is hell and hell heaven.  The greater
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
%

-- Support your local police force steal!!
%
No matter where you are, there you are.
-- Oliver's Law of Location
%
In the best of possible worlds the chateau of monseigneur the baron
was the most beautiful of chateaux, and madame the best of possible
baronesses.
-- Francis M. Voltaire (1694-1778)
-- Candide, Chap. i
%
The smallest interval of time known to man is
that which occurs in Manhattan between the traffic signal
turning green and the taxi driver behind you blowing his horn.
-- Carson's Definition
%
I always thought you were in my corner.
"Ah, no. See, actually I was the one who got you kicked out. You know
  you're incorrigible, Q. You're a lost cause. I can't go to a single
  solar system without having to apologize for you and I'm tired of it."
I wasn't the one who misplaced the entire Deltivid asteroid belt.
"Hey! This isn't about me, I've got better places to be."
-- Q and Q2, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
:Saturday-night special: [from police slang for a cheap handgun]
   n.  A {quick-and-dirty} program or feature kluged together
   during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to pressure
   from a {salescritter}.  Such hacks are dangerously unreliable,
   but all too often sneak into a production release after
   insufficient review.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 C=>8*) devilish chef with glasses and a moustache
-- SMILEY
%
  Regarding President Reagan, "For 7 1/2 years
   I've worked alongside him, and I'm proud to be
   his partner.  We've had triumphs, we've made
   mistakes, we've had sex."

  "Setbacks," he quickly corrected.  "We've had
   setbacks."
-- GEORGE BUSH at the College of Southern Idaho, 5/6/88
%
Scilurus on his death-bed, being about to leave four-score sons surviving,
offered a bundle of darts to each of them, and bade them break them.
When all refused, drawing out one by one, he easily broke them,--thus
teaching them that if they held together, they would continue strong;
but if they fell out and were divided, they would become weak.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders
%
May your future be limited only by your dreams.
-- Christa McAuliffe
%
"I ought to be judged as a captain who set out from Spain to the Indies
to conquer many warlike peoples of very contrary creed and customs,
where by divine will, I have placed under the sovereignty of the King
and Queen, Our Lords, another world, by which Spain, which was once
called poor, is now the most rich."
-- Christopher Columbus, Letter to Dona Juana de la Torre, 1500
%
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Britannia Rediviva, Line 208
%
To do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.
-- Book of Common Prayer
-- Catechism
%
As Tammie glow'red, amazed and curious,
The mirth and fun grew fast and furious.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Tam o' Shanter
%
 You have reached 555-6238.  Why?
-- Answering machine madness - brevity
%
if your mailbox is made out of old truck parts.
-- You may be redneck...
%
I just remembered something about a TOAD!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The fancier a car is named, the more gas it is burning.
-- Frank Jacobs
%
if you take the kids to watch rabbits breed.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Less is more.
-- Mies Van Der Rohe
%
At the Academy Awards Dinners all the actors and actresses in Hollywood
gather around to see what someone else thinks about their acting besides
their press agents.
-- Bob Hope
%

-- Teflon brain nothing sticks.
%
When I was five years old I was on a merry go round.  There was a
gunshot nearby.  The horses stampeded.  There I was running down the
street on a purple wooden horse.
-- Steven Wright
%
Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not
succeed.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
We walk, and our religion is shown in how we walk. Living in this world
means choosing, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly
expressed in the walk itself.
-- R.H. Blyth
%
That all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul,--the dinner bell.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto v, Stanza 49
%
Time-sharing is the junk-mail part of the computer business.
-- H. R. J. Grosch [attributed]
%
LaForge: "Who knows if we're even dead or alive."
-- "Yesterday's Enterprise", Stardate unknown
%
Worlds may change, galaxies disintegrate, but a woman always remains a
woman.
-- Kirk, "The Conscience of the King", stardate 2818.9
%
"It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of
 gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
 "Hit it."
-- Jake and Elwood Blues, "The Blues Brothers"
%
Wow!  Look!!  A stray meatball!!  Let's interview it!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing at all, for sure.
-- Socrates
%
If you have trouble attracting men, try ordering pizza instead. This way
 you can get whatever you like--the right size, the right toppings, and once
 the delivery boy is in your house, he's yours.
-- Hilary Dalton
%
By writing my fears down on paper I will see that not only am I afraid of
everything but that I also have really bad penmanship.
-- Dan Goodman
%
Ethics is not definable, is not implementable, because it is not conscious;
it involves not only our thinking, but also our feeling.
-- Valdemar W. Setzer
%
Hypotheses multiply so as to fill the gaps in factual knowledge concerning
biological phenomena.
-- James D. Regan
%
The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru
%
Sela: "Excuse me, I'm just finishing up a speech, for you, Mister Spock.  I
  rather enjoy writing, I don't get to do it very often in this job."
Data: "Perhaps you would be happier in another job."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can
without any difficulty contradict Socrates.
-- Plato
-- Symposium
%
Well, here I am in AMERICA..  I LIKE it.  I HATE it.
I LIKE it.  I HATE it.  I LIKE it.  I HATE it.  I LIKE it.
I HATE it.  I LIKE..  EMOTIONS are SWEEPING over me!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Ten decimals are sufficient to give the diameter of the earth to the
fraction of an inch.
-- S. Newcomb
%
The Republican administration has failed to enforce the Prohibition law;
is guilty of trafficking in liquor permits, and has become the protector
of violators of this law.  The Democratic Party pledges to respect and
enforce the Constitution and all laws.
-- Democratic National Platform, 1924
%
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
-- Bombeck's Rule of Medicine
%
Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us
stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.
-- Alexander Pope
%
The mildest manners with the bravest mind.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xxiv, Line 963
%
CHANNELS - The guy who has a desk between two expeditors.
-- THE ALL-PURPOSE BUSINESSMAN'S VOCABULARY
%
If you're a horse, and someone gets on you, and falls off, and then gets right
 back on you, I think you should buck him off right away.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation
with the average voter.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
Always do what you are afraid to do.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper.  Half never voted
for President.  One hopes it is the same half.
-- Gore Vidal
%
The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
My nose feels like a bad Ronald Reagan movie...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Sensors show lifeforms aboard, but I am unable to ascertain whether they
  are awake or dormant. However their propulsion system is inactive so I
  would hypothesize that the crew is asleep. However, I could be in error.
-- Data, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
This just in from a Nicholas Notifier up north.  Everyone's favorite
farmer and political commentator off the interstate near Chehalis has
just come up with the prize line of his career.

"Limit congressmen to two terms.  One in office.  One in jail."
-- Jonathan Nicholas' column in The Oregonian, Friday, March 29, 1991
%
We can see now that we Americans were caught unprepared, because
we were ordinary human beings, following the best advice we had at
the time.  No one would have guessed in 1941 that we would be attacked
in such an unsportsmanlike manner as we were.  No one could have visualized
Pearl Harbor, either out there or in Washington.  But if we had known
then what we know now, we would have expected an attack in 1941.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt,
-- Speaking at the Naval Air Force Station in Adak, Alaska, August 3, 1944
%
Keep the number of passes in a compiler to a minimum.
-- D. Gries
%
It's not to keep him from running off our property. It's to protect my
putting green.
                   why his dog, Breezy, wears a special collar that emits
                   a painful jolt of electricity should the dog try to
                   run away. (reported in the NY Daily News, 6/30/92 -
                   taken from The Quayle Quarterly, Summer/Fall 92)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle telling a guest at his house
%
BRUTE, n.  See HUSBAND.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
CIA spokesman : We can say with some certainty that Noriega was a
sadist,a drug-abuser and despot.
 Reporter: How do you know so much about him?
 CIA spokesman : Well he was on our payroll.
-- Johnny Tingle
%
Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up,
And isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
"It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere alse
Instead!"
-- A.A. Milne
%
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength,
because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm viii, 2
%
    IBM PC owners
Only one, but he'll have to go out and buy the light bulb
adaptor card first, which is extra.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
All change is not growth; all movement is not forward.
-- Ellen Glasgow
%
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.  I have come
 to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
-- Ronald Reagan
%
The Cosmic Dancer does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily,
lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another.
-- Nietzche
%

-- It's immature and silly, but then again so is high school.
-- Mathew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off
%
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy,
but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing
in line.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
What made you come to it?

My refusal to be born with any original sin.  I have never felt guilty
of my ability ... I have never felt guilty of being a man ... I saw the
root of the world's tragedy, the key to it, and the solution.  I saw
what had to be done.  I went out to do it.
-- John Galt
%
When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.
-- Reginald Heber (1783-1826)
-- Seventh Sunday after Trinity
%
Malice drinks one-half of its own poison
-- Seneca
%
The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known
forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical
machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the
writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical
fact to be.
-- Simon Newcomb (in 1901)
%
 :-[ sarcastic
-- SMILEY
%
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
  than a life spent doing nothing.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
:XOFF: /X-of/ n. Syn. {control-S}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I won't say my wife is fat, but she's the only woman I know ...
-- Benny Hill
%
...you mourn the death of GOTO and spaghetti programming more than your
dead fish.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
-- Ray Bradbury
%
Yesterday, and to-day, and forever.
-- New Testament
-- Hebrews xiii, 8
%
I've been in the academic world a long time...I can sleep with my eyes open,
which is an important skill for those of you considering jobs in middle and
upper management.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
Take a breath of the new dawn and make it a part of you.
-- Hopi proverb
%
A drug is that substance which, when injected into a rat,
will produce a scientific report.
-- Matz' Rule Regarding Medications
%
A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
%
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 26
%
Data: "Considering the exceptionally long lifespan of Vulcans, it does seem odd
  that Sarek and Spock did not choose to resolve those differences in the time
  allowed."
Picard: "Father and son.  Both proud, both stubborn, more alike than either of
  them were prepared to admit.  A lifetime spent building emotional barriers,
  they are very difficult to break down.  And now the time has come when it's
  too late.  It's a difficult moment.  It's a lonely one.  It's a moment that
  Spock is about to face."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
How to cook with Heard and Soul.
-- Jeffrey Dahmers Cookbook
%
A loser walks in Central Park with a German shepherd for protection--and
 meets a mugger with a rhinoceros. A loser is a female impersonator who
 doesn't know it, a window washer who steps back to admire his work, and a
 health-nut submarine captain who sleeps with the windows open!
-- Charlie Manna
%
One good turne asketh another.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. xi
%
Procedures devised to implement the purpose won't quite work.
-- Chisholm, Third Law, Corollary 3
%
There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman whilst she is making
 sausages.
-- Laurence Sterne
%
Know you of such a bird?
No...but we could _make_ one...
No, we _couldn't_, Baldrick...Oh, I suppose you have to be told some-
  time. What happens is, a mummy bird and a daddy bird...who love each
  other very much...
-- Edmund and Baldrick : Money
%
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
%
Another was, "Watch your opportunity."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Pittacus, vii
%
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxii, 21
%
Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Absalom and Achitophel, Part i, Line 268
%
 :-* Oops! (covering mouth with hand)
-- SMILEY
%
:asbestos cork award: n. Once, long ago at MIT, there was a
   {flamer} so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed,
   had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had
   been nominated for the `asbestos cork award'.  (Any reader in
   doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the
   etymology under {flame}.)  Since then, it is agreed that only a
   select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn
   few.
-- this dubious dignity but there is no agreement on *which*
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Happiness doesn't come from having what you want... in fact, it doesn't
come from anything at all.
-- Dan Goodman
%
"They that love beyond the world cannot be
 separated by it.  Death is but crossing the world,
 as friends do the seas; they live in one another
 still."
-- William Penn
%
To see the butcher slap the steak, before he laid it on the block,
and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly.  It was
agreeable, too -it really was- to see him cut it off, so smooth and juicy.
There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen;
it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of
tone, skillful handling of the subject, fine shading.  It was the triumph of
mind over matter; quite.
-- Dickens [Martin Chuzzlewit]
%
The Counselor and I will be indisposed today.
-- Riker
%

-- I'm not sure of what I should do when every thought I'm thinking of is you
%
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with
things you didn't have a good answer to.
-- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
%
Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity.  But
  improve man, you gain a thousandfold.
-- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed," stardate 3142.8.
%
When articles rise the consumer is the first that suffers, and when
they fall he is the last that gains.
-- Colton
%
If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal damnation!
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), St. Joan
%
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for
peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV
%
We're free people.  We belong to no one.
-- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3259.2.
%
If there is no struggle there is no progress
-- Frederick Douglas
%
Will you promise not to get mad if
I ask you something?
-- One of the world's worst questions
-- Jane Goodsell
%
He talked with more claret than clarity.
-- Susan Ertz.
%
Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
-- Demosthenes, Athenian orator and statesman
%
And the best part of C++ is, when you change the guts of a class in a
header file, everything needs to be recompiled, even things that don't
care about the guts of the class!  Oh, wait.
-- Rob Earhart
%
The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.
And in the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.
-- Dr. Miranda Jones and Spock,
-- "Is There in Truth No Beauty?," stardate 5630.8
%
A man is as old as he's feeling,
  A woman as old as she looks.
-- Mortimer Collins (1827-1876)
%
No man is an island, but some of us are pretty good peninsulas.
-- Solomon Short
%
We hire Orcus to be our guide.
-- Famous Last Words
%
You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that,
contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from
houses.  Really, that's what scientists believe.  In fact many
scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the
summer.  If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day,
you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist
sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.
-- Dave Barry, Postpetroleum Guzzler
%
I'm GLAD I remembered to XEROX all my UNDERSHIRTS!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
    TV comedians
Two, one to screw it in, and another to say "Sock it to Me."
Notes: Sock it = Socket. Also, the phrase was from "Laugh In."
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
"Does anyone have a knife?"
-- Great Quotes of Yule '93
%
Miscellaneous is always the largest category.
-- Walter Slovotsky, The Warrior Lives by Joel Rosenberg
%
Riker: "What, no seconds?"
Data: "I have discovered, sir, a certain level of impatience when I calculate a
  lengthy time interval to the nearest second."
-- "The Loss", Stardate unknown
%
You climb to reach the summit,
but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "The Cyberiad"
%
You must carry your struggle to the camp of your foe, and leave his severed
head pulsating on the floor before his accolades
-- Sun Tsu
%
Poverty wants some things, luxury many, avarice all things.
-- Abraham Cowley
%
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the
computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per
gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
-- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
%
There are in business three things necessary- knowledge, temper and time.
-- Feltham
%
 It makes me mad when people say I turned and ran like a
 scared rabbit.  Maybe it was like an angry rabbit, who was
 running to go fight in another fight, away from the first fight.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient
 to exactly the point of most pressure.
-- Milt Barber
%
You might not count in the New Order.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Don't always think that eveybody is laughing at you - that way, when they *are*
laughing at you, you won't miss the joke.
-- Steve Gardner
%
In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim to the top.
-- Poor Richard
%
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to
 be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will
 have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation. To those duties you
 have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for
 celebrity.
-- Robert Southey (to Charlotte Bronte)
%
My eye!  My eye!  Somebody, help me!  OOOoooOOOOoooOOOooohhhhhhh!!
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
I saw a close friend of mine the other day...  He said, "Stephen, why haven't
 you called me?"  I said, "I can't call everyone I want.  My new phone has no
 five on it."  He said, "How long have you had it?"  I said, "I don't know...
 my calendar has no sevens on it."
-- Steven Wright
%
    hackers
None. They use a hammer.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women
 and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics.
-- Speaker of the California Assembly Jesse Unruh
%
...you count things on your fingers in binary.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
A cousin of mine once said about money,
money is always there but the pockets change;
it is not in the same pockets after a change,
and that is all there is to say about money.
-- Gertrude Stein
%

-- SMILEY
-- I-)   <Geordi LaForge
%
It is very difficult to look at the possibility of lesbian sheep because if
you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex is to stand still.
Maybe there is a female sheep out there really wanting another
female, but there's just no way for us to know it.
-- Anne Perkins, U.C. Davis graduate student
-- on her study of sexuality in sheep
%
Kirk: "Thanks."
Martia: "This will help keep you warm."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Pessimist:  One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
Come then, expressive silence, muse His praise.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- Hymn, Line 118
%
There is only one way to console a widow, but remember the risk.
-- Lazarus Long
%
Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric
system.
-- P.J. O'Rourke Vancouver Sun, Dec. 20, 1991
%
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
 Thank you for calling the Satanic Hotline.  All of our operators
 are busy at the moment.  If you would like, leave a brief
 message after the tone, and someone will get back to you...
 When hell freezes over.
-- Answering machine madness - odd organizations
%
America's favorite sport is talking. Football is really just talk. You only
 get about four and a half seconds of action and then everybody talks. The
 commentators talk, the spectators talk, even the players get together and
 talk. Then they go back, sadly silent, play for another four and a half
 seconds, and then they get together and talk again!
-- John Cleese
%
Ye sons of France, awake to glory!
  Hark! hark! what myriads bid you rise!
Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,
  Behold their tears and hear their cries!
-- Joseph Rouget de L'Isle (1760-1836)
-- The Marseilles Hymn
%
I realize that I've made some very poor decisions recently, Dave, but I still
 have the utmost confidence in the mission.
-- HAL 9000
%
So how's it been here, Number One? Same old routine job?
-- Picard to Riker, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1
%

-- Subliminal Tag Line stcudorp dnalroB yuB
%
 "Throwing Money Away" by Phil T. Rich
-- Booktip of the month
%
Many strokes fell down strong oaks.
-- Proverb
%
As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.
-- Peter Drucker
%
I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse
 than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.
-- Frank Zappa
%
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,
-- Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas
-- v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 1927
%
It is disgusting to note the increase in the quantity of coffee used by
my subjects and the amount of money that goes out of the country in
consequence.  Everybody is using coffee.  If possible, this must be
prevented.  My people must drink beer.
-- Frederick the Great
%
Distrust interested advice.
-- Aesop
%
Against boredom, even the gods themselves struggle in vain.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
Inform all the troops that communications have completely broken
 down.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%
ADORE, v.t.  To venerate expectantly.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I mean, like, I just read your article in the Yale law recipe, on search and
 seizure.   Man, that was really Out There.
    I was so WRECKED when I wrote that...
-- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL
%
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience
-- Donald R. Perry Marquis, "archy and mehitabel", 1927
%
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen.
-- John Trumbull (1750-1831)
-- McFingal, Canto i, Line 67
%
In her tongue is the law of kindness.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xxxi, 26
%
Rapoport's Rule of the Roller-Skate Key: Certain items which are
crucial to a given activity will show up with uncommon regularity
until the day when that activity is planned, at which point the item
in question will disappear from the face of the earth.
-- Dan Rapoport
%

-- N.O.W. epitome of hypocricy in regards to Anita Hill & Paula Jones.
%
Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle,
yet will not his foolishness depart from him.
-- Proverbs XXVII, 22
%
:lint: [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named for the bits of fluff it
   supposedly picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely
   for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if
   in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, most esp. if
   the UNIX utility `lint(1)' is used.  This term used to be
   restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by
   references on USENET) it has become a shorthand for {desk check}
   at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other than C.  Also as
   v. {delint}.  2. n. Excess verbiage in a document, as in "This
   draft has too much lint".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    congressmen
Five hundred and thirty-five, but only if the following conditions are met:
The light bulb will not be changed in an election year. A committee will study
the light-bulb situation for at least a year. Taxes will have to be raised.
A fair and proportionate number of the light-bulb changers will be from
minority groups. No Social Security funds will be used to change the bulb.
Each state and congressional district will share in the benefits of changing
the light bulb. The blame for the failure of the present bulb will be assigned
to the other party. The new bulb will be twice as bright as the old bulb.
Because the new bulb is twice as bright as the old bulb, it will cost 130 times
as much. A Blue Ribbon Panel will investigate the light-bulb failures and issue
a mega-page report to the congress. A fact-finding trip to all countries known
to produce light bulbs will be made by most congressmen and their wives.
The CIA will investigate the Russian light-bulb-changing system. Details of the
Russian light-bulb-changing system will be sold to the Chinese by an American
naval officer. The surgeon general will issue a report about the perils of
over-bright light bulbs. A program to supply light bulbs to those who cannot
afford them will be introduced by Tip O'Neill. President Reagan will give
a speech extolling the virtues of kerosene lanterns. Tip O'Neall will initiate
a program of free kerosene for the needy. And finally, each and every
congressman will send every one of his constituents a newsletter describing how
he managed to get the light bulb changed almost single-handedly.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Somehow he got in [to law school]; he talked his way in.
-- James Quayle, Dan's father
%
Kirk: "I would like to speak to someone in authority."
Aelborne: "We, we don't have anybody in authority.  But I am the chairman of
  the Council of Elders, perhaps I will do.
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3198.4
%
 (1) I love you.
 (2) This won't hurt a bit.
 (3) The Mercedes is paid for.
 (4) The check is in the mail.
 (5) I was just going to call you.
 (6) I've always worn cowboy boots.
 (7) I swear I won't come in your mouth.
 (8) Of course I'll respect you in the morning.
 (9) We have a really challenging assignment for you.
 (10) I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
-- The greatest lies of all time
%
I went to a general store but they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.
-- Steven Wright
%
...all good growth is slow growth.
-- William J. Gaynor (1849-1913), American Politician
%
Never fret about losing a single sock in the wash again.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
...you see a sign on a door saying "Please make sure this door is locked"
and you wonder if lockd knows about it.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
The last man in the tobacco industry with principle was Sir Walter Raleigh.
-- Steve Allen
%
File Not Found, Wanna play Solitaire?
-- WindowError: 044
%
When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit  the ground.
-- Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
%
Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
-- SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
%
There's an inverse relationship between how good something is for you,
and how much fun it is.
-- Calvin and Hobbes
%
   (1)  Women don't know what they want;
      they don't like what they have got.
      (2)  Men know very well what they want;
            having got it, they begin to lose interest.
-- Adam's Law
%
 If this were the best of all possible worlds, I could come to
 the phone right now, but I can't, so if you could leave your
 name and number...
-- Answering machine madness - can't answer right now because...
%
Never run into debt, not if you can find anything else to run into.
-- Josh Billings
%
If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what
we're getting.
-- Stephen Covey, First Things First
%
Drink like a fish.  Try to get legless.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and
traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination.
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
%
Let me guess, Ed.   Pentecostal, right?

Nope.    Charismatic (I think - I've given up on what all those pesky labels
 mean).

Same difference - all zeal and feel, averaging less than one working brain
 cell per congregation. Starcap'n Ra, you pegged him.    Good work!
-- Starcap'n Ra, ra@asuvax.asu.edu
-- Ed Carp, erc@unisec.usi.com
-- Kenn Barry, barry@eos.UUCP
%
Too late, Peri. Time to say goodbye.
-- The Doctor
%

-- The difficult I do immediately The impossible I sub-contract.
%
        It's a hybrid of texas-state bluegrass, and a New York sensimillia.
This stuff is great, cuz you can go play a good eighteen holes on it, take it
home, and get stoned enough to play jesus bells on it.
-- Caddyshack
%
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
-- Kundera
%
TAILFINS!!  ...click...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
MILLERS ROAD, BROOKLYN: Westgate Freeway to Blackshaw Road, road
reconstruction will restrict traffic to one lane each way until about 31
May. A roadworkers' strike will then delay construction another three
months, followed by an earthquake later in the year that will require
complete reconstruction of the area. An industrial chemical accident early
next year will cause most of the western suburbs to become inhabitable for
the rest of the century, resulting in heavy traffic leading out of the
area. In 2032, worldwide pollution will cause the world to end, meaning
widespread panic, the death of the entire human race, and traffic delays
in most areas.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
Derision Preemption:
 A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of
emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption
is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
Many are prone to garnish the graves of past prophets and mentally
stone living prophets.
-- Spencer W. Kimball
%
I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon
was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand, pretending
he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
"Let me not live," saith Aretine's Antonia, "if I had not rather hear
thy discourse than see a play."
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 1, Memb. 1, Subsect. 1
%
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty,
hesitation or incongruity.
-- William Hazlitt
%
Goodness is beauty in its best estate.
-- Marlowe
%
Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as
any other fragile and precious thing.
-- Randolph S. Bourne
%
Keep me as the apple of the eye,
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xvii, 8
%
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even
ordinarily respectable.
-- H. L. Mencken, Prejudices, First Series
%
I am a Klingon, sir.  For me to seek escape when my captain goes
  to battle...
"You are a Star Fleet officer, Lieutenant."
Aye, Sir.
-- Worf and Picard, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7
%
 O |-) net.religion
-- SMILEY
%
We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination
of human rights--the elimination of human rights in accordance with the
pursuit of Justice.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 2/3/89
-- (reported in The Chicago Tribune, 2/4/89)
%
The following ties in nicely with another thread (What is music?)
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.  And even t
hen, on the rare occasions that something opens within, and the music enters, w
hat we mainly hear, or hear corraborated, are personal, private, vanishing evoc
ations.  But the man who creates the music is hearing somethin else, is dealing
 with the roar rising from the void, and imposing order on it as it hits the ai
r.  What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it
has no wards, and more triumphant, too, for that same reason.  And his triumph,
 when he triumphs, is ours.
-- James Baldwin Sonny's Blues
%
Bart:  "You gotta help me!  These two guys work me night and day.  They don't
feed me.  They make me sleep on the floor.  They put anti-freeze in the wine
and they gave my red hat to the donkey!"
French policeman:  "Anti-freeze in the wine?!  That is a very serious crime!"
-- English subtitles in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons
%
You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it?  And
not that many years later he's teaching college.  Now I ask you:  Is that
the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever
heard?  [pauses to light cigarette.]  No aptitude at all for long division,
but never mind.  It's him they ask to split the atom.  How he talked his
way into the Nobel prize is beyond me.  But then, I suppose it's like the
man says, It's not what you know...
-- Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein
%
Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the American people should
 not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that
 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that
 satanists are taking over America's day care centers...   An unjustified
 crusade against those perceived as satanists could result in wasted resources,
 unwarranted damage to reputations, and disruption of civil liberties.
     investigating claims about satanic-cult crimes, in a report
    of his findings, June, 1989
-- Kenneth Lanning, head of the FBI's special unit in charge of
%
"Confusing yourself is a way to stay honest."
-- Jenny Holzer
%
The reason we need the MX missile system is that the missiles we
currently have in the ground are the Minuteman model, which is very
old.  The Defense Department can't even remember where half of them
are.  Insects have built nests in them.  People have built houses
directly over the silos.  What this means, of course, is that if we
ever needed them to help obliterate all human life on the planet, they
could be a real embarrassment.  I mean, maybe YOU'RE comfortable with
the prospect of missiles that are supposed to represent you barging
over the North Pole trailing shreds of polyester carpeting from some
recreation room in South Dakota, but your strategic defense planners
are not.
                   Political Fallout
-- Dave Barry, At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
%
[On the difference between political life and academic life:]
 In Washington, it's dog eat dog.  In academia, it's exactly the opposite.
-- Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor and Harvard lecturer, on NPR
%
May our nation continue to be the beakon of hope to the world.
             [Not a beacon of literacy, though.]
-- The Quayle's 1989 Christmas card.
%
    alt.folklore.urban readers
light bulb?
One, who'll do it for food.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a
%
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if
the disputants had dared to define their terms?
-- Aristotle
%
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous
word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
-- General Colin Powell
%
:corge: /korj/ [originally, the name of a cat] n. Yet another
   {metasyntactic variable}, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated
   by the {GOSMACS} documentation.  See {grault}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and
meaningless in some sense.
-- Hagbard Celine H.M. S.H.
%
The 486 is to a modern CPU as a Jules Verne reprint is to a modern SF novel.
-- Henry Spencer
%
 :-() I stubbed my toe
-- SMILEY
%
if you voted Tammy Bakker as "Best Dressed Woman."
-- You may be redneck...
%
Awright, which one of you hid my PENIS ENVY?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life
than the greatest of things without it.
-- Carl Jung
%
So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs vi, 11
%
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the
opposite-that that particular peach is but a detail.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
-- Vogue (November, 1956).
%
People try to put us d-d-down, just because we ge-ge-get around.
 Things they do look awful c-c-cold.   Hope I d-die before I get old.
-- The Who
%
Don't rush a miracle man.  You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
-- From "The Princess Bride"
%
There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and
engineers.   While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far
the more certain.
-- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
%
How can they say my life isn't a success?
Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat
and escaped being eaten?
-- Cindy Adams
%
That device requiring the most service will be least accessable.
-- The RPCISPE's Fifteenth Universal Law
%
If thou injurest conscience, it will have its revenge on thee.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Open your purse and your mouth cautiously; and your stock of wealth
and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great.
-- Zimmerman
%
Ye gentlemen of England
  That live at home at ease,
Ah! little do you think upon
  The dangers of the seas.
-- Martyn Parker (c. 1600-1656)
-- Song
%
       Bravely bold Sir Robin, rode forth from Camelot,
       He was not afraid to die, Oh Brave Sir Robin,
       He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways
       Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%
There is not a "fragment" in all nature, for every relative fragment of one
thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
 you have there.  Hey sugar, you call this number often?  I bet
 you have answering machines bothering you all the time...  Yes
 indeedy.  Why don't you give me a call sometime and we can
 listen to some old recordings...  I might even play my beep for
 you.
-- I can't come to the phone now, so...  Hey that's a nice phone
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled.
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
%
Shall I show you the muscular training of a philosopher? "What muscles
are those?"--A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised;
careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
-- Epictetus (c. 60 AD)
-- Wherein consists the Essence of Good,
-- Discourses, Book ii, Chap. viii
%
I saw him now going the way of all flesh.
-- John Webster (c. 1580-1625)
-- Westward Hoe, Act ii, Sc. 2
%
In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead.
-- Egyptian Book of the Dead
%
Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana are not racists.
                   candidacy, 10/12/90, (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, regarding David Duke's
%
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%
My colleagues and I feel that independents like ElfQuest are nothing but sheep
in wolves' clothing.
-- S. Lee
%
The Bluebird of Happiness long absent
 from his life,  Ned is visited by the
 Chicken of Depression.
-- Gary Larson
%
...It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united
opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to
give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond
the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
      The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131
-- Martin Gardner, Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life,
%
HUMAN REPLICAS are inserted into VATS of NUTRITIONAL YEAST...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided
  missiles and misguided men.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a
thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the
beginning of fairies.
-- James Matthew Barrie
%
No person was ever honored for what he received.  Honor has been the
reward for what he gave.
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
I was never a boy.
-- Data, "Booby Trap", stardate 43205.6
%
...you can remember your ethernet hardware address.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
I have no talents.  I have genius or nothing.  But all
genius is distorted, even my own.
-- Nero Wolfe
%
These aren't my colors!
-- Q, "Deja Q,"  stardate 43539.1.
%
having fun gives me prickly heat.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 91 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Perfection: not perfect action in a perfect world, but appropriate
actions in an imperfect one.
-- R. H. Blyth
%
Somebody who thinks logically is a nice contrast to the real world
-- The Law of Thumb
%
NEKKED: nude.  "She was in the pool nekked as a jaybird!"
-- Texan Dictionary
%
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which
cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when
taken little by little.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Sertorius
%
The opinions expressed are those of the author.
His employer would disavow any knowledge of them,
presuming they knew that he had any.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that.
Whistler: You will, Oscar; you will.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
:scram switch: [from the nuclear power industry] n. An
   emergency-power-off switch (see {Big Red Switch}), esp. one
   positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel.  In general,
   this is *not* something you {frob} lightly; these often
   initiate expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed
   in a {dinosaur pen} for use in case of electrical fire or in
   case some luckless {field servoid} should put 120 volts across
   himself while {Easter egging}.  (See also {molly-guard},
   {TMRC}.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There is a voter born every minute.
-- P.T. Clinton
%
I knew, by the smoke that so gracefully curl'd
  Above the green elms, that a cottage was near;
And I said, "If there 's peace to be found in the world,
  A heart that was humble might hope for it here."
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Ballad Stanzas
%
What I don't like about chess is the way you have to sit and pretend to
 think.
-- Gardner Rea
%
For the ones who got a notion, a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive
I want to find one face that ain't looking through me
I want to find my place I want to spit in the face of these
Badlands....
-- Badlands, "Darkness On The Edge of Town"
%
Where there is much light, the shadow is deep.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
To safeguard one's health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome
illness indeed.
-- Francios de La Rochefoucauld
%
Bloody explorers ponce off to mumbo-jumbo land...come back with a
  tropical disease, a suntan, and a bag of brown lumpy things...Bob's
  your uncle everyone's got a picture of them in the toilet.
-- Edmund : Potato
%
if there's an Elvis portrait over the fireplace.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.
Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. ... Only
atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
-- Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, "The Pre-Adamic Creation and Evolution"
%
Content if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view,
The learn'd reflect on what before they knew.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Criticism, Part iii, Line 180
%
O'Brien: "Isn't that what marriage is about...sharing?"
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44429.6
%
Sentiment breeds weakness, let it get hold of you and you
are dead...
-- Avon
%
When the President does it, that means it's not illegal.
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, in interview with David Frost, 19 May 1977
%
Oh, listen to them, Artoo; they're dying!
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
To die is landing on some distant shore.
-- John Dryden
%
I grew up on a big farm. Last time I was home visiting my folks I delivered
 a calf. I tell ya, I feel so much thinner now.
-- Henriette Mantel
%
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.
-- John Gay (1688-1732)
-- My own Epitaph
%
Beverly: "Don't worry, Jean-Luc, it's the butler, only two lines!"
-- "A Fistful Of Datas", Stardate unknown
%
1. Stores that sell volume one will not know of volume two.
2. Stores that sell volume two will be out of volume one.
-- Riley's Law of Sequels
%
It is only the ignorant who despise education.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 571
%
If you cried a little less, the audience would cry more.
-- Edith Evans (to John Gielgud)
%
Full moon risen and my fever is high.
-- Eagles
%
The best view of government is in the rearview mirror as you're
driving away from it.
-- Ronald Reagan
%
 :-{) normal smiling face with a moustache
-- SMILEY
%
There are those that are born to be on top and those that are born
to be on bottom. Like officers and soldiers.
-- Sergeant Traub
%
The printed word expands to fill the space available
to it.
-- Parkinson's New Law
%
A man in the house is worth two on the street.
-- Mae West.
%
    public opinion researchers
With what degree of certainty do you need to know?
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A SNAP dump is like getting a snapshot of yourself
while hitting a baseball.  You can go back later and look
at what you did wrong so that you can improve.
-- MVS/ESA: Diagnosis: Tools and Service Aids LY28-1813-03
-- 5.0 Chapter 5.  SNAP Dumps
%
 :-" heavy smoker
-- SMILEY
%
Our way is peace.
       stardate 4040.7.
-- Septimus, the Son Worshiper, "Bread and Circuses,"
%
Things go right so they can go wrong.
-- Maah's Law
%
Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
Never get excited over how people look from behind.
-- Gillenson's Law of Expectation
%
I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
The assembled souls of all that men held wise.
-- Sir William Davenant (1605-1668)
-- Gondibert, Book ii, Canto v, Stanza 37
%
:feeper: /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually
   a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the {feep} sound.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The amount of time spent by a committee
on an agenda item is inversely proportional to the cost of the item.
-- Parkinson's Law of Committees
%
KYLIE
  I discovered today that "kylie" is actually Aboriginal for a
  boomerang. Which explains how Kylie Minogue's career keeps bouncing
  back, despite a lack of talent.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
To pull together is to avoid being pulled apart.
-- Bob Allisat
%
It has always been true that in the United States
 the people who ought to read books write them.
-- Gore Vidal
-- [Editor's note: Now if Vidal would only take his own advice...]
%
After the first year, Captain Kirk lost his secretary, Yeoman Rand.
 She used to bring him coffee (even heating it with a hand phaser in
 times of galley distress) and hand him clipboards with flashing lights
 on them for him to initial.  I wonder whatever happened to her...
-- karl@neosoft.com
%
Awake, my soul! stretch every nerve,
  And press with vigour on;
A heavenly race demands thy zeal,
  And an immortal crown.
-- Philip Doddridge (1702-1751)
-- Zeal and Vigour in the Christian Race
%
[E]lections amount to little more than choosing between the scum that
floats to the top of the barrel and the dregs that settle to the bottom.
-- L. Neil Smith
%
 (1)  When you empty a drawer for his clothes
       and a shelf for his toiletries, the relationship ends.
   (2)  When you finally buy pretty stationary
        to continue the correspondence, he stops writing.
-- Barbara's Rules of Bitter Experience
%
Are not within the leaf of pity writ.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Timon of Athens
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride.
Everything else they do is crap - and they know it.
-- Fred Friendly, 1980
%
:Technobabble:
John Barry
MIT Press 1991
ISBN 0-262-02333-4

Barry's book takes a critical and humorous look at the `technobabble' of
acronyms, neologisms, hyperbole, and metaphor spawned by the computer
industry.  Though he discusses some of the same mechanisms of jargon
formation that occur in hackish, most of what he chronicles is actually
and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the playful jargon of hackers (most
of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the kind of pompous,
passive-voiced word salad he deplores).
-- suit-speak -the obfuscatory language of press releases, marketroids,
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Murphy was a grunt.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #62
%
I went to the hardware store and bought some used paint.  It was in
the shape of a house.  I also bought some batteries, but they weren't
included.  So I had to buy them again.
-- Steven Wright
%
Let us fill your crack!
-- Sign on an asphalt truck
%
Bingo, gas station, hamburger with a side order of airplane noise,
and you'll be Gary, Indiana.
-- Jessie in the movie "Greaser's Palace"
%
The boys are back in town.
-- Thin Lizzie
%
Really to see the sun rise or go down every day...would preserve us sane
forever.
-- Thoreau
%
Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.
-- Mark Twain
%
Nada muere, todo baja del rio del tiempo al mar de la eternidad y alli queda.
-- Miguel de Unamuno,
-- "Ver con los Ojos y Otros Relatos Novelescos"
%
I must be out of my mind.
Starfleet would probably agree with you.
-- Picard and Pulaski, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
 oo "It's cold out"
-- SMILEY
%
:smart: adj. Said of a program that does the {Right Thing} in a
   wide variety of complicated circumstances.  There is a difference
   between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in
   particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs (yet ---
   see {AI-complete}).  Compare {robust} (smart programs can be
   {brittle}).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.
-- S. Tarrasch
%
They say you can't do it, but sometimes that isn't always true.
-- Casey Stengel
%
No action is without side effects.
-- Barry Commoner
%
You and me we're going nowhere slowly
 And we gotta get away from the past
 There's nothing wrong with going nowhere baby
 But we should be going nowhere fast

 Everybody's going nowhere slowly
 They're only fighting for the chance to be last
 There's nothing wrong with going nowhere baby
 But we should be going nowhere fast

 It's so much better going nowhere fast...

-- Nowhere Fast, Meat Loaf, _Bad Attitude_
%
The degree of civilization in a society
can be judged by entering its prisons.
-- F. Dostoyevski
%
If the people are to be the governors, who then shall be the governed?
-- Cotton Mather, leader of the Salem Witch-hunts
%
Reproof on her lips, but a smile in her eye.
-- Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
-- Rory O'More
%
The saddest moment in a person's life comes only once.
-- Brendan Francis
%
Access to quick cash is a necessity for those spur-of-the-moment plans.
-- from an IBM Southwest Federal Credit Union newsletter to members.
%
I read an article in a magazine: women 49 years old having their first
 child. Forty-nine! I couldn't think of a better way to spend my golden
 years. What's the advantage of having a kid at 49? So you can both be in
 diapers at the same time?
-- Sue Kolinsky
%
And this is his sofa, is it?
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
I love war....Peace will be hell for me.
-- George S. Patton
%
Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one
else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into
the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard
work, risking, and not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll
discover will be wonderful: yourself.
-- Alan Alda
%
"A Chicken McNugget doesn't die any easier than a baby fur seal."
-- Ted Nugent
%
The Joh virus
  Corrupts your data, but don't you worry about that.
-- New viruses on the block.
%
KETTLE
  Device designed to heat up water, whistle just too quietly for you
  to hear when it's finished, boil dry, explode and burn your house
  down.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
I'm changing my name to Chrysler
I'm going down to Washington, D.C.
I'll tell some power broker
   What they did for Iacocca
Will be perfectly acceptable to me!
I'm changing my name to Chrysler,
I'm heading for that great receiving line.
When they hand a million grand out,
   I'll be standing with my hand out,
Yessir, I'll get mine!
-- Tom Paxton
%
All you have to do is act like normal people, and they can't tell
the difference.  You just talk with them about the dull things they're
interested in, and they eat it up.  It's no trick at all to imitate
them.
-- J.A. Meyer
-- Brick Wall, Sept, 1951
%
Aggravate your choler.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted
to my kind of fooling.
-- Robert Frost
%
The challenge of space exploration and particularly of landing men on
the moon represents the greatest challenge which has ever faced the
human race.  Even if there were no clear scientific or other arguments
for proceeding with this task, the whole history of our civilization
would still impel men toward the goal.        In fact, the assembly of the
scientific and military with these human arguments creates such an
overwhelming case that in can be ignored only by those who are blind
to the teachings of history, or who wish to suspend the development of
civilization at its moment of greatest opportunity and drama.
-- Sir Bernard Lovell, 1962, in "The History of Manned Space Flight"
%
...in a dream, you are walking down a path (using PostScript's pathforall)
and get woken up by a closepath.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
I KAISER ROLL?!  What good is a Kaiser Roll without a little
 COLE SLAW on the SIDE?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The inability to benefit from feedback appears to be the primary cause
of pseudoscience.  Pseudoscientists retain their beliefs and
ignore or distort contradictory evidence rather than modify or reject
a flawed theory.  Because of their strong biases, they seem to lack
the self-correcting mechanisms scientists must employ in their work.
-- Thomas L. Creed, "The Skeptical Inquirer," Summer 1987
%
If you mess with a thing long enough, it will break.
-- Schmidt's Law
%
    folklorists
Ten. One to change it and nine to document it.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Any bus that can be the wrong bus will be the wrong bus. All others
are out of service or full.
-- John Corcoran
%
People perceive machines as people.
-- Taber's Second Law of Manufacturing Information Systems
-- Pat Taber
%
Troi: "Give yourself some credit, Mister Barclay."
Barclay: "Maybe...you're right."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate Unknown
%
:waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"]
   1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human
   limb.  When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the
   mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein
   in the story, which he wrote in 1942.  Now known by the more
   generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense
   interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance.  2. At
   Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used
   instead of {foobar} as a metasyntactic variable and general
   nonsense word.  See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to
live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
%
I have to laugh when I think of the first cigar, because it was probably just a
 bunch of rolled-up tobacco leaves.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers?  Have the people
 we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
-- George Wallace
%
I don't speak for my company, ....
 my company does not speak for me....
-- DISCLAIMER
%
To swim circles around the opposition.
-- Cliches for merfolk
%
"American Airlines. Fly with us and you won't walk again."
-- Sign seen in L.A.
%
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
-- Thomas Mann
%
Some people have a lot of vanity. They say, "I only wear glasses when I
 drive." If you only need glasses when you drive, then drive around with a
 prescription windshield!
-- Brian Regan
%
A man must first govern himself ere he be fit to govern a family, and
his family ere he be fit to bear the government in the commonwealth.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh
%
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday
they might force their beliefs on us.
-- Mario Cuomo
%
It is better to learn late than never.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 864
%
Time is the image of eternity.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Plato, xli
%
Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
-- Aesop
%
An economist is a man who would marry Farrah Fawcett for her money.
-- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
1. The more proficient one is at procrastination, the less
proficient one need be at all else.
2. The slower one works, the fewer mistakes one makes.
-- Doane's Laws of Procrastination
%
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due
to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this
you have the power to revoke at any moment.
-- Marcus Aurelius
%
We live in a time when automation is ushering in a second industrial
revolution.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson
%
Picard: "Disconnect Mister Barclay from the computer."
Worf: "Aye, Captain."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
    It may be that a genius of the so-called universal type--
an Aristotle, for example, or a Leibniz or a Leonardo da
-- Vinciis one whose mind has the group property.
-- Cassius J. Keyser
%
I want EARS!  I want two ROUND BLACK EARS to make me feel warm 'n secure!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
"Hey, er..." said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
The man looked at them doubtfully.
"I don't know.       Why, do you think I should have one?  It seems very odd to
give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
A horse hired, never tired.
-- Proverb
%
Khan: "Allow me to introduce you to Ceti Alpha V's only remaining *indigenous*
  lifeform.  What do you think?  It killed twenty of my people...including my
  beloved wife.  Oh, not all at once.  And not instantly to be sure.  You see,
  their young enter through the ears, and wrap themselves around the cerebral
  cortex.  This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to
  suggestion.  Later, as they grow, follows madness...and death."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx, 1890-1977
%
:mundane: [from SF fandom] n. 1. A person who is not in science
   fiction fandom.  2. A person who is not in the computer industry.
   In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my
   mundane life...."  See also {Real World}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim
above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Fools and madmen; there seething minds apprehend far
quicker than cool reason could ever comprehend.
-- A Midsummer Night's Dream.
%
They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy,
called the Rights of Man.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- On the Army Estimates, Vol iii, p. 221
%
"I beseech John Byrne that when The Star Brand
 obliterates Pittsburgh, that he spare the
 Captain's Table in the Pittsburgh airport, which
 serves a steak on toasted garlic bread with
 Bearnaise sauce that is second to none..."
-- Dave Sim
%
"C'MON GUYS, LET'S SHOW HER WHO'S BOSS"
-- Famous Last Words
%
She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. x
%
It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant.
-- Richard J. Ferris, president of United Airlines
%
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excels a dunce that has been kept at home!
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Progress of Error, Line 415
%
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
-- Robert Frost
%
And waste their music on the savage race.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- Love of Fame, Satire v, Line 228
%
:Yet Another: adj. [From UNIX's `yacc(1)', `Yet Another
   Compiler-Compiler', a LALR parser generator] 1. Of your own work: A
   humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the
   topic is not original, though the content is.  As in `Yet Another
   AI Group' or `Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm'.  2. Of
   others' work: Describes something of which there are already far
   too many.  See also {YA-}, {YABA}, {YAUN}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I know a little bit about handicapping. If the horse has an IV, you want to
 stay away from it.
-- Paula Poundstone
%
Win or lose, you lose.
-- Jensen's Law
%
There are times when I long for a Klingon woman.
-- Worf
%
SEP: to omit.  "Everybody gets a RC sep yew!"
-- Texan Dictionary
%
Speak me fair in death.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
Hairy fishnuts!?
-- Opus
%
I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse.
-- Groucho Marx
%
There are just two rules of governance in a free society:
Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
Generally the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation
[of Texas] was consummated or not; but not so all of them.  For myself,
I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the
war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger
against a weaker nation.  It was an instance of a republic following
the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice
in their desire to acquire additional territory.
-- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 1885
%
Picard: "What is it you want, Q?"
Q: "Your compassion."  [Silence]  "All right, sanctuary on this ship...*dreary*
  as it may sound for the both of us."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Some men put me in mind of half-bred horses, which often grow worse
in proportion as you feed and exercise them for improvement.
-- Greville
%
>Rubik's cube can be easily pulled apart and put back together again.  First,
>position one side at a diagonal to the others so that you can use a small coin
>to prise a corner out.  The others can then slip out easily without the coin.

A much meaner trick is to reassemble the cube with only one piece flipped
or only one corner twisted.
There is no way to flip or twist only one piece - all the
methods affect two pieces.  For greater effect, after you reassemble it so its
impossible to solve, scramble the cube so it won't be so obvious.  When they
first came out, I knew someone who was quite obnoxious about bragging about how
quickly he could solve the cube - his best time was somewhere in the three
minute range. This trick sure shut him up.
-- Joe Block (jpb@umbio.med.miami.edu)
%
The gentleman has not seen how to reply to this, otherwise than by
supposing me to have advanced the doctrine that a national debt is
a national blessing.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Second Speech on Foot's Resolution, Jan. 26, 1830, p. 303
%
Memories of you remind me of you.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
I write for Reader's Digest. It's not hard. All you do is copy out an
 article and mail it in again.
-- Milt Kamen
%
For as lack of adornment is said to become some women, so this subtle
oration, though without embellishment, gives delight.
-- Cicero (106-43 BC)
-- De Oratore, 78
%
What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
-- Famous Last Words
%
Any argument carried far enought will end up in semantics.
-- Hartz' Law of Rhetoric
%
Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do,
something to love, and something to hope for.
-- Joseph Addison
%
We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we
do want them as brothers.
-- Booker T. Washington
%
:block: [from process scheduling terminology in OS theory] 1. vi.
   To delay or sit idle while waiting for something.  "We're blocking
   until everyone gets here."  Compare {busy-wait}.  2. `block
   on' vt. To block, waiting for (something).  "Lunch is blocked on
   Phil's arrival."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Whoever said, It's not whether you win or lose that counts, probably
lost!
-- Martina Navratilova
%
I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought
nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap. xii
%

-- Send MORE Missionaries the last ones were DELICIOUS!
%
Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death....
-- Longfellow
%
That such have died enables us
  The tranquiler to die;
That such have lived, certificate
  For immortality.
-- Emily Dickinson
%
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1928
%
O great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o'er-rank states, thou grand decider
Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood
The earth when it is sick, and curest the world
O' the pleurisy of people!
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act v, Sc. 1
%
'T is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any
portion of the foreign world.
-- George Washington (1732-1799)
-- His Farewell Address
%
:plumbing: [UNIX] n. Term used for {shell} code, so called
   because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of
   one program to the input of another.  Under UNIX, user utilities
   can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable
   collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a
   shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time,
   and the capability is considered one of UNIX's major winning
   features.  A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar
   facilities.  Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing'
   (see {hairy}).  "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker
   out of `sort(1)', `comm(1)', and `tr(1)' with a
   little plumbing."  See also {tee}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of
truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life.
-- Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"
%
 Thank you for calling, no doubt,
 As you can guess, we're out.
 When we get home,
 We'll call on the phone.
 Until then, just hang about.
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
The net of law is spread so wide,
No sinner from its sweep may hide.
Its meshes are so fine and strong,
They take in every child of wrong.
O wondrous web of mystery!
Big fish alone escape from thee!
-- James Jeffrey Roche
%
All hell broke loose.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 918
%
Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Well, isn't that 'kick you in the crotch, spit on yr neck' fantastic?
-- Rachel, "Friends"
%
DUCK-BILL, n.  Your account at your restaurant during the canvas-back
season.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Rotten wood cannot be carved.
-- Confucius (Analects, Book 5, Ch. 9)
%
Magnocartic, adj.:
   Any automobile that, when left unattended, attracts shopping
carts.
-- Sniglets, Rich Hall & Friends
%
Such souls,
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.
-- Sir Henry Taylor (1800-?)
-- Philip Van Artevelde, Part i, Act i, Sc. 7
%
Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Don Marquis
%
To take a significant step forward, you must make a series of finite
 improvements.
-- Donald J. Atwood, General Motors
%
It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.
-- Joseph Joubert
%
I'm the Descartes of anxiety.  I panic, therefore I am.
-- Richard Lewis
%
How fleet is a glance of the mind!
  Compared with the speed of its flight
The tempest itself lags behind,
  And the swift-winged arrows of light.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk
%
Remember this,--that very little is needed to make a happy life.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, vii, 67
%
....Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they
should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this
an achievement.
-- Hal Abelson, MIT job advertisement
%
 Hello, this is Jim.  Unfortunately I can't answer the phone
 right now because I've just come back from the Mirror Worlds and
 I'm still made up of antimatter, so if I were to pick up the
 phone right now, the resulting energy release would make
 Hiroshima look like a wet firecracker.  So leave a message at
 the tone and I'll get back to you as soon as my component
 particles have been restored to their normal charges.
-- Answering machine madness - science fiction
%
Cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf.
-- Charles Darwin
%
RIMER, n.  A poet regarded with indifference or disesteem.

    The rimer quenches his unheeded fires,
    The sound surceases and the sense expires.
    Then the domestic dog, to east and west,
    Expounds the passions burning in his breast.
    The rising moon o'er that enchanted land
    Pauses to hear and yearns to understand.
                                                         Mowbray Myles
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Show us a home with young children and we'll show you a home where
every pack of cards counts out at between 37 and 51.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
:happily: adv.  Of software, used to emphasize that a program is
   unaware of some important fact about its environment, either
   because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it
   doesn't care.  The sense of `happy' here is not that of elation,
   but rather that of blissful ignorance.  "The program continues to
   run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
When putting it into memory, remember where you put it.
-- Leo Beiser's First Computer Axiom
%
Revolutions are not made; they come.
-- Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)
-- Speech, Jan. 28, 1852
%
No one has yet programmed a computer to be of two minds about a hard
problem or to burst out laughing.
-- Lewis Thomas
%
Birth, copulation and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, copulation and death.
-- T. S. Elliot, Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
%
Any resemblance between the above views and those of my
employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely
coincidental.  Any resemblance between the above and my own views is
non-deterministic.  The question of the existence of views in the
absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader.
The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for
the second god coefficient.  (A discussion of non-orthogonal,
non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Ella, Ella, Ella...Never knock on Death's door.  Ring the bell and run away!
  Death *really* hates that.
-- Matt Frewer as Dr. Mike Stratford in 'Doctor, Doctor'
%
True patriots all; for be it understood
We left our country for our country's good.
-- George Barrington (1755-c. 1840)
-- Prologue written for the Opening of the Play-house
-- at New South Wales, Jan. 16, 1796
%
Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, [Jack] always told me to
 be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.
-- Jacqueline Kennedy
%
You and I as individuals can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but
only for a limited period of time.  Why should we think that collectively,
as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?
-- Ronald W. Reagan
%
The tire is only flat on the bottom.
-- John L. Shelton
%
I'd like MY data-base JULIENNED and stir-fried!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
...you almost get hit by a bus that pulled away from the stop without
looking and you say:  PANIC: bus error
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
I don't need to be born again.  I got it right the first time.
-- Dennis Miller
%
There's one constant in buying a suit:   It should fit.
-- The Houston Chronicle, 3/15/90
%
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
-- New Testament
-- Galatians vi, 7
%
You may as well say, that 's a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast
on the lip of a lion.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act iii, Sc. 7
%
Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone? And leave me here
in wretchedness behind ye?
-- William Shakespeare
%
Carol: "I don't understand, who's responsible for all this.  Who is 'Khan'?"
Kirk: "Well, it's a long story."
David: "We appear to have plenty of time."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
And if his name be George, I 'll call him Peter;
For new-made honour doth forget men's names.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
When you have intercourse with another student in the class,
you not only distract them, you distract me.
-- John Dann, Systems Software lecture
%
I'm wobbling and I can't fall down!
-- Weeble
%
Arguments with furniture are rarely productive.
-- Kehlog Albran, The Profit
%
 Hello, this is Death.  I am not in right now, but if you leave
 your name and number, I'll be right with you.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
On their own merits modest men are dumb.
-- George Colman, the Younger (1762-1836)
-- Epilogue to the Heir at Law
%
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not.  We have
  plenty of messenger boys.
                 Office, 1876
-- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post
%
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind,
no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner
or later responded.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
%
Nothing minor ever happens to a car on the weekend.
-- Charles D. Hartman
%
When the plane you are on is late,
the plane you want to transfer to is on time.
-- Node's Postulate for Travellers
%
Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools.
-- Gene Brown
%
Lord, in the morning thou shalt hear
My voice ascending high.
-- Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
-- Psalm v
%
Attic tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Tractate of Education
%
You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 261
%
Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
-- Mark van Doren
%
CC -G -A -Z  HELLO.C GOODBYE.C ABBEY.C ROAD.C
-- Dennis M. Ritchie
%
BELA LUGOSI is my co-pilot..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
You know, you have to be careful not to get yourself
locked into this open systems stuff.
-- IBM executive
%
Take a breath, Al... Inhale.
                   Gore during the VP Debate in Atlanta, 10/13/92.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle politely cutting off Senator Al
%
:macrology: /mak-rol'*-jee/ n. 1. Set of usually complex or crufty
   macros, e.g., as part of a large system written in {LISP},
   {TECO}, or (less commonly) assembler.  2. The art and science
   involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1.  Sometimes
   studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology,
   ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike construction.  See
   also {boxology}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
An ounce of emotion is equal to a ton of facts.
-- John Junor
%
If you want to know what a man is really like,
take notice how he acts when he looses money.
-- New England proverb
%
For seldom shall she hear a tale
So sad, so tender, and so true.
-- William Shenstone (1714-1763)
-- Jemmy Dawson
%
   A village.  Sound of chanting of Latin canon, punctuated by short, sharp
   cracks.  It comes nearer.  We see it is a line of MONKS ala SEVENTH SEAL
   flagellation scene, chanting and banging themselves on the foreheads with
   wooden boards.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
He 's tough, ma'am,--tough is J. B.; tough and devilish sly.
-- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
-- Dombey and Son, Chap. vii
%
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the World we safely go,
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
-- William Blake (1757-1827), Auguries of Innocence, 53
%
Queensboro president Donald Mannis, charged with receiving bribes in
exchange for city contracts, resigned on Tuesday.   Mannis feels he must
devote more time to impending litigation, some of which might emanate
from a recent statement he made comparing New York Mayor Ed Koch to
Nazi Martin Bormann.  A spokesman from the Bormann estate said they are
weighing the odds of a slander suit.  Mayor Koch could naturally be
reached for comment, but we chose not to listen.
-- Dennis Miller, Saturday Night Live
%
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his
punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
I think especially in her position, a highly successful professional
woman, it would be a real exception to have an unwed child.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle to The Chron's Jerry Roberts.
%
Guys are lucky because they get to grow mustaches. I wish I could. It's
 like having a little pet for your face.
-- Anita Wise
%
Storage is a Weapon.
-- Amdahl ESS, 1995
%
Anywhere you hang yourself is home.
-- Henry Rollins
%
Chang: "'Cry havoc!  And let slip the dogs of war!'"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other,
here I am unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied...
In spite of everything I survive.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the
 earth!
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
    Zen masters
A tree in a golden forest.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
There is a certain triumph in well-considered monotony
-- Voltaire on COBOL
%
LOW-BRED, adj.  "Raised" instead of brought up.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%

-- If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings including this one.
%
For this relief much thanks: 't is bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
-- Pete Seeger
%
 ;-) smiling face gets his lights punched out
-- SMILEY
%
Lead me not into temptation - unless there's money involved.
-- SLR
%
We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our
children.
-- Haida Indian saying
%
There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
 =:-#} punk rocker with a mustache
-- SMILEY
%
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought
progress.
-- Charles F. Kettering
%
It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor,
 however, it is absolutely essential.
-- Robert Morley
%
Men know that if a woman had to choose between catching a fly ball and
 saving an infant's life, she would probably save the infant's life, without
 even considering whether there were men on base.
-- Dave Barry
%
Go, Soul, the body's guest,
  Upon a thankless arrant:
Fear not to touch the best,
  The truth shall be thy warrant:
    Go, since I needs must die,
    And give the world the lie.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
-- The Lie
%
if your job requires you to wear an orange vest.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Watch your mouth, kid, or you'll find yourself floating home.
-- Han Solo
%
He seems so near, and yet so far.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- In Memoriam, xcvii, Stanza 6
%
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
%
Remember that to change thy mind and to follow him that sets thee
right, is to be none the less the free agent that thou wast before.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, viii, 16
%
Kirk: "Midshipman, you're a tiger."
Scott: "My sister's youngest admiral.  Crazy to get to space."
Kirk: "Every young man's fancy.  I seem to remember it myself."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Kirk: "Well, Bones, this is...charming."
McCoy: "They're four-hundred years old.  You don't find many with the lenses
  still intact."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.3
%
Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept.
-- RFC 791, paraphrased
%
:rare mode: [UNIX] adj. CBREAK mode (character-by-character with
   interrupts enabled).  Distinguished from {raw mode} and {cooked
   mode}; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used
   in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode.  Usage: rare.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I don't know if the death penalty ever stopped anyone from killin', but
it stops 'em from killin' again.
-- Elvis
%
Do you want this to become violent?
-- Wesley to Rondon, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2
%
    A&R men
None. "We're not changing any light bulbs at the
moment."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something.
-- Wilson Mizner
%
 @-) seeing stars
-- SMILEY
%
Psychiatrists tell us one out of every five people is completely disturbed.
 And the reason is the other four are nuts.
-- Dave Astor
%
Like him in Aesop, he whipped his horses withal, and put his shoulder
to the wheel.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part ii, Sect. 1, Memb. 2
%
:This time, for sure!: excl. Ritual affirmation frequently uttered
   during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small
   obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a UUCP connection).  For the
   proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of
   Bullwinkle J. Moose.  Also heard: "Hey, Rocky!  Watch me pull a
   rabbit out of my hat!"  The {canonical} response is, of course,
   "But that trick *never* works!"  See {{Humor, Hacker}}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a
winning candidate.
-- Mark B. Cohen
%
    Contras
One, but he needs one Iranian, one Israeli, four
Canadians, and Arab, twenty Swiss, and Afghan, and
Oliver North to help him.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
You know it's going to be a bad day if you wake up with your water bed
 busted--and you know you ain't got a water bed.
-- Jan Murray
%
The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of
indifference.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious
 use of sabotage.
-- Thorstein Veblen
%
You call for the chef and explain to him that this flat fish here looks
nothing like flounder.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961)
%
When I heard that trees grow a new 'ring' for each year they live, I thought,
 we humans are kind of like that: we grow a new layer of skin each year, and
 after many years we are thick and unwieldy from all our skin layers.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
All is but lip wisdom which wants experience.
-- Sir Philip Sydney
%
Genderplex, n.:
       The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to
determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and
tortoises).
-- Rich Hall, Sniglets
%
A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely
foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-- Douglas Adams
-- Mostly Harmless
%
Preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger.
-- Tom Clancy, "THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER", 1984
%
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority,
it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest;
these can be created only by education.
-- John Dewey
%
Come inside and have a fit.
-- Sign on a clothing store
%
Help others for all the times that you have been ignored. Be kind to
others, for all the times that you have been scorned.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
-- Kahlil Gibran
%
He's DEAD, Jim. You get his teeth.
-- "Bones" McCoy, DDS
%
The lover in the husband may be lost.
-- Lord Lyttleton (1709-1773)
-- Advice to a Lady
%
- FM - Friendly missile - one of ours. The Allies now have friendly missiles
          fired from planes and ships pounding the Iraqi forces continuously.
          Friendly missiles are identified by a big smiling face painted on
          the warhead. Damage as a result of friendly missiles will now be
          known as "friendly damage", and the explosives inside the warhead
          are known as "friendly explosives."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
Alone!--that worn-out word,
So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
-- Edward Bulwer Lytton (1805-1873)
-- The New Timon, (1846), Part ii
%
The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it
should be such as to give him but little occasion to think mush about it.
-- Richard Whately (1787-1863)
%
I think the next four years we should try it with no President.
-- Dana Fradon
%
Well, that was a piece of cake, eh K-9?

Piece of cake, Master?     Radial slice of baked confection ...
coefficient of relevance to Key of Time: zero.
-- Dr. Who
%
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men
will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
-- John Maynard Keynes
%
The human mind is a dangerous plaything, Boys.  When it's used for Evil,
watch out!  But when it's used for Good, things are much... nicer.
-- the Tick
%
You shall comprehend all vagrom men.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
Au contraire. I am ecstatic about the whole incident. I only didn't
  laugh out loud, because if I did, I fear my _head_ would have fallen
  off...
-- Edmund to Melchett : Money
%
I'm not yelling--I'm just raising my voice.
-- T. K. Kelly
%
"Before I visited this planet, we aliens knew very little about earth...
 the only information we had came from television signals, and due to
 interstellar distances, we only received channel 3 at 4:30pm...

"But that's..."

"'Gilligan's Island'... I know. But it's all we had to go on.
 We theorized that Earth was a strange island society where everything
 was made out of bamboo..."
-- Robotman
%
Abroad in the world today is a monstrous falsehood, a consummate
fabrication, to which all social agencies have loaned themselves and
into which most men, women, and children have been seduced ... "the
Eleventh Commandment"; for such, indeed, has become the injunction: You
Must Adjust.
-- Robert M. Lindner (1915-1956)
%
I'm going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was.
He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective
we've had in a couple of hundred years.
-- Senator Dan Quayle
%
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
-- Sally Berger
%
Troi: "You've changed."
Barclay: "Is that a professional opinion?"
Troi: "No, pure observation."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Always pray that your opposition be wicked. In wickedness, there
is a strong strain toward rationality. Therefore, there is always
the possibility, in theory, of handling the wicked by outthinking them.
-- Marion J. Levy, Jr.
%
I see before me the statue of a celebrated minister,
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- Speech, Nov. 9, 1867
%
ACCOUNTABILITY, n.  The mother of caution.

    "My accountability, bear in mind,"
        Said the Grand Vizier:  "Yes, yes,"
        Of ability you possess."
                                                            Joram Tate
-- Said the Shah:  "I do 'tis the only kind
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
-- Samuel Butler
%
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people."
People say different things: so do instincts.  Our instincts are at
war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified
at the expense of the rest....
-- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
%
I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places.  He told me to quit
 going to those places.
-- Henny Youngman
%
USER, n.:
     The word computer professionals use when they mean idiot.
-- Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top
%
"I hate snakes!  I hate 'em!!"
"C'mon!  Show a little backbone, will ya?"
-- Raiders of the Lost Ark
%
Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable
amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince
his employer that he is going at a good pace.
-- Frederick W. Taylor
%
"What?"
"A seven-foot specter of evil appeared in front
of the car, so I ran over it.  Sounded like a bag
of laundry going under.  Hope I didn't hurt the
tires.  Want a fig newton?"
-- "Hey, Max Wake up!  You're missing all the fun!"
-- Sam and Max, Freelance Police
%
I never respected a man who could spell.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective
memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can
never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of
them all.  How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
-- C. S. Lewis
%
I don't pretend to have all the answers.  I don't pretend to even know what the
 questions are.  Hey, where am I?
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Statements by respected authorities which tend to agree with a writer's
viewpoint are always handy.
-- Amrom Katz
%
Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.
-- Pierre Boulez (1925- ), French composer and conductor
-- London Guardian (January 13, 1989)
%
The worst calamity after a stupid general is an intelligent general.
-- Charles DeGaulle
%
    dead politicians
As many as possible.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Fast, Frozen, Instant and Microwave.
-- The four good groups
%
There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created.  It is
almost a biological rebellion.  A profound revulsion against the planned
communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced
atmospheres.  They hunger for an Eden, where spring comes.
We all do.  The cave is deep in our memories.
-- Spock and Kirk, "The Way to Eden," stardate 5832.3
%
Judge not according to the appearance.
-- New Testament
-- John vii, 24
%
:whalesong: n. The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a
   PEP modem such as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to
   synchronize with another PEP modem for their special high-speed
   mode.  This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone handshake
   between conventional modems and is instantly recognizable to anyone
   who has heard it more than once.  It sounds, in fact, very much
   like whale songs.  This noise is also called "the moose call" or
   "moose tones".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"Huh ?"
-- Apple's MPW C compiler Error Message
%
Glaciers move in tides. So do mountains. So do all things.
-- John Muir
%
'Tis late before The brave despair.
-- Thomson
%
Wiring a plug is *dead* easy!
-- Famous Last Words
%
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
%
C - A lady executive.  An avid jogger, very healthy, and not too talkative.
Is an good cook if you like spicy food.  Unless you double check everything
you say (through LINT) you can unleash her fierce temper.  Her daughter C++
is still quite young and prone to tantrums, but it seems that she will grow
up into a fine young woman of milder temper and more sophisticated character.
-- Daniel J. Salomon
%
    disaster recovery planners
bulb?
None. If you will all evacuate to our backup facilities in West
Perth you will find that our backup bulb is already glowing
brightly and was brought up only one hour after notification of
failure of the primary bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light
%
After a storm comes a calm.
-- Mathew Henry (1662-1714)
-- Commentaries, Acts ix
%
Though pleased to see the dolphins play,
I mind my compass and my way.
-- Matthew Green (1696-1737)
-- The Spleen, Line 93
%
A bunch of the boys were whooping it in the Malemute saloon;
The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love,
the lady that's known as Lou.
-- Robert W. Service
%
GLASS
  Container which shatters at the most inconvenient and unexpected
  moments. Glasses are known to have properties that cause them to
  throw themselves out of people's hands. Glasses are also specially
  designed not to bounce. On anything.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
    field service engineers
Well, the diagnostics all check out fine, so it's a software
problem.
How long will it take?
That's indeterminate. It depends on how many dead bulbs they've
brought with them.
What if you have two dead bulbs?
They replace your fuse box.
-- How many
-- does it take to replace a dead light bulb?
%
Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough
cheese
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
%
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do
the work.
-- John G. Pollard
%
The highest duty is to respect authority.
-- Leo XIII (1810-1903)
%
It matters little what you believe, so long as you don't
altogether believe it.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
The truest wild beasts live in the most populous places.
-- Baltasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" 1647
%
Look at these three words written larger than all the rest, and with
  saying "We the people" .. these words and the words that follow ...
  must apply to everyone or they mean nothing.
-- special pride never written before or since tall words, proudly
-- Kirk, "The Omega Glory," stardate unknown.
%
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxims, Head
%
It has been said that fish is a good brain food. That's a fallacy. But
 brains are a good fish food!
-- Mel Brooks
%
Those men in the French resistance were really brave, having to
listen to Maurice Chevalier sing all the time.
-- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"
%
That life is long which answers life's great end.
 - Night Thoughts, Night v, Line 773
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Plain as a pike-staff.
-- Alain Rene Le Sage (1668-1747)
-- Gil Blas, Book xii, Chap. viii
%
Troi: "The captain will do everything in his power to stop you."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
T:      One big monster, he called TROLL.
     He don't rock, and he don't roll;
     Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
  He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
-- The Roguelet's ABC
%
:overflow pdl: [MIT] n. The place where you put things when your
   {pdl} is full.  If you don't have one and too many things get
   pushed, you forget something.  The overflow pdl for a person's
   memory might be a memo pad.  This usage inspired the following
   doggerel:

     Hey, diddle, diddle
     The overflow pdl
        To get a little more stack;
     If that's not enough
     Then you lose it all,
        And have to pop all the way back.
                                    --The Great Quux

   The term {pdl} seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this
   term is replaced by `overflow {stack}'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Do you know what a squiggle is?
-- John Dann, Computer Graphics lecture
%
It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who
want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to
do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no
matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.
-- Galileo Galilei
%
Wishing you and yours a safe and happy holiday season.
-- John "Mad Dog" Matzka
%
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
-- Tallulah Bankhead (1903-1968)
%

-- CAFFEINE.SYS not found Operator Halted.
%
An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
-- Will Rogers
%
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Essays: First Series (1841) "Self-Reliance"
%
We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking
without facts.
-- John Dewey
%
When you get older you have to be careful about always saying, "Things
 aren't as good as they used to be." But it's hard not to.
-- Andy Rooney
%
The difficulty in life is the choice.
-- George Moore, The Bending of the Bough, [1900], act IV
%
:Bloggs Family, the: n.  An imaginary family consisting of Fred and
   Mary Bloggs and their children.  Used as a standard example in
   knowledge representation to show the difference between extensional
   and intensional objects.  For example, every occurrence of "Fred
   Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of
   "person" may refer to different people.  Members of the Bloggs
   family have been known to pop up in bizarre places such as the DEC
   Telephone Directory.  Compare {Mbogo, Dr. Fred}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
'T is not in the bond.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
Each system has its own way of consuming vast amounts of
paper: in socialist societies by filling large forms in
quadruplicate, in capitalist societies by putting up huge
posters and wrapping every article in four layers of
cardboard.
-- Issawi's Observation on the Consumption of Paper
%
Two reasons for drinking:
one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it.
the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it.
-- Thomas Love Peacock
%
Dwain Dibbly! How can I be Dwain Dibbly?
-- Cat from "Red Dwarf"
%
Any man who hates dogs and loves whiskey can't be all bad.
-- W. C. Fields
%
Murder may be done by legal means, by plausible and profitable war,
by calumny, as well as by dose or dagger.
-- Lord Acton (1834-1902)
%

-- Patience Wait control.
%
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented
the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children
of the light.
-- Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
-- Essays in Criticism, Heinrich Heine
%
Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a
little, the price will fall.
-- Francis Bacon
%
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- Sonnet cxxi
%
Riker: "Then take your best shot, Locutus, 'cause we are about to 'intervene'."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44003.3
%
What would this country be without this great land of ours?
-- Ronald W. Reagan, philosopher
%
You two are book-men.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
MONASH UNIVERSITY COMPUTER CENTRE - MODEM DIAL-UP SERVICES

Users of the Greater Monash University can now access the computer systems
via  modems  24 hours except when they are out of order. All four campuses
are equipped with dial-in lines which under normal circumstances should be
either engaged or not operational.
    Your modem and  communications software should be set up to operate in
8-bit mode with no  parity and 1 stop bit. Except when it shouldn't. Which
may or may not be the case when and if you are using the dial-ins.
    Modems  at  Clayton Campus can  utilise  the  MNP-4  error  correcting
protocol. But don't.  'Cos to be honest, we haven't worked out how to turn
the bloody things on yet. If anyone has any ideas, please tell. Well, they
were a job lot going cheap without manuals, you know how it is...
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
%
And smale foules maken melodie,
That slepen alle night with open eye,
So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 9
%

-- All we are given is possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.
-- Ortega y Gasset
%
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence and determination.
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
steal.
-- As any magician will tell you Myth Direction is the secret of a successful
-- D. Henning
%
Beware of the cafe that serves crisp tapioca.
-- Confucius Says
%
Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Vision of Sir Launfal, Prelude to Part First
%
A man feared that he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.
-- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895
%
I honestly do not believe that anyone was really responsible for this
 accident, but if blame must be placed, it surely belongs, all 110% of it,
 on the other driver.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
Texas is Hell on woman and horses.
-- Wayne Oakes
%
As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the
things you didn't do.
-- Zachary Scott
%
I think I've reached a point,
 where every wish has come true.
And tired disguised oblivion,
 is everything I do.
-- The Cure
%
Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse,
And every conqueror creates a muse.
-- Edmund Waller (1605-1687)
-- Panegyric on Cromwell
%
[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
 8) frog
-- SMILEY
%
The atom bomb is a paper tiger...
Terrible to look at but not so strong as it seems.
-- Mao Zedong
%
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things
 we don't know yet.
-- Ambrose Bierce
%
   "I feel the Need..."
     "The Need..."
"FOR SPEED!"
-- Maverick and Goose in "TOP GUN"
%
There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
Me let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age;
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death;
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires, Line 408
%
IMPALE, v.t.  In popular usage to pierce with any weapon which remains
fixed in the wound.  This, however, is inaccurate; to imaple is,
properly, to put to death by thrusting an upright sharp stake into the
body, the victim being left in a sitting position.  This was a common
mode of punishment among many of the nations of antiquity, and is
still in high favor in China and other parts of Asia.  Down to the
beginning of the fifteenth century it was widely employed in
"churching" heretics and schismatics.  Wolecraft calls it the "stoole
of repentynge," and among the common people it was jocularly known as
"riding the one legged horse."  Ludwig Salzmann informs us that in
Thibet impalement is considered the most appropriate punishment for
crimes against religion; and although in China it is sometimes awarded
for secular offences, it is most frequently adjudged in cases of
sacrilege.  To the person in actual experience of impalement it must
be a matter of minor importance by what kind of civil or religious
dissent he was made acquainted with its discomforts; but doubtless he
would feel a certain satisfaction if able to contemplate himself in
the character of a weather-cock on the spire of the True Church.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The angry man always thinks he can do more than he can.
-- Albertano of Brescia
%
MISDEMEANOR, n.  An infraction of the law having less dignity than a
felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal
society.

    By misdemeanors he essays to climb
    Into the aristocracy of crime.
    "Captains of industry" refused his hand,
    "Kings of finance" denied him recognition
    And "railway magnates" jeered his low condition.
    He robbed a bank to make himself respected.
    They still rebuffed him, for he was detected.
                                                          S.V. Hanipur
-- O, woe was him! with manner chill and grand
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
The trouble with the average family is it has too much month left over at
 the end of the money.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he was dying in
a foreign land, "The descent to Hades is the same from every place."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Anaxagoras, vi
%
"Gee, this is pretty good for slop!"
-- Gourmet advice from JONNY QUEST
%
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that
we are underlings.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
  Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping, and watching for the morrow,--
  He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers.
-- Goethe (1749-1832)
-- Wilhelm Meister, Book ii, Chap. xiii
%
Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is
dear for a penny.
-- Plutarch
%
Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon
 having a good time.
-- In a Rome laundry
%
Answer me in one word.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
The best piece of advice was not to be an actress.
-- Isabella Rossellini
%
Captain, can I see you in your ready room. Its a private matter. No
  actually its an urgent one.
-- Dr. Crusher, "The Naked Now", stardate 41209.2
%
Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read.
-- Anonymous
-- Button from the Computer Museum, Boston, MA
%
There are times when you have to choose between being human and
having good taste.
-- Bertolt Brecht
%
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he'll invite himself over for dinner.
-- Calvin Keegan
%
A diplomat is man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never
 her age.
-- Robert Frost
%
:FM: /F-M/ n. *Not* `Frequency Modulation' but rather an
   abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from
   {RTFM}. Used to refer to the manual itself in the {RTFM}.
   "Have you seen the Networking FM lately?"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
REALITY, n.  The dream of a mad philosopher.  That which would remain
in the cupel if one should assay a phantom.  The nucleus of a vacuum.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
And though all cry down self, none means his ownself in a literal sense.
-- Butler
%
An harmless flaming meteor shone for hair,
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care.
-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
-- Davideis, Book ii, Line 95
%
Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance,
And toss them on the wheels of Chance.
-- Juvenal
%
WITTICISM, n.  A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted, and seldom
noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a "joke."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
logic demand that you be a part of it?
One man cannot summon the future.
But one man can change the present!
-- If change is inevitable predictable beneficial doesn't
-- Kirk and the Alternate Spock, "Mirror, Mirror," stardate unknown
%
Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.
-- Aristotle
%
Is That all There Is.
-- -=DgP=- Ridgefield, NJ.
%
Success in the information age will go to those who have the courage to
 challenge themselves, who constantly innovate, and learn how to adapt as
 they go.
-- Gen. (Ret.) Gordon R. Sullivan, former Chief of Staff, USA
%
    senators
Two to sponsor the bill and thirty-three to constitute a
quorum.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Sincerity is often the measure of your adaptability to adjust to
the opinions of those who can fire you.
-- John Francis Putnam (1964)
%
My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself, is that
one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
    journalists
Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to
bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical
government plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win
a pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a
light bulb assassin to break the bulb in the first place.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.
-- Sir Thomas Beecham
%
People always get tired of one another.  I grow tired of myself whenever
I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of
myself than anyone else can be of another person.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
"Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse
it suddenly does."
-- Marvin, the Paranoid Android
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
One who has a flood of words and a drop of reason.
-- Rowell's Definition of the Orator
%
 =):-) Uncle Sam
-- SMILEY
%
    My early and invincible love of reading, which I would not
exchange for the treasures of India. . .
-- Edward Gibbon
%
In the beginning, the grocery was without form and void, and
darkness was on the face of the 7-11.
-- (Haagendasz 1,1)
%
A bathroom hook will be loaded to capacity immediately upon becoming
available. This also applies to freeways, closets, playgrounds, downtown
hotels, taxis, parking lots, bookcases, wallets, purses, pockets,
pipe racks, basement shelves, and so on. The list is endless.
-- John Joyce
%
Every free citizen is an ENEMY of the STATE.
-- Kurt J. Robertson
%
Mr. Nguyen, I'm dead, not stupid.
-- A wise zombie from BILLY NGUYEN
%
PRESIDE, v.  To guide the action of a deliberative body to a desirable
result.  In Journalese, to perform upon a musical instrument; as, "He
presided at the piccolo."

    The Headliner, holding the copy in hand,
        Read with a solemn face:
    "The music was very uncommonly grand --
            The best that was every provided,
            For our townsman Brown presided
        At the organ with skill and grace."
    The Headliner discontinued to read,
        And, spread the paper down
    On the desk, he dashed in at the top of the screed:
        "Great playing by President Brown."
                                                         Orpheus Bowen
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Plenty brings pride.
-- Proverb
%
Sancho Panza by name, is my own self, if I was not changed in my cradle.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. xxx
%
We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or
gratified, we want to be again expecting.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
Anxiety is fear of one's self.
-- Wilhelm Stekel
%
PANTALOONS, n.  A nether habiliment of the adult civilized male.  The
garment is tubular and unprovided with hinges at the points of
flexion.  Supposed to have been invented by a humorist.  Called
"trousers" by the enlightened and "pants" by the unworthy.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Sir, he made a chimney in my father's house, and the bricks are alive
at this day to testify it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;
the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) (Attributed)
%
If you lose the power to laugh,
 you lose the power to think.
-- Clarence Darrow
%
Recursion in everyday life:

Inscription on a shampoo bottle:

Lather
Rinse
Repeat
-- Seen on an MIT computer's login message
%
I don't know if she likes this, but in a way I treat her as a staff
person.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, referring to Marilyn
%
Kirk: Of my friend, I can only say this.  Of all the souls I have
encountered in
  my travels, his was the most...*human*."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
I am a jelly doughnut.
-- John F. Kennedy
%
Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Comedy of Errors
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
I was just being polite, sir.
-- Worf to Picard, "Heart of Glory", stardate 41503.7
%
People will listen a great deal more patiently while you explain your
mistakes than when you explain your successes.
-- Wilbur N. Nesbit
%
For what it's worth, I understand your bitterness.
With respect sir, you cannot. I am asked to give up the very lifeblood
  of my mother and my father to those who murdered them.
So you blame all Romulans for that?
Yes.
Forever. What if someday the Federation made peace with the Romulans?
Impossible.
That's what your people said a few years ago, about humans. Think how
  many died on both sides in that war. Would you and I be here now like
  this? If we hadn't been able to let go of the anger and the blame.
  Where does it end Worf? If that Romulan dies, does his family carry
  the bitterness another generation?
Then you believe I should.
What I believe doesn't matter.
-- Riker & Worf, "The Enemy", stardate 43349.2
%
I'm never going to feel this way about anyone else.
You're right.
I didn't expect you to say that.
Oh, there will be others - but, the next time you feel love will be
  different. Each time is different.
Knowing that doesn't make it any easier.
It isn't supposed to.
-- Wesley and Guinan, "The Dauphin", stardate 42568.8
%
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental
one.  Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its
complexity often abstract away its essence.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
%
In our society, sometimes you have to penalize (innocent) people for
the good of everybody else.
-- A Pittsburgh Cop 10/16/93
%
Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
-- Ionesco
%
 You traded the Blues Mobile for a microphone?   OK, I can see that.
-- The Blues Brothers
%
And what 's impossible can't be,
And never, never comes to pass.
-- George Colman, the Younger (1762-1836)
-- The Maid of the Moor
%
Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
-- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977
%
 thought-recording device.  After the tone, think about your
 name, your reason for calling, and a number where I can reach
 you, and I'll think about returning your call.
-- This is not an answering machine this is a telepathic
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
If an experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment.
-- Bowie's Theorem
%
He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
-- Confucius
%
A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties,
the kind of insoluble problems as man.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
...you start typing semi-colons at the end of sentences instead of full stops;
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
    seventies disco dancers
Two. One to boogie up the ladder and one to say "Get daaowwwwn !"
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
We are born with our eyes closed and our mouths open, and we spend our
whole lives trying to reverse that mistake of nature.
-- Dale E. Turner
%
Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find
out.  Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring.  Ecstasy
-- is knowing exactly who one is and still not caring.
-- Tom Robbins
%
BACKBITE, v.t.  To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find
you.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
"I believe in equality. Equality for everybody. No
 matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to
 them."
-- Steve Martin
%
I can say 'Saskatchewan' without starting to stutter.
-- The Proclaimers
%
highest conception of the highest possible.  And whoever places his
highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of
himself and his life.  It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence
for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest
possible, here, now, for your very own.  To imagine a heaven and then
not to dream of it, but to demand it.
-- ... you see, God whatever anyone chooses to call God is one's
-- Kira Argounova
%
Virtue is its own revenge.
-- E. Y. Harburg
%
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion
 that they will come to a bad end.
-- Max Beerbohm
%
Rimmer's Father:   I just wanted to say...
Rimmer:            Yes?
Rimmer's Father:   I just wanted to say...you're a total smeghead!
Rimmer:            What?! That isn't my fantasy!
Cat:               No, it's mine.
-- Red Dwarf 'Better than life'
%
Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the
difference of things that are alike.
-- Madame de Stael
%
It may be that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the
 strong--but that's the way to bet.
-- Damon Runyon
%
"But I guess nobody gets to live happily ever after anymore, do they?"
-- Abby in SWAMP THING
%
Most guys'll tell you, if they had a choice of a way to die, they would
 want to die while in bed with a woman. Making whoopee. Which is great. For
 the guy.

 For the woman, let's be honest, it's a drag. She has really two choices.
 Number one, she's totally mortified and she avoids sex for the rest of her
 life. Or number two, she's walkin' around with an inordinate amount of
 confidence! "Hey, Denise, what's happening?" "Ohhhh, nothing ... last night
 I killed a man ..."
-- Jeff Cesario
%

-- No sooner said than done so acts your man of worth.
-- Quintus Ennius
%
Watch me moon that werewolf!
-- Famous Last Words
%
...it increases my paranoia like looking in my mirror and seeing a
 police car--but I'm not giving in an inch to fear.
-- David Crosby
%
McCoy: "My God, man!  I tried to save him!  I tried to save him!  I was
  desperate to save him!  He was the last best hope in the universe for peace."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
 Hut! Hut!   Hut!  Hut!  Hut!  Hut!  Hut!  Hut!  Hut!  Hut!
-- The Blues Brothers
%
Life is a game.  In order to have a game, something has to be more important
than something else.  If what already is, is more important than what isn't,
the game is over.  So, life is a game in which what isn't, is more important
than what is.
Let the good times roll.
-- Werner Erhard
%
  A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on.  Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke
sternly- "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no
understanding of what is going wrong."
  Knight turned the machine off and on.
  The machine worked.
-- AI koan
%
TAKE, v.t.  To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
    alt.folklore.urban readers
light bulb?
One, to be dying of cancer and request that everybody
around the world send him light bulbs so he can get into
the Guinness Book of World Records.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a
%
The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a
domestic animal.
-- Compton MacKenzie, "Cats' Company"
%
Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
-- William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
%
VALENTINE'S DAY
  The 14th of February. Every year on this day, any men who have
  forgotten the significance of the day report to casualty wards with
  their testicles in a small bag in their pocket.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Hangovers go away.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
...the executive who tells you that he read in PC week magazine that setting
up a LAN in a multi-vendor environment using DECNET was easy and asks you
to explain why it's taken you over a week to get the client/server
applications in a "production mode."
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Regrets and complaints about relations are to be attributed to the
same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers;
for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the
pressure of age, but for someone with the opposite deposition, youth
and old age are equally a burden.
-- Plato,_The Republic_, Book 1
%
Heisenberg was wrong, I know exactly where I am and where I'm going.
-- Einstein
%
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger,--
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
"Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think,
and thinking where we ought to feel."
-- John Churton Collins
%
..  here I am in 53 B.C. and all I want is a dill pickle!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing
systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Candida, Act III
%
The only good husbands stay bachelors:  They're too considerate to get
married.
-- Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936)
%
 :-( :-( :-( :-! Taylor Caldwell
-- SMILEY
%
Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never
be fully learnt.
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- The Complete Angler, Author's Preface
%
Time is money and money can't buy you love and I love your outfit.
-- THUNDER #1
%
Hope to the end.
-- New Testament
-- 1 Peter i, 13
%
This is the sort of English with which I will not put.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
    atheists
None. Atheists question whether it's really light anyway.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A bad standard is better than nothing.  It gives you something to violate.
-- The Hammer Forum, 1986
%
Add roughage to human food by shedding in it.
-- Cat Rule #8
%
There was no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society
than to debauch the currency ... Inflation engages all the hidden
forces of economic law on the side of destruction. and it does it
in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes
%
If you aren't open minded, you aren't trying.
-- DFL
%
Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.
-- William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778)
-- Speech, Jan. 14, 1766
%
Only skydivers know why the birds sing.
-- Roch Charmet (1930-1989)
%
"Will you walk into my parlour?" said a spider to a fly;
"'T is the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy."
-- Mary Howitt (1804-1888)
-- The Spider and the Fly
%
If Negro freedom is taken away, or that of any minority group, the
freedom of all the people is taken away.
-- Paul Robeson
%
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get
somewhere.
-- James Thurber
%
RAREBIT, n.  A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point
out that it is not a rabbit.  To whom it may be solemnly explained
that the comestible known as toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and
that _riz-de-veau a la financiere_ is not the smile of a calf prepared
after the recipe of a she banker.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
As you are old and reverend, you should be wise.
-- William Shakespeare
%
 =t== Mexican run over by train
-- SMILEY
%
Arnie: "In my country, we lined all the drug dealers and drug addicts
and shot them in the back of the head."
Fellow cop: "Nah, that wouldn't work here. Too many politicians."
Arnie: "Shoot them first."
-- "Red Heat"
%
The hands that clean these toilets also
make your food... Please aim properly.
-- Sign seen at a restaurant toilet
%
You have displac'd the mirth, broke the good meeting,
With most admir'd disorder.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Don't ever prophesy; for if you prophesy wrong, nobody will forget it and
 if you prophesy right, nobody will remember it.
-- Josh Billings
%
We will take the good will for the deed.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book iv, Chap. xlix
%
    first-time computer users
One, but it takes him three hours and two phone calls to the
electrician before he realizes he forgot to turn the switch
on.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
There's a great power in words,
it you don't hitch too many of them together.
-- Josh Billings
%
"Is there a Roman numeral for zero?" [no]
-- Amazingly Mind-bogglingly Stupid Question #7432
%
Women waste men's lives and think they have
indemnified them by a few gracious words.
-- Balzac
%
Ten thousand years - a single thought. A single thought - ten thousand
years.
-- Zen saying
%
Truthful, adj.:
       Dumb and illiterate.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
%
We aren't lost!
-- Famous Last Words
%
I respect you, just not very much is all
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox
%
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the
medical profession.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror.
It grasps nothing.  It regrets nothing.
It receives but does not keep.
-- Chuang Tzu
%
So well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book viii, Line 548
%
We are all descendents of Adam and we are all products of racial
miscegenation.
-- Lester B. Pearson
%
For birth control, I rely on my personality.
-- Milt Abel
%
Still may syllabes jar with time,
Still may reason war with rhyme,
Resting never!
-- Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
-- Underwoods. Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme
%
These patriots don't mince words... Okay, sure, they *are* dangerous,
hopelessly ignorant, inbred, retarded borderline lunatics with an
about it.
-- insatiable lust for the blood of sinners but at least they're *honest*
-- Reverend Ivan Stang,
-- cofounder of the Church of the Subgenius,
-- about a group known as Free Love Ministries,
-- in his book _High Weirdness By Mail_
%
Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual
        growth can be acheived only through persistent
       excercise of real love
      _The Road Less Travelled_
-- M. Scott Peck, M.D.
%
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
-- Ian Botham
%
There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges
of class.
-- Leonard Sidney Woolf
%
:CP/M:: /C-P-M/ n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early
   microcomputer {OS} written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and
   Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually
   wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981.
   Legend has it that Kildall's company blew its chance to write the
   OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps
   wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his
   private plane.  Many of CP/M's features and conventions strongly
   resemble those of early {DEC} operating systems such as
   {{TOPS-10}}, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11.  See {{MS-DOS}},
   {operating system}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Seven-eighths of everything can't be seen.
-- Marshall's generalized iceberg theorem
%
proof by accumulated evidence:
   Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.

proof by cosmology:
   The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or
   meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God.

proof by mutual reference:
   In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in
   reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in
   reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in
   reference A.

proof by metaproof:
   A method is given to construct the desired proof. The
   correctness of the method is proved by any of these
   techniques.
-- How to Prove It, Part 5
%
:pound on: vt. Syn. {bang on}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    Soviet emigres
None. Soviet emigres are used to sitting in the dark.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
:stale pointer bug: n. Synonym for {aliasing bug} used esp. among
   microcomputer hackers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
-- Theophrastus
%
Can you use Berkeley Unix?
.. Non-Berkeley Unix?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
I seem to be having tremendous difficulties with my lifestyle. -
Arthur.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
He's so old that when he orders a three-minute egg, they ask for the money
 up front.
-- Milton Berle
%
OBSERVATORY, n.  A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses
of their predecessors.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 This is a boring answering machine message.  Leave a message
 anyway.  (Useful to keep people from calling at odd hours to
 hear your latest exciting message.)
-- Answering machine madness - brevity
%
You are a stupid, square-headed, bald git, aren't you, eh?  [there is a cut
 here]  I'm pointing at you, yes, I'm pointing at you, but I'm not actually
 addressing you; I'm addressing the one prat in the country who thought he
 could get hold of this recording, turn it round, and actually work out the
 rubbish that I'm saying.  What a poor, sad life he's got!  [there is a cut
 the lot of you!  Bollocks to you!
-- here]  Frankly, your act's crap, anyway anybody could have had it.  I hate
-- {NB: Said by the club manager, backwards don't look for it}
-- Red Dwarf - 'Backwards'
%
Resistance is useless.
-- A Dalek, Dalek Invasion of Earth
-- or The Doctor, Dalek Invasion of Earth
%
The Great Roe is a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a
 lion, though not the same lion.
-- Woody Allen
%
Brave thirst of fame his bosom warms.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
%
The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many
accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.
-- Ed Parker
%
Approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley is praise indeed.
-- Thomas Morton (1764-1838)
-- A Cure for the Heartache, Act v, Sc. 2
%
The Kathy Rigby doll--pull HER string, and you'll be sorry.
-- Gary Burbank, AM 700 WLW radio (Cincinnati)
%
An exception TESTS a rule; it NEVER proves it.
-- Edmund C. Berkeley
%
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
-- Old Testament
-- Job xvi, 1
%
A true friend is someone who is there for you when he'd rather be anywhere else
-- Len Wein
%
Man is by nature a political animal.
-- Aristotle
%
Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown
  An' peeked in thru' the winder,
An' there sot Huldy all alone,
  'Ith no one nigh to hender.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Biglow Papers, Second Series, The Courtin'
%
An efficient organization is one in which the accounting
department knows the exact cost of every useless
administrative procedure which they themselves have initiated.
-- E.W.R. Steacie
%
Cucumbers don't care if you make more money than they do.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For
on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation,
our neighbors build up their philosophy of life.
-- A. J. Cronin
%
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently
that which should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker, business philosopher and writer
%
You will now answer to the charge of being a grievously savage race.
-- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7
%
One good turn gets most of the blankets.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
%
Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is
improperly exposed.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 258
%
you crack your knuckles and the
window rattles.
-- You know you have a small apartment when...
-- S. Rickly Christian
%
My Biscuits are Burnin'!
-- Yosemite Sam
%
Perhaps Dundee's wild-warbling measures rise,
Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- The Cotter's Saturday Night
%
Hobbes clearly proves that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Poetry, a Rhapsody
%

-- We've come at the worst possible time of course....
-- Avon
%
News always travels by the fastest available route.
-- Major Whitey Ardmore
%
You can't out-talk a man who knows what he's talking about.
-- Hutchins' Law
%
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops
and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say
to their sons: "Come back with your shield, or on it". Later on this
custom declined. So did Rome.
-- Henry Adams
%
What we call 'Progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another
 nuisance.
-- Henry Havelock Ellis
%
Theory: A hunch with a college education.
-- "Laughs Unlimited"
%
It has been observed that the height of a man from the crown of the
head to the sole of the foot is equal to the distance between the
tips of the middle fingers of the two hands when extended in a straight
line.
-- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD)
-- Natural History, Book vii, Sect. 77
%
:LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a
   verb or noun for the operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps
   incrementally between the two endpoints of the line."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
LL.D.  Letters indicating the degree _Legumptionorum Doctor_, one
learned in laws, gifted with legal gumption.  Some suspicion is cast
upon this derivation by the fact that the title was formerly _LL.d._,
and conferred only upon gentlemen distinguished for their wealth.  At
the date of this writing Columbia University is considering the
expediency of making another degree for clergymen, in place of the old
Custus_, and written _$$c_.  The name of the Rev. John Satan has been
suggested as a suitable recipient by a lover of consistency, who
points out that Professor Harry Thurston Peck has long enjoyed the
advantage of a degree.
-- D.D. _Damnator Diaboli_.  The new honor will be known as _Sanctorum
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
They 're only truly great who are truly good.
-- George Chapman (1557-1634)
-- Revenge for Honour, Act v, Sc. 2
%
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
-- Martin Mull
%
Before you ask more questions,
think about whether you really want to know the answers.
-- Gene Wolfe, "The Claw of the Conciliator"
%
 Bicycles don't whine unless something is really wrong.
-- Reasons why a bicycle is better than a woman number 4
%
Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this:
to know so much and have control over nothing.
-- Herodotus
%
Servant of God, well done; well hast thou fought
The better fight.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book vi, Line 29
%
Don't spend two dollars to dry-clean a shirt. Donate it to the
 Salvation Army instead. They'll clean it and put it on a hanger. Next
 morning buy it back for seventy-five cents.
-- Billiam Coronel
%
 Remember - more than three shakes is a wank.
-- Written on urinal
%
All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and
the crop in summer.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iv, 44
%
Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never
be said again.
-- Delmore Schwartz
%
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
-- Coleridge
%
For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic
 is fine.   To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a
 not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment.
-- church teaching that you must also vote according to that that's
-- Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy
%
The combination of a number of things to make existence worthwhile.
Yes, the philosophy of 'nome,' meaning 'all.'
-- Spock and Lincoln, "The Savage Curtain," stardate 5906.4
%
Reality is rarely what we imaging.  Great and noble things do not
always happen for great and noble reasons.
-- Tracy Thompson, 'Reader's Digest,' Oct. 1994
%
The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared
for not by our labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his
infinite wisdom has given control of property interests of the country, and
upon the successful management of which so much remains.
-- George F. Baer [railroad industrialist]
%
Quality is inversely proportional to the time left for
completion of the project.
-- Wright's First Law of Quality
%
I'd rather go whoring than warring.
-- Bill Gray
%
Bride, n.: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
True as the needle to the pole,
Or as the dial to the sun.
-- Barton Booth (1681-1733)
-- Song
%
I prefer to remain an enigma.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 97 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
ARSENIC, n.  A kind of cosmetic greatly affected by the ladies, whom
it greatly affects in turn.

    "Eat arsenic?  Yes, all you get,"
        Consenting, he did speak up;
    "'Tis better you should eat it, pet,
        Than put it in my teacup."
                                                             Joel Huck
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite
at the beginning of the sentence.  For maximum comprehension, do not
start listening until the first clause is concluded.  Begin instead at
the word "but" which begins the second, or active, clause.  This is the
way to tell a liberal from a conservative--before they tell you.  Thus:
"I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none,
but ... " (a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut).
-- Frank Mankiewicz
%
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who
can't read them.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
You can and you can't
 You shall and you shan't;
 You will and you won't
 You'll be damned if you do,
 And you'll be damned if you don't.
-- Lorenzo Dow
%
I've really got into astronomy lately.  So much so that I have installed a
skylight in my ceiling.  This really upsets the people that live above me.
-- Steven Wright
%
She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue iii
%

-- Yankee Go Home! And Take Me With You!
-- Sign in Cuba
%
It brings a sense of order and stability to my universe to know you're
  still a pompous ass...and a damn sexy man.
-- Capt. Philipa Louvois, "The Measure of a Man", stardate 42523.7
%
It may be that those who do most, dream most.
-- Stephen Leacock
%
If you post it, they will flame.
       according to Brian Frost (b1f5814@rigel.tamu.edu)
-- The voice from Field of Dreams,
%
Do not believe what I tell you here any more than if it were some
tale of a tub.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book iv, Chap. xxxviii
%
"Beware the [lobbyist], my son, the jaws that bite, the claws that
snatch" (with thanks to Lewis Carroll).  No matter how noble the cause
or well meaning its professional advocates, lobbyists are still paid to
get results.  They're subject to errors in judgement, shortcomings in
motives, and most of them don't even vote in your district.
-- Pierre S. du Pont
%
"Headache?"
"No thanks, I've already got one."
-- The Fusco Brothers
%
The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind.
-- General Joseph "Vinegar Bend" Stilwell (1883-1946)
%
>consult guide about Steven Meretzky
Mostly harmless.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
"You'd better ask yourself `Do I feel lucky?'
Well, do you, punk?"
-- Dirty Harry
%
    American college football players
a light bulb?
The entire team! And they all get a semester's credit
for it!
-- How many
-- does it take to change
%
 ~M''~ camel
-- SMILEY
%
Abomination of desolation.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xxiv, 15; Mark xiii, 14
%
I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
-- F. H. Wales (1936)
%
SYLPH, n.  An immaterial but visible being that inhabited the air when
the air was an element and before it was fatally polluted with factory
smoke, sewer gas and similar products of civilization.  Sylphs were
allied to gnomes, nymphs and salamanders, which dwelt, respectively,
in earth, water and fire, all now insalubrious.  Sylphs, like fowls of
the air, were male and female, to no purpose, apparently, for if they
had progeny they must have nested in accessible places, none of the
chicks having ever been seen.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
.DLL corrupted. Major bummer.
-- WinError #73
%
Riker: "Who would want a Vulcan ship?"
Omag: "Hypothecially speaking?!"
Riker: "'Hypothetically speaking'."
Omag: "I never learned to speak hypothetical."  [Laughs]
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Whenever you drop your equipment in a fire-fight, your ammo and
    grenades always fall the farthest away, and your canteen always
    lands at your feet.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #55
%
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
Penny saved is a penny got.
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
-- The Miser, Act iii, Sc. 12
%
Life often presents us with a choice of evils rather than of goods.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
%
If you don't care for your scalp, you'll get rabies!
-- Monty Python
%
Nice jail. Looks strong.
-- H. Houdini
%
    Hence no force however great can stretch a cord however
fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight:
there will always be a bending downwards.
-- William Whewell
%
The ease of my burdens, the staff of my life.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. ix
%
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-- Albert Einstein
%
If you don't know where you're going,
when you get there you'll be lost.
-- Yogi Berra, Baseball Hall of Famer, NY Yankees
%
If, in the course of several months, only three
worthwhile social events take place, they will all fall on the same
evening.
-- Law of Social Dynamics (Johnson Second Law)
%
Inventions reached their limit long ago,
 and I see no hope for further development.
-- Julius Frontinus, 1st century A.D.
%
What the orators want in depth, they give you in length.
-- Montesquieu
%
Consult the dictionary frequently to avoid mispelling.
-- Writing Rule 30
%
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues
of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself
a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst
be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.
I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Only had a couple beers; gimme my car keys.
-- Famous Last Words
%
I like trees because they seem more resigned to
 the way they have to live than other things do.
-- Willa Cather
%
Who hath not own'd, with rapture-smitten frame,
The power of grace, the magic of a name?
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 5
%
The effect of one upright individual is incalculable.
-- Oscar Arias
%
No, oh, no!  Bad, bad Zoot!
-- Dingo, Zoot's identical twin sister
%
Man and nations will act rationally when all other
possibilities have been exhausted.
-- Katz' Law
%
No amount of misfortune will satisfy the man who is not satisfied with
reading a hundred epigrams.
-- Martial
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Supplemental.  A young boy, shielded from
our initial  sensor scans, has been discovered pinned beneath a fallen
beam.  The degree of  damage to the Vico is making our rescue attempt
difficult."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
Reach high, for the stars lie hidden in your soul.  Dream deep, for
every dream precedes the goal.
-- Pamela Vaull Starr
%
Elbow Macaroni.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
Keep playing with the same toys.  But let's paint them a little
shinier.
-- A domestic-policy adviser to President George Bush
%
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering
and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution
to the creative act.
-- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
%
The summer day has clos'd- the sun is set; Well have they done their office,
those bright hours, The latest of whose train goes swiftly out In the red west.
-- Bryant
%
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it;
We are happy now because God wills it.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Vision of Sir Launfal, Prelude to Part First
%
Science is a body of truths which offers clear and certain knowledge about
the real world and is therefore superior to tradition, philosophy,
religion, dogma, and superstition which offer shadowy knowledge about an
ideal world.
-- Donald DeMarco
%
"Bubbles in the pipe are like air in your veins"
"Cogito, Ergo Zoom"
-- G. Jeanette McWilliams wk00196@worldlink.com
-- Brock Yates
%
A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
-- Montaigne
%
Picard: "I was not aware that Sarek was offended by Spock's opposition."
Perrin: "*I* was offended.  I made sure that Spock knew it.  I'm very
protective  of my husband.  I do not apologize for it."
I", Stardate 45235.4
-- "Unification
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Supplemental.  We have entered Cardassian territory and
  are proceeding on our quest to locate the Phoenix."
-- "The Wounded", Stardate 44429.6
%
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  Hope, in this deep and
powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well,
or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading
for .success, but rather an ability to work for something because
it is good.
-- Vaclav Havel
%
What is research but a blind date with knowledge?
-- Will Harvey
%
Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism.
-- Donald Kaul
%
I gobbled a dry martini and hurried back through the reed curtain to
the dining room.
The eighty-five cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail-bag and was
served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a
quarter, cut my throat for six bits and bury me at sea in a barrel of
comcrete for a dollar and a half plus sales tax.
-- Raymond Chandler
%
Both Empedocles and Heraclitus held it for a truth that man could
not be altogether cleared from injustice in dealing with beasts as
he now does.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Which are the most crafty, Water or Land Animals? 7
%
:comment out: vt. To surround a section of code with comment
   delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment
   marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted.  Often
   done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but is being left in
   the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when
   the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in
   order to debug some other part of the code.  Compare
   {condition out}, usually the preferred technique in languages
   (such as {C}) that make it possible.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Each kiss is as the first.
-- Miramanee, Kirk's wife, "The Paradise Syndrome," stardate 4842.6.
%
I would have you call to mind the strength of the ancient giants,
that undertook to lay the high mountain Pelion on the top of Ossa,
and set among those the shady Olympus.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book iv, Chap. xxxviii
%
"Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn't they have
color film back then?"
"Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It's just the
WORLD was black and white then."
"Really?"
"Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930's, and it was
pretty grainy color for a while, too."
"That's really weird."
"Well, truth is stranger than fiction."
"But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world was black and
white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?"
"Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane."
"But... but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn't their
paints have been shades of gray back then?"
"Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the 30's."
"So why didn't old black and white photos turn color too?"
"Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?"
-- Calvin and Dad, "Calvin and Hobbes", 29 October 89
%
Seals are very intelligent animals. They've probably thought of defending
themselves. Only one problem:  no hands. They're sitting on the beach,
getting whomped on the head, going:  THONK "Man, this sucks." THONK "Wish
we had some hands." THONK "Or at least a couple of helmets." THONK.
-- Denis Leary
%
The contents of this message *may* reflect MY personal opinion.
The contents of this message is *not* intended to reflect
those of my employer, or anyone else.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
:If you want X, you know where to find it.: There is a legend that
   Dennis Ritchie, inventor of {C}, once responded to demands for
   features resembling those of what at the time was a much more
   popular language by observing "If you want PL/I, you know where to
   find it."  Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for
   fending off requests to alter a new design to mimic some older
   (and, by implication, inferior and {baroque}) one.  The case X =
   {Pascal} manifests semi-regularly on USENET's comp.lang.c
   newsgroup.  Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in
   discussions of graphics software (see {X}).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I've had five years of happy marriage. Which isn't bad out of fifteen ...
 She looked at me one night, said, "Do you think I'll lose my looks when I
 get old?" I said, "If you're lucky."
-- Bub Thomas
%
Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two
complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors
through rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect
of the remaining errors by providing for recovery from them.  An
interesting footnote to this design is that now a system failure can
usually be considered to be the result of two program errors: the
first, in the program that started the problem; the second, in the
recovery routine that could not protect the system.
-- A. L. Scherr,
-- "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage Operating Systems,
-- Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and Philosophies,"
-- IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1973, pp. 382-400
%
Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in
Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll
never have time to regret it.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The wolfe from the dore.
-- John Skelton (c. 1460-1529)
-- Colyn Cloute, Line 1531
%

-- An optimist Someone who hasn't been given all the facts yet.
%
DON'T go!!  I'm not HOWARD COSELL!!  I know POLISH JOKES...  WAIT!!
 Don't go!!  I AM Howard Cosell!...  And I DON'T know Polish jokes!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
A rhapsody of words.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
I think their experience with us may have helped their contemptuousness;
 the ignorance they come by naturally.
-- Chuck McManis (personal communication)
%
Two wrongs are only the beginning.
-- Kohn's Corollary to Murphy's Law
%
I'm sorry, baby. You want monogamy? Marry a swan.
-- HEARTBURN
%
None but the brave deserves the fair.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Alexander's Feast, Line 15
%
 :X lips are sealed
-- SMILEY
%
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our
 salvation.
-- Jack Gladney, from White Noise
%
:teraflop club: /te'r*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point
   Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume
   outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few
   simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing
   techniques.  Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been
   the founder.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Yes, cut the red wire! I'm sure that's right!
-- Famous Last Words
%
 :-D laughing (at you!)
-- SMILEY
%
MAMMALIA, n.pl.  A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a
state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened
put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Many receive advice, few profit by it.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 149
%
The mad scientist was once only a creature of gothic romance; now he is
everywhere, busy torturing atoms and animals in his laboratory.
-- Edward Abbey
%
De-regulating S&Ls won't cost taxpayers $$$$$.
-- Conservative idea #5
%
Have you ever used IPCS?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature,
 volume, humidity and other variables, the computer will do as it damn well
 pleases.
-- Harward's Law, as applied to Computers
%
BIGAMY, n.  A mistake in taste for which the wisdom of the future will
adjudge a punishment called trigamy.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
To bear is to conquer our fate.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- On visiting a Scene in Argyleshire
%
Because, my dear Julian, pure ignorant young girls cannot save
complicated neurotic over-educated older men from disaster, however
much they kid themselves that they can.
-- Iris Murdoch
%
He 's armed without that 's innocent within.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epistle i, Book i, Line 94
%
Botany is not a science; it is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and
 Latin.
-- Alphonse Karr
%
Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no
  wish to serve under them.  Captain, a starship also runs on
  loyalty to one man.  And nothing can replace it or him.
-- Spock, "The Ultimate Computer," stardate 4729.4.
%
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions;
he is neither hot nor timid.
-- Chesterfield
%
Asked from what country he came, he replied, "I am a citizen of the world."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week.
 Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days until
 the condition clears up.
-- Peter De Vries
%
I am resolved to grow fat, and look young till forty.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- The Maiden Queen, Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Let's go to the Bookstore
-- JFK
-- Famous Last Words
%
 :-* after eating something bitter or sour
-- SMILEY
%
Technology transition
 helping people replace old useless processes, methods and tools
 with new useless processes, methods and tools
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth
the first time he bites off more than he can chew.
-- Herb Caen
%
I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.
-- Cicero
%
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit
 and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
-- Harvey Diamond
%
We repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purpose.
-- Will Durant
%
Mercy and justice, marching cheek by joule.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, First Week, First Day
%
I wasn't aware you had such handsome legs.
-- Lwaxana Troi to Picard, "Man Hunt", stardate 42859.2
%
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "Man and Superman"
%
Idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who
    turn bitter overnight, deceived by the lies they've told themselves.
-- Don DeLillo
%
Men's skin is different from women's skin.  It is usually bigger, and
it has more snakes tattooed on it.  Also, if you examine a woman's skin
very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently
tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ...
   [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important
         world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the
   next few square feet of the woman's skin.  Thank you.]
... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your
cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of
billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called cells!    And what is even
more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying!  This is a
fact.  Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the
older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and
obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the
window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger
hotshot cells moving up from below.
-- Dave Barry, Saving Face
%
The dice of God are always loaded.
-- Emerson
%
No pressure, no diamonds.
-- Mary Case
%
If you don't run your own life, somebody else will.
-- John Atkinson
%
:test: n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get
   thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup
   of the results.  2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the
   simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder,
   ready to pounce on mistakes.  Judging by the quality of most
   software, the second definition is far more prevalent.  See also
   {demo}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You are taking the wrong sow by the ear.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. iv
%
The number of adjectives and verbs that are added to the description of
a menu item is in inverse proportion to the quality of the resulting dish.
-- John Calkins
%
If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe
 him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, "This is a glass of
 water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it
 a glass of water?" And eventually he dies of thirst.
-- Shelley Berman
%
Picard: "Are you responsible for this incident in Engineering?"
Q: "Of course!  I needed to find out if what I suspected about the girl were
  true."
Picard: "That being..."
Q: "That she's Q."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
"Gud, marry me, or I'll kick yer ass."
-- Honkeytonk Sue
%
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
-- Edward Abbey
%
    rednecks
Two, one to drive their home to the hardware store and
one to buy the bulb and screw it in.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
WHAT guard?
-- Famous Last Words
%
Philadelphia was a gay, lighthearted town. Anyone found smiling after
 the curfew rang was liable to be arrested. If a woman dropped her glove on
 a street, she might be hauled before a judge for stripteasing. The city had
 so many reformers, they tried reforming each other ... Undertaking in
 Philadelphia--a mortician can hardly tell if he's burying a dead person or
 a live one.
-- W. C. Fields
%
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment.  They farm
fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical
sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child
labor, exchange information ceaselessly.  They do everything but watch
television.
-- Lewis Thomas
%
 Mafia boss:     Rub the shit out.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
The amount of litter in the street is proportional to the local rate
of unemployment.
-- David Lloyd-Jones
%
Some people say a front-engine car handles best. Some people say a
 rear-engine car handles best. I say a rented car handles best.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
I don't kill my enemies: I slime them
-- Odo
%
I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating
-- Boss Tweed
%
 <|-( Chinese and doesn't like these kind of jokes
-- SMILEY
%
 GENERAL KNOWLEDGE:  Describe in detail.  Be objective and
 specific.
-- Life Studies 101 (Bob Pasker <rbp@NETCOM.COM>)
%
Those who don't study the past will repeat its errors. Those who
do will find other ways to err!
-- Charles Wolf, Jr.
%
Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last
 fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
-- Sir Julian Huxley
%
An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
-- David Gerrold
%
"How was it, little buddy?"
"It was dark, like a cave, and there were no
and floor!  Giant roaches howled like damned souls
as they skittered along the mouldered grout-work!"
-- toilets just black, smoking holes in the walls
-- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police
%
...after fooling around all day with routers you pick up the phone and start
dialing an IP number.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
You know it's going to be a bad day when: your alarm clock-radio wakes you with
the words "One minute to impact."
(Of course, you won't have to worry about getting up to go to work.)
-- Ambidextrous Rex
%
Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low,--an excellent thing in woman.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
Have you ever made a "flippy" disk?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we shall die.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xxii, 13
%
I was such a pacifist I used to get beaten up by Quakers
-- Woody Allen,Sleeper
%
Sometimes, when I drive across the desert in the middle of the night,
with no other cars around, I start imagining:  What if there were
no civilization out there?  No cities, no factories, no people?  And
then I think:  No people or factories?  Then who made this car?  And
this highway?  And I get so confused I have to stick my head out the
window into the driving rain---unless there's lightning, because I
could get struck on the head by a bolt.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
I pay my taxes in copper pieces.
-- Famous Last Words
%
    Wizards should not go seeking revenge, killing, or death in general. After
all, revenge, killing, and death in general have a way of showing up whether
you are looking for them or not.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I
%
Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.
-- Edward Abbey
%
If I stop loving anything will it all come back one day? Cuz everything I
love is taken away.
-- Hit Me
%
INK, n.  A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic and
water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
intellectual crime.  The properties of ink are peculiar and
contradictory:  it may be used to make reputations and unmake them; to
blacken them and to make them white; but it is most generally and
acceptably employed as a mortar to bind together the stones of an
edifice of fame, and as a whitewash to conceal afterward the rascal
quality of the material.  There are men called journalists who have
established ink baths which some persons pay money to get into, others
to get out of.  Not infrequently it occurs that a person who has paid
to get in pays twice as much to get out.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Spock: "For everything there is a first time, Lieutenant.  Don't you agree,
  Admiral?"
Kirk: "Mmm-hmm."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle on the concept
-- of a manned mission to Mars
%
Q: "Where's the Main Shuttlebay?"
Computer: "Main Shuttlebay is located on Deck Four."
Q: "Take me there."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Better have failed in the high aim, as I,
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed,--
As, God be thanked! I do not.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- The Inn Album, iv
%
The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is
incomprehensible to the computer.
-- Vance Packard
%
Everybody in Los Angeles is in therapy. It's a good thing they don't have
 parking spaces for the emotionally handicapped. There'd be no place to
 park.
-- Jackson Perdue
%
No call alligator long mouth till you pass him.
-- Jamaican Proverb
%
God save the mark.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
All things being equal, all things are never equal.
-- Marshall L. Smith
%
No one is more carnal than a recent virgin.
-- John Steinbeck
%
ZEAL:
-- Quality seen in new graduates if you're quick.
%
there's a disturbance in the Force.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 13 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead
of stating problems, people like to pass out half-accurate statements together
with half-available solutions which they can't finish and which they want you
to finish.
-- Amrom Katz
%
Do you use DWIM to make life interesting?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%

-- Mary Had A Little Lamb Aint Genetic Science Amazing?
%
I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks
 ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said no.
-- Woody Allen
%
Microsecond:
Amount of time needed for a program to bomb.
-- Computing Definition
%
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%
Top Ten Christmas Movies in Times Square
  10.  Hot Buttered Elves
   9.  Santa's Magic Lap
   8.  Babes in Boyland
   7.  Crisco Kringle
   6.  Yes, Yes, Oh God Yes, Virginia
   5.  Ninja Reindeer Killfest '88
   4.  Not-So-Tiny Tim
   3.  Santa Goes Round-The-World
   2.  The Nutcracker Swede
   1.  I'm Not Rudolph; That's Not My Nose
-- David Letterman
%
if you wear a belt buckle weighing more than 3 lbs.
-- You may be redneck...
%
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that
good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
-- Rom. 12:2
%
Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna --
or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things
come out.
-- Barbara Walters
%
You can't use tact with a congressman. A congressman is a hog. You must
 take a stick and hit him on the snout.
-- Henry Adams
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Supplemental.  We have sustained light damage from an
  attack by an alien species known as the Calamarian.  They apparently have a
  grievance with Q, no doubt one of many lifeforms that do."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
... But the reward of a successful collaboration is a thing that cannot
be produced by either of the parties working alone.  It is akin to the
benefits of sex with a partner, as opposed to masturbation.  The latter
is fun, but you show me anyone who has gotten a baby from playing with
him or herself, and I'll show you an ugly baby, with just a whole bunch
of knuckles.
-- Harlan Ellison
%
My life is a patio of fun!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
"Interesting poll results reported in today's New
York Post: people on the street in midtown
Manhattan were asked whether they approved of the
US invasion of Grenada.  Fifty-three percent said
yes; 39 percent said no; and 8 percent said "Gimme
a quarter?"
-- David Letterman
%
Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Last night I watched the news from Washington (the Capitol).
 The Russians had escaped while we weren't watching them (like Russians will).
 Now we have all this room; we've even got the moon,
 and I hear the USSR will be open soon as Vacationland for
 lawyers in love.
-- Jackson Browne
%
Sully was the first to learn to jump.  In the end is it
not proper that the student should  surpass the master.
To Quote the immortal Socrates: "I drank what?"
-- Sullivan
%
A cure for bags under the eyes: sleep upside down and the bags will often
 work through to a less noticeable part of the body.
-- Mary Dunn
%
Our deeds determine us,as much as we determine our deeds.
-- George Eliot
%
Accurst ambition, how dearly I have bought you.
-- John Dryden
%
I know I'm going to miss her, a tomato ate my sister.
-- From "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes".
%
Hatred, n.: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
K'Vada: "You will sleep Klingon style!  We do not soften our bodies
by...putting
  down padding."
Picard: "Good!  I prefer it that way!"
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.1
%
Bed Spreaders spread spreads on beds.
Bread Spreaders spread butter on breads.
And that Bed Spreader better
watch out how he's spreading
or that Bread Spreader's
sure going to butter his bedding.
-- Dr Suess
%
The person is thinking: Yeah, I really do love him.
But I hope he showers at least once a day.
-- What most people are thinking when they say "I love you"
-- Michelle, age 9
%
Recently, my personal advisors have beeen telling me to go to
America.   Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and
telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?
-- Alexi Sayle
%
I felt like I was in charge.
     Panama Canal's locks
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, after working the
%
Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial
fire,--conscience.
-- George Washington (1732-1799)
-- Rule from the Copy-book of Washington when a schoolboy
%
For the man who has everything... Penicillin.
-- F. Borquin
%
Commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iv, Sc. 5
%
The ways of the gods are full of providence.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ii, 3
%
Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them, for your
friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.
-- Pope
%
    NASA technicians
Seventy, and they plan it for two weeks and when they finally
get around to it the weather's bad so they postpone it till
next week. The light bulb costs 3 million dollars.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
UFP President: "James T. Kirk, it is the judgement of this council
that you be  reduced in rank to captain.  And as a consequence of
your new rank, you be  given that duty for which you have shown unswerving
ability...the command of a  starship."
-- "STIV:TVH", Stardate 8390.
%
The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and
understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge
and of the fear of the Lord.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xi, 2
%
Take a look at this - I'm sure you know it. 'King and Country'.
Ah yes...without doubt my _favourite_ magazine. Soft, strong...and
  thoroughly absorbent.
Tophole, Blackadder, I thought it would be right up your alley...
-- Melchett and Edmund : Captain Cook
%
 ~~:-( net.flame
-- SMILEY
%
You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown
to pieces.
-- Henry Kaiser
%
He has, I know not what, of greatness in his looks, and of high fate,
that almost awes me.
-- John Dryden
%
As you know, death is my bread and danger my butter.  No, danger is my
bread and death is my butter.  No, danger is my, death is, no, no wait,
sorry, death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
-- Woody Allen, "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"
%
You just gotta save Christianity, Richard! You gotta!
-- Loretta Young, to Richard the Lionhearted, in the movie The Crusades, 1935
%
During the intervening years, this ex-American baseball player who
defected to the Soviet Union rose through the ranks to the height of
power, where he is now the single, behind-the-scenes controlling force
behind all Soviet policy decisions.  It is he to whom Reagan refers as
'The Evil Umpire'.
-- Glen Raphael "Recent U.S. Foreign Policy"
%
Do you know Duff's device?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
"Strange, when you think of it, that of all the
 countless folks who have lived before our time on
 this planet not one is known in history or legend
 as having died of laughter."
-- Sir Max Beerbohm
%
No one ever prayed heartily without learning something.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
:XON: /X-on/ n. Syn. {control-Q}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
If you are given two contradictory orders, obey them both.
-- Brintnall's Second Law
%
..  over in west Philadelphia a puppy is vomiting..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
County Mayo, Ireland, for an absentee owner, the Earl of Erne. Though
the harvest had been disastrous, Captain Boycott refused to reduce rents
and attempted to evict any tenants who could not pay in full. As a
result, he became the object of the earliest known effort to force an
alteration of policy by concerted nonintercourse. His servants departed
en masse. No one would sell him food. Life became so miserable for him
that at last he gave up and returned to England. To boycott is "to
combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of
intimidation or coercion."
-- Boycott In 1880, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was land agent in
-- Willard R. Espy, "O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun"
%
It is a faith (not always justified) of theoretical physics that if man
 proposes what is sufficiently elegant, nature, pleased and flattered, will
 say yes.
-- Leon N. Cooper, Introduction To The Meaning & Structure Of Physics
%
Bliss in possession will not last;
Remembered joys are never past;
At once the fountain, stream, and sea,
They were, they are, they yet shall be.
-- James Montgomery (1771-1854)
-- The Little Cloud
%
Picard: "Human or not, I want no part of you."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal
of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody
by having schools without education.
-- Robert Maynard Hutchins
%
:wish list: n. A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably
   won't get done for a long time, usually because the person
   responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way
   to do it.  "OK, I'll add automatic filename completion to the wish
   list for the new interface."  Compare {tick-list features}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Whose service is perfect freedom.
-- Book of Common Prayer
-- Collect for Peace
%
A man so various, that he seem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Absalom and Achitophel, Part i, Line 545
%
The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic.
-- William Shakespeare
%
And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,--
  That star of life's tremulous ocean.
-- Paul Moon James (1780-1854)
-- The Beacon
%
Spock: "I did not anticipate such a passionate response to my arrival."
Pardek: "Romulans are passionate people.  The Vulcans will learn to appreciate
  that quality in us."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
Anyone can be great with money. With money, greatness is not a talent
but an obligation. The trick is to be great without money.
-- Italo Bombolini
%
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us
  the truth about its author.
-- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
%
The gingham dog and the calico cat...
-- Eugene Field
%
Too much is just enough.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), [on whiskey]
%
No experiment is reproduceable.
-- Wyszowsky's Second Law
%
Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue.
-- Old Testament
-- Job xx, 12
%
Picard: "I also have the responsibility of being the bearer of unhappy news."
Spock: "Sarek.  Sarek is dead."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
PREROGATIVE, n.  A sovereign's right to do wrong.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000,
illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0.  Considering government subsidies
of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
-- William A. Turnbow
%
Khan: "Your argument?"
Joachim: "Yours...is the...superior."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
 -/- stirring up trouble
-- SMILEY
%
"I can't think of anything more relaxing than being locked
in a moving car with YOU for about 300 hours, little pal."
"That's really sweet, Sam.  I may weep openly."
-- "Sam and Max", Freelance Police
%
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Kindness it is that brings forth kindness always.
-- Sophocles
%
HIPPOGRIFF, n.  An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half
griffin.  The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and
half eagle.  The hippogriff was actually, therefore, a one-quarter
eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold.  The study of
zoology is full of surprises.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
You know how dumb the average guy is?  Well, by definition, half of them are
 even dumber than THAT.
-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
%
In another paper delivered today, Paul W. Kinsie of the American Social
Health Association warned that, if the moon was to be kept free from
venereal disease, prostitution must be banned there.
-- The Realist, November, 1962
%
Spock: "Intrigues me, this Picard."
Data: "In what manner, sir?"
Spock: "Remarkably analytical, and is dispassionate, for a human.  I understand
  why my father chose to mind-meld with him.  There is almost a Vulcan quality
  to the man."
Data: "Interesting.  I have not considered that."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
Super Bowl (XX = Yawn)
-- Oxymoron
%
My views and opinions do not reflect
the same for my employer or my country,
and definitely not the chancelor!
-- DISCLAIMER
%
Walking on water wasn't built in a day.
-- Jack Kerouac
%
the law!
-- 1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight it's not just a good idea, it's
%
>consult guide about Damogran
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
Damogran is a planet whose surface is mostly water. It is a favorite spot
for Presidential dedication ceremonies. Also see the entries on France.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Open marriage is nature's way of telling you you need a divorce.
-- Marshall Brickman
%
You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent
evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a
supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights
source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but
of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival.If
man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is
right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his
values and to keep the product of his work.  If life on earth is his
purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being:  nature forbids
him the irrational.  Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts
to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means:
is anti-life.
-- are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim the
-- the law of identity.  A is A and Man is Man.  Rights are conditions
-- John Galt
%
JUDGEMENT IS USUALLY SOUND: Lucky.
-- Interpreting supervisors comments...
%
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him:
  'Whose?'
-- Don Marquis
%
No sentence fragments.
-- Writing Rule 42
%
The truth of the matter is that window management under X is not yet
well understood.
-- The Xlib Programming Manual
%
Anybody got a cigarette? Thanks very much, sir--I left mine in the machine.
-- London Lee
%
The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- On the Tranquillity of the Mind
%
He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are
inclined to purity are not so.
-- Saint John Climacus
%
You come from a very brave and unique race. I'm glad you're here on
  the ENTERPRISE.
Thank you, Commander. And welcome home.
-- Riker and Worf, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5
%
if your idea of a "gourmet meal" is chitlins.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The dog is a yes-animal.  Very popular with people who can't afford a
yes man.
-- Robertson Davies
%
A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size, or it is not
 the door that Providence means for him.
-- Henry Beecher
%
This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.
-- All we have of freedom all we use or know --
-- Kipling
%
You are an excellent tactician, Captain.  You let your second in
command attack while you sit and watch for weakness.
-- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9
%
No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect
enough to be under some degree of restraint.
-- Chesterfield
%
There are a billion people in China.  It's not easy to be an individual
in a crowd of more than a billion people.  Think of it.  More than
a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type
of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.
-- A. Whitney Brown, _The Big Picture_
%
Bankrupt Association Termed in Poor Shape
-- Lawrence (KA) Journal-World 7/12/77
%

-- Emacs the choice of a GNU generation.
%
 A false witness will not go unpunished,
 and he who pours out lies will not go free.
-- Proverbs 19:5
%
Things that make you go "aww fuck"
-- Kate Holleran
%
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
-- Timothy Leary
%
:superuser: [UNIX] n. Syn. {root}, {avatar}.  This usage has
   spread to non-UNIX environments; the superuser is any account with
   all {wheel} bits on.  A more specific term than {wheel}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I gin to be aweary of the sun.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 5
%
There are no passengers on spaceship earth.  We are all crew.
-- Marshall McLuhan
%
A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of
wonders.
-- Lord Dunsany, The Laughter of the Gods
%
Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d'etre oblige de'en pleurer.
(I make myself laugh at everything, in case I should have to weep.)
-- Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais (1732-1799)
%
 'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same
 time as 'n' tasks.
 'n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks.
-- Gray's Law of Programming
-- Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law
%
Madam, have you ever considered a career in security.
If it's anything like baby-sitting, I'm an authority.
-- Worf and Brenna O'dell, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
Do you know Gray code?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Where no hope is left, is left no fear.
-- Milton
%
It is a point of wisdom to be silent when occasion requires, and better
than to speak, though never so well.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of the Training of Children
%
Traveler: "It's not over Wesley...there's still a way."
-- "Remember Me", Stardate unknown
%
One of his sayings was, "Even the gods cannot strive against necessity."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Pittacus, iv
%
He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the
clouds shall not reap.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes xi, 4
%
Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.
-- John Selden (1584-1654)
-- Learning
%
There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #25
%
The harder you work, the luckier you get.
-- Gary Player
%
Bill Posters Will be Prosecuted Vigorously!
Under the sign, someone wrote:
Bill Posters is innocent and lives in another state!
-- Sign on Public Wall
%
We need a new cosmology.   New Gods.  New Sacraments.  Another drink.
-- Patti Smith
%
Never kill a man, especially if it means taking his life.
-- Woody Allen, "Love and Death"
%

-- Artery The study of fine paintings.
%
This dungeon is a pushover.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit,
you would stay out and your dog would go in.
-- Mark Twain
%
I think when you go on trial they should have a parrot there that
says guilty or not guilty for you, as a sort of courtesy.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Glen. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hot. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
    managing editors
You were supposed to have changed that light bulb last week!
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
    conservatives
One; after reflecting in the twilight on the merit of the
previous bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Keep your ears open.
-- Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #7
%
You say I'm cool, I'm no fool,
 but then you wind up applying to grad school...
-- Matt Groening
%
These round things Asur has attached to his sled: they take the wood away
from the Earth-Mother, they make it move too fast; they turn around and
round in a strange, e-ville fashion.  Indeed, they are ungodly, and Asur
should be stoned to death forthwith.
-- Translated from proto-Indo-European
-- scratched on clay tablets, circa 6500 BC
%
When is man strong until he feels alone?
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Colombe's Birthday, Act iii
%
Heav'd on Olympus tott'ring Ossa stood;
On Ossa, Pelion nods with all his wood.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xi, Line 387
%
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our
human loneliness is cause enough.  But it is a hard quest worth making
to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily
the person one desires to be.
-- Anna Louise Strong
%
I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
The secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
%
I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of
my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the
last small twig has grown.
-- Kathe Kollwitz
%
Thinking small-minded is when you see your bus on the other side of the
 street and wish you could teleport across to catch it.
-- Kenneth Arromdee (arromdee@cs.jhu.edu)
%
Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
Gung ho....
-- Avon
%
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that
 reflects it.
-- Edith Wharton
%
This is yet another example of how our actions produce random results.
-- Data, "Contagion", stardate 42609.1
%
    The destruction of this planet would have no significance
on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the
sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring
for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in
the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a
power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its
funeral pyre.  The choice is ours.
-- Stanley Kubrick
%
Of all the paths [that] lead to a woman's love
Pity 's the straightest.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- The Knight of Malta, Act i, Sc. 1
%
I'm totally DESPONDENT over the LIBYAN situation and the price of CHICKEN..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
In waking a tiger, use a long stick.
-- Mao
%
To the unbeliever, all signs are as dust in the wind.
-- Hepesh, Curse of Peldon
%
I live just off Ventura Boulevard, where all the weirdos hang out, and I
 was on a corner the other day when a wild-looking sort of gypsy-looking
 lady with a dark veil over her face grabbed me right on Ventura Boulevard
 and said, "Karen Haber! You're never going to find happiness, and no one is
 ever going to marry you." I said, "Mom, leave me alone."
-- Karen Haber
%
Picard: "Captain's Log, Stardate 46192.3.  We have arrived at Starbase 112 with
  the loading-relief supplies destined for Tagra IV, an ecologically-devastated
  planet in the Argoles Cluster.  We have also taken on a rather unusual
  passenger."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
`I want you to stop quoting me out of context,' he said.  `Printing
my comments intact would make things much easier.'  Mansfield went
on to claim `I...[like]...boys.'
-- From the Harvard Lampoon's mock of the Harvard Crimson
%
Dorion, ridiculing the description of a tempest in the "Nautilus"
of Timotheus, said that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling
saucepan.
-- Athenaeus (c. 200 AD)
-- The Deipnosophists, viii, 19
%
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern'st good-night.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
You're dithpicable
-- Daffy Duck
%
For prying into human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not
concern.
-- Victor Hugo
%
Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority
to all that befalls him.
-- Romain Gary
%
I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings...
 Boy With Pail...  Kitten On Fire.
-- Steven Wright
%
Never buy what you do not want
because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
That in our proper motion we ascend
Up to our native seat: descent and fall
To us is adverse.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 75
%
Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has survived the fall!
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book iii, The Garden, Line 41
%
The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.
-- Father Robert F Capon
%
'T is now the summer of your youth. Time has not cropt the roses from
your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.
-- Edward Moore (1712-1757)
-- The Gamester, Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Ius summum saepe summa est malitia.
[Rigorous law is often rigorous injustice.]
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Heautontimoroumenos, Act iv, Sc. 5, 48, (796.)
%
Nobody notices the big errors.
-- Mayes Law.
%
Brahms: "So *you're* the one who's been fouling up my engine designs."
-- "Galaxy's Child", Stardate unknown
%
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac
(and nobody cares about it).
-- Bill Joy 6/21/85
%
Neither the water nor the moon make any effort to achieve a reflection.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Oh no not me, I never lost control.  You're face to face with the man who sold
the world.
-- David Bowie
%
You've buttered your bread--now sleep in it.
-- Gracie Allen
%
I ask, sir, what is the militia?  It is the whole people, except
for a few public officials.
-- George Mason
%
If the test installation functions perfectly, all subsequent systems
will malfunction.
-- Troutman's Programming Postulate #1
%
Passions are fashions.
-- Clifton Fadiman
%
Earthment like Rameses, Alexander, Ceasar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan.
  Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.
-- Spock, "Patterns of Force," stardate 2534.7.
%
Self-defense is nature's oldest law.
-- Dryden
%
:snarf: /snarf/ vt. 1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document
   or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's
   permission.  See also {BLT}.  2. [in the UNIX community] To
   fetch a file or set of files across a network.  See also
   {blast}.  This term was mainstream in the late 1960s, meaning
   `to eat piggishly'.  It may still have this connotation in
   megs of stuff a day."  3. To acquire, with little concern for
   legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing).  "They
   were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them."
   4. Syn. for {slurp}.  "This program starts by snarfing the
   entire database into core, then...."  5. [GEnie] To spray
   food or {programming fluid}s due to laughing at the wrong
   moment.  "I was drinking coffee, and when I read your post I
   snarfed all over my desk."  "If I keep reading this topic, I think
   I'll have to snarf-proof my computer with a keyboard {condom}."
   [This sense appears to be widespread among mundane teenagers ---
   ESR]
-- context.  "He's in the snarfing phase of hacking -{FTP}ing
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
if you still think pro-wrestling is real.
-- You may be redneck...
%
if you've ever filled a deer tag on a golf course.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The Diabolonian position is new to the London playgoer of today, but not to
 lovers of serious literature.    From Prometheus to the Wagnerian Siegfried,
 some enemy of the gods, unterrified champion of those oppressed by them, has
 always towered among the heroes of the loftiest poetry.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "On Diabolonian Ethics"
%
Eyes of unholy blue.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- By that Lake whose gloomy Shore
%
The only thing on the level is mountain climbing.
-- Eddie Quinn
%
I'll have some white toast.  Dry, ma'am
-Elwood
-- "The Blues Brothers"
%
A hospital is no place to be sick.
-- Samuel Goldwyn, immigrant turned famous movie producer
%
And now, in keeping with Channel 40's policy of always bringing you the latest
 in blood and guts, in living color, you're about to see another first---an
 attempted suicide.
-- Chris Hubbock, who shot herself during a broadcast
%
    preservation society members
light bulb?
One, but it takes a year to find an antique Edison light bulb
so it'll be architecturally accurate.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a
%
"Hey, Sam, how about a loan?"
"Whattaya need?"
"Oh, about $500."
"Whattaya got for collateral?"
"Whattaya need?"
"How about an eye?"
-- Giancana [small talk]
%
    Unix programmers
Only one, but if you forget to tell him "2>" he'll mash both
the live and dead bulbs into the same socket at once.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,
Liege of all loiterers and malcontents.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Love's Labour 's Lost
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Just let the wardrobe do the acting.
 (to Michael Keaton, on the set of Batman)
-- Jack Nicholson
%
Power corrupts, but we still need electricity.
-- D.W. Jones
%
or by others.
-- Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered either by themselves
%
A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.
-- Edgar J. Mohn
%
Have you ever written an adventure program?
... a real-time game?
... a multi-player game?
... a networked game?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
 Lincoln:        Four score and seven shits ago...
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
There is more than one way to crash a system.
-- Murphy's Seventh Law of Programming
%
Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that
even those most difficult to please. . . never desire more of it
than they already have.
-- Rene Descartes
%
What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so
that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our
country. Nice try anyway, George.
-- D.J. on KSFO/KYA
%
A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Isn't fun like the best thing to have ever?
-- Arthur
%
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xxxi, 30
%
There is no limit to how bad things can get.
-- Hane's Law
%
Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Procrastination is the thief of time:
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
-- Edward Young (English poet, 1683-1765)
%
Such as may make thee search the coffers round.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- At a Vacation Exercise, Line 31
%
I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in
 the world is fixed.
-- Frank Deford
%
He's so nervous that he wears a seat belt in a drive-in movie.
-- Neil Simon
%
    Technical Support staff
I'm sorry, we don't support that kind of lighting
technology.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent.
-- Euripides
%
Better late than before anybody has invited you.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Nothing can be rushed. Things must grow, they must grow upward ...
-- Paul Klee
%
...you think "grep keys /dev/pockets" or "grep homework /dev/backpack"
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Speech at the Charleston Bar Dinner, May 10, 1847, Vol. ii, p. 393
%
Each person has the right to take part in the management of public
affairs in his country, provided he has prior experience, a will
to succeed, a college degree, influential parents, good looks, a
resume, two 3X4 snapshots, and a good tax record.
-- Carlos Eduardo Novaes
%
Alpenstock: limited number of shares in mountain real estate
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
if you share your beer with your dog.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Thousands of days of civilians ...  have produced a...
 feeling for the aesthetic modules --
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
You know it's Monday when you find a land mine in your food.
-- Garfield
%
:nanotechnology:: /nan'-oh-tek-no`l*-jee/ n. A hypothetical
   fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built with
   the individual specification and placement of each separate atom.
   The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place
   in 1990, for example with the deposition of individual xenon
   atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very
   large computer company.  Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the
   hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler
   in his book "Engines of Creation", where he predicted that
   nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers,
   permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal
   wealth.  See also {blue goo}, {gray goo}, {nanobot}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
-- Daniel Dennett
%
my Dress For Obscurity class meets then.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 95 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
-- Henny Youngman
%
HA! I always knew you didn't have the guts!
-- Famous Last Words
%
My systems are only programmed for one at a time.
-- Data
%
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe
it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better
to know than to be ignorant.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
One horse laugh is worth 10,000 syllogisms.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
"Badger!  Grab something and *hang on*!"
  "Right-Oh!  I'm hanging onto this 1890 Liberty Head Silver Dollar!"
-- Badger, Judah and Nexus battening down the hatches, from "Nexus"
%
What? Over?    Did you say 'over?'  Nothing is over until we say it is!
  Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?  Hell no!
-- John Belushi, from Animal House
%
Whenever you turn on the radio, you hear the last few notes
of your favourite song.
-- Horowitz' Law
%
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
I have never taken things on trust. I see no reason to
make an exception in the case of a mysterious area of
danger
-- Avon
%
These things are not for the best, nor as I think they ought to be;
but still they are better than that which is downright bad.
-- Plautus (254-184 BC)
-- Trinummus, Act ii, Sc. 2, 111, (392.)
%
Oh, intercourse the penguin!
-- Monty Python
%
The fact is, squire, the moment a man takes to a good pipe, he becomes
a philosopher; it's the poor man's friend; it calms the mind, soothes
the temper, and makes a man patient under troubles; it has made more
good men good husbands, kind masters, indulgent fathers and honest
fellows, than any other thing on this universal world.
-- Richard Haliburton
%
    Republican Presidential candidates from 1988
(Dole) When I was a poor boy growing up in Kansas we
didn't have light bulbs. Now I have the housekeeper do it.
-- How many
-- did it take to change a light bulb?
%
A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our [society's] coronary
occlusions.
-- Diet and Stress in Vascular Disease,
-- Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol 197, No. 9., 1961, pg 806.
%
It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington.
-- Admiral Grace Hopper
%
One woman can make you fly like an eagle. Another can give you the
    strength of a lion.  But only one in a cycle of lives can fill you with
  gladness and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy.
-- Hawk, from Twin Peaks
%
Thought is deeper than all speech,
  Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach
  What unto themselves was taught.
-- Christopher P. Cranch (1813-?)
-- Stanzas
%
Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water.
-- Ben Franklin
%
A system of economy is good when ... the farmer, the manufacturer, and the
 trader enjoy the full liberty of their property, their production, and their
 industry.
-- Eschasseriaux
%
 "di-dah" for the filthy words:
 Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah di-dah,
 Di-dah di-dah di-dah, di-dah;
 di-dah di-dah di-dah?
 Di-dah di-dah di-dah.
 Di-dah di-dah, di-dah di-fuck.
-- This limerick is --SO--FILTHYthat it would offend you. So I'll put
%
As I went under the new telegraph-wire, I heard it vibrating like a
harp high overhead.  It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life,
a supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work
of this life of ours.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
-- Paul Erlich
%
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or
nothing about it.
-- Olin Miller
%
I am slow of study.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Do you know what ASCII stands for?
... EBCDIC?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Nobody goes to bed hungry in America
-- R. Reagan
%
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
  The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more;
  On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Abt Vogler, ix
%
Access to computers, and anything which might teach you comething
about the way the world workd, should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On imperative.
-- Steven Levy
%
Flair is what marks the difference between artistry and mere competence.
-- Riker,  "Time Squraed,"  stardate 42679.2.
%
Yar: "Captain Jean-Luc Picard, I wish I could say you've been like a father to
  me, but I've never had one so I don't know what it feels like.  But if there
  was one person in this universe who I would choose to be like, someone who I
  would want to make proud of me, it's you.  You who have the heart of an
  explorer and the soul of a poet.  So you'll understand when I say, 'Death is
  that state in which one exists only in the memory of others', which is why it
  is not an end.  No goodbyes, just good memories.  Hailing frequencies closed,
  sir."
-- "Skin Of Evil", Stardate 41601.3.
%
Han  "I don't know.  You think a princess and a guy like me..."
Leia "No."
-- Star Wars
%
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery
the soil of love.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
%
[A small difference of opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court in 'Texas v.
Johnson' 491 U.S. 397 (1989)]
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,
it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an
idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or
disagreeable.
Surely one of the purposes of a democratic society is to legislate
against conduct that is regarded as evil and profoundly offensive
to the majority of people; whether it be murder, embezzlement,
pollution or flag burning.
-- Justice William J. Brennan, writing for the majority.
-- Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dissenting.
%
 [W]e shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we
 reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence
 save to serve man.
 Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967),
 pp. 1203-1207.
-- Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our
%
To add insult to injury.
-- Phaedrus
%
"Bowling?"
  "You know. Thats where a big black thing knocks down a lot of little
   white things."
"That sounds like the A-Team to me."
-- Keith "Badger" Vallenti found this on a channel flip
-- from Don Adam's CHECK IT OUT
%
    Ayatollahs
None. There were no lights in the thirteenth century.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
When a person gets kissed for the first time, they fall down and they
don't get up for at least an hour.
-- How do people in love typically behave?
-- Wendy, age 8
%
"COBOL programmers are destined to code COBOL for the rest of their lives,
and thereafter."
-- Remark made by Bertrand Meyer (inventer of the Eiffel language)
-- at a panel discussion at OOPSLA '89
%
What is freedom?  Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create
for yourself the alternatives of choice.  Without the possibility of
choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an
instrument, a thing.
-- Archibald MacLeash (b. 1892)
%
We need to take a look at [the Constitution] and maybe, from time to time, we
 should curtail some of those rights.
-- Chicago Police Superintendent LeRoy Martin, 7/91
%
In the handbook, it says that most people ignore the strange and unusual;
 while I myself *am*... strange and unusual.
-- BEETLEJUICE
%
Mainframe:
Primary person who just got set up for the blame of the system crash.
-- Computing Definition
%
New systems create new problems.
-- Dr. John Gall
%
See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending
reality. When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're
tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego
and your own self. That's what it's all about.
-- Keith Haring
%
:content-free: [by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] adj.
   Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge.
   Though this adjective is sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more
   usually connotes derision for communication styles that exalt form
   over substance or are centered on concerns irrelevant to the
   subject ostensibly at hand.  Perhaps most used with reference to
   speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators.
   "Content-free?  Uh... that's anything printed on glossy
   paper."  (See also {four-color glossies}.)  "He gave a talk on
   the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the
   fin-de-siecle aesthetic.  It was content-free."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
 is by accident.  That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
 We cause accidents.
-- Nathaniel Borenstein
%
process that traditionally requires some debugging.
 USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system.
-- As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs a
%
I'm shouting again.  I've got to watch that.
-- One of said invaders worrying about appearances....
%
always within reach.
-- I cannot achieve complete humility although complete humiliation is
-- Dan Goodman
%
Picard: "One photon torpedo would've ended their war."
Riker: "It almost did."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men.  Our
a great ardor for grain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of
man.
-- greatness is built upon our freedom is moral, not material.   We have
-- Woodrow Wilson
%
It is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merry Wives of Windsor
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he
submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class.  C- is
best described as a low-level programming language.    In fact, the
language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code
statements to execute a given task.  In this respect, it is very
similar to COBOL.
-- THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: C-
%
 Hello.  I'm David's answering machine.  What are you?
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%
:ASCIIbetical order: /as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ adj.,n. Used to
   indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than
   alphabetical order.  This lexicon is sorted in something close to
   ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries beginning
   with non-alphabetic characters moved to the end.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Picard: "For what it's worth, I understand your bitterness."
Worf: "With respect, sir, you cannot."
-- "The Enemy", Stardate unknown
%
The giant panda lives in bamboo thickets and feeds on bamboo shoots. There
 are only thirty-six giant pandas left. The reason there are only thirty-six
 giant pandas left is the shortage of bamboo shoots, which the natives eat
 in great quantities, especially with baked giant panda.
-- Jack Douglas
%
:raw mode: n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits
   directly to or from an I/O device (or, under {bogus} systems
   that make a distinction, a disk file) without any processing,
   abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system.  Compare
   {rare mode}, {cooked mode}.  This is techspeak under UNIX,
   jargon elsewhere.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Abruptness is eloquence in parting, when spinning out the time is
but the weaving of new sorrow.
-- Sir John Suckling
%
It all seems so stupid, it makes me want to give up. But why should
I give up, when it all seems so stupid.
-- Martin Gore
%
We are not so concerned with *what* the members of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints think, as we are *that* they think.
-- Hugh B. Brown said something like this.
%
What, me worry?
-- Alfred E. Neuman
%
Persons who would be placed outside the pale of society with contempt
are not those who would be placed there by another culture.
-- Ruth Benedict
%
A college joke to cure the dumps.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Cassinus and Peter
%
"God cannot alter the past but historians can."
-- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
%
I was a house painter for five years. Five years. I didn't think I'd ever
 finish that damn house.
-- John Fox
%

-- nothing and then marry him.
-- Cher
%
Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to
psychological
problems.
-- Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
%
Machines should work. People should think.
Machines don't often work, people don't often think.
-- The IBM Pollyanna Principle
-- Truth about the IBM Pollyanna Principle
%
Kirk: "Romulan ale, why Bones, you know this is illegal."
McCoy: "I only use it for medicinal purposes.  I got aboard a ship that brings
  them in a case every now and then.  Now don't be afraid."
Kirk: "2283."
McCoy: "Yeah, well it takes this stuff a while to ferment."
Kirk: "Ohh."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.3
%
MEET GOD IN PERSON!
This Thursday  from  12-2pm,  God  will be signing copies of his new single, "I
Don't Like Fridays" in the record department at Myer Southland.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
Were it not that they are loath to lay out money on a rope, they would
be hanged forthwith, and sometimes die to save charges.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsect. 12
%
Only in America could women demand to be considered an official minority
group with all the special privileges pertaining thereunto.
-- "Cactus" Ed Abbey
%
A man's best things are nearest him,
  Lie close about his feet.
-- Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) (1809-1885)
-- The Men of Old
%
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
-- Arthure "Bugs" Baer
%
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
The tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Never sound excited. Imagine yourself at a dinner table back in the United
 States with the local editor, a banker, and a professor talking over
 coffee. You try to tell what it was like, while the maid's boyfriend, a
 truck driver, listens from the kitchen. Try to be understood by the truck
 driver while not insulting the professor's intelligence.
-- Edward R. Murrow (to a young war correspondent)
%
Judge Sternwood:   So, Agent Cooper, how are you finding our little corner of
                   the world?
Cooper:     It's heaven, sir.
Judge S.:   Well, this week heaven includes arson, multiple homicide, and an
            attempt on the life of a Federal agent.
Cooper:     Heaven is a large and interesting place, sir!
-- Judge Sternwood & Agent Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_
%
It is the nature of our species to be free.
-- Kirk, "Metamorphosis," stardate 3219.8.
%
I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
%
But to the hero, when his sword
  Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
  The thanks of millions yet to be.
-- Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867)
-- Marco Bozzaris
%
This is gross ... My Aunt Velveeta lets that stupid dog of hers sit right
 next to her in the dining room. And when she gets done eating, she will
 take her plate and let that dog lick it clean right at the table! Then
 she'll put some Poli-Grip on it and slip it right back in her mouth.
-- Heywood Banks
%
I guess we were all guilty, in a way.  We all shot him, we all skinned him, and
 we all got a complimentary bumper sticker that said, "I helped skin Bob."
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
 :-O Wow!
-- SMILEY
%
There are lots of good women who, when they get to heaven, will watch
to see if the Lord goes out nights.
-- Ed Howe
%
"Arizona is a rock-n-roll state."
-- Alice (I want to be your governor) Cooper
%
They call it football, but the object of the game is to bash the other guy
 so hard that he's eventually carried off the field on a stretcher. I can't
 watch football anymore. My psychiatrist said it's better that way. I used
 to watch a game, see the players in a huddle--and think they were talking
 about me.
-- Jackie Mason
%
He no play-a da game.  He no make-a da rules!
-- On the pope and birth control
%
Something the heart must have to cherish,
  Must love and joy and sorrow learn;
Something with passion clasp, or perish
  And in itself to ashes burn.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- Motto, Hyperion, Book ii
%
:by hand: adv. 1. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive,
   trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed
   automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to
   step tediously through.  "My mailer doesn't have a command to
   include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to do it
   by hand."  This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to
   retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping into
   a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of one's mailbox
   file, reading that into an editor, locating the top and bottom of
   the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting
   `>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor,
   returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering
   to delete the file.  Compare {eyeball search}.  2. By extension,
   writing code which does something in an explicit or low-level way
   for which a presupplied library routine ought to have been
   available.  "This cretinous B-tree library doesn't supply a decent
   iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse.
-- Caliban
%
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity
of conlusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleages,
which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven,
thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
-- Leo Tolstoy
%
All that glisters is not gold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Bread and Circuits:
 The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny -
no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues,
and in many cases dangerous.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pedantic and that's just
 as good.
-- D Gary Grady
%
DEVIL
  A popular character in mythology, commonly blamed by Christians for
  everything from plagues to burnt toast. Of course, if the devil
  ever actually appeared, it would scare these people shitless.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in power we
truth, in order to get power we would have to become very much like them.
-- would behave very differently from those who now hold it when, in
-- (Lenin's fatal mistake, both in theory and in practice.)
%
The field cannot well be seen from within the field
-- Emerson
%
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you've got.
-- H. Jackson Brown
%
Data: "I believe it was a beacon."
Picard: "A beacon?"
Data: "Yes, sir.  A homing beacon, sent from Earth."
-- "Conspiracy", Stardate unknown
%
Senators are a prolific source of advice, and most of it is bad.
-- Dean Acheson
%
Your breath comes straight from Satan's bottom, Baldrick.
-- Edmund : Beer
%
Are we on STRIKE yet?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
But I was going to go into Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!
-- Luke Skywalker to his Uncle (Star Wars)
%
    mathematicians
One. He gives it to five Oregonians, thereby reducing the
problem to an earlier joke.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh
-- Old Testament
-- Genesis ii, 23
%
  "Working mothers are the backbone of the third half of the economy."
-- Glenda Jackson, Channel 4 TV
%
The item you had your eye on the minute you walked in will be
taken by the person in front of you.
-- The Cafeteria Law
%
'T is beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on:
Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%
diseases and his mother's age.
-- There are only two things a child will share willingly communicable
-- Benjamin Spock
%
My grandfather's a little forgetful, but he likes to give me advice. One
 day he took me aside and left me there.
-- Ron Richards
%
An efficient program is an exercise in logical brinkmanship.
-- E. Dijkstra
%
Lolth, Schmolth  get Ms. Ugly outa my way!
-- Famous Last Words
%
Scott: "A good crew."
LaForge: "Yeah, they are."
Scott: "And a fine ship.  A credit to her name.  But I've found that a ship is
  only as good as the engineer who takes care of her.  And from what I can see,
  the Enterprise is in good hands."
-- "Relics", Stardate 46125.3
%
Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first
or second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being
once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw
it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.
-- St. Augustine
%
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs compos'd,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorn'd,
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourn'd!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 51
%
 machinations often brought the world to the *BRINK* of chaos!"
-- "I know this creature.  He is the EMBODIMENT of EVIL decades ago, his
-- "Hey people change!"
-- The Shadow and associates discuss Shiwan Khan.
-- From THE SHADOW
%
The way we treat eachother is the foundation of the gospel of Christ.
-- Marvin J. Ashton
%
"Awww..."
  "Don't let that 'sweet' act fool ya, Harry! They're DANGEROUS ASSASSINS!"
-- Two guards from ZOT!
%
:JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ n. The names JRL and JRN were
   sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID
   used under {{TOPS-10}} and {WAITS}; they were understood to be
   the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser'
   and `J. Random Nerd' (see {J. Random}).  For example, if one
   said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is,
   "log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should
   use his own computer ID in place of `JRN'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My first psychiatrist said I was paranoid, but I want a second opinion
 because I think he's out to get me.
-- Tom Wilson ("Ziggy")
%
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to
do.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
%
"Hawk, we're going to die."
"Never say die...and certainly never say we."
-- MASH
%
Fitzgerald: The rich are different from us.
Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
%
Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
In the name of the Prophet--figs.
-- Horace Smith (1779-1849)
-- Johnson's Ghost
%
The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
ADA:
  Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in Computing.
        Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA awareness.
-- Datamation (January 15, 1984)
%
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are
for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay
in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be
where he will.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854),V, Solitude
%
I had some morals, but I gave them away.
-- Liberal motto
%
Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant or an
enemy, must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves.
-- Aesop (620-560 B.C.)
%
if your father is also your uncle.
-- You may be redneck...
%
An American is a person who demonstrates against a new power plant, then
goes home and flips on all the lights, turns up the air conditioner,
puts a tape in the stereo, opens the refrigerator door, plugs in the
coffee maker and sits down to see if the television cameras caught him
protesting.
-- Wendell Trogdon
%
In the full tide of successful experiment.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
-- First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
%
 8-) swimmer
-- SMILEY
%
A commune is where people join together to share
their lack of wealth.
-- Richard M. Stallman
%
When in doubt, duck.
-- Malcolm Forbes
%
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law
of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
-- Sir James G. Frazer
%
It will not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part ii, Chap. viii
%
You have brought nothing but pain and suffering to this crew and I am
  still not entirely convinced that all this isn't you latest attempt
  at a puerile joke.
It is a joke, joke on me, joke on the universe. The king who would be man.
-- Picard and Q, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think what we think.  That which
distinguishes the man who is content to _be_ something from the man
who wishes to _do_ something.  A man of great wealth, or one who has
been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of
brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on.  In our
civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so
highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of
office.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
%
Love is blind. I guess that's why it proceeds by the sense of touch.
-- Morey Amsterdam
%
Partying is such sweet sorrow.
-- Robert Byrne
%
I have eaten the plums
 that were in the icebox
         And which you were probably saving
         for breakfast.
                 Forgive me.
                 They were delicious.  So sweet
                 and so cold.
-- William Carlos Williams, 1934, _This is Just to Say_
%
"I recall my exact words: `There's a pile of dinosaur eggs over there,
 youngster,' I said, smiling paternally the while. `Get sucking.'"
-- Alan Moore, V FOR VENDETTA
%
Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.  Do not overdo it.
-- Lao-Tzu
%

-- Ascii evalution   .   :  !  I  L
%
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
-- James Thurber
%
The best catches are never seen.
("Did you see that?"--"See what?")
-- The Fifth Commandment of Frisbee
-- Dan Roddick
%
User fell asleep while waiting.
-- WindowError: 024
%
"Spock, maybe your reknowned Vulcan logic can get Jim to rest.  God
 know he never listens to me."
  "Do not take it personally, Dr. McCoy. *None* of us listens to you."
-- A classic exchange between Spock and McCoy in the STAR TREK comic
%
When I was young we didn't have MTV; we had to take drugs and go to
concerts.
-- Steven Pearl
%
Agony!
Beyond power of speech
When the one thing you want
Is the one thing that's out of your reach.
-- Into the Woods
%
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
%
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.
-- Dale Carnegie
%
Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Moral Essays, Epistle i, Line 172
%
The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by people
who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried anything.
-- Jim Joyce, former computer science lecturer at the University of California
%
The Almighty in His infinite wisdom
did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1942)
%
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
The powers that be are ordained of God.
-- New Testament
-- Romans xiii, 1
%
Squished Squirrel
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
Behind every great man is a great woman.
Behind every great woman is a great behind.
-- anonymous male chauvinist
%
If you treat a sick child like an adult and a sick adult like a child,
 everything usually works out pretty well.
-- Ruth Carlisle
%
My father was doing some strange chores for my mother.
They won't tell me what kind.
-- How did your mom and dad meet??
-- Jeremy, AGE 8
%
Practice is the best of all instructors.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 439
%
Emallgration:
 Migration toward lower-tech, lower-information environments
containing a lessened emphasis on consumerism.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
The star that bids the shepherd fold.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 93
%
Glossary: Shoeshine stand.
-- Ray Hand
%
    feminists
That's not funny, abusive white male aggressor!!
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
But God, who is able to prevail, wrestled with him; marked him for his own.
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- Life of Donne
%
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly.
 Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
%
End? What end?  You whites will be with us forever.
-- Chiun, Master of Sinanju
%
Please close all windows at speeds beyond 140MPH.
-- Sticker on dash of MA chase vehicle
%
Macb. What is the night?
L. Macb. Almost at odds with morning, which is which.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
There is America, which at this day serves for little more than to
amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall,
before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that
commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Speech on the Conciliation of America, Vol. ii, p. 115
%
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known,
then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
-- Fred Allen
%
He tricked me into marrying him. He told me I was pregnant.
-- Carol Leifer
%
In life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscle trained: know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she 'll say to thee,
"I find thee worthy; do this deed for me"?
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- Epigram
%
Things are only impossible until they're not.
-- Jean-Luc Picard
%
'T was good advice, and meant, my son, Be good.
-- George Crabbe (1754-1832)
-- Tale xxi, The Learned Boy
%
 CEO:            (1980's) I've got all the shit I want.
                 (1990's) Oooh, SHIT!
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Well, one thing's for sure:  we're all going to be a lot thinner!
-- Han Solo (Star Wars)
%
Q: "You can't do this to me, Jean-Luc."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn
to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit
for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which
your later work belongs.
-- Albert Einstein
%
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
-- J. D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye"
%
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
-- Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
%
Drop the guy with the devil ears.
-- NBC, June, 1965
%
What lies before us and what lies behind us.... are small matters
compared to what lies within us...and when we bring
what lies within into the world... miracles happen!
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Finally, Zippy drives his 1958 RAMBLER METROPOLITAN into the
 faculty dining room.
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our
 lungs there'd be no place to put it all.
-- Robert Orben
%
Life's too short, and so are you!
-- Hooper
%
Chang: "And were you obeying or disobeying orders...when you arranged the
  assassination of Chancellor Gorkon?"
Kirk: "I didn't know about the assassination until we boarded the ship."
Chang: "Do you still deny that you did not fire on Kronos One?"
Worf: "Your Honors, *please*!"
Chang: "And do you still deny your men beamed aboard and shot the chancellor?"
Worf: "Objection!"
Kirk: "I cannot confirm or deny actions I did not witness."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
1. If it's green or wriggles, it's biology.
2. If it stinks, it's chemistry.
3. If it doesn't work, it's physics.
4. If it's incomprehensible, it's mathematics.
5. If it doesn't make sense, it's either economics or psychology.
-- Handy Guide to Modern Science
%
I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow
perhaps I shall contradict it all.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
And Abner said to Joab, "Let the young men come forward and play before us."
Joab answered "Yes, let them."    So they came up one by one, and took their
places, twelve for Benjamin and Ishbosheth and twelve from David's men.
Each man seized his opponent by the head and thrust his sword into his
side; and thus they fell together.
-- Samuel 2,2,14-16
%
I do- I do- I do- I do- what any normal person would do at that age.
You call home.  You call home to mother and father and say, "I'd like
to get into the National Guard."
                   (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Senator Dan Quayle, 8/19/88
%
This is the stupidest thing I have ever done...
-- Famous Last Words
%
All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun.
Money's just the way we keep score.
-- Henry Tyroon
%
Professor Plum: "What are you afraid of? A fate worse than death?"
Mrs Peacock: "No, just death."
-- _Clue_
%
When forty million people believe in a dumb idea,
it's still a dumb idea.
-- Ad run by United Technologies Corporation
%
I'm frequently appalled by the low regard you Earthmen have for life.
-- Spock, "The Galileo Seven," stardate 2822.3.
%
 We Scorpios don't believe in astrology.
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
Picard: "Doctor, is it absolutely necessary to see the medical files to attempt
  treatment?"
Beverly: "It would be *dangerous* to do without them."
Riker: "It's a risk I think we have to take."
MacDuff: "He's right, Captain.  I volunteer for the procedure."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.
-- John Keats (1795-1821)
-- Hyperion, Book ii
%
Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons",
speaking on fans of "The Simpsons":

"I have this comic strip called 'Life In Hell',
which runs in 200 newspapers, and I get a lot of
fan mail from generally articulate, literate people.
And now I walk down the street and I see people
wearing Simpsons T shirts who I'm afraid might
beat me up, so the quality of fans has broadened.
The people who are my fans now frighten me."
-- from "Newsweek" magazine, June 18, 1990, page 13
%
DISSEMBLE, v.i.  To put a clean shirt upon the character.

    Let us dissemble.
                                                                  Adam
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
To arms! to arms! ye brave!
  The avenging sword unsheathe!
March on! march on! all hearts resolved
  On victory or death!
-- Joseph Rouget de L'Isle (1760-1836)
-- The Marseilles Hymn
%
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there
Then I, for one, won't go.

[Chorus]

Take me apart, take me apart,
You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there
I'll stay right here in bed.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
You don't need to fly to have more fun with wings.
-- Joe Anderson
%
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
-- Notes on Virginia, Query xviii, Manners
%
"That's an engineer on his work term. He's sawing pipes, then soldering
them back together again...He'll do that 10 times to make the pipe
shorter."
-- J. MacKay Statistics 332
%
If called by a panther...don't anther.
-- Ogden Nash (1902-1971), "Parents Keep Out!"
%
Thought I to myself, we shall never come off scot-free.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book v, Chap. xv
%
what you're taking for it...
-- It's not reality or how you perceive things that's important it's
%
I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad.
-- Oedipus Rex
%
Life let us cherish, while yet the taper glows,
And the fresh flow'ret pluck ere it close;
Why are we fond of toil and care?
Why choose the rankling thorn to wear?
-- J. M. Usteri (1763-1827)
-- Life let us cherish
%
Many people have played themselves to death.
Many people have eaten and drunk themselves to death.
Nobody ever thought himself to death.
-- Gilbert Highet
%
The forces of good and evil are working within and around me, I must
choose, and in a free will universe I do have a choice.
-- Sovereign
%
There is a 70% probability of tomorrow.
-- actual weatherman quote, 1988
%
Ground not upon dreams; you know they are ever contrary.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- The Family of Love, Act iv, Sc. 3
%
Oh Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
-- St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430)
%
Lunchtime. My momma used to pack those tongue sandwiches. And I couldn't
 eat them tongue sandwiches. I couldn't eat tongue. I couldn't eat nothing
 that came out of an animal's mouth. I had too much class. My favorite was
 egg sandwiches.
-- Larry Storch
%
Life is too short to spend debugging Intel parts.
-- Van J.
%
In order to make [a person] covet a thing, it is only necessary to
make the thing difficult to attain.
-- Samuel Clemens
%
The controlling Intelligence understands its own nature, and what
it does, and whereon it works.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, vi, 5
%

-- Planned parenthood -the impossible dream.
%
:segfault: n.,vi. Syn. {segment}, {segmentation fault}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
COMMENDATION, n.  The tribute that we pay to achievements that
resembles, but do not equal, our own.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
What we've got here is failure to communicate... Some men you just
 can't reach. So you get what we got here last week.. Which is the
 the way he wants... Well, he gets.
-- Cool Hand Luke
%
Hey babe, Wanna get LUCKY?
-- Pick up line
%
I was nauseous and tingly all over... I was either in love or I had smallpox.
-- Woody Allen
%
The most harmful error of any program will not be discovered until the
program has been in production for at least six months.
-- Troutman's Programming Postulate #2
%
Ah, Blackadder. Started talking to yourself, I see.
Yes...it's the only way I can be assured of intelligent conversation.
-- Melchett and Edmund : Potato
%
One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have
believed it--they also believed the world was flat.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
if your mother refers to you as "Bubba, Jr."
-- You may be redneck...
%
Space: the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship
Enterprise.  It's five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to
seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has
gone before.
-- Captain James T. Kirk
%
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
She was so wild that when she made French toast she got her tongue caught in
the toaster.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
%
    The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of
people in the poor countries are going to starve to death
before our eyes.  We shall see them doing so upon our
television sets.
-- C.P. Snow
%
Money is never more important than your body and mind, but you must work
to support yourself. Never depend on others for your livelihood.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Take care and say this with presence of mind.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Act iv, Sc. 6, 31, (769.)
%
Old friends become bitter enemies on a sudden for toys and small offenses.
-- Robert Burton
%
All the modern inconveniences ...
-- Mark Twain
%

-- Most projects start out slowly and then sort of taper off.
-- Augustine's Law Number XL
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
    medical students
None. They are too busy propping up the bar.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have
to experience it.
-- Max Frisch
%
U.S. citizens and their dogs may have some of the most expensive
urine in the world.
-- Carl A. Osborne, writing about American's obsession
-- with taking vitamins in 'The Compendium North'
%
Something goes wrong every minute. What you do is fix it..
-- Lt Gen Pagonis
%
One's life is so often the life that one does not lead.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all
 you begin to sound like a five-year-old.
-- Jean Kerr
%
Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a man healthy, but socially dead.
-- The Wheel of Morality (Animaniacs)
%
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
-- Quentin Crisp
%
What are kids, really, but little stupid people who live in your house and
 don't pay rent?
-- Rick Reynolds
%
Eating the bitter bread of banishment.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything
depended upon man.
-- Francis J. Spellman (1889-1967)
%
:weenie: n. 1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a
   less amusing version of {BIFF} that infests many {BBS}
   systems.  The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social
   skills travelling under a grandiose {handle} derived from
   fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics.  Among sysops, `the weenie
   problem' refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden
   {flamage} weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS.
   Compare {spod}, {computer geek}, {terminal junkie}.
   2. [Among hackers] When used with a qualifier (for example, as in
   {UNIX weenie}, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an
   insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice,
   and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or
   herself to be the same sort of weenie.  Implies that the weenie has
   put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the
   area indicated; whether this is good or bad depends on the hearer's
   judgment of how the speaker feels about that area.  See also
   {bigot}.  3. The semicolon character, `;' (ASCII
   0111011).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
 rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
%
"Butter becomes weightless?.... Raymond Burr must be in orbit by now."
-- Holy Melodrama it's Bat-Bat!, (From Bakshi's MIGHTY MOUSE series)
%
    lawyers
Fifty four. Eight to argue, one to get a continuance, one to
object, one to demur, two to research precedents, one to
dictate a letter, one to stipulate, five to turn in their
time cards, one to depose, one to write interrogatories, two
to settle, one to order a secretary to change the bulb, and
twenty-eight to bill for professional services. (another huge
answer is at the bottom of this file.)
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The Best Way To Accelerate A Macintoy is At 9.8 M/S^2
-- Charles A. Fee, .sig
%
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
-- Marston Bates, American zoologist
%
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
-- Thomas Fuller
%
I don't have a bank account, because I don't know my
 mother's maiden name.
-- Paula Poundstone
%
Q2: "Ewweh!  What a dreadful color!"
Q: "Yeah."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Flag of the free heart's hope and home!
  By angel hands to valour given!
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome,
  And all thy hues were born in heaven.
Forever float that standard sheet!
  Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet,
  And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?
-- Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820)
-- The American Flag
%
In a state-run society the government promises you security. But it's
a false promise predicated on the idea that the opposite of security
in risk. Nothing could be further from the truth. The opposite of
security is insecurity, and the only way to overcome insecurity is
to take risks. The gentle government that promises to hold your hand
as you cross the street refuses to let go on the other side.
-- Theodore Forstmann
%
Love is never what we looked for and always takes us by surprise:   it's the
 rock on Coyote's head in the middle of the Road Runner chase.  It's not the
 pain of love Coyote minds, it's the *futility* of his inventions in the face
 of his fate.
-- Ian Shoales, Social Critic and Bitter Loudmouth
%
Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Whether an Aged Man ought to meddle in State Affairs
%
   Tips for aliens in New York:
   Land anywhere.  Central Park, anywhere.  No one will care or indeed
even notice.
   Surviving: get a job as a cabdriver immediately.  A cabdriver's job
is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines
called taxis. Don't worry if you don't know how the machine works and
you can't speak the language, don't understand the geography or indeed
the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out
of your head.  Believe me, this is the best way of staying
inconspicuous.
   If your body is REALLY weird, try showing it to people in the streets
for money.
   Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling, Noxios,
or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East River, which is
said to be richer in those lovely life-giving nutrients than the finest
and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved.
   Having fun: this is the big section. It is impossible to have more
fun without electrocuting your pleasure center....
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
Your gift is princely, but it comes too late, And falls like sunbeams
on a blasted blossom.
-- Suckling
%
As you know, I planned a trip out there for some time, so it fits in
very nicely.
-- President George Bush, on his trip to LA after the riots
%
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game.  You want us
to pay income taxes, too?
-- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox
%
Personally, should I ever form a globe spanning comglomerate,
I intend to do it fairly and without malice or dirty politics.
I hope you fellows don't make that too difficult a task;
I would have to have to have you all killed.
-- David Neal (abbadon@nuchat.uucp)
%
Oh that it were my chief delight
  To do the things I ought!
Then let me try with all my might
  To mind what I am taught.
-- Jane Taylor (1783-1824)
-- For a Very Little Child
%
Things go right long enough to lull you into a false sense of
security, then they go totally wrong.
-- Morley's law
%
It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend
before he knows him.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. i
%
Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.
-- Cyril Connolly
%
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires,
is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
-- Jonathan Swift
%
 :-e disappointed
-- SMILEY
%
THE RAVENOUS BUGBLATTER BEAST OF TRAAL:
   A mind-bogglingly stupid animal.  It assumes that if you can't see it,
   it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous...
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
    hookers
None - they get screwed - they don't usually do the screwing.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I'm a doctor, not a magician.
-- Dr. Pulaski, "The Royale", stardate 42625.4
%
If law school is so hard to get through, how come there are so many
 lawyers?
-- Calvin Trillin
%
In time, most jobs are filled by people incompetent to carry out their duties.
-- Peter Principle, Corollary 1
%
PERSEVERANCE, n.  A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an
inglorious success.

    "Persevere, persevere!" cry the homilists all,
    Themselves, day and night, persevering to bawl.
    "Remember the fable of tortoise and hare --
    Why, back there in Dreamland, renewing his lease
    Of life, all his muscles preserving the peace,
    The goal and the rival forgotten alike,
    And the long fatigue of the needless hike.
    His spirit a-squat in the grass and the dew
    Of the dogless Land beyond the Stew,
    He sleeps, like a saint in a holy place,
    A winner of all that is good in a race.
                                                          Sukker Uffro
-- The one at the goal while the other is where?"
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:tick: n. 1. A {jiffy} (sense 1).  2. In simulations, the
   discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the
   simulation mechanism.  In AI applications, this amount of time is
   often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is
   the ordering of events.  This sort of AI simulation is often
   pejoratively referred to as `tick-tick-tick' simulation,
   especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long,
   independent chains of causes is {handwave}d.  3. In the FORTH
   language, a single quote character.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:winged comments: n. Comments set on the same line as code, as
   opposed to {boxed comments}.  In C, for example:

     d = sqrt(x*x + y*y);  /* distance from origin */

   Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You have an annoying fascination for timepieces, Mr. Sulu.
-- Star Trek "Corbomite Maneuver" - Scott
%
Are you married?
No, I'm divorced.
And what did your husband do before you divorced him?
A lot of things I didn't know about.
-- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court"
%
If a fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
-- William Blake
%
:nano-: [SI: the next quantifier below {micro-}; meaning *
   10^(-9)] pref. Smaller than {micro-}, and used in the same rather
   loose and connotative way.  Thus, one has {{nanotechnology}}
   (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with
   `microtechnology'; and a few machine architectures have a
   `nanocode' level below `microcode'.  Tom Duff at Bell Labs has
   also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury".
   See also {{quantifiers}}, {pico-}, {nanoacre}, {nanobot},
   {nanocomputer}, {nanofortnight}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I'm used to dogs. When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose
 in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key
 eight hours later. A cat would never put up with that kind of rejection.
 When you returned, she'd stalk you until you dozed off and then suck the
 air out of your body.
-- Erma Bombeck
%
Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the
barriers of nationality.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
When you have finished your daily toil, go to bed and sleep in peace.
God is still awake.
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
%
are driven off by courageous flies.
-- April 3 In the Persian Gulf, Iranians attack the Islip garbage barge, but
-- Dave Barry "Year in Review for 1987"
%
Had sigh'd to many, though he loved but one.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto i, stanza 5
%
Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them apart.
-- Cervantes
%
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
  A medley of extemporanea;
  And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
  And I am Marie of Roumania.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
leaving is much more difficult than entering.
-- First Law of Hacking
%
LaForge: "Either way, Reg, you're an important part of this crew.  In fact, I
  could really use your help with that Level Three Diagnostic."
Barclay: "Sure."
Troi: "Excuse me, Commander, but um, I believe Mister Barclay and I have a date
  scheduled, for a walk in the Arboretum?"
LaForge: "The diagnostic can wait.  I'll see you later."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44721.9
%
The progress toward totalitarianism arose, and keeps arising, because
of society's refusal to be shit.
-- Kathy Acker
%
Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live.
-- Shirley
%
Now my EMOTIONAL RESOURCES are heavily committed to 23% of the
 SMELTING and REFINING industry of the state of NEVADA!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
 :-% bearded
-- SMILEY
%
Go to hell, Avon....
Probably....
-- Servalan
-- Avon
%
The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.
-- Thomas Carlyle
%
Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need more.
-- Addison H. Hallock
%
All math classes begin at 8 AM; also, movies on Federal Government.
-- M. M. Johnston
%
The cure for capitalism's failing would require that a government
would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.
-- Robert L. Heilbroner
%
In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means
death by slow starvation.  The old principle:  who does not work does
not eat, has been replaced by a new one:  who does not obey shall not
eat.
-- Leon Trotsky
-- in "Why Does Socialism Continue to Appeal to Anyone?", Robert Hessen
%
:batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive.  Hackers use this somewhat more
   loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in
   particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare
   it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to
   as `batch mode' switches.  A `batch file' is a series of
   instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running
   in batch mode.  2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting.
   "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all
   those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next
   week..." 3. `batching up': Accumulation of a number of small
   tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency.  "I'm
   batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up
   bottles to take to the recycling center."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
"Darling, would you like to propose another toast?"
"To a warmed, darkened, slightly crispy slice of bread."
-- Bizarro
%
"You can't expect a mother to be with a small child all the time" Margaret
Mead once remarked, with her usual good sense, but in 1978 she shocked
feminists by snapping that women don't really have children to put them
in day care twelve hours a day, either.
-- Caroline Bird, "The Two Paycheck Marriage"
%
I've been on the Valium diet for eight and a half years now. If you take
 enough Valium it'll help you lose weight. It doesn't really curb your
 appetite, but most of your food falls on the floor.
-- George Miller
%
Data: "Q says he has hurt his back."
Beverly: "Uh-huh."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain;
Awake but one, and lo, what myriads arise!
Each stamps its image as the other flies.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
%
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
-- David Dunham
%
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, C++ makes it harder,
but when you do, it blows away your whole leg"
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
%
The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.  And
since the party is in full control of all records, and in equally
full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past
is whatever the party chooses to make it.  Six means eighteen,
two plus two equals five, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance
is strength.
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), "1984"
%
Hasta la vista, Bebe!
-- Terminator 2 on int'l terms
%
Data: "Human interpersonal relationships are more complex.  Your experience may
  not have adequately prepared you."
Q: "I'm not interested in 'human interpersonal relationships'.  I just want to
  prove to Picard that I'm indispensable."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
  or otherwise.
-- A species that enslaves other beings is hardly superior mentally
-- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion," stardate 3211.7.
%
Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat,
And therefore let 's be merry.
-- George Wither (1588-1667)
-- Poem on Christmas
%
Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the
 money to do it right.
-- Kurt Herbert Alder
%
A technique is a trick that works.
-- Gian-Carlo Rota
%
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune, Manual of MuadDib by Princess Irulan
%
:jack in: v. To log on to a machine or connect to a network or
   {BBS}, esp. for purposes of entering a {virtual reality}
   simulation such as a {MUD} or {IRC} (leaving is "jacking
   out").  This term derives from {cyberpunk} SF, in which it was
   used for the act of plugging an electrode set into neural sockets
   in order to interface the brain directly to a virtual reality.
   It is primarily used by MUD and IRC fans and younger hackers on BBS
   systems.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
When I was a Brownie, I ate all the cookies.
-- Madonna
%
To expect a former senator to be content in the Cabinet is to hope
that a warlord will find serenity as a slave.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%
Martia: "They don't take girls."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
And when once the young heart of a maiden is stolen,
  The maiden herself will steal after it soon.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Ill Omens
%
 8_) don't get your nose out of joint
-- SMILEY
%
PUNCH MEN KICK WOMEN CHOP CHILDREN
-- Sign in window of karate studio
%
It happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and
those within despair of getting out.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap. v
%
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
-- William James
%
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
  As his corse to the rampart we hurried.
-- Charles Wolfe (1791-1823)
-- The Burial of Sir John Moore
%
:rib site: [by analogy with {backbone site}] n. A machine that
   has an on-demand high-speed link to a {backbone site} and serves
   as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party traffic in
   email and USENET news.  Compare {leaf site}, {backbone site}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome
 for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, _The Little Prince_
%
The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights
can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals
take precedence over the interests and rights of others
-- Ayn Rand
%
if your pocket knife often doubles as a toothpick.
-- You may be redneck...
%
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
%
Remote from man, with God he passed the days;
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.
-- Thomas Parnell (1679-1717)
-- The Hermit, Line 5
%
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,--the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,--Nature's good
And God's.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- A Soul's Tragedy, Act i
%
e-credibility: the non-guaranteeable likelihood that the electronic data 
you're seeing is genuine rather than somebody's made-up crap.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
Chang: "What would your favorite author say, 'Let us sit upon the ground and
  tell sad stories of the death of kings.'  Tell us your sad story, Kirk."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
There is no difference between theory and practice in theory, but there is
often a great deal of difference between theory and practice in practice.
-- Chuck Reid
%
When in trouble, obfuscate.
-- Halgren's Solution
%
if your home library is a entire set of TV Guides.
-- You may be redneck...
%
A little bench of heedless bishops here,
And there a chancellor in embryo.
-- William Shenstone (1714-1763)
-- The Schoolmistress, Stanza 28
%
KORAN, n.  A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been
written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a
wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Springes to catch woodcocks.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Never ask the customer if they did it--in case they tell you.
-- First rule of murder
-- Horace Rumpole (John Mortimer)
%
The ideal reasoner, would, when he had once been shown a single fact
in all its bearings, deduce from it not only the chain of events which
led up to it but also the results which would follow from it.  As Cuvier
could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single
bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series
of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both
before and after.  We have not yet grasped the results which the reason
alone can attain to.  Problems may be solved in the study which have
baffled all those who have sought a solution by aid of their senses.  To
carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the
reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts which have come to his
knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a
possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education
and encyclopedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.  It is not so
impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is
likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavored in
my case to do.
-- Sherlock Holmes
%
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public
property.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
-- Life of Jefferson (Rayner), p. 356
%
so much more rational.
-- The liberal of any species is always more dangerous because he always seems
-- Solomon Short
%
I am ... a woman ... and ... technically a parasitic uterine growth
-- Sean Doran the Younger [allegedly]
%
    Democratic presidential candidates from 1988
(Paul Simon) My media experts tell me I'm foolish for
wearing my hair the same way I did in the 50's. But
that's what Paul Simon's all about. And I suppose my
media experts are gonna say I'm foolish for this, but in
all candor, I change my light bulbs the same way I did
in the 50's: my wife gets on a ladder and I turn it.
-- How many
-- did it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
War may be Hell... but it's good for business.
-- The Association for Merchants, Manufacturers, and Morticians
%
O star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there,
To waft us home the message of despair?
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 325
%
    people about to move out of the city
screw in a light bulb?
They don't bother, the neighborhood's been turning black
anyway.
-- How many
-- does it take to
%
    election canvassers
None. They'd just go round telling everyone that it's time
for a change but the only way this can come about is if
everyone votes for "New light bulb."
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants.
-- Albert Einstein
%
May the force be with you.
-- Luke Skywalker
%
Beware of the fool whose volume of words is as that of ten men, a
hundred arrows shot and each one wide of the target.  If thou art wise,
shoot one and that one straight.
-- Bustan of Sadi
%
We are drawn to our television sets each April the way we are drawn to
 the scene of an accident.
-- Vincent Canby on the Academy Awards
%
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
To us, it might look like just a rag.  But to the brave, embattled men of the
 fort, it was more than that.  It was a flag of surrender.  And after that, it
 was torn up and used for shoe-shine rags, so the men would look nice for the
 surrender.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!
  Confusion on thy banners wait!
Though fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing,
  They mock the air with idle state.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- The Bard, I, 1, Line 1
%
    amoebas
One. No, 2. No, 4. No, 8. No, 16. No, 32.......
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of
 hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect.
-- George Carlin
%
I am glad that my Adonis hath a sweete tooth in his head.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues and his England, Page 308
%
Every burned book enlightens the world.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation
%
The inefficiency and stupidity of the staff is a subset of the
inefficiency and stupidity of the management.
-- Theed's Fourth Law of Management
%
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
%
:ICBM address: n. (Also `missile address') The form used to
   register a site with the USENET mapping project includes a blank
   for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy.
   This is actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of
   USENET links on a plotter; however, it has become traditional to
   refer to this as one's `ICBM address' or `missile address', and
   many people include it in their {sig block} with that name.
   (A real missile address would include target altitude.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Everything comes to him who waits - except a loaned book.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
I am not merry; but I do beguile
The thing I am, by seeming otherwise.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
If there was a terrible storm outside, but somehow this dog lived
through the storm, and he showed up at your door when the storm was
finally over, I think a good name for him would be Carl.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
All things being equal, you lose.
All things being in your favour, you still lose.
-- Todd's First Law
-- Corollary
%
No problem is so formidable that you can't walk away from it.
-- Charles Schulz
%
Picard: "Well, Mister Data, what do you think?"
Data: "I would not have thought it possible, sir.  I am eager to test the
  success of our efforts.  It does remain to be seen whether the Romulans will
  accept us."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
Invest in inflation. It's the only thing going up.
-- Will Rogers
%
Not to be or to be, that the question is.
-- Yoda and Shakespeare
%
The hat is the ultimum moriens of respectability.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, viii
%
    carpenters
Sod you! That's the electrician's job.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
He that would have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding.
-- William Shakespeare
%
As hard as finding a piece of hay in an incredibly large stack of needles
-- BlackAdder
%
    Magicians must exercise caution in all things. Each of you has heard the
story of the mage who perfected the gold producing spell, only to be crushed
by his newfound wealth. Less well known is the story of the sorcerer who turned
everyone he didn't like into a toad, until the day he exercised the spell on an
entire unfriendly village and was found the next morning hopped to death. Then,
of course, there is the extremely unpleasant story of the wizard who doubled as
a gentleman farmer, and his perfection of a manure abundance spell. Whether
this latter mage is still alive or not is open to debate, for no one has ever
had the wherewithal to visit the scene of his accident to find out.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XII
%
... Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of
the person making the claim, not the critic.  It is not the responsibility
of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the
responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals
or colored lights never healed anyone.  The skeptic's role is to point out
claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidence and to
provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with
the accepted body of scientific evidence. ...
-- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215
%
First C Program, huh?
-- C Error #011
%
David: "He killed everybody we left behind!"
Carol: "Oh of course he didn't.  David, you're just making this harder."
Terrell: "I'm afraid even it's harder than you think, doctor.
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
A man that 's fond precociously of stirring
      Must be a spoon.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- Morning Meditations
%
Better late than never.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. x
%
A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Book iii, Chap. ix
%
Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
-- Writing Rule 29
%
Of all the tall tales, I think my favorite is the one about Eli Whitney and the
 interchangeable parts.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
Quit worrying about your health.  It'll go away.
-- Robert Orben
%
Two sodium atoms are walking along the street when one stops and says,
"Oh my God, I think I've lost an electron!"
"Are you sure?"  asks the other sodium atom.
"Yes," replies the first sodium atom, "I'm positive."
-- R.D. Hayler, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, to a friend
%

-- Memory fault core...uh...um...core...Oh dammit, I forget!
%
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each
other without consideration of their relation to experience.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
Don't wait for answers, just take your chances, don't ask me why
-- B.Joel
%
We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement.
-- Richard J. Daley
%
The best defence against the atom bomb is not to be there when it goes off.
-- British Army Journal 1949
%
Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor
its worth escape thee.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, vi, 3
%
Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts
lesions upon the earth.
-- Ian McHarg
%
If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with
 priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that
 it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get
 their money's worth.
-- A. J. Liebling
%
One must always be drunk. Everything is there: it is the essential issue.
 To avoid that horrible burden of Time grabbing your shoulders and crushing
 you to the earth, you must get drunk without restraint.
-- Charles Baudelaire
%
Ah, to be a buzzard now that spring is here!
-- Edward Abbey
%
The superior man is distressed by the limitation of his ability;  he is not
distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability he has.
-- Confucius
%
To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream,
not only plan but also believe.
-- Anatole France
%
The Angel ended, and in Adam's ear
So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book viii, Line 1
%
Back and side go bare, go bare,
  Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
  Whether it be new or old.
-- Bishop Still (John) (1543-1607)
-- Gammer Gurton's Needle, Act ii
%
Can you program in assembler on 2 different machines?
... on 4 different machines?
... on 8 different machines?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
It matters not what you are thought to be, but what you are.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 785
%
Under the wide an starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will,
And this be the verse that you grave for me,
Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
-- Rudyard Kipling
%
"It's not enough knowing good from rotten..."
                                         "You're telling me."
"When something new pops up every day."
                                         "You're telling me!"
"It's only new, though, for now..."
                                                       "Nouveau!"
"But yesterday's forgotten..."
                           "...and tomorrow is already passe!"
"There's no surprise."
      "That is the state of the art, my friend!
      That is the state of the art!"
-- Stephen Sondheim, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
%
The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will
multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern.
-- Taylor Branch
%
The more you have, the more you have that needs fixing.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
In ev'ry sorrowing soul I pour'd delight,
And poverty stood smiling in my sight.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xvii, Line 505
%
They try to humiliate you in the hospital. They make you pee in a bottle. I
 hate that. I was in the hospital. The nurse said, "You have to pee in a
 bottle." When she left I poured Mountain Dew in there. She came back and I
 chugged it. She was puking for days. It's a sick world and I'm a happy guy!
-- Larry Reeb
%
No matter how much we achieve one day, we must continue the next.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle iii, Line 177
%
A wise woman never yields by appointment.
-- Stendhal
%
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
  From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
  But we left him alone with his glory.
-- Charles Wolfe (1791-1823)
-- The Burial of Sir John Moore
%
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.  When I ask why
the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
-- Dom Helder Camara
%
I had fried mozzarella cheese. Deep-fried cheese. Oh, there's a
 cardiovascular dream come true. The cheese doesn't have enough fat--let's
 give it a cholesterol Jacuzzi! '
-- Rick Corso
%
Modeling paged and segmented memories is tricky business.
-- P. J. Denning
%
    medflies
None: they do it in the fruit.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
All theoretical chemistry is really physics;
and all theoretical chemists know it.
-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988)
%
Love and magic have a great deal in common.  They enrich the soul,
delight the heart.  And they both take practice.
-- Nora Roberts
%
Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or
haven't any sense.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes,
respectability and children.  Nothing can lift those seven milestones
from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the
milestones are lifted.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should
have stayed a virgin.'
-- Lillian Carter
%
The booby father craves a booby son,
And by Heaven's blessing thinks himself undone.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- Love of Fame, Satire ii, Line 165
%
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797), in a letter to William Smith
%
In the long run, men only hit what they aim at.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Have you ever downgraded your job to upgrade your processing power?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
HAIR TONICS, please!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Life is an incurable disease.
-- Abraham Cowley
%
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Measure for Measure
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists,
free love and "art," but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and
every one of them soon or late.
-- H. L. Mencken, The Butte Bashkirtseff
%
Ambition often puts men upon doing the mesaest offices:  so climbing is
performed in the same posture with creeping.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
%
If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.
-- Larry Leissner
%
I, who have so much and so universally adored this [greek], "excellent
mediocrity,"
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap. xiii
%
Love your country but never trust its government.
-- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania
%
It is bad luck to be superstitious.
-- Andrew W. Mathis
%
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
-- O'Henry
%
This is a bug.  I have told my manager that it is a bug.  He doesn't seem
to care.  Today is my last day at IBM, and I don't care either.
-- Comment seen in some source code.
%
As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes vii, 6
%
`... spell `creat' with an E.' [When asked what he would do
 differently if starting UNIX over again.  Note that in
 Plan 9, `creat' _is_ spelled with an E.]
-- Ken Thompson
%
As a man of more than average caution, I have never felt absolutely
secure until Evans and Novak have spoken.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!
[Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!]
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 B.C.)
%
Get lost, you can't compare with my powers.
-- M. Bison, Street Fighter II
%
How shall I be able to rule over others, that have not full power
and command of myself?
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book i, Chap. lii
%
:code police: [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] n.
   A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst
   into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style
   rules.  May be used either seriously, to underline a claim that a
   particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest
   that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by
   anal-retentive {weenie}s.  "Dike out that goto or the code
   police will get you!"  The ironic usage is perhaps more common.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite
sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many
things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance
and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but
dead; symmetrical but stiff.
-- Edward Abbey
%
New York eclipses all other cities in the spontaneous cordiality and
generosity of its inhabitants - at least, such inhabitants as I have
encountered.
-- H. P. Lovecraft, 9/29/1922
%
:win: [MIT] 1. vi. To succeed.  A program wins if no unexpected
   conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficiently {robust} to
   take exceptions in stride.  2. n. Success, or a specific instance
   thereof.  A pleasing outcome.  "So it turned out I could use a
   {lexer} generator instead of hand-coding my own pattern
   recognizer.  What a win!"  Emphatic forms: `moby win', `super
   win', `hyper-win' (often used interjectively as a reply).  For
   some reason `suitable win' is also common at MIT, usually in
   reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem.  Oppose
   {lose}; see also {big win}, which isn't quite just an
   intensification of `win'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:wheel: [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A
   person who has an active {wheel bit}.  "We need to find a
   wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives."  (See {wedged}, sense
   1.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
For oh! so wildly do I love him That paradise itself were dim And
joyless, if not shared with him.
-- Moore
%
Exit, pursued by a bear.
-- Stage direction in Shakespeare's _The_Winter's_Tale_
%
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it
prolongs the torments of man.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
%
The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself,
but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.
-- Albert Schweitzer
%
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
-- Mallery's Engineering Truism
%
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
Will evil ever rest?  I hope not.
-- Powdered Toast Man
%
No enemy is so terrible as a man of genius.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
-- Drew Bundini Brown
%
The world is an enormous injustice.
-- Jules Romains
%
:polygon pusher: n. A chip designer who spends most of his or her
   time at the physical layout level (which requires drawing
   *lots* of multi-colored polygons).  Also `rectangle
   slinger'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason
of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour
and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xc, 10
%
Make yourselves good scouts and good rifle shots in order to
protect the women and children of your country if it should ever
become necessary.
-- Lord Baden-Powell Scouting for Boys(1908)
%
New York: homes, homes everywhere, and not a place to live.
-- Don Herold
%
Beverly: "Her transcript is *very* impressive.  She's done honors work in
  neurobiology, plasmadynamics, and nicoregeneration.  I'd say that's pretty
  well-rounded."
Rogers: "Well that's a nice way of saying that I haven't decided what I'm going
  to do with my life."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs:  they are foreign and
 will not always conform to our whim.
-- James Reston
%
 :-{~ has read too many of the toilet paper articles previous to lunch
-- SMILEY
%
 :Q what?
-- SMILEY
%
I'm INVINCIBLE!
-- Famous Last Words
%
The weight of your pack increases in direct proportion to the amount
of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the pack weight
goes on increasing anyway.
-- Milt Barber
%
There is nothing I love as much as a good fight.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
%
... humanity...[the] striving of man to achieve greatness through
  his own resources.
-- Anton Karidian, "The Conscience of the King," stardate 2819.1.
%
GOLDFISH
  Small orange coloured fish designed to fit easily into cat's claws.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own
eyes, there is the least of real liberty.
-- Henry M. Robert
%
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
-- Samuel Butler
%
 \o/ PTL (praise the lord, or pass the loot?)
-- SMILEY
%
Dire combustion and confused events
New hatch'd to the woful time.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
    Jehovah's Witnesses
None. There is no point trying to change anything now. God
will be replacing the whole house real soon, but nobody knows
quite when.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized
life.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Time's gradual touch has moulder'd into beauty many a tower which
when it frown'd with all its battlements, was only terrible.
-- Mason
%
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
-- Frederick Douglass
%
"A duel to the death!"
  "Dr. Science!"
"Okay, until we get tired
 and grumpy."
-- From the DR. SCIENCE TV show
%
"Considering my last relationship, I'd rather have the extra rib."
-- Overheard in a coffee bar, man speaking
%
Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.
-- Margaret Mead. American anthropologist
%
Computer human interface
 the means by which the program conditions the user
 into never trying all the things that don't work
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
Why do you mock me? Why do you wish to anger me?
Only to see if it is still possible.
-- Worf and Korris, "Heart of Glory", stardate 41503.7
%
Creation sleeps! 'T is as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause,--
An awful pause! prophetic of her end.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- Night Thoughts, Night i, Line 23
%
BILLINGSGATE, n.  The invective of an opponent.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say
it happened naturally.
-- Lao Tse
%
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
-- Sir Edmund Hillary
%
If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd
 still be eating frozen radio dinners.
-- Johnny Carson
%
...A change of clothes?
Of course, sir! I wouldn't forget a change of clothes!
Well, that's something. Let's see...a Robin Hood costume.
-- Edmund and Baldrick : Corporal Punishment
%
Not that the earth doth yield
In hill or dale, in forest or in field,
A rarer plant.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Third Day
%
When the source is deep, the stream is long.
-- Zen saying
%
Kirk: "You keep insisting that there's no danger, I keep assuring
you that there
  is.  Would you mind telling me--"
Aelborne: "It is our way of life, Captain."
Kirk: "That's the first thing that will be lost!"
-- "Errand Of Mercy", Stardate 3198.4
%
Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak
to all mankind.
-- Emily P. Bissell
%
The Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What
have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?
-- Old Testament
-- Numbers xxii, 28
%
I was not born to be forced.   I will breathe after my own fashion. ... If a
 plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
As that great captain, Ziska, would have a drum made of his skin when
he was dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his
enemies to flight.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader
%
It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
-- Walt Disney
%
Just as a diamond is not polished without
 friction, a great man is not made without adversity.
-- Confucius Says
%
:bogosity: /boh-go's*-tee/ n. 1. The degree to which something is
   {bogus}.  At CMU, bogosity is measured with a {bogometer}; in
   a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might
   raise his hand and say "My bogometer just triggered".  More
   extremely, "You just pinned my bogometer" means you just said or
   did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale,
   pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one
   might also say "You just redlined my bogometer").  The
   agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the {microLenat}.  2. The
   potential field generated by a {bogon flux}; see {quantum
   bogodynamics}.  See also {bogon flux}, {bogon filter},
   {bogus}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I can't understand why everyone nowadays has such a low opinion of marital
 sex. The marriage experts apparently believe that nine out of ten married
 couples find it easier to get the kids to bed than to lure each other there
 ... Oddly enough, one never reads about an unmarried couple having any
 problems of sexual adjustment. Unlike Mr. and Mrs., who just can't seem to
 get the hang of it, the unmarried take to sex like ducks to water and
 unfailingly achieve perfect union in a star-spangled blaze of glory ...
 They exist in a rarefied stratosphere, unmarred by the little domestic
 difficulties that plague marriage. You never read of an unmarried couple
 running out of cigarettes or losing the car keys. And they never, never,
 never disagree about what time is bedtime. It always is.
-- Jane Goodsell
%
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
-- Sigmund Freud
%
(1) The boss is always right.
(2) When the boss is wrong, refer to rule 1.
-- Rules
%
Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too.
-- Reflections on the nature of love
-- Greg, age 8
%
Don't tell your friends their social faults: they will cure the fault and
 never forgive you.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
%
The tengu was the most troublesome creature of Japanese
legend.  Part bird and part man, with red beak for a nose
and flashing eyes, the tengu was notorious for stirring up
feuds and prolonging enmity between families. Indeed, the
belligerent tengus were supposed to have been man's first
instructors in the use of arms.
-- From: Mythical Beasts by Deirdre Headon
%
...someone sticks a Post-It note on your screen and you try to lower it
behind some other windows.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the
 Devil was my natural master and captain and friend.  I saw that he was in
 the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only from fear.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), "The Devil's Disciple"
%
If If, Then Then.
-- The Theorem Theorem
%
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."
-- Hilaire Belloc
%
I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by
the fireside and simply look on.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
%
Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even
one which cannot be justified on any other grounds.
-- J. Finnegan
%
Give a man a computer program and you give him a headache,
but teach him to program computers and you give him the power
to create headaches for others for the rest of his life...
-- R. B. Forest
%
Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that
 brunette becomes a good color for flowers.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
"Battered Woman Syndrome" defense
-- Female-Only Defense 04
%
Four things are to be strengthened:
Torah,and good deeds, prayer and one's good manners.
-- Berachoth
%
Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
-- Judith Viorst
%
If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught
and shot now.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
 Farmer:         I get subsidies for my shit.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which
gives immortality to conversation.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
When this girl at the museum asked me who I liked better, Monet or Manet, I
 said, "I like mayonnaise."  She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder.
 Then she left.  I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Sure as a gun.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. vii
%
It must be done like lightning.
-- Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
-- Every Man in his Humour, Act iv, Sc. v
%
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed
and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Areopagitica
%
Wake up and smell the coffee.
-- Ann Landers
%
There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.
-- Burton Hillis
%
Well? Did you glimpse the afterlife?!  What's in store for all of us?!"

"Bikinis... babes... full-body massages... Joe Clark with a bat...
On the whole, a mixed blessing.
-- "Bloom County"
%
I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both.
Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity
is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is
a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.
-- Norman Cousins
%
There comes a time in every man's life, and I've had many of them.
-- Casey Stengel
%
When are you buttheads gonna learn that you can't oppose
 Gestapo tactics *with* Gestapo tactics?
-- Reuben Flagg
%
Mr Flibble: Game over, boys!
-- Red Dwarf - 'Quarantine'
%
You can hardly do anything that won't seem stupid later.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
I sat through it.   Why shouldn't you?
-- David Letterman, it a spot promoting one of his shows
%
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted!
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Ae Fond Kiss
%
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Ever reverse-engineer or decompile a program?
... Did you find bugs in it?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Defeated, but not dismayed- crushed to the earth, but not humiliated- he
seemed to grow more haughty beneath disaster, and to experience a
fierce satisfaction in draining the last dregs of bitterness.
-- Washington Irving
%
 (U2's "With or Without You":)
 No one's here to answer the phone,
 Leave a message at the tone,
 And we'll get back to you.
 We'll get back to you!
-- Answering machine madness - mainly musical theme
%
Advertising copy.  Where sentences are replaced by participle phrases.
Noun phrases.  And dangling conjunctions.  Bleah.
-- K<bob>
%
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
-- Lord Kelvin, Royal Society President, 1895
%
And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs
committed in drunkenness.
But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the
harvest of a summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.
-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
%
Guide to understanding a net.addict's day:
   Slow day: didn't have much to do, so spent three hours on usenet.
   Busy day: managed to work in three hours of usenet.
   Bad  day: barely squeezed in three hours of usenet.
-- jenk@microsoft.com (Jen Kilmer)
%
Some people have entirely too much free time on their hands.
-- Gene Spafford (spaf)
%
You can shoot... the animals... in the forest...
 but you cannot... shoot the *forest*.
-- Nature and the Swamp Thing
%
A scholar sent to the United Nations is condemned to attend an eternity
of faculty meetings.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
%
Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister spirit, come away!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Dying Christian to his Soul
%
Property has its duties as well as its rights.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- Sybil, Book ii, Chap. xi
%
For evil news rides post, while good news baits.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Samson Agonistes, Line 1538
%
Picard: "The first vessel I that I served on as captain, was called the
  'Stargazer'.  It was an overworked, underpowered vessel, always on the verge
  of flying apart at the seams.  And every measurable sense, my Enterprise is
  far superior.  But there are times, when I would give almost everything, to
  command the Stargazer again."
Scott: "Yeah, it's like the first time you fall in love.  You don't ever love a
  woman quite like that again."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
 Please leave your name, phone number, the time you called, and
 your favorite color of underwear.  We'll get back to you if we
 like the color.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
There are so many sweet touches I've yet to endure.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
if the Elvis Hotline limits you to 1 call per day.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Today I dialed a wrong number.  The other side said, 'Hello?' and I said,
'Hello, could I speak to Joey?'  They said,' Uh, I don't think so...He's only
 two months old.'  I said, 'I'll wait...'
-- Steven Wright
%
Creative thinking should be viewed as an essential supplement to,
though not a replacement for, critical thinking.
-- Lloyd P. Provost & R. M. Sprout, Quality Progress [August 1996]
%
Among the porcupines, rape is unknown.
-- Gregory Clark
%
The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude
of sects and religions.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Vicissitude of Things
%
Arithmetical proofs of theorems that do not have arithmetical bases
prove nothing.
-- G. O. Ashley
%
I've been traded to Cincinnati.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 81 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Si Dios no hubiera descansado el domingo
habria tenido tiempo de terminar el mundo.
(If God hadn't rested on Sunday,
He would have had time to finish the world.)
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
-- "Los Funerales de Mama Grande", 1974
%
I can't stand intolerant people.
-- Tore Adolfson
%
Chang: "Your father was killed for what he wanted."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man;
  He 's ben on all sides thet give places or pelf;
But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,--
  He 's ben true to one party, an' thet is himself.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Biglow Papers, First Series, No. ii
%
Shadows of the morning light
 Shadows of the evening sun
 Until the shadows and the lights were one.
-- Jane's Addiction "Three Days"
%
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
-- Maya Angelou
%

-- Amiga over 256,000,000,000 pixels sold.
%
Advise well before you begin, and when you have maturely considered,
then act with promptitude.
-- Sallust
%
I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
Never run after your own hat--others will be delighted to do it; why spoil
 their fun?
-- Mark Twain
%
Let 's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the
remote.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Doing just the opposite is also a form of imitation
-- G. C. Lichtenberg
%
    big black monoliths
Sorry, light bulbs are an evolutionary dead end.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
There are as many Communists in the freedom movement as there are
Eskimos in Florida.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%
Sabina proceeded with her melancholy musings: What if she had
a man who ordered her about? A man who wanted to master her?
How long would she put up with him? Not five minutes!
>From which it follows that no man was right for her. Strong or weak.
-- Kundera
%
... But we've only fondled the surface of that subject.
-- Virginia Masters
%
Complain to one who can help you.
-- Yugoslav proverb
%
He who walks astride the fence has few directions from which to choose.
-- Tupper's Political Postulate
%
:XEROX PARC: /zee'roks park'/ The famed Palo Alto Research
   Center.  For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the
   mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking
   hardware and software innovations.  The modern mice, windows, and
   icons style of software interface was invented there.  So was the
   laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D
   machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s
   by a decade.  Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in
   their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to
   describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant
   ideas for everyone else.

   The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level
   {suit}s has been well anatomized in "Fumbling The Future:
   How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer" by
   Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co.,
   1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Picard: "Well done, Mister Data.  Though...I don't think you got Commander
  Riker's hair quite right."
Data: "I will be more observant in the future, sir."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
I am a collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes.
-- Six Degrees of Separation
%
Officer, what led you to believe the defendant was under the influence?
Because he was argumentary and he couldn't pronunciate his words.
-- Richard Lederer "Disorder in the Court"
%
No system is ever completely debugged. Attempts
  to debug a system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder to
  find.
-- Laws of Project Management #6
%
A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself;
a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of
self-government.  The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde
step in history.
-- Lord Acton (1834-1902)
%
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in 't.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861)
-- Aurora Leigh, Book ii
%
On this site I am going to build a forty-story building to house nothing
 but eye doctors and opticians. It will be a site for sore eyes.
-- Colonel Lemuel Stoopnagle (Frederick Taylor)
%
"I simply cannot ride in a car that says,
 "Women's Transit Authority" on the side."
-- The Badger discusses the proprieties of driving in "Badger"
%
All is flux, nothing stays still.
-- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.)
%
Or where the pictures for the page atone,
And Quarles is sav'd by beauties not his own.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Dunciad, Book i, Line 139
%
The [human] species is capable of much affection.
-- Deela the Scalosian, "Wink of an Eye," stardate 5710.5.
%
There are three things I've learned not to discuss
 with people: Religion, Politics, and the Great Pumpkin.
-- Linus from PEANUTS
%
Whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame.
-- New Testament
-- Philippians iii 19
%
Vietnam.
-- Spiro Agnew
%
There are a million ways to lose a work day,
but not even a single way to get one back.
-- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, "Peopleware", 1987
%
Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator
is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for
doing a lot.
-- Edward Abbey
%
"I'm ashamed to be here, but not ashamed enough to leave"
-- Stupid country song titles #7
%
The one time in the day that you lean back and relax is
the one time the boss walks through the office.
-- Theory of Selective Supervision
%
Think that day lost whose low descending sun Views from thy hand
no noble action done.
-- Jacob Bobart
%
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
-- George Washington, First U.S. President
%
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
-- Daily Sun-Post (San Clemente, CA) 1/17/77
%
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to
compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.
-- Edward Abbey
%
It's a matter of life after death. After he's dead, I have a life.
-- Mrs White, _Clue_
%
Can you read a state diagram?
... Do you need one?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
You twist and turn like a...twisty turny thing. You're a weedy pigeon,
  Blackadder, and you can call me Susan if it isn't so.
-- Melchett : Beer
%
  one with nintendo
  halcyon symbiosis
hand thinks for itself
-- haiku from Effector Online, Volume 1, Number 6
%
You never know when you're making a memory.
-- Rickie Lee Jones
%
You have the mouth of a prattling jackanapes, but your eyes, they
tell a different story.
-- Sharaz Jek, CAVES OF ANDRONZANI
%
 Richard Nixon should pull out before it's
 too late, just like his father should've.
-- Toilet graffiti
%
Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last.
-- Martin Luther King
%
Sydneian showers
Of sweet discourse, whose powers
Can crown old Winter's head with flowers.
-- Richard Crashaw (c. 1616-1650)
-- Wishes to his Supposed Mistress
%
 :-O Mr. Bill
-- SMILEY
%
Reporter: Ah.  So, kids, caught anything?
Lisa:     Not yet, sir.
Reporter: Uh huh.  Uh, what are you using for bait?
Lisa:     My brother's using worms, but I who feel the tranquility
          outweights the actual catching of fish, am using nothing.
Reporter: I see.  And what's your name, son?
Bart:     I'm Bart Simpson.  Who the hell are you?
Reporter: Heh heh.  I'm Dave Shutton, I'm an investigative reporter who's
          on the road a lot and, uh, I must say that in my day, we didn't talk
          that way to our elders.
Bart:     Well, this is my day, and we do, sir.
          [catches something on the line, with appropriate `Hulp!' noises]
          All right!  We eat tonight!
-- ``Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish''
%
That was so fast, can you show me one more time?
-- Troi
%
WASH
  An activity that, if men had their way, would only be done once or
  twice a month. Down beneath it all, most men would much rather
  cover themselves in mud and walk around in skins. Which explains
  the popularity of football.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,
Save thine "incomparable oil," Macassar!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto i, Stanza 17
%
"Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity and may Adil
has a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of
the workers."
-- Homer in "Crepes of Wrath", from The Simpsons
%
Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most
important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on a third
generation which has little in the way of education about what our
Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to
charlatens, quacks, and hustlers.
-- Dr. Walter Williams
%
Like Douglas conquer, or like Douglas die.
-- John Home (1724-1808)
-- Douglas, Act v, Sc. 1
%
Draft politicians, not human beings.
-- antidraft slogan coined by Jeff Daiell, 1979
%
        Hug O' War

I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.
-- Shel Silverstein
%
Slimey? Mud hole? My HOME this is!
-- Yoda
%
Never let your major professor know that you exist.
-- Meredith's Law for Graduate School Survival
%
    Borg
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  All of them.
%
You do not want the one you can afford.
-- Baker's Law of Economics
%
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the
theory of computation suggest that once the ability to
represent your own structure has reached a certain critical
point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can
never represent yourself totally.  Godel's Incompleteness
Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting
ancient fairy tale which warns you that "To seek self-
knowledge is to embark on a journey which . . . will always be
incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt,
cannot be described."
-- Problem, Tarski's Truth Theoremall have the flavour of some
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter
%
Stupid people always think they are right.  Wise people listen to advice.
-- Proverbs 12:15
%
Rise, honest muse! and sing The Man of Ross.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Moral Essays, Epistle iii, Line 250
%
That well by reason men it call may
The daisie, or els the eye of the day,
The emprise, and floure of floures all.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, Line 183
%
Data: "Commander Riker, you have anticipated my denouement.  However, the
  sentiment is appreciated.  I will continue."
-- "Schisms", Stardate unknown
%
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
-- Nicolas Bolleau-Despreaux
%
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America
 before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."
-- Vine Deloria, Jr.
%
Beefsteaks and porter are good belly mortar.
-- Scottish Proverb
%
There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
-- George Carlin
%
How far high failure overleaps the bounds of low success.
-- Lewis Morris
%
Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds
and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the
mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
-- Joseph Addison
%

-- You stay here, Audrey this is between me and the vegetable!
-- Seymour, from _Little Shop Of Horrors_
%
(Percy tries to attract Edmund's attention to his comedy breasts)
Aaarrggg...aarrgggg...
Sorry, he's sick. Leprosy. Of the brain...
-- Percy and Edmund : Beer
%
Advanced BASIC
-- Oxymoron
%
That's Mr. C to you bub!
-- C Error #013
%
I'm considering a move to Memphis,that's Memphis,Tenesee
 It worked for Elvis Presley,why can't it work for me?
-- Colour-blind James Experience
%
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty,
 and to someone else if she is plain.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
 Masochism:      Do shit to me!
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton
love corrupteth and embaseth it.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.
-- Peter's Placebo
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter
%
The trick is to stop thinking it is `your' money.
-- IRS auditor
%
The 'principle' of the constancy of the velocity of light is not
merely 'ununderstandable', it is not supported by 'objective matters
of fact'; it is untenable, and, as we shall see, unnecessary... Also
of philosophical import is that with the abandonment of the 'principle'
of the constancy of the velocity of light, the geometries which have
been based on it, with their fusion of space and time, must be denied
their claim to be a true description of the physical world.
-- Herbert E. Ives,
-- "Revisions of the Lorentz Transformations", October 27, 1950
%
Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.
-- Lady Mary Wortley Montague
%
Intellect annuls fate.  So far as man thinks he is free.
-- Emerson
%
Speak little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit.
-- Trench
%
No vacuum cleaner should give a human being a double polaroid.
-- Red Dwarf 'The Last Day'
%
The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
-- Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
-- The Anglo-French Alliance
%
Put God to work for you and maximize your potential in our divinely
ordered capitalist system.
-- Norman Vincent Peale
%
Called a blind date to set up a meeting at a restaurant. I said, "I'll be the
 one in the leather jacket." She said, "I'll be the one drinking sake." Turned
out it was one of those biker-sushi places. We never met.
-- [Imitation] Steven Wright
%
Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, and talk'd like poor Poll.
-- David Garrick (1716-1779)
-- Impromptu Epitaph on Goldsmith
%
All students who obtain a B will feel cheated out of an A.
-- M. M. Johnston
%
Not only is "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" a wholly remarkable book,
it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the "Celestial Home Care
Omnibus", better selling than "Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity",
and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical
blockbusters, "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes"
and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?"
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the
Galaxy, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has already supplanted the
great "Encyclopedia Galactica" as the standard repository of all knowledge
and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is
apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more
pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words "DON'T PANIC"
inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
The gods play games with men as pieces.
-- Titus Maccius Plautus (254?-184 B.C.)
%
Truth hath a quiet breast.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
We must reform if we would conserve.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
%
Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun.
-- Jeff Berner
%
Worry not about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you mine
are still greater.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
Oh yes, the great British music hall tradition. Two men with incredibly
  unconvincing cockney accents, going :
      'What's up with you, then?'
      'What's up with me, then?'
      'Yeah, what's up with you, then?'
      'I'll tell you what's up with me - I'm right browned off.'
      'Right browned off?'
      'Yeah, right browned off.'......GET ON WITH IT!!!
-- Edmund : Major Star
%
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment.
To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
-- Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
%
No one in the world walks around saying, "We're number two! We're number two!"
-- CBS Sports commentator John Madden on losing the Super Bowl.
%
"'I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain'
said he.  'Results without causes are much more impressive.'"
-- Sherlock Holmes in "The Stockbroker's Clerk"
%
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
-- Sir Noel Coward
%
I left my body in my other clothes.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 46 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Our birth is nothing but our death begun,
As tapers waste the moment they take fire.
-- Edward Young
%
A little Dobbs'll do you.
-- Emle O'Day
%
 >:-< mad
-- SMILEY
%
 Leakproof seals - will.
 Self starters   - will not.
-- Murphy's Law No.  3
%
Your attitude, not your aptitude, determines your altitude in life.
-- Carol
%
Believe it or not. I always considered myself a moderate.
What changed your mind?
Being stationed here for six months. Watching the body count grow. The
  three assassination attempts on my life.
Well, that'll change your point of view.
-- Alexana Devos and Riker, "The High Ground", stardate 43510.7
%
:qux: /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard {metasyntactic
   variable}, after {baz} and before the quu(u...)x series.
   See {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}.  This appears to be a
   recent mutation from {quux}, and many versions (especially older
   versions) of the standard series just run {foo}, {bar},
   {baz}, {quux}, ....
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Could you please continue with the petty bickering? I find it most intriguing.
-- Data, "Haven", stardate 41294.5
%
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger and faster man,
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.
-- Walter D. Wintle
%
To follow foolish precedents, and wink
With both our eyes, is easier than to think.
-- William Cowper
%
    rocket scientist
None they just tell Marcus to do it.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are
the founders of human civilization.
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Remarks on Agriculture, Jan 13, 1840, p. 457
%
Good, the more
Communicated, more abundant grows.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book v, Line 71
%
The sweet simplicity of the three per cents.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- Endymion, Chap. xcvi
%
Beautiful as sweet,
And young as beautiful, and soft as young,
And gay as soft, and innocent as gay!
 - Night Thoughts, Night iii, Line 81
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Someday there is going to be a book about a middle aged man with a good
job, a beautiful wife and two lovely children who still manages to be happy.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
A penny will hide the biggest star in the Universe if you hold it
close enough to your eye.
-- Samuel Grafton
%
He said that men ought to remember those friends who were absent as
well as those who were present.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Thales, ix
%
This is easy.  You never have to figure out what to get for children,
because they will tell you exactly what they want.  They spend months
and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday-
morning cartoon-show advertisements.  Make sure you get your children
exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices.  If
your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You
Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it.  You may be worried that it
might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe
me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child
who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift.
-- Gifts for Children --
-- Dave Barry, Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide
%
Justice?  You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the
law.
-- William Gaddis, writer
%
:bit decay: n. See {bit rot}.  People with a physics background
   tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay.  See
   also {computron}, {quantum bogodynamics}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Metaphysical totalitarianism of any kind stifles the freedom we have as
human beings. It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative
to faith is punishment - that's how you train dogs, not develop people.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
It matters not so much what you sing, but why
-- J.S. Bach
%
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
-- Carl Sandburg
%
 pp# cow
-- SMILEY
%
In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
-- John Ray
%
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "The Hammer of God"
%
I would say that like Elvis' daughter and Michael Jackson, it now appears
as though we have some irreconcilable differences.
Chairman John Kasich
-- House Budget Committee
%
When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know
that town's in trouble.
-- Edward Abbey
%
    You are right on target when you say that mad scientists
have a total disregard for the wellbeing of others.  We don't
want to spread evil; we just see no point in bothering to
spread good.
-- Richard M. Mathews
%
I have five dollars for each of you.
-- Bernhard Goetz
%
Procrastination shortens the job and places the
responsibility for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who
imposed the deadline).
-- First Law of Procrastination
%
LaForge: "I'll take a look and see if there're any rules I haven't broken."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
                                            (___)
       \^^^^^^^^\   (__)                    (o o)
        \^^^^^^^^\\ (oo)                     \ /
     *-----\_______\/\/                    \--O--/
  ^--------\   \S/  /\_____^              \\/_^{} /==V===[]
            \______/                        \_____\\//
                                             \__/
It's a bird...                               //\\         The Boss
 It's a plane...                             //  \\   (Bruce Holstien)
                                             //   //
                                             ^^    ^^
-- ^_______/   - \______^              // -----\
%
        2
 E = M C
-- Albert Einstein
%
If you can actually count your money
then you are not really a rich man.
-- Paul Getty
%
To do nothing is in every man's power.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
Arguments are lost only to bigots.
-- Liberal Rule # 3
%
Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
  be a dog.  Sigh!  There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy
%
    sax players
Just one, but he has to go through a whole box to find just
the right one.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
The general prizes most the fortress which took the longest siege.
-- Edward Garrett
%
Pencil cursors are for user-interface weenies.
-- Rob MacLachlan
%
When they want it bad (in a rush), they get it bad.
-- John K. Meskimen
%
Laughter is by definition healthy.
-- Doris Lessing
%
:angry fruit salad: n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too
   many colors.  (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre
   day-glo colors found in canned fruit salad.)  Too often one sees
   similar effects from interface designers using color window systems
   such as {X}; there is a tendency to create displays that are
   flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term
   use.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    lawyers
Three. One to change it and 2 to keep interrupting by
standing up and shouting "Objection !"
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
 A man without a religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
-- Vique's Law
%
Sweet grave aspect.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Week, Fourth Day, Book i
%
It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.
-- William Shakespeare
%
...you enclose comments in your class notes with "/* */"
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
Hi, we're the good ol' blues brothers' boys band.  from Chicago.
-Elwood
-- "The Blues Brothers"
%
Many a time,... from a bad beginning great friendships have sprung up.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Act v, Sc. 2, 34, (873.)
%
"No. 1.... The LARCH tree."
-- Monty Python
%
For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and
in all sorts.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book iii, Chap. xiii
%
As soon
Seek roses in December, ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that 's false, before
You trust in critics.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Line 75
%
Shouldn't we be charging admission for this?!
-- Zach
%
We are holding Elvis's brain hostage on Planet Zork.
-- Bloom County
%
What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of
any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot
day in June?
-- Edward Abbey
%

-- Fathers are NOT visitors visitation is for prisoners.
%
Associate with well-mannered persons and your manners will improve.
Run with decent folk and your own decent instincts will be
strengthened.  Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum.
Hang around with rich people and you will end by picking up the check
and dying broke.
-- Stanley Walker
%
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!
-- Lloyd Bridges from AIRPLANE!
%
 :V woodpecker
-- SMILEY
%
ARTHUR: Did you say shrubberies?
ROGER:  Yes.  Shrubberies are my trade.  I am a shrubber.  My name is Roger
        the Shrubber.  I arrange, design, and sell shrubberies.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
ACCORD, n.  Harmony.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish,
 but that they cease to love.
-- W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
%
The election is this: the Great Communicator against the Great
Depressor... We are going for the gold!
-- Vice President George Bush, 1984
%
If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall
live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow weeps.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Oh for a tongue to curse the slave
  Whose treason, like a deadly blight,
Comes o'er the councils of the brave,
  And blasts them in their hour of might!
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- The Fire-Worshippers
%
Spare-Time
-- Programmer's Oxymoron
%
Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is
 a match.
-- Will Rogers
%
In my attempt to hit a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
I've fallen... but I'll be back...
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger
%
    Maybe we're just lucky to live in a universe composed by a
divine Bach.  Perhaps next door, the inhabitants of a John
Cage universe muddle along in chaos...
-- Michael Weiss, in sci.physics
%
A good place to start is where you are.
-- Charles Wolf, Jr.
%
Everyone wants to be noticed, but no one wants to be stared at.
-- Law of Human Quirks
%
Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently
estimated.
-- Augustine's Law Number XXIII
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
    In magic, as in all true professions, there are rules by which you must
play. At least, you must play by them until such time as you can get away with
something else.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. I (Preface)
%
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and
everything else follows in the same way.
-- Alan J. Perlis
%
When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets
another one.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved
into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears
of those who use it.  After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear
war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious
fanatics.
-- Denise Caruso (digital commerce columnist, New York Times)
%
One of our secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.
-- William Lyon Phelps
%
Everybody hates a prodigy, detests an old head on young shoulders.
-- Erasmus
%
Better not take a dog on the Space Shuttle, because if he sticks his head out
 when you're coming home his face might burn up.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
  the last of our prejudices.
-- Most of us are attracted by beauty and repelled by ugliness one of
-- Kirk, "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" stardate 5630.7.
%
:buried treasure: n. A surprising piece of code found in some
   program.  While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from {crufty}
   to {bletcherous}, and has lain undiscovered only because it was
   functionally correct, however horrible it is.  Used sarcastically,
   because what is found is anything *but* treasure.  Buried
   treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed.  "I just
   found that the scheduler sorts its queue using {bubble sort}!
   Buried treasure!"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological
society.
-- Isaac Asimov
%
In time of war the first casualty is truth.
-- Boake Carter
%
There is no cure for birth and death other than to enjoy the interval.
-- George Santayana (1863-1952)
%
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Samson Agonistes, Line 1721
%
Let us endeavour to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will
be sorry.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), from Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar(1894)
%
Al, I felt the baby kick!
-- Sam Beckett.
%
    Oregonians
Two. One to do the work and 1 to hold the umbrella.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick
with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told
well is immortal.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
-- Advice to Youth (published 1923)
%
if you own more cowboy boots than sneakers.
-- You may be redneck...
%
     Don't worry about opposition.
     Remember, a kite rises against the wind, not with it.
-- HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
%
When beer goes flat, you can toss it out.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
When human it's abortion; when it's a chicken, an omelet.
-- Carlin
%
Quite frankly sir, I've suspected this for some time. Clearly
  Captain Blackadder has been disobeying orders with a breath-taking
  impertinence.
I don't care if he's been rogering the Duke of York with a prize-
  winning leek...!
-- Cpt. Darling and Melchett : Corporal Punishment
%
How do we come to think of things, rather than of processes
in this absolute flux?  By shutting our eyes to the successive
events.  It is an artificial attitude that makes sections in
the stream change, and calls them things...
When we shall know the truth of things, we shall realise how
absurd it is for us to worship isolated products of the incessant
series of transformations as though they were eternal and real.
Life is no thing or state of a thing, but a continuous movement
or change.
-- S. Radhakrishnan
%
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in
 order to save us.
-- Peter De Vries
%
The best way out is always through.
-- Robert Frost
%
Anything NEW and/or IMPROVED, isn't.
-- HERSHISER'S FIRST RULE
%
DEINOTHERIUM, n.  An extinct pachyderm that flourished when the
Pterodactyl was in fashion.  The latter was a native of Ireland, its
name being pronounced Terry Dactyl or Peter O'Dactyl, as the man
pronouncing it may chance to have heard it spoken or seen it printed.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%

-- Three words women love to hear no prenupital agreement.
%
I put up my thumb... and it blotted out the planet Earth.
-- Neil Armstrong
%
Now go back or thou shalt most certainly die.
-- Q, "Encounter at Farpoint", stardate 41153.7
%
The so-called Christian world is contracepting itself out of existence.
       Right, Speaking For Themselves, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet
-- Fr. L. Kieffer, HLI Reports, August 1989, as quoted in The Far
%
My pride fell with my fortunes.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
The deep of night is crept upon our talk,
And nature must obey necessity.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
One of the most dangerous forms of human error is forgetting what one
is trying to achieve.
-- Paul Nitze
%
ABATIS, n.  Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside
from molesting the rubbish inside.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
"Hey Dad, if I saved up my allowance, could I buy a monkey?"
"Of course not!"
"OK, then I won't save up."
-- Leave It To Beaver
%
I think our No.1 problem is that nobody wants to take responsibility for
anything, but don't quote me.
-- Randy Glasbergen, "The Saturday Evening Post"
%
Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.
-- Solomon Short
%
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time
 to change that here and there.
-- Richard Feynman
%
The message from the moon which we have flashed to the far corners
of the planet is that no problem need any longer be considered insoluble.
-- Norman Cousins, Apollo astronaut
%
He held his seat,--a friend to human race.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book vi, Line 18
%
Joshu is my favorite Zen Master. It is said that a monk once asked him,
To be holy - what is it like?
      Joshu replied, To dump a mountain of shit on a clean plain.
-- Disk Sutphen
%
To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, and fill his snuff-box,
is like giving a pair of laced ruffles to a man that has never a shirt
on his back.
-- Tom Brown (1663-1704)
-- Laconics
%
Kirk: "Don't crucify yourself, it wasn't your fault."
Spock: "I was responsible."
Kirk: "For no actions but your own."
Spock: "That is not what you said at your trial."
Kirk: "That was as captain of the ship.  Human beings--"
Spock: "But, Captain, we both know that I am not human."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing
which ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams
%
Beer won't care if you can't find the carburetor.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
 Why no, Ossifer, I'm not under the alcofluence of incohol.
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
%
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve
freedom.  The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in
power.
-- Gerry Spence 'From Freedom to Slavery,' 1993
%
Do you know what HCF means?
... Ever use it?
... Intentionally?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
He that loses hope may part with anything.
-- Congreve
%
By the glare of false science betray'd,
That leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind.
-- James Beattie (1735-1803)
-- The Hermit
%
I think I am an overnight sensation right now!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
He who has an opinion of his own, but depends on the opinion and tastes
of others is a slave.
-- Klopstock
%
I have a great dog. She's half Lab, half pit bull. A good combination.
 Sure, she might bite off my leg, but she'll bring it back to me.
-- Jimi Celeste
%
Don't play dumb.  You're not as good at it as I am.
-- Colonel Flagg, M*A*S*H
%
Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal
fitness of things?
-- Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
-- Tom Jones, Book iv, Chap. iv
%
Oh? And which Pitt would this be? Pitt the Toddler? Pitt the Embryo?
  Pitt the Glint in the Milkman's Eye?
-- Edmund : Dish and Dishonesty
%
Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Tam o' Shanter
%
 because both of them are the same mentality.
      as quoted in The Far Right, Speaking For Themselves, a Planned
      Parenthood pamphlet
-- To be against abortion and not against contraception it makes no sense
-- Nancy O'Brien, Anti-Choice Activist, introducing Joan Andrews, 3/11/89,
%
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be
otherwise.
-- Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", 1969
%
Cavorting about like that isn't proper behavior.
-- Picard
%
At the bottom of all the tributes paid to a democracy is the common man,
walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross
on a little piece of paper &shyp; no amount of rhetoric or voluminous
discussion can possibly diminish the overhwhelming importance of the point.
-- Winston S. Churchill
%
Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
-- Josh Billings
%
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Letter to Lord Chesterfield, 7 April 1775
%
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah v, 20
%
if you skipped school in the 6th grade to vote.
-- You may be redneck...
%
There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.
-- Lou Reed, Magic and Loss
%
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Beverly: "I hear you've been accepted to the Academy.  I have a son there."
Rogers: "Oh.  Being posted on the Enterprise, I guess you don't get to see him
  very often."
Beverly: "No, not as much as I'd like."
-- "True Q", Stardate 46192.3
%
Learn of the skillful: he that teaches himself hath a fool for a master.
-- Poor Richard
%
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
:pizza, ANSI standard: /an'see stan'd*rd peet'z*/ [CMU] Pepperoni
   and mushroom pizza.  Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered
   by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of
   that flavor.  See also {rotary debugger}; compare {tea, ISO
   standard cup of}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
In the beginning was the word - and the word was four bytes.
-- from the bible?
%
Curiosity in the humanities is a free person's humility, and a humble
person's freedom.
-- Joseph Duffy
%
Every solution breeds new problems.
-- Murphy's Law Corollary  7
%
In films murders are always very clean.  I show how difficult it is and
  what a messy thing it is to kill a man.
-- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)
%
:senior bit: [IBM] n. Syn. {meta bit}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 3, Memb. 1, Subsect. 3
%
There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell
em.
-- Yogi Berra
%
    During the Renaissance America began.  Christopher Columbus was a great
navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.  His ships
were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.  Later the Pilgrims
crossed the Ocean, and the was called the Pilgrim's Progress.  When they
landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill
rolling their was hoops before them.  The Indian squabs carried porposies on
their back.  Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their
cabooses, which proved very fatal to them.  The winter of 1620 was a hard one
for the settlers.  Many people died and many babies were born.  Captain John
Smith was responsible for all this.
-- Richard Lederer, The world According to Student Bloopers
%
Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar?
-- James Beattie (1735-1803)
-- The Minstrel, Book i, Stanza 1
%
A sacred burden is this life ye bear:
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly.
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin,
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
-- Frances Anne Kemble (1811-)
-- Lines addressed to the Young Gentlemen leaving the Lenox Academy, Mass.
%
These are volatile times, your Highness. The American Revolution
  lost your father the colonies, the French Revolution murdered
  brave King Louis, and there are tremendous rumblings in Prussia.
  Although that might be something to do with the sausages.
-- Edmund : Sense and Senility
%
A burrito is almost always a wonderful thing.
-- karl@neosoft.com
%
You are not Morg.  You are not Eymorg.
-- Kara the Eymorg, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5432.3
%
Quantum Mechanics: A crew kept on the payroll to repair quantums, which
   decay frequently to the ground state.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
Twenty percent of zero is better than nothing.
-- Walt Kelly
%
The good man prolongs his life; to be able to enjoy one's past life
is to live twice.
-- Martial (40-102 AD)
-- Epigram x, 23
%
The world's as ugly as sin, And almost as delightful
-- Frederick Locker-Lampson
%
DENNIS: You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some
        watery tart threw a sword at you!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Our reruns are better than theirs.
-- Nick at Nite
%
By Jove the stranger and the poor are sent,
And what to those we give, to Jove is lent.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book vi, Line 247
%
It is better to wear out than to rust out.
-- Richard Cumberland (1631-1718)
-- in G. Horne The Duty of Contending for the Faith (1786) p. 21, n.
%
Tarmin: "But there is nothing to fear?"
Jev: "Father..."
Worf: "I am not fearful."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
Lots of fellows think a home is only good to borrow money on.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
Is it a world to hide virtues in?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
fluke, snow: unexpected happening on a glacier.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
:speedometer: n. A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of
   LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes).
   The pattern is shifted left every N times the operating
   system goes through its {main loop}.  A swiftly moving pattern
   indicates that the system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows
   down as the system becomes overloaded.  The speedometer on Sun
   Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one
   of the Cylons from the wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV
   series.

   Historical note: One computer, the GE 600 (later Honeywell 6000)
   actually had an *analog* speedometer on the front panel,
   calibrated in instructions executed per second.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:patch space: n. An unused block of bits left in a binary so that
   it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language
   instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to
   contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to contain a
   jump or call to the patch space).  The widening use of HLLs has
   made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM
   shops.  See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Only I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Two in the Campagna, xii
%
Within the oyster's shell uncouth The purest pearl may hide, Trust
me you'll find a heart of truth Within that rough inside.
-- Mrs. Osgood
%
A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow
real poverty.
-- Hume
%
Ever notice that IMHO sounds a lot like `I'm a whore'?--that's why
every time you see those letters you should think `Who's the pimp?'.
-- "Bob"'s Big Book of Things to Say, Think, and Do on the Net,
-- O'Reilly & Assoc., Dobbstown (1984)
%
 B-) "I pray daily for death"
-- SMILEY
%
PRELATE, n.  A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and
a fat preferment.  One of Heaven's aristocracy.  A gentleman of God.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
But oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- On his Deceased Wife
%
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost would never throw the Devil
 out of Heaven as long as they still need him as a fourth for bridge.
-- Letter in New Libertarian Notes #19
%
:manged: /mahnjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian
   `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange',
   `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged,
   usually beyond repair.  "The disk was manged after the electrical
   storm."  Compare {mung}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
And what is writ is writ,--
Would it were worthier!
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 185
%
PHILOSOPHY, n.  A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
First in, first out.
-- Second Law of Hacking
%
The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and
 act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
-- P.J. O'Rourke - A Parliament of Whores
%
I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow,
-- Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
-- Letter, Nov. 6, 1747
%
It takes money to make money because you have to copy the design
exactly.
-- Steven Wright
%
It's easy to drop a cucumber.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
It is a Hamlet-like torture to be truly liberal.
-- Leonard Bernstein
%
The past is still the past.
-- Beck
%
There are some things that are so serious that you have to laugh at them.
-- Niels Bohr
%
I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.
-- Old Testament
-- Job xxix, 13
%
"All changes, even the most longed for, have their
 melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part
 of ourselves; we must die to one life before we
 can enter another."
-- Anatole France (1844-1924)
%
 ;-) "If you touch my daughter again, they won't be blanks"
-- SMILEY
%
Euripides was wont to say, "Silence is an answer to a wise man."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of Bashfulness
%
The President scores much better than Bill Clinton.
                  marital infidelity to Clinton's during a televised interview
                  with David Frost, 10/92.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, comparing Bush's record of
%
    Think until it hurts.
-- Roy Thomson
%
The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 127
%
A large part of [the purpose] of education may well be what men have
-- most feared and most desired the achievements of moments of ecstasy.
-- George Leonard
%
Man shall not live by bread alone.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew iv, 4; Deuteronomy viii, 3
%
:TMRCie: /tmerk'ee/, [MIT] n. A denizen of {TMRC}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxxxix, 14
%
You know how it is when you're walking up the stairs, and you get to the top,
 and you think there's one more step?  I'm like that all the time.
-- Steven Wright
%

-- This sentence contradicts itself no actually it doesn't.
-- Hofstadter
%
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
-- Gloria Leonard
%
Big-endians and small-endians.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Gulliver's Travels, Part i, Chap. iv, Voyage to Lilliput
%
Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Polite Conversation, Dialogue ii
%
Swinish gluttony
Ne'er looks to heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Crams, and blasphemes his feeder.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 776
%
There are bugs and then there are bugs.  And then there are bugs.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Criticism, Part iii, Line 53
%
Boss to employer: No, Baxter, you're not being replaced by a computer- only
a silicon chip.
-- Eli Stein
%
Every one is bound to bear patiently the results of his own example.
-- Phaedrus (c. 8 A.D.)
-- Book i, Fable 26, 12
%
I never knew the old gentlemen with the scythe and hour-glass bring
anything but grey hairs, thin cheeks, and loss of teeth.
-- Dryden
%
    Home Secretaries
None - they merely sack someone else for letting it go out.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children?
 Well, she and I were.
-- Mort Sahl
%
To lead the people, walk behind them.
-- Lao-Tzu
%
Now the Lord God planted a garden East of Whittier in a place called
Yorba Linda, and out of the ground he made to grow orange trees that
were good for food and the fruits thereof he labeled SUNKIST ...
-- The Begatting of a President
%
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
%
I think trash is the most important manifestation of culture we have in my
 lifetime.
-- Johnny Legend
%
Have you ever set off a Halon system?
... Intentionally?
... Do you still work there?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
My toughest fight was with my first wife.
-- Mohammad Ali
%
At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five
 dollars for the second glass.  The refill contained the antidote.
-- Emo Phillips
%
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 178
%
The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn
 flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins.   Leonard Bernstein and
 living bras are incompatible.  And you cannot sustain adult, probing,
 meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by
 a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper.
-- Rod Serling
%
Perfection is achieved only on the point of collapse.
-- C. N. Parkinson
%
For right is right, since God is God,
  And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty,
  To falter would be sin.
-- F. W. Faber (1814-1863)
-- The Right must win
%
This PORCUPINE knows his ZIPCODE..  And he has ``VISA''!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Islamic women can do kinky things with their ankles.
 That's why the Koran says they aren't supposed to reveal them in public.
-- Weird theory #47
%
Language is fossil poetry.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "The Poet"
%
Stop, stop all this dancing, I need room to breathe.
-- the Hollies
%

-- Comet ASCII: - ---===>>>>>>>>>>>>*
%
little while ago; I inserted some random characters into the executable.
Please forgive me.  You can recover the file by typing in the code over again,
since I also removed the source.
-- Okay, Okay I admit it.  You didn't change that program that worked just a
%
Chicken Soup, n.:  An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts
of aureomycin,
cocaine, interferon, and TLC.  The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is
neurotic dependence on one's mother.
-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
%
Enquire not what boils in another's pot.
-- Thomas Fuller
%
Always do the hard part first.  If the hard part is impossible, why
waste time on the easy part?  Once the hard part is done, you're home free.

Always do the easy part first.      What you think at first is the
easy part often turns out to be the hard part.  Once the easy
part is done, you can concentrate all your efforts on the hard part.
-- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985
%
LaForge: "On the other hand, I remember everything about the time
I got my first
  pet, a Cirkacian cat.  I was eight.  I remember how funny-looking he was, I
  remember how excited I was.  It was if it happened yesterday."
Data: "Perhaps you remember the pleasant memories and forget the unpleasant
  ones."
LaForge: "No, sometimes the bad memories can be the most intense of all."
Data: "It would seem there is no predictable pattern to human memory."
LaForge: "'It would seem'."
-- "Violations", Stardate 45429.3
%
 :-d~ smokes heavily
-- SMILEY
%
The moment you're born you're done for.
-- Arnold Bennett
%
Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why.
-- Sidney Hillman (1887-1946)
%
Everything comes to him who waits, among other things, death.
-- Francis Bradley
%
On ability:
A dwarf is small, even if he stands on a mountain top;
a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65)
%
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians
outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them
with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any
penalties.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
%
If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.
-- Pablo Picasso
%
You say to me-wards your affection 's strong;
Pray love me little, so you love me long.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- Love me Little, Love me Long
%
Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,
Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
-- Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
-- Politics and Poetics
%
I was born nude, and I wish to be buried nude.
-- Elle MacPherson, 1995
%
You can't tell me that cowboyx, when they're branding cattle, don't sort of
 "accidentally" brand each other every once in a while.  It's their way of
 letting off stress.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a
limit that's very seldom mentioned.  It's the point where free speech
begins to collide with the right to privacy.  I don't think there are any
other conditions to free speech.  I've got a right to say and believe
anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else.
.... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.
-- H.L. Mencken
%
Once I was a tadpole, in the beginning of the begin;
 Then I was a toadfrog with my tail tucked in.
 Then I was a monkey in a banyan tree;
 Now I'm a professor with a Ph.D.
-- Anonymous creationist's view of evolution
%
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
%
Any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers
 not in it.
-- Nora Ephron
%
I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.
-- Terence
%
The qualities that most attract a woman to a man are usually the same
 ones she can't stand years later.
-- Murphy's laws on sex
%
Self-piercing earrings
-- "101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR"
%
It's a mistake to try to understand machines...they only worry me.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
Call upon a man of business during hours of business only to transact your
 business. Then go about your business and give him time to attend to his
 business.
-- Anonymous
%
So long as you are ready to die for humanity, the life of your country
is immortal.
-- Giuseppe Mazzini
%
Hit any key?  Where's the any key?
-- DOS user
%
Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
-- Old Testament
-- Daniel v, 27
%
"And when do you expect to get married?"
"Oh, right away, sport, right away, you know!  I 'aven't 'ad it
for weeks!"
-- Monty Python
%
if your gene pool is a foot deep and usually empty.
-- You may be redneck...
%
:shambolic link: /sham-bol'ik link/ n. A UNIX symbolic link,
   particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or
   results in your ending up in some completely unexpected part of the
   filesystem....
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I am afraid that is beyond my design parameters.
-- Data
%
Their discords sting through Burns and Moore,
  Like hedgehogs dressed in lace.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- The Music-Grinders
%
You may recognize me from the movies ... I go a few times a week.
-- Wayne Federman
%
At first I was uncertain, but now I'm not so sure.
-- Heisenberg
%
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore
are most economical in its use.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
The other line moves faster. This applies to all lines- bank, supermarket,
tollbooth, customs, and so on. And don't try to change lines. The
Other Line- the one you were in originally- will then move faster.
-- Barbara Ettorre
%
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
  Elysium, though it were in the halls of Hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.
-- Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos, LXXXI
%
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
-- Ronald W. Reagan
%
I went on to test the program in every way I could devise.  I strained
it to expose its weaknesses.  I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass
stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold.
I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be
developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case.
Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's
temperature to be less than absolute zero.  I had found an error.  I
chased down the error and fixed it.  Now I had improved the program to
the point where it would not run at all.
             Holes and the Fate of Stars
-- absent not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had
-- George Greenstein, Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black
%
'T is a little thing
To give a cup of water; yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips,
May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarean juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.
-- Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854)
-- Ion, Act i, Sc. 2
%
Few, few shall part where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Hohenlinden
%
Before you kill something make sure you have something better
to replace it with; something better than political opportunist
slamming hate horseshit in the public park.
-- Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man", 1969
%
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
%
If you're speaking of worships of sorts, we represent many beliefs.
-- McCoy, "Bread and Circuses," stardate 4040.7.
%
A chase always involves two parts: first breaking contact, second the
retiring action to divorce oneself from the incident.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
%
A special cleaning ordinance bans housewives from hiding
dirt and dust under a rug in a dwelling.
-- real standing law in Pennsylvania, United States of America
%
"California is proud to be the home of the freeway."
-- Ronald Reagan
%
Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts.
This is the secret of success.
-- Swami Sivananda
%
Foecal Matters and Their Application to Agriculture.
-- England's True Wealth
%
If that makes any sense to you, you have a big problem.
-- C. Durance, Computer Science 234
%
A can of ASPARAGUS, 73 pigeons, some LIVE ammo, and a FROZEN DAQUIRI!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The mike works. That's very important to make sure the mike works, and
ours is working well.
                   sound check before the VP debate, 10/5/88
                   (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Senator Dan Quayle informing reporters of a successful
%
At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur's mind.
His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top of his head.
The room folded flat about him, spun around, shifted out of existence and left
him sliding into his own navel.
They were passing through hyperspace.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue,
and if there be any praise, think on these things.
-- New Testament
-- Philippians iv, 8
%
The spotted owl isn't really important because it's only a subspecies.
-- Denny Smith
%
Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
You always know where your cucumber has been.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
-- Edward Abbey
%
It behooves the writer to avoid archaic expressions.
-- Writing Rule 24
%
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
  That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
-- Omar Khayyam (died c.1133)
-- Rubaiyat, Stanza xix
%
'T was merry when
You wager'd on your angling; when your diver
Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he
With fervency drew up.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Antony and Cleopatra
-- Act ii, Sc. 5
%
 Clinton:        I didn't inhale this shit.
                 I tried this shit before and I didn't like it so....
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Man, Epistle ii, Line 1
%
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice,
 and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
-- G. K. Chesterton
%
LaForge: "Eliminate LaForge."
-- "Identity Crisis", Stardate unknown
%
This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a
question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
-- Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
%
The quotes are over, Doctor.
-- Scorby, Seeds of Doom
%

-- History doesn't repeat itself historians merely repeat each other.
-- First Rule of History
%
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
-- Edward R. Murrow
%
I keep hearing that Jesus Christ is coming, but nobody knows his tour dates.
-- Michael Lucas
%
 <:-( disappointed
-- SMILEY
%
I will not quarrel with a slight mistake, such as our nature's frailty
may excuse.
-- Roscommon
%
accident.
-- Be security conscious because 80 percent of people are caused by
%
Wait!  You have not been prepared!
-- Mr. Atoz, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," stardate 3113.2.
%
WHILE IT HAS BEEN POSSIBLE TO PROVIDE DEFINITIVE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS
the experiment didn't work but I figured out I could get publicity for it.
-- Research definitions
%
To a Europe exhausted by nearly two centuries of religious wars,
[Isaac] Newton's works were first and foremost a message about God;
that He did not behave in a capricious or arbitrary fashion, in response
to either His will or human prayer, but in accordance with absolute,
unwavering, and humanly discoverable laws of nature which governed
him and all his works. He had become the infinitely perfect Clock-Maker,
his works fathomable by the human mind.
-- Forrest MacDonald
%
 (Whole family crowds around, including screaming babies and
 noisy pets; to the tune of "Frere Jacques":)
 We're not here now,
 We're not here now,
 Don't hang up,
 Don't hang up,
 Leave your name and number,
 Leave your name and number,
 We'll call back,
 We'll call back.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
:CI$: // n. Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service.
   The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges.
   Often used in {sig block}s just before a CompuServe address.
   Syn. {Compu$erve}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Kids, don't try this at home!
-- Famous Last Words
%
There's no thief like a bad book.
-- Italian Proverb
%
Everything takes more time and money.
-- Anne DeCaprio
%
The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men.  And
character comes from boyhood.  Thus every boy is a challenge to his
elders.
-- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964)
%
A five-year-old kid raised his hand at school. The teacher declined to let
 him leave the room. Five minutes later she reversed herself. She said, "All
 right, Sonny, you may go now."

 The little boy looked up and said, "I don't have to."

 She said, "What do you mean you don't have to?"

 He said, "I opened up my geography book and went in the ocean."
-- Norm Crosby
%
The great secretary of Nature, Sir Francis Bacon.
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- Life of Herbert
%
To love is to suffer.  To avoid suffering one must not love.  But
then one suffers from not loving.  Therefore to love is to suffer.
Not to love is to suffer.  To suffer is to suffer.  To be happy is
to love.  To be happy, then, is to suffer.  But suffering makes one
unhappy.  Therefore to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer,
or suffer from too much happiness.
-- Woody Allen, "Love and Death"
%
Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates
in the country.
-- Marion Barry (Mayor, Washington, D.C.)
%
Guinan: "Shut up kid."
-- "The Dauphin", Stardate unknown
%
Do not use a foreign term when there is an adequate
   English quid pro quo.
-- Writing Rule 22
%
Never ask for directions in Wales, Baldrick, you'll be washing
  spit out of your hair for a fortnight.
-- Edmund : Amy and Amiability
%
He coude songes make, and wel endite.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- Canterbury Tales, Prologue, Line 95
%
It would be a swell world if everybody was as pleasant as the fellow who's
 trying to skin you.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
Would you please shut up and sit down!
     speech in Crystal City, Va.
-- George Bush, to a grooup of POW-MIA families protesting his campaign
%
The impersonal hand of government can never replace
the helping hand of a neighbor.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
%
They love their land because it is their own,
  And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a king upon his throne,
  And think it kindness to his Majesty.
-- Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867)
-- Connecticut
%
If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end
 across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.
-- AMAZING BUT TRUE...
%
Scott: "Computer, shut this bloody thing off.  It's time I acted my age."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
Elsie's awfully good to her mother--she never goes home.
-- Charley Weaver (Cliff Arquette)
%
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind.
-- Mark Harrold
%
Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes
when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is
almost a consolation.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
Volume is a defense to error.
-- Richard A. Leahy
%
You just come along with me and have a good time.  The Galaxy's a fun place.
You'll need to have this fish in your ear.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard
-- Prof. Steiner
%
    Necrophiliacs
None. Necrophiliacs prefer dead bulbs.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
%
The only thing to do with advice is to pass it on. It is
never of any use to oneself.
-- Oscar Wilde, "An Ideal Husband"
%
Beat all your feathers as flat down as pancakes.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- The Roaring Girl, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Picard: "But you believe that he might have gone there to see Pardek."
Sarek: "The Romulan senator?  How do you know Pardek?"
Picard: "I've heard of him."
Sarek: "That's what he's done!  He's gone to see Pardek."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45235.4
%
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew xix, 24
%
:UNIX weenie: [ITS] n. 1. A derogatory play on `UNIX wizard',
   common among hackers who use UNIX by necessity but would prefer
   alternatives.  The implication is that although the person in
   question may consider mastery of UNIX arcana to be a wizardly
   skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and
   the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity
   that is alleged to infest many UNIX programs.  "This shell script
   tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous ways.  It must have
   been written by a real UNIX weenie."  2. A derogatory term for
   anyone who engages in uncritical praise of UNIX.  Often appearing
   in the context "stupid UNIX weenie".  See {Weenix}, {UNIX
   conspiracy}.  See also {weenie}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Hell is truth seen too late.
-- H. G. Adams
%
    NSC members
Three, in fourteen countries.
Note: The NSC is the US National Security Council, whose rubric
Oliver North was acting under, and which is often accused by
people such as Gore Vidal of secretly governing the country.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
If you're in a boxing match, try not to let the other guy's glove touch your
 lips, because you don't know where that glove has been.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside
 you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
-- Robert Benchley
%
All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
-- Aristotle
%
The compromise will always be more expensive than either of
the suggestions it is compromising.
-- Juhani's Law
%
The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
to ...... to ......... uh ............
-- Hurewitz's Memory Principle
%
Sometimes the beauty of the world is so overwhelming, I just want to throw back
 my head and gargle.  Just gargle and gargle, and I don't care who hears me,
 because I am beautiful.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
Growing up, I was a little guy. My father enrolled me in a local martial
 arts academy. So once a week I got beat up in a more formal setting.
-- Jonathan Katz
%
And o'er the hills, and far away
  Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, across the day,
  Thro' all the world she follow'd him.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- The Day-Dream, The Departure, iv
%
          (__)
          (oo)     M   M   O0O   OOO
  / |     ||       M M M  O   O O   O
 *  ||----||       M   M   O0O   OOO
    ~~    ~~
        COW
-- /-------\/  -MM MM  O   O O   O
%
To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
-- Felix Frankfurter
%
The value of marriage is not that adults produce
children, but that children produce adults.
-- Peter De Vries
%
A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to
Greenblatt.  As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by.  "Is it
true", asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as
Lisp".  Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt
shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick.
-- AI koan
%
...Oh, so you _do_ know her then?
...No, just a wild stab in the dark, which is incidentally...what
  you'll be getting if you don't start being a bit more helpful.
-- Crone and Edmund : Bells
%
Vogon spaceships don't look as if they had been designed so much as
 congealed.
-- Douglas Adams
%
FINE
  Term used by weathermen when they don't really know what it's going
  to be like. Of course, if the rest of us made as many mistakes in
  our jobs as weathermen do in theirs, the entire world would be a
  disaster area. "Well guv, I expect if we use this plastic pretend
  bolt to hold up this building, the structure will be FINE with
  possible later collapse on Thursday."
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
 (:^( Jack Nicholson in Chinatown
-- SMILEY
%
Just like the falling rainbow
Just like the stars in the sky
Life should never feel small.
-- Vearncombe
-- Black, Paradise
%
If I let go of the feelings which cause me pain, I would have no feelings
at all.
-- Dan Goodman
%
That unit is a woman.
A mass of conflicting impulses.
-- Spock and Nomad, "The Changeling," stardate 3541.9
%
Have you ever used a computer?
... for more than 4 hours continuously?
... more than 8 hours?
... more than 16 hours?
... more than 32 hours?
-- from The Hacker Test, Version 1.0,
-- by Felix Lee, John Hayes and Angela Thomas
%
DARING, n.  One of the most conspicuous qualities of a man in
security.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It's on the other side.
-- Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning
%
Think it's time I'm leavin' / Nothin' here to make me stay.
-- Led Zeppelin
%

-- Money DOES talk it says goodbye!
%
I read in Cosmo that women like to have whipped cream sprayed over their
 breasts. Unfortunately, my girlfriend has silicone implants. So I use
 non-dairy topping.
-- Jeff Shaw
%
Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.
-- Emerson
%
Now I know how Pontius Pilate must have felt.
-- Sinclair
%
With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I
try to be a fraud and a half.
-- Otto von Bismark
%
History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.
-- Francis M. Voltaire (1694-1778)
-- L'Ingenu, Chap. x, (1767.)
%
I am a Klingon. If you doubt it, a demonstration can be arranged.
That is the response of a Klingon. The response I would expect from my
  older brother.
-- Worf and Kurn, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2
%
    Sagittarians
The sun is shining, the day is young, we've got our
whole lives ahead of us, and you're inside worrying
about a stupid burned out light bulb?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
 ):-) smiley big-face
-- SMILEY
%
No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend until
he is unhappy.
-- Thomas Fuller
%
   Your best dreams may not come true;
   fortunately, neither will your worst dreams.
-- Newman's Discovery
%
"Want some pretzels?"
"No thanks, we're on duty.  A couple beers would be nice, though."
-- The Simpsons
%
I may be an idiot, but indeed I am no fool.
-- Men at Work
%
The people arose as one man.
-- Old Testament
-- Judges v, xx, 8
%
A good crier of green sauce.
-- Francis Rabelais (1495-1553)
-- Works, Book ii, Chap. xxxi
%
The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's
outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by
mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club.  Once
tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims
the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding.
-- Mike Harding, The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac
%
We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.
-- Jeff Marder (the question, of course, is whether this is good or bad)
%
Don't ask of your friends what you yourself can do.
-- Quintus Ennius
%
Trieste, Italy: Gun-toading thugs hijacked a bloodmobile
 near the Italian-Yugoslavian border, stealing hundreds of
 pints of freshly drawn blood. Lawmen blame the robbery on
 vicious, thirst-crazed vampires!
-- Weekly World News, Vampires Hijack Bloodmobile!
%
Like Aesop's fox, when he had lost his tail, would have all his fellow
foxes cut off theirs.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader
%
Whistle, and she 'll come to you.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- Wit Without Money, Act iv, Sc. 4
%
>consult guide about Magrathea
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
According to legend, Magrathea was a planet that amassed incredible wealth
by manufacturing other planets. The legends also mention it as the setting
of the very eagerly awaited second Infocom Hitchhiker's game.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Percy...what is that on the front of your tunic?
'Tis a brooch, my lord. A brooch cunningly fashioned out of pure green.
...It looks like you've sneezed.
-- Edmund and Percy : Money
%
    Zen Buddhists
3.  One to do it, one not to do it, and one to do both.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
I've seen friends die....
-- Blake
%
Pittacus said that half was more than the whole.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Pittacus, ii
%
"Then Job fell to his knees and cried to the Lord,
 `Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory.
 Thou hast a good job. Don't blow it.'"
-- Woody Allen
%
Perfection is the child of time.
-- Joseph Hall
%
Producers seem to be so prejudiced against actors who've had no
training.  And there's no reason for it.  So what if I didn't attend the
Royal Academy for twelve years?  I'm still a professional trying to be
the best actress I can.  Why doesn't anyone send me the scripts that
Faye Dunaway gets?
-- Farrah Fawcett-Majors
%
And don't confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
-- J. Hookham Frere (1769-1846)
-- The Monks and the Giants, Canto i, Line 6
%
FIGHT APAth
-- Seen on a park fence
%
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
-- Bryan W. Procter (1787-1874)
-- The Sea
%
The little I know, I owe to my ignorance
-- Sacha Guitry
%
This child is not mine as the first was;
  I cannot sing it to rest;
I cannot lift it up fatherly,
  And bless it upon my breast.

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle,
  And sits in my little one's chair,
And the light of the heaven she 's gone to
  Transfigures its golden hair.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- The Changeling
%
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.
-- Dan Rather
%
A doctor can always bury his mistakes...
An architect can only advise his client to plant ivy.
-- attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright
%
City girls just seem to find out early ... how to open doors with just
 a smile ... a rich old man, and she won't have to worry ... she'll dress
 up all in lace, and go in style.
-- Lyin' Eyes, The Eagles
%
One more such victory, and we are lost.
-- Pyrrus
%
Trouble with you Jewish girls is that your desire
to DO is in inverse proportion to your willingness to TALK about it.
-- Slovotsky's Law number Twenty-Three
-- Walter Slovotsky, The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg
%
I just want to be a good engineer.
     at the 1988 AppleFest
-- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech
%
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Freedom has no meaning of itself. There are always restrictions, be they
 legal, genetic, or physical. If you don't believe me, try to chew a radio
 signal.
-- Kelvin Throop III
%
:replicator: n. Any construct that acts to produce copies of
   itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a
   program (see {quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb},
   and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life},
   sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}.  It is even
   claimed by some that {{UNIX}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves
   of an extremely successful replicator; see {UNIX conspiracy}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from
barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.
-- John O'Hara
%

-- Gritty Kitty Litter stays crunchy, even in milk!
%
Even though they raised the rate for first class mail in the United
day.
-- States we really shouldn't complain it's still only two cents a
%
The sad vicissitude of things.
-- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
-- Sermon xvi
%
He looks good with a ripped shirt.
-- Why Kirk is better
%
:eat flaming death: imp. A construction popularized among hackers by
   the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from a famously
   turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran
   "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort
   (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's
   1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the
   phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been
   an influence).  Used in humorously overblown expressions of
   hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Definite possibility
-- Oxymoron
%
It's nice to be in a position where people apologize because they
assume there's humor in your work, based on past experience,
but they're not sure where it is.
-- Rob Pike
%
PRO:  You won't be wondering your ass off about what stupid foreigners
      are saying.
CON:  You can't give the stupid foreigner wrong directions!
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
%
O liberty!  O liberty!  What crimes are committed in your name!
-- Mme. Jeanne (Manon) Roland (1754-1793)
%
Who ran
Through each mode of the lyre, and was master of all.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- On the Death of Sheridan
%
I'm having a tax-deductible experience!  I need an energy crunch!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a
deep heart.  The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.
-- Fedor Dostoevsky
%
TIGHTS, n.  An habiliment of the stage designed to reinforce the
general acclamation of the press agent with a particular publicity.
Public attention was once somewhat diverted from this garment to Miss
Lillian Russell's refusal to wear it, and many were the conjectures as
to her motive, the guess of Miss Pauline Hall showing a high order of
ingenuity and sustained reflection.  It was Miss Hall's belief that
nature had not endowed Miss Russell with beautiful legs.  This theory
was impossible of acceptance by the male understanding, but the
conception of a faulty female leg was of so prodigious originality as
to rank among the most brilliant feats of philosophical speculation!
It is strange that in all the controversy regarding Miss Russell's
aversion to tights no one seems to have thought to ascribe it to what
was known among the ancients as "modesty."  The nature of that
sentiment is now imperfectly understood, and possibly incapable of
exposition with the vocabulary that remains to us.  The study of lost
arts has, however, been recently revived and some of the arts
themselves recovered.  This is an epoch of _renaissances_, and there
is ground for hope that the primitive "blush" may be dragged from its
hiding-place amongst the tombs of antiquity and hissed on to the
stage.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
Marry an orphan: you'll never have to spend boring holidays with the
 in-laws (at most an occasional visit to the cemetery).
-- George Carlin
%
The `loner' may be respected, but he is always resented by his
colleagues, for he seems to be passing a critical judgment on them,
when he may be simply making a limiting statement about himself.
-- Sidney Harris
%
A guy sees a fat lady carrying a duck. The guy says, "What are you doing
 with that pig?" The fat lady snorts, "That's not a pig, it's a duck." The
 guy says, "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the duck."
-- Jack Carter
%
you put both contact lenses in the same eye.
-- You can tell it's going to be a rotten day when
%
And puts himself upon his good behaviour.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto v, Stanza 47
%
Never serve oysters during a month that has no paycheck.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
-- Niklaus Wirth
%
There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither.
-- Ramsey Clark
%
We are what we are and it's never enough.
-- Chris de Burgh
%
When you can't breathe through your nose, tomorrow seems strangely like the
 day before yesterday.
-- E. B. White
%
"My wife ran off with my best friend, and I miss him"
-- Stupid country song titles #12
%
Some must be great. Great offices will have
Great talents. And God gives to every man
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life, and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordain'd to fill.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book iv, The Winter Evening, Line 788
%
We that are in the vaward of our youth.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only
to extreme; To be sublimely great or to be nothing.
-- Southey
%
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection presents them to view.
-- Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842)
-- The Old Oaken Bucket
%
The grinders cease because they are few.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes xii, 3
%
    Union Electricians
Seventeen - One to give the bulb to the screw-inner. One to
screw in the bulb. One to hold him on the step ladder. Four to
hold the step ladder steady. One to flick the switch to test
the bulb. One to make sure that the other bulbs in the room
will need fixing. One to supervise. Two to take a coffee break,
one to eat lunch, and one to nap. One to plot the best way of
breaking into the apartment at night. One to drink gin n tonics
with the yuppies.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
One man's Mede is another man's Persian.
-- George S. Kaufman
%
:toolsmith: n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die
   specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s with which
   other programmers create applications.  Many hackers consider this
   more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see
   {uninteresting}.  Jon Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer
   Science" chapter of his book "More Programming Pearls",
   quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying "I'd rather write programs to
   write programs than write programs".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What is told in the ear of a man is often heard a hundred miles away.
-- Chinese Proverb
%
Honeymoon night was hot. She was moaning all night in ecstasy. Opening
 gifts: "An orange squeezer! Oh my God! A waffle maker!" Next morning the
 guy down the hall gave me the big thumbs-up. "Boy, you were using
 everything but the kitchen sink in there!"
-- Mike Binder
%
I wandered by the brookside,
  I wandered by the mill;
I could not hear the brook flow,
  The noisy wheel was still.
-- Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) (1809-1885)
-- The Brookside
%
The readiest and surest way to get rid of censure, is to correct
ourselves.
-- Demosthenes
%
Eva Goss was a woman given to uncanny intuitions. It was her contention,
 often expressed to Mr. Goss, that the female of the species had an occult
 sixth sense which a mere male did not possess. Some of her intimations of
 disaster bordered on the supernatural, as witness the occasion, some years
 ago, when she had urged Mr. Goss to turn back to the house as they were
 setting out for a drive, because she had a premonition she left her
 cigarette burning somewhere. Mr. Goss could not find her cigarette, but
 while he was looking for it he had laid his lighted cigar on the hall
 table, and the house had burned to the ground. Mrs. Goss could not have
 been more pleased.
-- Corey Ford
%
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending
their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to
buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.
-- Emile Henry Gauvreay
%
ICE
  What water becomes if you freeze it. (See "gas", "Celsius") The
  main uses of ice are to cool down drinks with, place down people's
  backs, and economical housing for Eskimos.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
For "ignorance is the mother of devotion," as all the world knows.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2
%
Nothing in life is "fun for the whole family."
-- Jerry Seinfeld
%
"Go to Hell!" or other insult direct is all the answer a snoopy question
deserves.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule
 for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-- Mark Twain
%
If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.
-- Ben Franklin
%
"Don't cut any wood baby, 'cause I'll be comin' home with a load"
-- Stupid country song titles #13
%
She has as much originality as a Xerox machine.
-- Laurence J. Peter.
%
No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no
sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one
another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the
remedy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than
when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often
by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in step and obey in silence
the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty
of the good citizen not to be silent.
-- Charles Eliot Norton, True Patriotism, 1898
%
He was an angry man, Uncle Swanny. He had printed on his grave: "What are
 you lookin' at?"
-- Margaret Smith
%
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own
world, which comes to the same thing).
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
-- The Myth of Sisyphus (1955)
%
REFERENDUM, n.  A law for submission of proposed legislation to a
popular vote to learn the nonsensus of public opinion.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
WEAKNESSES, n.pl.  Certain primal powers of Tyrant Woman wherewith she
holds dominion over the male of her species, binding him to the
service of her will and paralyzing his rebellious energies.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
12. I have seen the truth... and it makes absolutely no sense.
-- One of 21 Thoughts to Get You Through Almost Any Crisis
%
HYBRID, n.  A pooled issue.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
WOMAN:
An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and
having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
%
Albert:  I performed the autopsy on Jacques Renault.  Stomach contents re-
         vealed, let's see, beer cans, a Maryland license plate, half a bi-
         cycle tire, a goat, and a small wooden puppet.  Goes by the name of
         Pinocchio.
Cooper:  You're making a joke!
Albert:  I like to think of myself as one of the happy generations.
-- Agent Albert Rosenfield & Agent Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_
%
Whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
We have ways to make you scream.
-- Intel advertisement, in the June 1989 Doctor Dobbs Journal
%
Of manners gentle, of affections mild;
In wit a man, simplicity a child.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epitaph on Gay
%
A lady came up to me on the street and pointed to my suede jacket.
"You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered.  I replied
in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll
have to kill you too."
-- Jake Johansen
%
One who contends with immortals lives a very short life.
-- Homer, Book V of the Iliad
%
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens! how the style refines!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Criticism, Part ii, Line 220
%
My eyes are an ocean in which my dreams are reflected.
-- Anna M. Uhlich
%
When a girl ceases to blush,
she has lost the most powerful charm of her beauty.
-- Gregory I
%
It has beeen said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of
money is so quite as truly.
-- Samuel Butler
%
Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under
his roars.  Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a
brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron
tabernacles behind the railroad yards.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), writing of William Jennings Bryan,
-- counsel for the supporters of Tennessee's anti-evolution law
-- at the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in 1925
%
Laws were made to be broken.
-- Christopher North
%
LAWYER, n.  One skilled in circumvention of the law.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey
if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and
the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
-- Lyndon Johnson
%
Some people never learn anything because they understand everything
 too soon.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
%
The best advice I've ever received? How about the strangest? When I was
 thirteen, my father took me aside and told me that all a girl needed to
 know to get by in life was written on the top of a mayonnaise jar. I
 puzzled for days about the meaning of the phrase, "Refrigerate After
 Opening" until my father remarked that in his day mayo jars always said,
 "Keep Cool, Don't Freeze."
-- C. E. Crimmins
%
I've been scheduled for a karma transplant.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 6 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes
stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep,
poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight,
supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow shit, cheat
grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies--and then
leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he
loves the West.
-- Edward Abbey
%
BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
-- Seymour Papert
%
Virtue does not always demand a heavy sacrifice --
only the willingness to make it when necessary.
-- Frederick Dunn
%
An absence, the decline of a dinner invitation, an unintentional coldness,
 can accomplish more than all the cosmetics and beautiful dresses in the
 world.
-- Marcel Proust
%
MUMMY, n.  An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern
civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with
an excellent pigment.  He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the
vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower
animals.

    By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
    Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
    We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
    Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
    Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
    And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
    O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
    For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
                                                          Scopas Brune
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled
among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.  His
life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far
beyond yours.  Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to
find these words.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
%
To know yourself is the ultimate form of aggression.
-- Sigmund Freud
%
Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes
 on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists
 and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and
 not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a
 useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter.
 We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is
 second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little
 scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds
 if we felt like it.
-- Dave Barry
-- Stay Fit & Healthy Until You're Dead
%
The man that blushes is not quite a brute.
 - Night Thoughts, Night vii, Line 496
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time,
when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it
time well spent.
-- Montaigne
%
I went to San Francisco. I found someone's heart.
-- Steven Wright
%
... it is not through sin that he opposes God. The Devil's strategy for our
times is to make trivial human existence and to isolate us from one another
while creating the delusion that the reasons are time pressures, work demands,
or economic anxieties.
-- C. S. Lewis
%
    gully dwarves
Two. Not more than two.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light light bulb?
%
The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
The starting point of all individual achievement is the adoption of a
 definite purpose and a definite plan for its attainment.
-- Napoleon Hill
%
Veni, vidi, vici [I came, I saw, I conquered].
-- Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 B.C.)
%
A clown is a clown and will always be a clown.
-- Babbaluche the cobbler
%
All welfare and adversity that come to man and other creatures come
through the Seven and the Twelve.  Twelve signs of the Zodiac, as the
Religion says are the twelve commanders on the side of light; and the
seven planets are said to be the seven commanders on the side of
darkness.  And the seven planets oppress all creation and deliver it
over to death and all manner of evil: for the twelve signs of the Zodiac
and the seven planets rule the fate of the world.
-- The Menok i Xrat
%
She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book iii, Line 208
%
ARTHUR:    Be quiet!  I order you to shut up.
ARTHUR:    I am your king!
OLD WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
 
-- OLD WOMAN: Order, eh who does he think he is?
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
What are you looking at?
"I was considering the possibility that you are telling the truth...that
  you really are human."
It's the ghastly truth, Mr. Data. I can now stub my toe with the best
  of them.
"An irony. It means that you have achieved in disgrace, what I have always
  aspired to be."
-- Q and Data, "Deja Q", stardate 43539.1
%
Love taught him shame; and shame, with love at strife,
Soon taught the sweet civilities of life.
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- Cymon and Iphigenia, Line 133
%
There are more horses' backsides in the military service of the United
States than there are horses.
-- Robert J. Clark
%
The man who builds a factory builds a temple; the man who works there,
worships there.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
%
I am programmed in multiple pleasuring techniques.
-- Data
%
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
 won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead
 look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it
 reasonable?"
-- Richard Feyman's father
%
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
Out of the same substances one stomach will extract nourishment,
another poison; and so the same disappointments in life will chasten
and refine one man's spirit, and embitter another's.
-- William Matthews
%
To be willing to die for an ideal is to set a rather high price on
conjecture.
-- Oscar Wilde (?)
%
A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture.  You don't have to go.  You'll
 just be walking down the street, and...ooooohhhhhh, that's much better...
-- Steven Wright
%
LaForge: "You must have been one hell of a bartender."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't
even remember leaving open.
-- Rose Lane
%
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an englishman.
-- From "Jack and the beanstalk"
%
if you've ever given rat traps as gifts.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever
in amber, a more than royal tomb.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Historia Vitae et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent, i, Exper, 100
%
"A Hacker is any person who derives joy from
 discovering ways to circumvent limitations."
-- Bob Bickford, rab@well.sf.ca.us, 1986
%
"The language of politics is poetry, not prose.
 Jackson is poetry.  Cuomo is poetry.  Dukakis is a
 word processor."
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon
%
I don't see any archers.
-- Famous Last Words
%
How many, once lauded in song, are given over to the forgotten; and
how many who sung their praises are clean gone long ago!
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, vii, 6
%
person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the
power and is not easy.
-- Anybody can become angry that is easy; but to be angry with the right
-- right purpose, and in the right way that is not within everybody's
-- Aristotle
%
Sometimes luck isn't enough.
-- L. Luciano
%
Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not
the only one that deserves to be laughed at?
-- Grenville
%
If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular
tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- The Rivals, Act iii, Sc. 3
%
America! half-brother of the world!
With something good and bad of every land.
-- Philip James Bailey (1816-1902)
-- Festus, Scene, The Surface
%
You can't just walk into a store and buy a gun.  There's all sorts of
registration, there are all sorts of state laws.
                   for the Massachusetts furlough program. Quayle was soon
                   informed that indeed in many states a person could just
                   walk into a store and buy a gun.
                    in the NY Times, 8/27/88)
-- Senator Dan Quayle after criticizing Michael Dukakis
%
Data, how can you be programmed as a virtual encyclopedia of human
  information and not know a simple word like snoop?
Possibility: A kind of human behavior I was not designed to emulate.
-- Picard & Data, "Encounter at Farpoint,"  stardate 41153.7.
%
:killer micro: [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. A
   microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or
   supercomputer performance turf.  Often heard in "No one will
   survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the
   downsizers.  Used esp. of RISC architectures.

   The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is
   doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer
   Tomatoes" (one of the {canonical} examples of
   so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers).  This has even more flavor
   now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just
   individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively
   parallel computers).
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:demented: adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a
   program.  The connotation in this case is that the program works as
   designed, but the design is bad.  Said, for example, of a program
   that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages,
   implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse.  Compare
   {wonky}, {bozotic}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The perfect man is the true partner.  Not a bed partner nor a fun partner,
but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with [you] and possess that
quality of joy.
-- Erica Jong
%
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-- Woody Allen
%
Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all
boundaries.
-- Corita Kent
%
I saw a sign at a gas station.  It said "help wanted".  There was another sign
 below it that said "self service".  So I hired myself.  Then I made myself the
 boss.  I gave myself a raise.  I paid myself.  Then I quit.
-- Steven Wright
%
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
As if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
If you don't want your dog to have bad breath, do what I do:  Pour a little
Lavoris in the toilet.
-- Comedian Jay Leno
%
    To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind:
civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of
experience to a central humane system of thought.  The present
age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar
to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and
the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the
weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress,
which is usual in this barbaric age).
-- Robert Graves
%
War is the health of the State.
-- Proudhon (?)
%
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
It never was our guise
To slight the poor, or aught humane despise.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xiv, Line 65
%
Ignorance is king, many would not prosper by its abdication.
-- A Canticle for Leibowitz
%
'T is expectation makes a blessing dear;
Heaven were not heaven if we knew what it were.
-- Sir John Suckling (1609-1641)
-- Against Fruition
%
mean football parks.
-- When the lord said "Let the Earth Bring Forth Grass" He did not
%
Don't worry, it's only a five minute job!
-- Famous Last Words
%
All of life is a blur of Republicans and meat!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
A single idea, if it is right,
saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
-- Jacques Maritain
%
Courses even with the sun
Doth her mighty brother run.
-- Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
-- The Gipsies Metamorphosed
%
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the
baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
self-interest.  We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to
their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but
of their advantages.
-- Adam Smith
%
It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like
 stockbrokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.
-- Alexander Haig
%
Right, I'll do you for that!
-- The Black Knight
%
Ya can talk all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was!
No it aint!     But ya gotta know the territory!
-- Meredith Willson, The Music Man
%
ZANZIBARI, n.  An inhabitant of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, off the
eastern coast of Africa.  The Zanzibaris, a warlike people, are best
known in this country through a threatening diplomatic incident that
occurred a few years ago.  The American consul at the capital occupied
a dwelling that faced the sea, with a sandy beach between.  Greatly to
the scandal of this official's family, and against repeated
remonstrances of the official himself, the people of the city
persisted in using the beach for bathing.  One day a woman came down
to the edge of the water and was stooping to remove her attire (a pair
of sandals) when the consul, incensed beyond restraint, fired a charge
of bird-shot into the most conspicuous part of her person.
Unfortunately for the existing _entente cordiale_ between two great
nations, she was the Sultana.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 Mathematician: Shit happening is just a special case...
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
-- Socrates
%
Cat:            What is it?
Rimmer:         It's a rent in the space-time continuum.
Cat:            What is it?
Lister:         The stasis room freezes time, you know, makes time stand
                still.  So whenever you have a leak, it must preserve
                whatever it's leaked into, and it's leaked into this room.
Cat:            What is it?
Rimmer:         It's singularity, a point in the universe where the normal
                laws of space and time don't apply.
Cat:            What is it?
Lister:         It's a hole back into the past.
Cat:            Oh, a magic door!  Well, why didn't you say?
-- Red Dwarf - 'Stasis Leak'
%
:barfulous: /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj. (alt. `barfucious',
   /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf,
   if only for esthetic reasons.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
How shall we rank thee upon glory's page,
Thou more than soldier, and just less than sage?
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- To Thomas Hume
%
 Statistics are like lampposts: they are good to lean on, but
   they don't shed much light.
-- Storm P (Robert Storm-Petersen), 1882-1946, Danish black-and-white artist
%
The olive grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Regained, Book iv, Line 244
%
If you are going to throw a club, it is important to throw it ahead of you,
 down the fairway, so you don't have to waste energy going back to pick it
 up.
-- Tommy Bolt
%
Watermelon--it's a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.
-- Enrico Caruso
%
Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ix, Line 782
%
 (Klingon voice:)  ANSWERING MACHINE.  SPEAK.
-- Answering machine madness - brevity
%
Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
Optimism is an intellectual choice
-- Diana Schneider
%
I can jump dictionareys.
-- Dan Quayle
%
You don't want that last French fry, do you?
-- Famous Last Words
%
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
-- Mark Twain
%
Come into the garden, Maud,
  For the black bat, night, has flown;
Come into the garden, Maud,
  I am here at the gate alone.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Maud, Part i, Sect. xxii, Stanza 1
%
 :###) Jimmy Durante
-- SMILEY
%
Go get a real estate license.
-- Frank Zappa
%
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing
forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.  You are
avenged fourteen hundred and forty times a day.
-- Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Intellectual brilliance is no guarentee against being dead wrong.
-- David Fasold
%
Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
-- Gene Fowler
%
Q: "The Calamarian are not very hospitable creatures."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
To avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front of me, I struck the pedestrian.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
My plan: To chew some bubblegum and do some research, and we're all out
    of bubblegum.
-- Rajeev Pandey
%
Levity is the soul of wit.
-- Melville D. Landon. (Eli Perkins)
%
A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.
-- Heywood Hale Broun (1888-1939)
%
Money is the sincerest of all flattery.
-- Lazarus Long
%
aitch, are, ay, bee, cue, dee, double u, ee, ef, el, em, en, ess, ex,
eye, gee, jay, kay, oh, pea, see, tee, vee, why, you, zee
-- S. Harris, on the design of EBCDIC
%
Man who go to bed with sex problem wake up with solution in
hand.
-- Confucius Says
%
If you listen to the news, read the news, you'd think we were still
in a recession. Well, we're not in a recession. We've had growth;
people need to know that. They need to be more upbeat, more positive...
-- Vice President Dan Quayle in October 91
%
Sell your mountain-side chalet.  You never used it much anyway.
-- Forty-two things to do as preparation for life as a mermaid.
%
I know nothing.
-- Ken Thompson
%
The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of
 non-violence has been the organization of violence.
-- Joan Baez
%
Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and
drink the universe in a glass of rain.
-- Ihab Hassan
%
Can someone get this walking carpet out of my way?
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without
changing a single idea.
-- Robert Anton Wilson
%
MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way.
-- Henry Spencer
%
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
Two men look out from the same bars:
One sees the mud, and one sees the stars.
-- Frederick Langbridge
%
To marry the girl I did. And she gave me the advice.
-- General Mark Clark
%
if you consider "Outdoor Life" deep reading.
-- You may be redneck...
%
 Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
-- Pohl's Law
%
Anything is better than Julius.  I think that is why Ceasar got
assassinated. I took the name of Groucho because I always look solemn, I
guess.
-- Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
%
The most dangerous thing in the world is to leap a chasm in two jumps.
-- David Lloyd George
%
Frailty, thy name is woman!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Science is nothing but developed perception,
interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
-- George Santayana
%
Chitlins? That's pig intestines! That includes the lower tract. Ain't no
 food down in that area. Chitlins--I think somebody misspelled that word.
-- Bill Cosby
%
It seemed to me that, somehow, the blue jay was trying to communicate
with me. I would see him fly into the house across the way, pick up
the telephone, and dial.  My phone would ring, and it would be him,
but it was just this squawking and cheeping.  "What?! What?!" I would
yell back, but he never did speak English.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
These are bagpipes.  I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired
when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm.
Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound
achieved by the pig.
-- Alfred Hitchcock
%
[He was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked
like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
-- Mark Twain
%
For where 's the state beneath the firmament
That doth excel the bees for government?
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Fifth Day, Part i
%
One thing that's always available on a golf course is advice. If you play
 like I do, you think everybody knows something you don't know. If I see a
 bird fly over, I think he's going to tell me something.
-- Buddy Hackett
%
Sir, I beg you to reconsider.  If not for your sanity, you haven't even
considered the moral implications of your decision.  You will be joining
a society where you will be compelled to have sex with beautiful woman
twice daily, on demand.  Now, am I the only one here who finds that
just a little bit tacky? Well, quite clearly, I am.
-- Kryten in Red Dwarf 'Holoship'
%
 :) midget smiley
-- SMILEY
%
Chemistry is applied theology.
-- Augustus Stanley Owsley III
%
Diseases for Kisses (Hyperkarma):
 A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be
far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism in both camps.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #40
%
The morally unthinkable killing of children has not only become routine,
but it is increasing in the world's leading democracy. What will it take
for parents and religious, community and political leaders to stand up and
say enough?
-- Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund.
-- An article in The New York Times today stated that death by gunfire
-- is now the #2 cause of death among the young in America
%
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
And falls on the other.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 7
%
It is a luxury to be understood.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.
-- Vicomte de Chateaubriand
%
TOXIC CUSTARD WORKSHOP FILES
  Fictional alleged humour written during the early-1990s by some
  deranged git in Australia. Now known to cause permanent brain
  damage if consumed for long periods of time.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Virtue is its own reward.
-- Phyllis Schlafly
%
Riker: "O'Brien, take a nap.  You didn't see *any* of this, you're not
  involved."
O'Brien: "Right, sir.  If you need me, I'll be here in the corner, dozing off."
-- "Pen Pals", Stardate 42695.3
%
Men give women jewels when they have absolutely no idea what might
please them, and are not willing to take time to find out.
-- Sheri S. Tepper
%
Men have become tools of their tools.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
%
Here's a good gag if you go swimming in a swamp and when you com out you're all
 covered with leeches.  Just say, "Hey, has anybody seen my raisins?"  (Because
 leeches kind of look like big raisins.)
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
It is too dangerous, you must not go alone.
Hey, I'm your cha'DIch.
-- Worf and Picard, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2
%
    blondes
It depends how many blondes there are, but some people
prefer it with the lights off.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
ROLLERBLADING
  By far the most fashionable way to injure yourself at the moment.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
He that falls in love with himself, will have no rivals.
-- Ben Franklin
%
Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which
get you.  And all you can do is go where they can find you.
-- Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
%
They can because they think they can.
-- Virgil
%
I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than be a success at something
I hate.
-- George Burns
%
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions.  When they don't, it
is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
-- Jessamyn West
%
No amount of organization can counteract determined laziness.
-- Chris Hansen
%
What you think means more than anything else in your life. More than
what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position,
and more than what anyone else may think about you.
-- George Adams
%
You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you
really need.
-- Vernon Howard
%
The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where
millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
-- Edwin Arlington Robinson
%
We're the same.  We share the same history, the same heritage, the same
  lives.  We're tied together beyond any untying.  Man or woman, it makes
  no difference.  We're human.  We couldn't escape from each other even
  and what you are!  A bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without
  end.  And the only thing that's truly yours is the rest of humanity.
    That's where your duty lies!
-- if we wanted to that's how you do it, Lieutenant!  By remembering who
-- Kirk, "Who Mourns for Adonais?" stardate 3468.1.
%
 Do not speak ill of the dead.
       Pittacus,Solon, Thales) c. 650 - c. 550 BC
       Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. I, sec. 70
-- The Seven Sages (Bias, Chilon, Cleobulus, Periander,
-- From Diogenes Laertius,
%
"...the automated office is still in its infancy.  More IBM Selectric
typewriters are stolen in a year than word processing computers sold..."
-- A quote from 1988 SF Chronicle
%
I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked if I had any questions.
 I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the speed of light and
 you turn your headlights on, does anything happen?   He said he couldn't
 answer that.  I told him sorry, but I couldn't work for him then.
-- Steven Wright
%
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
-- Francis Scott Fitzgerald
%
The book above all others in the world which should be forbidden is a
 catalogue of forbidden books
-- Lichtenberg
%
This is the beginning of the end.
-- Talleyrand
%
Drink to me.
-- Last words of Pablo Picasso
%
Baby conceived in automatic car shiftless bastard.
-- Confucius Says
%
"I can see stopping a car for a dog.  But a cat?
 You squish a cat and go on.  I think we're overcomplicating life."
-- Iowa Democratic State Senator James Gallagher
%
Ships dim-discover'd dropping from the clouds.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Seasons, Summer, Line 946
%
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- Evangeline, Part i
%
Left Handed Screwdrivers.
-- Oxymoron
%
Smile, it is the key that fits the lock of everybody's heart.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
-- Ernest Hemingway
%
Reality is a sandwich I did not order.
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
...what I told you was true...from a certain point of view.
          -Ben Kenobi
-- ...understanding Marketing...
%
It's, it's, it's a Dalek Attack!
-- F. Mercury as a Whovian
%
It's a good thing you're cute Wesley, or you could really be obnoxious.
-- Oliana Mirren, "Coming of Age", stardate 41416.2
%
Think of ease, but work on.
-- English Proverb
%
Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another
successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
%
I bet it was pretty hard to pick up girls if you had the Black Death.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
McCoy: "How can you be deaf with *ears* like that?"
-- "STIII:TSFS", Stardate 8210.3
%
There seems no plan because it is all plan.
-- C. S. Lewis
%
Well you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a woman's man--no time to
 talk.
-- Barry Gibb
%
Thy steady temper, Portius,
Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar,
In the calm lights of mild philosophy.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
-- Cato, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the
eyes of the soul.
-- Ovid (43 B.C.- A.D. 17) born on Mar 20, Roman poet
%
There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what
 it's a plan for.
-- Fred Hoyle
%
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or
with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
-- Isaac Bashevis Singer
%
Self-abuse is the sincerest kind.
-- Solomon Short
%
It's like the old pie-in-the-face routine:   it stops being funny when it
        starts being you.
-- Stephen King, _The Stand_ (uncut)
%
    IBM staff
IBM staff don't change light bulbs - they add value to photon
emitter units.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
It were a journey like the path to heaven,
To help you find them.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 303
%
People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either
 one being made.
-- Sausage Principle
%
In fact, I don't think 7-11s even take coupons.I should check that out...
-- Bill Gates, 1992
%
TRICHINOSIS, n.  The pig's reply to proponents of porcophagy.
    Moses Mendlessohn having fallen ill sent for a Christian
physician, who at once diagnosed the philosopher's disorder as
trichinosis, but tactfully gave it another name.  "You need and
immediate change of diet," he said; "you must eat six ounces of pork
every other day."
touch it!"
    "Do you mean that?" the doctor gravely asked.
    "I swear it!"
-- "Pork?" shrieked the patient "pork?  Nothing shall induce me to
-- "Good! then I will undertake to cure you."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Take the folks at Coca-Cola.  For many years, they were content to sit
back and make the same old carbonated beverage.  It was a good
beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up
drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a
nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves
and the teacher says: Imagine what it does to your TEETH!    So
Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw
no need to improve ...
-- Dave Barry, In Search of Excellence
%
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe
what is proved.
-- Galileo Galilei
%
Step back and look at the big picture, you'll eventually realize that all
    the frustrations, stress, nailbiting and hairpulling was worth it.
-- Gordon Wong
%
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass.
 suggestion that all good Christians should be against Sandra Day O'Connor's
 nomination to the Supreme Court
-- Senator Barry Goldwater, when asked what he thought of Jerry Falwell's
%
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends
and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while
we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
-- Clarence S. Darrow (1857-1938)
%
MEANING
  When you say you're going to rip both my testicles from my groin
  and stuff them down my throat... what do you really mean by the
  word "groin"?
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Those who live closest arrive latest.
-- Law of Arrival
%
 :-, smirking
-- SMILEY
%
Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Lloyd
 Bentson today said that he would now return to his
 old job as the Grandfather Clock on the Captain
 Kangaroo show.
-- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update
%
If you like it, they don't have it in your size.
-- Hadley's Law of Clothing
%
PLAUDITS, n.  Coins with which the populace pays those who tickle and
devour it.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
About the only thing we have left that actually discriminates in favor
of the plain people is the stork.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
We now have kricket krap!
-- Sign at a garden shop
%
A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as
he can.
-- Moms Mabley
%
As the French say, there are three sexes,--men, women, and clergymen.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Lady Holland's Memoir, Vol. i, p. 262
%
Of the two classic certainties, death and taxes, death is preferable. At
 least you're not called in six months later for an audit.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
Mister Worf, show these children the airlock.
-- Picard
%
On Earth it is considered ill mannered to kill your friends
while committing suicide....
-- Avon
%
The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization
that built it.
-- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985
%
Any simple problem can be made insoluble if
enough meetings are held to discuss it.
-- Mitchell's Law of Committees
%
A watched telephone never rings.
-- The Ring Rule
%
:computer geek: n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living.  One
   who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers:
   an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the
   personality of a cheese grater.  Cannot be used by outsiders
   without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage
   of `nigger'.  A computer geek may be either a fundamentally
   clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}.  Also
   called `turbo nerd', `turbo geek'.  See also {propeller head},
   {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal
   junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.
-- Quintilian (42-118 AD)
-- Institutiones Oratoriae, i, x, 7, 21
%
When faced with a problem, some people say 'Let's use AWK.'   Now they
have two problems.
-- Zalman Stern
%
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), "Life", 1950
%
He who builds according to every man's advice
will have a crooked house.
-- Danish proverb
%
LaForge: "Then again, you could've been built just for this ship."
Data: "I have considered that possibility as well.  It may also be
the case that  every starship in the Federation is equipped with an
artificial lifeform such  as myself." LaForge: "Hmm.  If that's true,
maybe you all look alike.  A standard-issue  android, hard to construct,
so only one allowed per vessel." Data: "Hmm."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
A proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
Artoo, it worked!  I knew you could do it!
-- C3P0 (Star Wars)
%
In 1962, you could buy a pair of SHARKSKIN SLACKS, with a
 ``Continental Belt,'' for $10.99!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
It's the worst plan since Abraham Lincoln said, 'Oh, I'm tired of
  kicking around the house tonight. Let's go take in a show.'
-- Edmund : Major Star
%
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are
 composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
-- Mark Russell
%
America's best buy for a nickel is a telephone call to the right man.
-- Ilka Chase
%
And brought of mighty ale a large quart.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- The Milleres Tale, Line 3497
%
         3842.2.
-- ... motivations of passion or gain those are reasons for murder.
-- Shras, the Andorian Ambassador, "Journey to Babel," stardate
%
Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia
because they were liars.  The truth was that Plato knew philosophers
couldn't compete successfully with poets.
                    Shell
-- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) Venus on the Half
%
America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
%
I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
-- Remark to Francoise Gilot, 1946
%
if you've ever used lard in bed.
-- You may be redneck...
%
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody.
 Now I see that I should have been more specific.
-- Jane Wagner, _The Search For Intelligent Life In The Universe_
-- [Performed by Lily Tomlin]
%
No blessed leisure for love or hope,
  But only time for grief.
-- Thomas Hood (1798-1845)
-- The Song of the Shirt
%
    Republican Presidential candidates from 1988
(DuPont) Light bulbs need to be changed? Gosh. I guess
the servants have always taken care of that... With a
DuPont administration, the power of the free market will
be unleashed to produce light bulbs that never need
changing.
-- How many
-- did it take to change a light bulb?
%
ALL NEW ............ The software is not compatible with previous versions
-- computer terms as seen from a Marketing point of view
%
There is no such thing as inner peace;  there is only nervousness or death.
Any attempt to prove otherwise is a breach of manners.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
:incantation: n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that
   one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result.  Not used
   of passwords or other explicit security features.  Especially used
   of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned
   from a {wizard}.  "This compiler normally locates initialized
   data in the data segment, but if you {mutter} the right
   incantation they will be forced into text space."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,--
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Taming of the Shrew
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
A woman well bred and taught, furnished with the additional accomplisments of
knowledge and behavior, is a creature without comparison.
-- Daniel DeFoe
%
Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says,
is lost to us by incredulity.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Coriolanus
%
People in distress never think you feel enough.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784
%
The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed,
by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
%
True worship is a daily act of humbling yourself before your deity and
offering a pure heart and holy words.
-- Deng Ming-Dao
%
Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
%
It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place
have an undoubted title to the first.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Tale of a Tub, Dedication
%
Et tu, Brute!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
I filled out an application that said, "In Case Of Emergency Notify".
 I wrote "Doctor" ... What's my mother going to do?
-- Steven Wright
%
And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and
fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it
looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own.  One
approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin
is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then
of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides
gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode.  So this
procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom
youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and
Orson Welles.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
%
Change is not progress.
-- H.L. Mencken
%
Forsake not an old friend, for the new is not comparable unto him.
A new friend is as new wine: when it is old thou shalt drink it with
pleasure.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiasticus ix, 10
%
  it is only because we have no choice.
-- Our missions are peaceful not for conquest.  When we do battle,
-- Kirk, "The Squire of Gothos," stardate 2124.5.
%
A mental midget.
-- Moe Howard
%
(1) Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
(2) Any given program costs more and takes longer.
(3) If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
(4) If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
(5) Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
(6) The value of a program is porportional to the
    weight of its output.
(7) Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the
    programmer who must maintain it.
(8) Make it possible for programmers to write programs in
    English, and you will find that programmers cannot write
    in English.
-- Laws of Computer Programming
-- SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2
%
Now you're assimilating with POWER!
-- Nintendo of Borg
%
Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xxxvii, 37
%
If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions. If there were no
 questions, there would be no lies.
-- B. Traven
%
Fate - Protects fools, little children and ships named "Enterprise."
-- Riker "Contagion," stardate 42609.1.
%
It is probably true that the UNIX operating system has extensive
 documentation since most things are written down somewhere.
-- McGilton and Morgan
%
The sooner all the animals are dead, the sooner we'll find their
money.
-- Ed Bluestone, The National Lampoon
%
   (1) You can't win.
   (2) You can't break even.
   (3) You can't even quit the game.

Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful
is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's Theorem. To wit:

   (1) Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
   (2) Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
   (3) Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
-- Ginsberg's Theorem
-- Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem
%
A waist is a terrible thing to mind.
-- Solomon Short
%
:wallpaper: n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly
   listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of
   all or part of a login session.  (The idea was that the paper for
   such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced
   at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.)  Now rare,
   esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g.,
   PHOTO on TWENEX).  However, the UNIX world doesn't have an
   equivalent term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there.
   The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin
   and end transcript files were `:WALBEG' and `:WALEND',
   with default file `WALL PAPER' (the space was a path
   delimiter).  2. The background pattern used on graphical
   workstations (this is techspeak under the `Windows' graphical user
   interface to MS-DOS).  3. `wallpaper file' n. The file that
   contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on
   paper.  (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy
   of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things
familiar, and familiar things new.
-- Johnson
%
No clap of thunder in a fair frosty day could more astonish the world
than our declaration of war against Holland in 1672.
-- Sir William Temple (1628-1699)
-- Memoirs, Vol. ii, p. 255
%
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving
his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental
attitude.
-- W. W. Zeige
%
In practical life, the woman is judged by man's law,
as if she were a man, not a woman.
-- Henrik Ibsen
%
Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iii, Line 37
%
Personal Tabu:
 A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that
allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or
religious dictums.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
    bluegrass musicians
It doesn't matter because the banjo player is gonna' change
it again anyway after everybody else is done.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
stance: pose struck by a climber when an appreciative audience is watching.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
The $1.98 funeral--naturally that's not an elaborate ceremony. In fact,
 they don't bury you for that. They put you in a plain brown envelope and
 mail you out of town. For an extra fifty cents they'll have the postal
 clerks hum a hymn as you go through the cancellation.
-- Pat Buttram
%
:hello, world: interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the
   C/UNIX universe.  2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this
   message.  Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to
   write in a new environment is one that just prints "hello, world"
   to standard output (and indeed it is the first example program
   in {K&R}).  Environments that generate an unreasonably large
   executable for this trivial test or which require a {hairy}
   compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to
   {lose} (see {X}).  3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an
   entrance or requesting information from anyone present.  "Hello,
   world!  Is the {VAX} back up yet?"
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Spock: "Gas.  Gas, Captain.  Under impulse power she expends fuel
like any other
  vessel.  We call it 'plasma'.  But whatever the Klingon designation is it is
  merely ionized gas."
Uhura: "Well what about all that equipment we're carrying to catalog gaseous
  anomalies?  Well the thing's got to have a tailpipe."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
>consult guide about Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up
with the following entry:
The best drink in existence; somewhat like having your brains smashed out
by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Far away, across the fields, the tolling of the iron bell
draws the faithful to their knees, with its softly spoken magic spell
-- Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
%
Character is made by what you stand for; reputation, by what you fall for.
-- Robert Quillen
%
 (Jimmy Buffett's "This Hotel Room:")  I ain't home, I ain't
 home, you better leave a message 'cause I ain't home.
-- Answering machine madness - mainly musical theme
%
Troi: "Spare me the inspirational anecdote."
-- "The Loss", Stardate unknown
%
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The
sun is but a morning star.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
%
Persevering mediocrity is much more respectable, and unspeakably
more useful than talented inconstancy.
-- Dr. James Hamilton
%
On the other hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of
two cubes or a fourth power to be written as a sum of two fourth powers
or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the
second to be written as a sum of two like powers.  I have a truly
marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too
narrow to contain.
-- Fermat
-- Fermat's Last Theorem, by Harold Edwards
%
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that
 you would lie if you were in his place.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Well, you know, it sounds like they've got their own nuts on an anvil and
 they're hammering away at them.
-- Dave Crocker
%
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin
As self-neglecting.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
But Beeblebrox you know, he is one of my most profitable clients.  He has
personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.

Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Keeping proprietary and confidential information secret is the key to moving
 the computer industry into the 21st century.
-- Letter from Apple Computer and Rasterops to the Macintosh user community
%
This cordial julep here,
That flames and dances in his crystal bounds.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Comus, Line 672
%
Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Beppo, Stanza 45
%
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
 were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
 opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability
 to function.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
%
The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.
-- David Paranka
%
Eyesburg Lettuce.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.
-- Aristotle
%
Love is a form of temporary insanity curable only by marriage.
-- The Psychological Prognosis
%
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 23
%
Be honest with yourself until the end of your life. Then listen to the slow
 movement of the Schubert Quintet and kick the bucket.
-- Nathan Milstein
%
When the wind blows, worship its roar.
-- Pythagoras
%
You don't have to suffer to be a poet.
Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
-- John Ciardi
%
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 16
%
The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of
 course you never do.
-- Gregory Bateson
%
"Lampshade Love"

    Oh Lampshade! How you soften light.
   Protecting my eyes from blinding light.
       You shift the light on this and that.
 At parties you double as a hat.
       Oh Lampshade! It's so clearly true,
   That I am devoted so much to you.
-- Ravenous Tenebrosity
%
 (Automatic gunfire, explosions, rockets, jets; agitated voice:)
 I'm pinned down and can't come to the phone right now, and Bob's
 handling supporting fire!  Leave your name and number, and a
 message!  We'll get back to you as soon...  FIRE IN THE HOLE!
 (BOOM!)  We'll get back to you as soon as the air cover napalms
 the place!
-- Answering machine madness - can't answer right now because...
%
 and last month in advance.
-- You could get a new lease on life if only you didn't need the first
%
    netters
2, 1 to do it and 1 to read this huge file first to
check it hasn't been done already!
-- How many
-- does it take to submit a light bulb joke?
%
Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness;
however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness
as Roo.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
%
An arrant traitor as any is in the universal world, or in France,
or in England!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry V
-- Act iv, Sc. 8
%
Who loves me well, loves my dog also.
-- Proverb
%
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the
pen is very sharp.
-- P. Terry
%
The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may
not be made to understand it.
-- Confucius
%
Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes
of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic"
%
A car is just a big purse on wheels.
-- Johanna Reynolds
%
You're Extremely Weird, Sir
-- Marcie, Peanuts.
%
Our swords shall play the orators for us.
-- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
%
Aim at the sun, any you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far
higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself.
-- Joel Hawes
%
When it's dark enough you can see the stars.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
My parents used to send me to spend summers with my grandparents. I hate
 cemeteries!
-- Chris Fonseca
%
Somewhere in Tenafly, New Jersey, a chiropractor is viewing
 ``Leave it to Beaver''!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Caroline! I never knew you knew her!
Oh yes! I even touched her once.
...Touched her what?
Her...once. In a corridor.
I've never heard it called _that_ before.
-- Edmund and Percy : Potato
%
Haste maketh waste.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. ii
%
Top executives cannot afford to be isolated from the people below, who
are in better touch with what is going on, and cannot afford to set
unrealistic goals.
-- Charles Burck
%
    gun control advocates
Let the police do it - private citizens can't be trusted
with light bulbs !
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
While the people try to determine what the candidate stands for,
he candidate tries to determine what the people will stand for.
-- Zabel's Political Observation
%
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
%
Two drunks sitting at the bar. One drunk says, "Hey, did you hear about the
 new ice cubes with the hole in the middle?" The other drunk says, "Whaddya
 mean hear about 'em? I married one!"
-- Hap Happy
%
Spock: "It is no concern of *Starfleet*."
Picard: "On the contrary, it is very much Starfleet's concern.  You're in a
  position to compromise the security of the Federation."
Spock: "You may assure your superiors, Captain, that I am here on a personal
  mission of peace, and *I* will advise Starfleet when it is appropriate."
Picard: "That is not satisfactory."
Spock: "You cannot remain here, Captain Picard."
Picard: "And I will not return without a full explanation."
-- "Unification II", Stardate Unknown
%
       We're knights of the Round Table
       Our shows are formidable
       But many times
       We're given rhymes
       That are quite unsingable
       We're opera mad in Camelot
       We sing from the diaphragm a lot.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
:four-color glossies: 1. Literature created by {marketroid}s
   that allegedly contains technical specs but which is in fact as
   superficial as possible without being totally {content-free}.
   "Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals."
   Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the
   material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white.
   Four-color-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a
   problem.  2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't
   contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't
   produce the expected or desired output.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 0-) Cyclops
-- SMILEY
%
Nitwit ideas are for emergencies.  You use them when you've got nothing else
to try.  If they work, they go in the Book.  Otherwise you follow the Book,
which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.
-- Larry Niven, "The Mote in God's Eye"
%
Our conscience is our spirit's natural response to thorns, thistles,
and briars.
-- James E. Foust
%
RIBROASTER, n.  Censorious language by oneself concerning another.
The word is of classical refinement, and is even said to have been
used in a fable by Georgius Coadjutor, one of the most fastidious
founder of the Fastidiotic School.
-- writers of the fifteenth century commonly, indeed, regarded as the
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The more you judge, the less you love.
-- Honore de Balzac
%
INJURY, n.  An offense next in degree of enormity to a slight.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
 ) Cheshire cat
-- SMILEY
%
"Curse these personal computers!" cried the novice in anger, "To make them do
anything I must use three or even four editing programs.  This is truly
intolerable!"
The master programmer stared at the novice.  "And what would you do to remedy
this state of affairs?" he asked.
The novice thought for a moment.  "I will design a new editing program," he
said, "a program that will replace all these others."
Suddenly the master struck the novice on the side of his head.
"What did you do that for?" exclaimed the surprised novice.
"I have no wish to learn another editing program," said the master.
And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
-- The Zen of Programming
%
If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends let others excel you.
-- Colton
%
"And what's this fish doing in my ear?
        Arthur Dent.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
"What's hard is simple,
 What's natural, comes hard.

 Maybe you could show me,
 How to let go,
     Lower my guard,
 Learn to be....free.

 Maybe if you whistle...
 Whistle for me."
-- Stephen Sondheim, ANYONE CAN WHISTLE
%
..  my NOSE is NUMB!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
The American people aren't interested in details.
-- Lyn Nofziger
%
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John
-- Act v, Sc. 7
%
 8-O took too many nodoz to work on thesis
-- SMILEY
%
Where Nature's end of language is declin'd,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
-- Love of Fame, Satire ii, Line 207
%
:quad: n. 1. Two bits; syn. for {quarter}, {crumb},
   {tayste}.  2. A four-pack of anything (compare {hex}, sense 2).
   3. The rectangle or box glyph used in the APL language for various
   arcane purposes mostly related to I/O.  Former Ivy-Leaguers and
   Oxford types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories of
   dear old University.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Whoever said getting there was half the fun never rode in a Class VIII probe.
-- K'Ehleyr, "The Emissary", stardate 42901.3
%
    There are as many styles of magic as there are magicians. While much of
magic is gaudy, noisy, and easily appreciated by the masses, it goes without
saying that some of the finest sorcery is also the most subtle; small, delicate
changes in the fabric of being that often can only be discerned by another
wizard's practiced eye. Occasionally, even a wizard as learned as myself will
experience a twinge of regret that I have not yet conquered some of the most
delicate aspects of my art; that, for example, I have not learned the Eastern
finger magic, where, by the turn of a knuckle, the mage may make the flowers
sing. And perhaps some day my fingers might learn that art, on the day they
become tired from constantly carrying about the large amounts of gold I receive
for performing the more gaudy and noisy magic that pays so well.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VII
%
The Golden Rule is of no use to you whatever unless you realize it is
your move.
-- Frank Crane
%
They should put expiration dates on clothes so we would know when
they go out of style.
-- Garry Shandling
%
We have killed more people celebrating Independence Day than we lost
 fighting for it.
-- Will Rogers
%
You cannot see the wood for the trees.
-- John Heywood
%
Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the
most important decisions a teenager can make.
-- Heathers (Pauline Flaming)
%
It is almost sure death to eat cucumbers and drink milk at the same meal.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
-- John Muir
%
I saw and loved.
-- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
-- Memoirs, Vol. i, p. 106
%
If my film makes one more person miserable, I've done my job.
-- Woody Allen
%
It is sometimes expedient to forget who we are.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 233
%
Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a
young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
-- Mark Twain
%
Just a little pin prick...
-- Pink Floyd
%
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it
should end there.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
%
I hope you understand this because I don't...
-- Dr. Andrew P. Paplinski, Microprocessor Applications lecture
%
Judging from their laughter, the children at school found my remarks
  humorous. So without understanding humor, I have somehow mastered it.
-- Lal to Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
self-reliance, self-control, and courage. This is achieved through the
application of mental stress, physical rigor, minute regulation of behavior,
pressures, hazards and psychological bonding.
-- We teach what are called the vigorous virtues determination,
%
 :-)8 man with bowtie
-- SMILEY
%
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say
 something pretty damn quick.
-- Moss Hart
%
When all else fails, read the instructions!
-- Cahn's Axiom
%
14. If you think that there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.
-- One of 21 Thoughts to Get You Through Almost Any Crisis
%
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
-- Albert Camus
%
Dan Quayle had a trip planned to Beijing, but was worried because of
the turmoil at that end. His security adviser however informed him that
it was pretty safe for D. Q. as, 'They are only harassing intellectuals.'
And the President put his hand on my shoulder and said: 'Dan,
I _knew_ Spiro Agnew.  He was a friend of mine.  And Dan...
You're no Spiro Agnew!'
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
<*>{}<*>        The only reason you remember your name        <*>{}<*>
 <*>{}<*>        is because everybody keeps yelling at you.    <*>{}<*>
-- AH
%
Sometimes, where a complex problem can be illuminated by many tools,
one can be forgiven for applying the one he knows best.
-- Robert Machol
%
Melt and dispel, ye spectre-doubts, that roll
Cimmerian darkness o'er the parting soul!
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 263
%
The nice thing about dying is that once you've gotten it over with, you can
stop being afraid of it.
-- Solomon Short
%
Those who hesitate under fire usually do not end up KIA or WIA.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #46
%
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
-- Thomas Dunn English
%
Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell
profitable with advertising.
-- Albert Lasker
%
Women are more easily and more deeply terrified ... generating more
sheer horror than the male of the species.
-- Spock, "Wolf in the Fold", stardate 3615.4
%
In an evolving man-machine system, the man will get dumber faster
than the machine gets smarter.
-- by Scott Guthery, SEN Jan 87, p. 20
%
ARREST, v.t.  Formally to detain one accused of unusualness.

    God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.
                                            _The Unauthorized Version_
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.
-- Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
-- Gebir, Book i, (1798)
%
Whenever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.
-- Heinrich Heine
%
"No beer?  I think that comes under 'sick and in pain.'"
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
We are on the verge: Today our program proved
 Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%
All the world's a VAX,
And all the coders merely butchers;
They have their exits and their entrails;
And one int in his time plays many widths,
His sizeof being N bytes.  At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the Regent's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his Sun,
And shining morning face, creeping like slug
Unwillingly to school.
-- A Very Annoyed PDP-11
%
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Bite the hand that won't feed you fast enough.
-- Cat Rule #2
%
What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
  heart and mind so empty that we cannot fill them with love and warmth
-- To all mankind may we never find space so vast, planets so cold,
-- Garth, "Dagger of the Mind," stardate 2715.2.
%
It is a maxim universally agreed upon in agriculture, that nothing
must be done too late; and again, that everything must be done at
its proper season; while there is a third precept which reminds us
that opportunities lost can never be regained.
-- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD)
-- Natural History, Book xviii, Sect. 44
%
Men just don't seem to jump off the bridge for big reasons;
they usually do so for little ones.
-- W.H. Ferry
%
Plastic glasses?
-- Oxymoron
%
Please spare us all the attempts to get everyone to shorten their
 emotional bandwidth on-line until everyone sounds like a sober
 philosophy major calmly discussing the merits of post neo-realism
 as reflected in modernistic Danish furniture.
-- Chris Neckalson (chrisn@sco.com)
%
RABBLE, n.  In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority
tempered by fraudulent elections.  The rabble is like the sacred
nothing.  (The word is Aristocratese, and has no exact equivalent in
our tongue, but means, as nearly as may be, "soaring swine.")
-- Simurgh, of Arabian fable omnipotent on condition that it do
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them.
-- New Testament
-- Matthew vi, 1
%
I went down to the drugstore and ate a chicken saled sandwhich
and drank some coffee. The coffee was overstrained and the sandwhich
was as full of rich flavour as a piece torn off an old shirt.
Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a
couple of toothpicks and has a lettuce sticking out of its sides,
preferably a little wilted.
-- Raymond Chandler
%
Have a very good reason for everything you do.
-- Laurence Olivier
%
One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody
everything every night before you go to bed.
-- Ann Landers
%
Scott: "What've you done with the duotronic enhancers?"
LaForge: "Well, those were *replaced* with isolinear chips about forty years
  ago.  A lot more efficient now.  Oh, that's an EPS power tap there!"
Scott: "Ahh."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
NEGRO, n.  The _piece de resistance_ in the American political
problem.  Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to
build their equation thus:  "Let n = the white man."  This, however,
appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Elegance and truth are inversely related.
-- Becker's Razor
%
Now there is fame! Of all-hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the
public-fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the
artist. It is sad. It is true.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
-- Quoted in David Douglas Duncan, Picasso's Picassos (1961)
%
If Alien was my friend, I'd like to be with him when he went to the dentist.
 When they started drilling, he'd probably go nuts and start eating everybody.
 That Alien!
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
What maintains one vice, would bring up two children. Remember, many
a little makes a mickle; and farther, beware of little expenses;
a small leak will sink a great ship.
-- Benjamin Franklin
%
Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket,
a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.  What have we to offer in exchange?
Uncertainty!  Insecurity!
-- Isaac Asimov
%
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity,
try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or
to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without
choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove
the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic,
skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story,
who snarls that the freedom of man's mind was needed to create an
industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given
an arrowhead and a bearskin, not a university chair of economics.
-- any concept derived from it let the anthropoid who does not choose
-- nouns, adjectives, or verbs let the witch doctor who does not
-- it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception let
-- try to prove it without logic let the pygmy who proclaims that a
-- yank the base from under his building, not yours let the cannibal
-- John Galt
%
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of
his own works.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book i, Chap. iv
%
Never mistake motion for action.
-- Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961)
%
We certainly have a right to exercise control over our own bodies.
You'll get no argument from me.
-- Riker and Dr. Pulaski, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
Kirk: "And who do we have here?"
Preston: "Midshipman First Class Peter Preston, engineer's mate, *sir*!"
Kirk: "First training voyage, Mister Preston?"
Preston: "Yes, *sir*!"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Under consideration: We never heard of it.
-- Kelvin Throop III, The Management Dictionary
%
Bus stop rat bag: hah, hah!   Charade you are...
-- Pink Floyd
%
We hold these truths to be self-evident,--that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
-- Declaration of Independence
%
Smiles from reason flow,
To brute deny'd, and are of love the food.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ix, Line 239
%
The pitcher wound up and he flang the ball at the batter.  The batter
swang and missed.  The pitcher flang the ball again and this time the
batter connected.  He hit a high fly right to the center fielder.  The
center fielder was all set to catch the ball, but at the last minute
his eyes were blound by the sun and he dropped it.
-- Dizzy Dean
%
Your butt is mine.
-- Michael Jackson, Bad
%
'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there 's no place like home;
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere.

An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gayly, that came at my call,
Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.
-- J. Howard Payne (1792-1852)
-- Home, Sweet Home. (From the opera of "Clari, the Maid of Milan")
%
Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places
and does not cure or even diminish it.
-- Mark Twain
%
:YABA: /ya'b*/ [Cambridge] n. Yet Another Bloody Acronym.
   Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests
   that it be given a name that is acronymic.  The response from those
   with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the
   proposed name would then be `YABA-compatible'.  Also used in
   response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?"  See also
   {TLA}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?
-- Fred Allen
%

-- Your If is the only peace-maker much virtue in If.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician.
 We need more statesmen.
-- Bob Edwards
%
I have to knit some dust bunnies for a charity bazaar.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 86 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
-- Truman Capote
%
Never stop learning; knowledge doubles every fourteen months.
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book
%
Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.
-- Dean William R. Inge
%
The meek shall inherit the Earth.
-- Psalms 37:11
%
That 's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Home-Thoughts from Abroad, ii
%
Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all.
-- Lord Balfour's Contention
%
Omissions, no less than commissions, are often times branches of injustice.
-- Antoninus
%
To Greece we give our shining blades.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Evenings in Greece, First Evening
%
Fear is the lock and laughter the key to your heart.
-- Steven Stills
%
You have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to
examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man.  His
negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence; and his
positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love,
tenderness.  And what is it that makes one man an exceptional leader?
We see here indications that it is his negative side which makes him
disciplined, is vital to his strength.Your negative side, removed
from you, the power of command begins to elude you.
-- strong that his evil side, if you will, properly controlled and
-- Spock, "The Enemy Within," stardate 1673.1
%
Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),
Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;
Who loving novels, full of affectation,
Receive the manners of each other nation.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Day
%
I was ne'er so thrummed since I was a gentleman.
-- Thomas Dekker (1572-1632)
-- The Honest Whore, Part i, Act iv, Sc. 2
%
Be quick, but never hurry.
-- John Wooden
%
Down with everything that's up.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge
%
Could we forbear dispute and practise love,
We should agree as angels do above.
-- Edmund Waller (1605-1687)
-- Divine Love, Canto iii
%

-- A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down And won.
-- John Prine
%
  OSBORNE THE WEIRD (1621-1664)
    St Osborne could be seen running around the streets of Naples
    wearing nothing more than a tea cosy. Which is a pretty good
    reason for being known as weird. He would often be heard
    squawking, saying what he claimed were the prayers that bears
    uttered, and smoking a strange weed-like substance. Which are
    several more reasons for being known as weird.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
 @:-) Indian (East)
-- SMILEY
%
I promised to help a friend fold road maps.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 70 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
Space travel is utter bilge.
-- A British government official in the thirties.
%
 :-> happy
-- SMILEY
%
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
That's not a Beholder.  It's a Spectator.
-- Famous Last Words
%
        Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the
month.  According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people
are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China.
   The words Coca-Cola translate into Chinese as either
(depending on the inflection) wax-fattened mare or bite the wax
tadpole.
 Bite the wax tadpole.
 There is a sort of rough justice, is there not?
             The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's
hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to
but broad satiric vistas do not open up.
-- bite a wax tadpole.  Coke it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad,
-- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle
%
:fat electrons: n. Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the
   causation of computer glitches.  Your typical electric utility
   draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of
   coil taps located near the top of the dynamo.  When the normal tap
   brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use
   special auxiliary taps on the *bottom* of the coil.  Now,
   this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary
   or `thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy electrons that are
   heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator.  These flow
   down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp
   corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck.
   This is what causes computer glitches.  [Fascinating.  Obviously,
   Compare {bogon}, {magic smoke}.
-- fat electrons must gain mass by {bogon} absorption -ESR]
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you
find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you
is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people
looking at it.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
%
if you have to mow your driveway.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Sir Thomas Moore, for instance, burned alive for refusing to recant
  his Catholicism, must have been kicking himself as the flames
  licked higher, that it never occured to him to say, 'I recant
  my Catholicism'.
-- Edmund : Ink and Incapability
%
I imagine you've guessed by now that these big
 explosion panels are nothing more than an obvious
 method of *greatly* reducing my penciling time.
-- Ty Templeton footnotes how he Draws Comics. From Stig's Inferno
%
Beverly: "I couldn't even *guess* at your I.Q. level now."
Barclay: "Probably somewhere between twelve-hundred and fourteen-fifty."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than
 too much liberty, (or libertinism).
-- Ben Franklin
%
I ... reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has
 nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the
 universe in which we live.   Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the
 universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist.
       Vol. XVII, No. 1 (Winter 1983), pg. 12
-- physicist Ralph Alpher, Theology of the Big Bang, Religious Humanism,
%
Neither rhyme nor reason.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Together we aspire. Together we achieve.
-- Eric E. Williams
%
Bizoos, n.:
   The millions of tiny individual bumps that make up a
basketball.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%
 Physicist (Theoretical):
                 Shit SHOULD happen.
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn'd.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book ii, The Timepiece, Line 29
%
Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.
-- Emerson
%
Plato was continually saying to Xenocrates, "Sacrifice to the Graces."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Xenocrates, iii
%
They died, as if o'ercome by sleep.
-- Hesiod (c. 700 BC)
-- Works and Days, Line 116
%
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.
-- Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love"
%
"Now we are going to set this pile of evil ablaze.  But remember, because
these are children's toys, the fire will spread quite rapidly.       So, please
stand back and try not to inhale the toxic fumes."
-- Minister in "Krusty Gets Busted", from The Simpsons
%
Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (Earl Beaconsfield) (1805-1881)
-- On Import Duties, April 25, 1843
%
One foot in the grave.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- The Little French Lawyer, Act i, Sc. 1
%
Marriage is when you get to keep your girl and don't have to give her
back to her parents
-- What Exactly is marriage??
-- Eric, AGE 6
%
The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.
-- Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, 'The Life of Samuel Johnson'
%
Remember what Simonides said,--that he never repented that he had
held his tongue, but often that he had spoken.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Rules for the Preservation of Health, 7
%
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it
is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
-- David Friedman
%
I am become death, shatterer of worlds.
-- Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavadgita,
-- after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion)
%
What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.
-- Will Rogers
%
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
-- Gail Godwin
%
Facts are stupid things.
-- President Ronald Reagan
-- (a blooper from his speech at the '88 GOP convention)
%
Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct
order in the state....the end of the social compact is
defeated... No free government was ever founded, or ever
preserved its liberty without uniting the characters of the
citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the
state...Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the
freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to
preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as
freemen.
-- Richard Henry Lee
%
It is better to copulate than never.
-- Lazarus Long
%
A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself
and then says them about other people.
-- Peter McArthur
%
I'm rich and you aren't, so there!
-- J. Pierpont Flathead, Bank of Zork
%
Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in.
 It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.  A product
is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money,
as manufacturers typically believe.  This is incompetence.  Customers
pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value.  Nothing
else constitutes quality.
-- Peter Drucker
%
I'm as doomed as doomed can be!
-- Ed Grimley The one and only Ed Grimley, aka Martin Short
%
I weep for the future.
-- Maitre d' of Chez Luis
%
Cover me. I'm changing lanes.
-- Bumper sticker
%
 - Helen Keller
-- SMILEY
%
Two wrongs make a right in discrimination.
-- Liberal Rule #33
%
    managers
Three.  One to get the bulb and two to get the phone number
to dial one of their subordinates to actually change it.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self was
enough.
-- E.M. Cioran
%
"The ballet opens at a carnival. There are
 refreshments and rides. Many people in gaily
 colored costumes dance and laugh, to the
 accompaniment of flutes and woodwinds, while the
 trombones play in a minor key to suggest that soon
 the refreshments will run out and everybody will
 be dead."
-- Woody Allen
%
The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the
sense, the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever
since is the illumination of the spirit.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
Bowels of compassion.
-- New Testament
-- 1 John iii, 17
%
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters
of their thoughts.
-- John Locke
%
    feminists
Two. One to threaten that as a mother, she will be
unable to provide her children light without federal
assistance; and a N.O.W. attorney to ask the Justice
Department to sue GE for allowing the bulb to go out in
the first place.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
IN'ARDS, n.  The stomach, heart, soul and other bowels.  Many eminent
investigators do not class the soul as an in'ard, but that acute
observer and renowned authority, Dr. Gunsaulus, is persuaded that the
mysterious organ known as the spleen is nothing less than our
important part.  To the contrary, Professor Garrett P. Servis holds
that man's soul is that prolongation of his spinal marrow which forms
the pith of his no tail; and for demonstration of his faith points
confidently to the fact that no tailed animals have no souls.
Concerning these two theories, it is best to suspend judgment by
believing both.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
-- Finagle's Fourth Rule
%
    Democratic presidential candidates from 1988
(Al Gore) As usual, the other left-wing wacko candidates
are putting forth solutions that moderate Southerners
won't cotton to on Super Tuesday. At least I hope not.
-- How many
-- did it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
"We'll make you one with everything!"
-- Yogi's Vegetarian Pizza
%
:trampoline: n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some
   {HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the
   Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable
   (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection
   between code sections.  These pieces of {live data} are called
   `trampolines'.  Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand
   in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the
   trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true
   trampoline.  See also {snap}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the
structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for
being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way
along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong
choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life
this way.
-- Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
%
OLYMPIAN, adj.  Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by
gods, now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and
mutilated sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his
appetite.

    His name the smirking tourist scrawls
    Upon Minerva's temple walls,
    Where thundered once Olympian Zeus,
    And marks his appetite's abuse.
                                                           Averil Joop
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Zealous, yet modest; innocent, though free;
Patient of toil, serene amidst alarms;
Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms.
-- James Beattie (1735-1803)
-- The Minstrel, Book i, Stanza 11
%
Worst Month of the Year:
      February.  February has only 28 days in it, which means that if
you rent an apartment, you are paying for three full days you don't
get.  Try to avoid Februarys whenever possible.
-- Steve Rubenstein
%
It's just a matter of time before we're late.
-- Michael Walsh
%
I will not purchase this record, it is ssccrrrratched.
-- John Cleese
%
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
-- Josh Billings
%
Chekov: "Excuse me, we are looking for nuclear wessels.  Nuclear wessels."
-- "STIV:TVH", Stardate 8390.
%
Too bad there's not such a thing as a GOLDEN skunk, because you'd probably be
 PROUD to be sprayed by one.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.  The obedient must be
slaves.
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.
-- Ken Thompson, quoted by Dennis Ritchie
%
The bird of passage known to us as the cuckoo.
-- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD)
-- Natural History, Book xviii, Sect. 249
%
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
-- Lazarus Long
%
Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
%
Pun-provoking thyme.
-- William Shenstone (1714-1763)
-- The Schoolmistress, Stanza 11
%
We are giving instruction to FBI agents in the various Chinese
dialects ... to handle present and likely future contingencies.
-- J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)
%
Watching television, you'd think we lived at bay, surrounded on all
sides by human-seeking germs.  We are instructed to spray disinfectant
everywhere, into the air of our bedrooms and kitchens and with special
energy into bathrooms. In real life, however, disease occurs so
infrequently that it has a freakish aspect.
-- Lewis Thomas
%
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it
only by coming to grips
with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
-- Charles De Gaulle
%
Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
-- John Dewey
%
I want a girl that can swallow my pride.
-- Frank Zappa, "Jewish Princess"
%
Names are not always what they seem.  The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp
is pronounced Jackson.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life
as though it were thy last.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ii, 5
%
"Software that's harder to patch." -John Jacobs
-- ...understanding Firmware...
%
if you think campho-phenique is a miracle drug.
-- You may be redneck...
%
There shall he love when genial morn appears,
Like pensive Beauty smiling in her tears.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 95
%
Melchett, I prostrate myself before the feet of the world's _greatest
  living comedian_!!!....
-- Edmund : Money
%
Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.
-- Edward Abbey
%
What were your impressions of Dr. Graves?
He seemed brilliant. Egocentric, arrogant, chauvinistic.
-- Picard and Lt. Selar, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5
%
Friendship is inexplicable, it should not be explained,
if one doesn't want to kill it.
-- Max Jacob
%
 One of the benefits of a college education is to show
the little boy its little avail.
-- James Thurber
%
An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will
be postponed.
-- Kin Hubbard
%
Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You could n't pry
that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened
out for a crow-bar.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
-- The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, vi
%
When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.
-- African proverb
%
Possible existence of a parallel universe has been scientifically
  conceded.
-- Spock, "The Alternative Factor," stardate 3088.7.
%
When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various
Luther, Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations ("visions").  St. Theresa
almost certainly was a hysteric.  The book _The Psychotic Personality_,
by Leon J. Saul and Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the
psychotic personalities of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science),
Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones...
It seems significant that the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul,
also suffered from epilepsy.
-- religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic or at least
-- extremely abnormal behavior that has characterized so many of them.
-- Frank Zindler, "Religiosity as a Mental Disorder," American Atheist
-- magazine, April 1988, p. 27
%
I'm going through cherry cheesecake withdrawl.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 18 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
HARVEY SMITH
  The gesture made by the more careless visiting American presidents
  to Australians. (Honest.)
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Well, Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable,
 And Lightness has a call that's hard to hear.
-- Indigo Girls
%
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a
battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.
-- Calvin
%
A good conscience is a continued Christmas.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
%
America is great, because America is free.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
%
The universe is intractably squiggly.
-- Charles Suhor
%
... Dogs are the leaders of the planet.  If you see two life
forms, one of them's making a poop, the other's carrying it for
him, who would you assume is in charge?"
-- Jerry Seinfeld, "SeinLanguage"
%
Kiss till the cow comes home.
-- Beaumont and Fletcher
-- Scornful Lady, Act iii, Sc. 1
%
PANTOMIME, n.  A play in which the story is told without violence to
the language.  The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The world is full of fatheads...
-- Mystery Science Theatre 3000
%
The mountains are calling me and I must go...
-- John Muir
%
Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
  Whose word no man relies on;
He never says a foolish thing,
  Nor ever does a wise one.
-- Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
-- Written on the Bedchamber Door of Charles II
%
 ?-( has black eye
-- SMILEY
%
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any
party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in
anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself.  Such an
addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could
not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter To Francis Hopkinson, Paris Mar. 13, 1789
%
Once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck
dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.
-- Pop Baslim
%
A servant with this clause
  Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
  Makes that and th' action fine.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- The Elixir
%
What do you take me for, an idiot?;
-- General Charles de Gaulle, when a journalist asked him if he was happy
%
I never fall off.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making
use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
-- William James
%
Scott: "Thank God."
Uhura: "Did you see the way they *ate*?"
Chekov: "Horrible table manners."
Spock: "I doubt that our behavior will distinguish us in the annals of
  diplomacy."
Kirk: "I'm going to sleep this off.  Please let me know if there's some other
  way we can screw up tonight?"
McCoy: "I'm going to find a pot of black coffee."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left
unsaid and for deeds left undone.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
%
Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones
 in movies.
-- Bill Bulko
%
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture
available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want.
The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes, in "New York Times", 1969
%
:green card: n. [after the "IBM System/360 Reference Data"
   card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not
   green.  Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use
   of assembly language.  "I'll go get my green card so I can check
   the addressing mode for that instruction."  Some green cards are
   actually booklets.

   The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370
   was introduced, and later a yellow booklet.  An anecdote from IBM
   refers to a scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room
   at Yorktown in 1978.  A luser overheard one of the programmers ask
   another "Do you have a green card?"  The other grunted and
   passed the first a thick yellow booklet.  At this point the luser
   turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never
   to return..
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Now, reader, I have told my dream to thee;
 See if thou canst interpret it to me
 Or to thyself, or neighbor. But take heed
 Of misinterpreting; for that, instead
 Of doing good, will but thyself abuse
 By misinterpreting evil issues.
-- John Bunyan, The Pilgrims's Progress
%
"I... AM NOT... A PACIFIST!"
-- An angry defensive back explains to rednecks, in AMAZING GRACE AND CHUCK
%
We have gathered here today to pay final respects to our honored dead.
  And yet it should be noted in the midst of our sorrow, this death takes
  place in the shadow of a new light, the sunrise of a new world, a world
  that our beloved comrade gave his life to protect and nourish.  He did
  not feel this sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we will not debate his
  profound wisdom at these proceedings.  Of my friend I can only say this,
  of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most -
  human.
-- Kirk,  "The Wrath of Khan,"  stardate 8130.3.
%
Hypocrites do the devil's drudgery in Christ's livery.
-- Matthew Henry
%
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
Hit me one time...Hit me twice...OH!  That's rather nice!
-- Hexxus
%
I was more impressed by the contents of my handkerchief the last
  time I blew my nose.
-- Edmund : Private Plane
%
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from
history.

I know guys can't learn from yesterday ...
Hegel must be taking the long view.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
-- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar"
%
We'll lead an ideal life if you'll just avoid doing one thing: don't think.
-- Ronald Reagan (to then-wife Jane Wyman)
%
The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their
people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such
engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make
every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of
his country when ever that was reared. This made them invincible;
and the same remedy will make us so.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper(1814)
%
Lookie, lookie, here comes cookie...
-- Stephen Sondheim
%
One of the Greek lady gods got a crush on one of the Greek man gods.
He tried to hit her with lightning and thunderbolts, but he just
couldn't get  her away from him ...
After a while, they became the first married gods.
-- Concerning the origins of love
-- Robbie, age 8
%
Was she so loved because her eyes were so beautiful or were her eyes
so beautiful because she was loved?
-- Anzia Yezierska
%
There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
I asked you not to have a spaz attack in tx.general, BUT NOOOOO!!!!
-- Karl, via John Belushi
%
We shall always keep a spare corner in our heads
to give passing hospitality to our friends' opinions.
-- Joseph Joubert
%
Enter the mill and you will come out floury.
-- Common Estonian Proverb
%
Uncertain fortune is thoroughly mastered by the equity of the calculation.
-- Blaise Pascal
%
:tourist information: n. Information in an on-line display that is
   not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of
   what's going on with the software or hardware behind it.  Whether a
   given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what
   the user is looking for at any given time.  The `bytes free'
   information at the bottom of an MS-DOS `dir' display is
   tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information
   in a UNIX `ps(1)' display.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
-- Elbert Hubbard, "Epigrams"
%
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying,
And this same flower that smiles to-day
  To-morrow will be dying.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- To the Virgins to make much of Time
%
The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we
must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954)
%
All airline flights depart from the gates most distant from
the center of the terminal.
Nobody ever had a reservation on a plane that left Gate 1.
-- Walters' Rule
%
I am not aware that any community has the right
to force another to be civilized.
-- John Stuart Mill
%
Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,
  Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
  He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- Motto, Hyperion, Book i
%
Are they taking DDT?
-- Vice President Dan Quayle asking doctors at a Manhattan
-- AIDS clinic about their treatments of choice, 4/30/92
-- (reported in Esquire, 8/92, and NY Post early May 92)
%
[FORTRAN] will persist for some time --
probably for at least the next decade.
-- T. Cheatham
%
Let me play with it first and I'll tell you what it is later.
-- Miles Davis
%
The glory of great men should always be measured by the means
they have used
to acquire it.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it
stop.
-- P. J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
%
In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter,
which stings in the very flowers.
-- Lucretius (95-55 BC)
-- De Rerum Natura, iv, 1133
%
Sagan:   The international unit of humility.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

-- Mark Twain
%
"Hey Charlie, what's that noise?"
-- "I dunno must be SKYLAB!"
-- Dogs In Space
%
The understanding is always the dupe of the heart.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 102
%
I find a lot of actors are infantile people.  It's just so silly what we do
half the time.  Someone said to my daughter, 'Are you gonna be an
actress like your mum?'  And she said, 'Oh please.  I'm gonna be
something useful, like a nurse.'
-- Tracy Ulman
%
Do not use hyperbole; not one writer in a million
   can use it effectively.
-- Writing Rule 25
%
Gotta love me...I'm the baby.
-- baby dinosaur, DINOSAURS
%
YOKE, n.  An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, _jugum_, we owe
defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy.
A thousand apologies for withholding it.
-- one of the most illuminating words in our language a word that
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
In America there are two classes of travel: first class and with children.
-- Benchley's travel distinction
%
La Mathematica e' l'alfabeto nel quale DIO ha scrito l'universo.
[Mathematics is the Alphabet God used to write the Universe.]
-- Galileo Galilei
%
To open...Open like any umbrella.  To close...Close like any umbrella.
-- Instructions for Sears compact manual umbrella
%
People at the top make decisions as though times were good when people
at the bottom know that the organization is collapsing.
-- Paul Gray
%
But don't you see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual.
The look in a face, the music of a violin.  A Paris theater can be infused
with the spiritual for all its solidity.
-- Lestat, _The Vampire Lestat_, Anne Rice
%
 :-Q~ smoking
-- SMILEY
%
Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give
possesses you.
-- Andre Gide
%
There's a new birth-control pill for women. You put it between your knees
 and keep it there.
-- Bill Barner
%
Pity 's akin to love.
-- Thomas Southerne (1660-1746)
-- Oroonoka, Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Does anybody know how to do the damnable 4x4x4 Rubik's Cube?  can you give me
some hints?  I can get two sides opposite to each other completed, but that's
it.

I guess it's a bit funny that you do two sides first, instead of the
corners and edges first followed by the inside centers.  Not quite the
best joke I've read today, though.
-- Norman Diamond diamond@tkov50.enet.dec.com
%
Early to bed and early to rise, and you'll meet very few of our best
 people.
-- George Ade
%
 Aristotle:      The essence of shittyness...
-- 'Shit Happens' according to...
%
Forget your enemies. It's your friends you frustrate that cause all
the problems.
-- Michael J. Tucker
%
The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its
pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.
-- William Lloyd Garrison
%
I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
-- Walt Disney (1901-1966)
%
HURRICANE, n.  An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now
generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone.  The hurricane is
still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain
old-fashioned sea-captains.  It is also used in the construction of
the upper decks of steamboats, but generally speaking, the hurricane's
usefulness has outlasted it.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
The very technology that makes our living simpler makes society more
complex. The more efficient we get, the more specialized we become
and the more dependent.
-- Thomas Griffith
%
And remember, rebooting your brain can be tricky.
-- Eric Townsend (erict@flatline)
%
A simple yes would have sufficed.
-- Picard
%
Perhaps I am flogging a straw herring in mid-stream, but in the light of
 what is known about the ubiquity of security vulnerabilities, it seems vastly
 too dangerous for university folks to run with their heads in the sand.
-- Peter G. Neumann, RISKS moderator, about the Internet virus
%
 _) suffering from Lorentz contractions (they're coming every ten minutes
now)
-- SMILEY
%
If a problem causes too many meetings, the meetings eventually
become more important than the problem.
-- Hendrickson's Law
%
HEALTH: Never go to the hospital or visit a doctor.
If you have a stroke, keep drinking and act like you
prefer to use only one side of your body. If you cut
off a limb while using a power tool-so what? That's
why there's duct tape and staple guns.
If someone tries to drive you to the hospital after
a heart attack or maiming, punch him in the throat.
(Optional retorts: "Drive This!" or "Fuck you!" or
"Shut the fuck up!")
-- Denis Leary from "Are you Man enough?"
%
As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours
Should not be numbered by years, daies, and hours.
-- Du Bartas (1544-1590)
-- Divine Weekes and Workes, Second Week, Fourth Day, Book ii
%
Time to die...
-- Roy Batty
%
Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that, by means of electricity, the
world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a
breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain,
instinct with intelligence!
-- N. Hawthorne
%
I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and
  rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending
  that I'm deaf.
-- Edmund : Nob and Nobility
%
The love we give away is the only one we keep.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
I asked my doctor if I should have a vasectomy. He said leave a sleeping
 dog lie. The last time I had sex my self-winding watch stopped.
-- Lenny Rush
%
All creatures must learn to coexist. That's why the brown bear and the
 field mouse can share their lives and live in harmony. Of course, they
 can't mate or the mice would explode.
-- Betty White (in The Golden Girls)
%
>consult guide about Earth
Mostly harmless.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to
pain.
-- Alan Watts
%

-- Be good to your ENVIRONMENT Purge a liberal.
%
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six.   Mother took me to
see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
-- Shirley Temple
%
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
-- Lord Halifax Works
%
Never get out of bed before noon.
-- Charles Bukowski
%
The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old
just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is
better.
-- Robert P. Vanderpoel
%
Where your nightmares end ... Terror begins.
-- Willard.
%
I've been looking forward to this evening about as much as I'd look forward
 to having my prostate examined by the Incredible Hulk.
-- Jan Murray
%
That thief is stupid to want to kill me.
-- Darkwood
-- Famous Last Words
%
 =:-) smiley punk-rocker
-- SMILEY
%
I'll show you fun. Simon, let the games begin.
-- Marshall, "Just Say No Fun", Eerie Indiana
%
This is Captain William Riker of the Klingon vessel PAGH. I order you
  to lower your shields and surrender.
-- Riker to the ENTERPRISE, "A Matter of Honor", stardate 42506.5
%
He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah liii, 7
%
Serve Coke or RC with meat; 7-Up or Sprite with fish, Dr. Pepper with
 game...
-- Calvin Trillin
%
 :-$ "These braces sure do hurt!"
-- SMILEY
%
And on the seventh day, while He was resting, He created snack
cakes.  And He saw that they looked good, and He did bite into one,
at which time he realized that they tasted like something that had
been sitting on a shelf wrapped in cheap plastic for decades.  He had
too much goop on His fingers to blast them into the void from which
they had come, and therefore He drove them out until they had left
the Promised Land and were stuck in a cheap, tacky display on the end
of the aisle.
-- Haagendasz 3, 12-15
%
Chekov: "I do not understand.  If there was a ship underneath us,
surely the  assassins beamed aboard from that wessel, not Enterprise."
Spock: "You're forgetting something, Mister Chekov.  According to
our databanks,  this ship fired those torpedoes.  If we did, the killers
are here.  If we did  not, whoever altered the databanks is here.
 In either case, what we are  looking for, is here."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
 An ambitious and aggressive mother conned pianist Arthur Rubinstein into
 listening to her 10-year-old son murder a nocturne by Chopin. At the
 conclusion of the massacre, Rubinstein announced, "Madam, that is
 undoubtedly the worst piano playing I ever heard." Whereupon the mother
 nodded happily and told her son, "You see, stupid? Now will you give up
 those expensive piano lessons and try out for the Little League baseball
 team?
-- Art Buchwald
%
Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
%
    It is strange that we know so little about the properties
of numbers.  They are our handiwork, yet they baffle us; we
can fathom only a few of their intricacies.  Having defined
their attributes and prescribed their behaviour, we are hard
pressed to perceive the implications of our formulas.
-- James R. Newman
%
This is not your world, human. You do not command here.
"I'm not here to command."
Then you must be ready to fight. Something Starfleet does not teach you.
"You may test that assumption at your convenience."
-- Duras and Picard, "Sins of the Father", stardate 43685.2
%
Many books require no thought from those who read them, for a very
simple reason- they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Those works, therefore, are the most valuable that set our thinking
faculties in the fullest operation.
-- Colton
%
Where love rules, there is no rule to power; and where power predominates,
there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
-- C. G. Jung
%
A comely olde man as busie as a bee.
-- John Lyly (c. 1554-1606)
-- Euphues and his England, Page 252
%
The public is not made up of people who get their names in the papers.
-- Woodrow Wilson
%
Nyssa: What is this mission of yours, father?   You're so changed by it.
[You look younger, but so cold.]
Master: Logopolis is a cold place, a cold high place looking over the
universe.
-- Logopolis
%
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not
 to take medicine.
-- Sir William Osler
%
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the
customary form as the main aim in life.  The most important motive
for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its
result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
-- Albert Einstein, On Education
%
    There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science
of mathematics. . . We repeat, there was far more imagination
in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
-- Voltaire
%
From reveries so airy, from the toil
Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing old in drawing nothing up.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book iii, The Garden, Line 188
%
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Rabbi Ben Ezra
%
A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?
-- Don Marquis
%
There's no BODY-CHECKING in golf!!!
-- Charlie Brown to Lucy.
%
Some are born to move the world--to live their fantasies, but must of us
 just dream about the things we'd like to be. Sadder still to watch it die
 than never to have known. For you, the blind who once could see, the bell
 tolls for thee.
-- Neil Peart
%
If you want to get something DONE, stay out of universities.
-- John Hammond in Jurassic Park (The Book), page 125
%
 (V)=| pacman champion
-- SMILEY
%
Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth.  When perfect sincerity is
expected, perfect freedom must be allowed;  nor has anyone who is apt
to be angry when he hears the truth, any cause to wonder that he
does not hear it.
-- Tacitus
%
"Do you think there's a God?"
"Well, SOMEbody's out to get me!"
-- Calvin & Hobbes
%
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
:dinosaurs mating: n. Said to occur when yet another {big iron}
   merger or buyout occurs; reflects a perception by hackers that
   these signal another stage in the long, slow dying of the
   {mainframe} industry.  In its glory days of the 1960s, it was
   `IBM and the Seven Dwarves': Burroughs, Control Data, General
   Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac.  RCA and GE sold out
   early, and it was `IBM and the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR,
   Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while.  Honeywell was bought out
   by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys (in 1984 ---
   this was when the phrase `dinosaurs mating' was coined); and in
   1991 AT&T absorbed NCR.  More such earth-shaking unions of doomed
   giants seem inevitable.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Data: "That is part of my dilemma.  I have the curiosity of humans, but there
  are questions that I will never have the questions to.  What it is like to
  laugh, or cry, or to experience any human emotions."
Q: "Hm.  Well, if you ask me, these human emotions are not what they're cracked
  up to be."
Data: "Hm."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you
 are brave.
-- E. M. Forster, as a small child
%
FIRST HEAD: All right! All right! We'll kill him first and then have tea and
            biscuits.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Data: "Early bird [gets the worm]?  I believe Commander Shelby erred.  There is
  no evidence of avian or crawling vermicular lifeforms on Jure IV."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds", Stardate unknown
%
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to
 admit that each party is worse than the other.  The one that's out always
 looks the best.
-- Will Rogers
%
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
-- Frank Zappa
%
I need someone really bad.  Are you really bad?
-- Bumper Sticker
%
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
%
I think I made a horrible mistake.
-- Wesley to Guinan, "Evolution", stardate 43125.8
%
The world, the flesh, and the devil.
-- Book of Common Prayer
-- The Litany
%
The old gun-in-the-KAOS-agent's-sphincter trick. That's the second time I've
fallen for that this month.
-- Maxwell Smart
%
Picard: "I'm Jean-Luc Picard.  Welcome aboard the Enterprise, Captain Scott."
Scott: "Thank you, sir, and call me 'Scotty'."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
SUCCESS, n.  The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.  In
literature, and particularly in poetry, the elements of success are
exceedingly simple, and are admirably set forth in the following lines
by the reverend Father Gassalasca Jape, entitled, for some mysterious
reason, "John A. Joyce."

    The bard who would prosper must carry a book,
        Do his thinking in prose and wear
    A crimson cravat, a far-away look
        And a head of hexameter hair.
    Be thin in your thought and your body'll be fat;
    If you wear your hair long you needn't your hat.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Nobody can compel me to be happy in his own way. Paternalism is the
 greatest despotism.
-- Immanuel Kant
%
The only thing wrong with doing nothing is that you never know when
you're done.
-- The Stovall's Law of negative inaction
%
Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that is
always respected, even when it is associated with vice.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
"Quid pro quo, Hillary, quid pro quo."
-- Silence Of The Lambs Pt. 2
%
Picard: "They took everything I was!  They used me to kill...and to destroy...
  and I couldn't stop them!  I tried so hard!"
-- "Family", Stardate unknown
%
I shall be as secret as the grave.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iv, Chap. lxii
%
I do not even fulfill the domestic-content requirements for being a
cabinet secretary.
-- Labor Secretary Reich,
-- Noting that his replacement hip was made in Germany and France, 1994
%
Without education, we are in the horrible and deadly danger of taking
educated people seriously.
-- G. K. Chesterfield
%
 :-0 orator
-- SMILEY
%
Worf: "Captain, we are being hailed by the Klingon homeworld."
Picard: "Gowron or K'Tal?"
Worf: "Neither, sir.  It is the junior adjutant to the diplomatic delegation."
Riker: "'Junior adjutant'."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.1
%
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the
stupid have an answer for every question.
-- Edward Abbey
%
The national budget must be balanced.  The public debt must be reduced;
the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled.
Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't
want to go bankrupt.  People must again learn to work, instead of living
on public assistance.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), 55 BC
%
Brevity is the soul of wit.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act ii, Sc. 2
%
Architecture is the printing press of all ages, and gives a history
of the state in which it was conducted.
-- Lady Morgan
%
Beer always gives good head.
-- Women vs. Beer
%
:nanoacre: /nan'oh-ay`kr/ n. A unit (about 2 mm square) of real
   estate on a VLSI chip.  The term gets its giggle value from the
   fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres
   once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
She often gave herself very good advice [though she very seldom followed it].
-- Lewis Carroll
%
To live outside the law, you must be honest.
-- Bob Dylan
%
I guess the hard thing for a lot of people to accept is why God would allow me
 to go running through their yards, yelling and spinning around.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
    SAS programmers
That depends; what color is the bulb?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth
his spirit than he that taketh a city.
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs xvi, 32
%
Judas had given them the slip.
-- Mathew Henry (1662-1714)
-- Commentaries, Matthew xxii
%
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've
always worked for me.
-- Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939), journalist
%
You can't fight the law of conservation of energy. You can bargain with it,
but you can't fight it.
-- Solomon Short
%
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
-- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
%
We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn
of a beautiful new world.  We will see it when we believe it.
-- Saul Alinsky
%
Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected
by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick
their cubs into form.
-- Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592)
-- Essays, Book ii, Chap. xii, Apology for Raimond Sebond
%
:puff: vt. To decompress data that has been crunched by Huffman
   coding.  At least one widely distributed Huffman decoder program
   was actually *named* `PUFF', but these days it is usually
   packaged with the encoder.  Oppose {huff}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I had not time to lick it into form, as a bear doth her young ones.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader
%
My neighbor has a circular driveway ... he can't get out.
-- Steven Wright
%
Within the book and volume of my brain.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 5
%
If we are going to stick to this damned quantum-jumping, then I regret
that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.
-- Erwin Schrodinger
%
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road.
 They get run over.
-- Aneurin Bevan
%
He was the nearest thing I'd seen to a human being without actually being
 one.
-- Spike Milligan
%
Parts that cannot be assembled incorrectly will be.
-- The RPCISPE's Tenth Universal Law
%
Of course you realize this means war!
-- Bugs Bunny
%
carabiner: oversized safety pin to hold up a diaper seat.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
He who depends on another man's table often dines late.
-- Italian proverb
%
Never tell a woman that you didn't realize she was pregnant unless you're
 certain that she is.
-- Dave Barry
%
We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity,
family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1988
%
:frobnitz: /frob'nits/, plural `frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or
   `frobni' /frob'ni:/ [TMRC] n. An unspecified physical object, a
   widget.  Also refers to electronic black boxes.  This rare form is
   usually abbreviated to `frotz', or more commonly to {frob}.
   Also used are `frobnule' (/frob'n[y]ool/) and `frobule'
   (/frob'yool/).  Starting perhaps in 1979, `frobozz'
   /fr*-boz'/ (plural: `frobbotzim' /fr*-bot'zm/) has also
   become very popular, largely through its exposure as a name via
   {Zork}.  These variants can also be applied to nonphysical
   objects, such as data structures.

   Pete Samson, compiler of the original {TMRC} lexicon, adds,
   "Under the TMRC [railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed
   (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer.  Several had fanciful designations
   written on them, such as `Frobnitz Coil Oil'.  Perhaps DRS intended
   Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the name was quickly taken for
   the thing".  This was almost certainly the origin of the
   term.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
BOB-B-Que.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants.
-- Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium CIV, c. 63
%
Poor man, he just stands and stares at a yellow flower
for minutes at a time. He would be far better off
with something to do.
-- Charles Darwin's gardener
%
Be on your guard against a silent dog and still water.
-- Latin proverb
%
ARTHUR:          But if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve
                 Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh.  He'd just say it.
BROTHER MAYNARD: It's down there carved in stone.
GALAHAD:         Perhaps he was dictating.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
The universe long ago passed the point of total collapse.
-- Monitor, Logopolis
%
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard II
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
:Wizard Book: n. Hal Abelson's, Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's
   "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (MIT
   Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1), an excellent computer science text
   used in introductory courses at MIT.  So called because of the
   wizard on the jacket.  One of the {bible}s of the LISP/Scheme
   world.  Also, less commonly, known as the {Purple Book}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It takes a wise man to recognize a wise man.
-- Xenophanes
%
Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book i, Line 62
%
If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.
-- Mary Webb
%
Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes xi, 1
%
I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iii, Chap. xxxiii
%
We secretly switched your salt with Folger's crystals.
-- Ryan Rieck
%
    Lisp programmers
(((H)mmm,) (I'm ((not) sure, better))) (find (out))...
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
William, is something wrong?
"What do you mean?"
Do you not like girls?
"'Course I do."
-- Brenna O'Dell and Riker, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
Man's best friend tastes surprisingly like chicken.
-- Northern Exposers
%
"Such senseless violence!  I don't understand it."
"We don't expect you to.  If cartoons were meant for adults, they'd be on in
prime time."
-- Marge and Lisa in "Krusty Gets Busted" from The Simpsons
%
If you can't fight, you ain't right.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Silence can be the biggest lie of all.  We have a responsibility to speak
up; and whenever the occasion calls for it, we have a responsibility to
raise bloody hell.
-- Herbert Block
%
For a black man, there's no difference between the North and the South. In
 the South they don't mind how close I get so long as I don't get too big;
 in the North they don't mind how big I get so long as I don't get too
 close.
-- Dick Gregory
%
 our company.
-- Maintain an awareness for contribution to your schedule, your project,
-- A Group of Employees
%
Your bivouac for the night is the spot where got tired of marching
    that day.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #60
%
War isn't a good life, but it's life.
-- Kirk, "A Private Little War," stardate 4211.8.
%
If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you have sewage.
If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine, you have sewage.
-- SCHOPENHAUER'S LAW OF ENTROPY
%
I swear 't is better to be much abused
Than but to know 't a little.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
-- Oscar Wilde, "An Ideal Husband"
%
I have NO change! Buzz off freak.
-- Famous Last Words
%
Up until now,  you have been...uninteresting. It's only now that your
  life form begins to merit serious attention.
-- Traveler, "Where No One Has Gone Before", stardate 41263.1
%
Shamus, n. [Yiddish]:
 A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the
temple, and makes sure everything is in working order.
 A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagog
functionaries, and there's a joke about that:
      A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the
middle of a service, Oh, Lord, I am nobody!    The cantor, not to be
bested, also cries out, Oh, Lord, I am nobody!
      The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, Oh, Lord, I
am nobody!    The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, Look who thinks
he's nobody!
-- Arthur Naiman, Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish
%
If a tool is put away when you're sure it won't be needed again, it
will...soon.
-- Law of Annoyance
%
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Antony and Cleopatra
-- Act iv, Sc. 14
%
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
-- James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
-- In a copy of Omar Khayyam
%
Hugs are NEVER enough :-) !!!!
-- Sonia
%
 This is 234-3249, and no, it's not Pete's Pizzaria.  It's not
 the Credit Union either, and no one named Pam lives here.  You
 can leave a message though.
-- Answering machine madness - miscellaneous
%
Hold the MAYO & pass the COSMIC AWARENESS...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
%
Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down and write it as
it occurs to you. The writing is easy- it's the occurring that's hard.
-- Stephen Leacock
%
Sorry about that Chief.
-- Maxwell Smart
%
New members urgently required for SUICIDE CLUB, Watford area.
-- Monty Python's Big Red Book
%
There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser
 so terrible as the conscience that dwells in every man.
-- Confucius Says
%
I used to be a bartender at the Betty Ford Clinic.
-- Steven Wright
%
Oregano is the spice of life.
-- Henry J. Tillman
%
The likelihood of anything happening is in direct proportion to the
amount of trouble it will cause if it does happen.
-- Sam W. Warren
%
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life's business being just the terrible choice.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- The Ring and the Book, The Pope, Line 1236
%
:moria: /mor'ee-*/ n. Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of
   the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available
   for a wide range of machines and operating systems.  The name is
   from Tolkien's Mines of Moria; compare {elder days},
   {elvish}.  The game is extremely addictive and a major consumer
   of time better used for hacking.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Never characterise the importance of a statement in advance.
-- Ross' Law
%
The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems
and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting
language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best
dangerous.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup in The C++ Programming Language
%
Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.
-- Sophocles (496-406 BC)
-- Hipponous, Frag. 280
%
Nikki Louda:
I thought i could smell f%*king petrol
-- Famous people swearing...
%
Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle-tail.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act iii, Sc. 6
%
    Romulans
Ch'iv na myinki blish.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
%
ICONOCLAST, n.  A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are
imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest
that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but
pileth not up.  For the poor things would have other idols in place of
those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth.  But the
iconoclast saith:  "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not;
and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress
the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
DANGER, n.

    A savage beast which, when it sleeps,
        Man girds at and despises,
    But takes himself away by leaps
        And bounds when it arises.
                                                          Ambat Delaso
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
HAD to make him President of the United States.  It's the only job he's
qualified for!
-- He wasn't much of an actor, he wasn't much of a Governor Hell, they
-- Michael Cain
%
... there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species
should be equal amongst one another without subordination or subjection.
-- John Locke
%
WRCT.
-- Hello, this is God. Whenever I'm in Pittsburgh which is all the time,
-- since I'm omnipresent I listen to all the radio stations at once, including
-- Radio advertisement for WRCT Radio
%
No one may kill a man.  Not for any purpose.  It cannot be condoned.
-- Kirk, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5431.6.
%
We are hypnotised into believing that two TV sets
will make us twice as happy as one TV set.
-- Laura Huxley (wife of Aldous)
%
 lot of things.   You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things...
 This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have
 nothing to do with ourselves.
-- Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will that will uncover a
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 6/23/72
%
"Standards committees are not the best ways to create a standard.
 Standards meetings and standards themselves are horribly political
 things.  One thing that people forget is that many standards are made by
 rather small groups of people.  A few good people can really save the
 day, and a few idiots can really make it miserable for years to come."
-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of UNIX
%
BARBARA STANWYCK makes me nervous!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Into a world unknown,--the corner-stone of a nation!
-- Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-- The Courtship of Miles Standish, iv
%
One of these centuries the brutes, private or public, who believe
that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson
of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force.
-- Ragnar Danneskjold
%
I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies
are my meditations.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxix, 99
%
 Life is pleasant, but I have no yearning to clutter up the universe after
 it is over.
-- On having children
%
"Vogon Constructor Fleets.  Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from
a Vogon: forget it.  They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy--
not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.  They
wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous
Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent
back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and
finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his
throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
We were hungry when we got to Moscow, Soviet.
-- Groucho Marx
%
David: "I've tried warning you before.  Scientists have always been
pawns of the
  military!"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
BABY Back Ribs.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
I can't say I've ever been lost, but I was bewildered
once for three days.
-- Daniel Boone (1734-1820), attributed
%
Life begins at the centerfold and expands outward.
-- Miss November (1966)
%
All major bugs in a software project will turn up five minutes
before it is due.
-- Murphy's Eleventh Law of Programming
%
Like the stain'd web that whitens in the sun,
Grow pure by being purely shone upon.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Lalla Rookh, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan
%
There's no room in the drug world for amateurs.
-- Raoul Duke
%
Audacity, and again audacity, and always audacity.
-- Georges Jacques Danton
%
The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new
development.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
%
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"All your papers these days look the same;
Those William's would be better unread --
Do these facts never fill you with shame?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I wrote wonderful papers galore;
But the great reputation I found that I'd won,
Made it pointless to think any more."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
%
How poor are they that have not patience!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%

-- Toyota: Taking Our Yen Out Thanks All
%
Who is John Galt?

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind.  After centuries of
being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire
the day when men withdraw their vultures.
-- of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire  until
%
An economist is a chap who, when asked for his social security number,
gives an estimate.
-- K. M. Reese, "Newscripts", Chemical & Engineering News (26 Jun 89), p. 64
%
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
-- Lily Tomlin
%
He knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in
the depths of hell
-- Old Testament
-- Proverbs ix, 18
%
They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE
 is driving the car for insurance, ...     your driver's license number. In the
 state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social
 Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a
 number and you reside forever more on the list of weird people who don't give
 out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts.
-- Arthur Miller
%
Rack of Raccoon
-- Road Kill Cafe - Today's Special
%
If you're a circus clown, and you have a dog that you use in your act, I don't
 think it's a good idea to also dress the dog up like a clown, because people
 see that and they think, "Forgive me, but that's just too much."
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Quality assurance
 a way to ensure you never deliver shoddy goods accidentally
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
I saw a flie within a beade
  Of amber cleanly buried.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- The Amber Bead
%
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested
solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that
writing didn't require any.
-- Russell Baker
%
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
-- Albert Camus
%

-- STD's the gift that keeps giving.
%
Bad in the best, though excellent in neither.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- The Passionate Pilgrim, iii
%

-- I'm from Georgia what country are YOU from?
%
A submarine will move through the water most efficiently if it
is 10 to 13 times as long as it is wide.
-- "Programming Pearls", Communications of the ACM, Sep. 1985
%
In that fierce light which beats upon a throne.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Idylls of the King, Dedication
%
Trouble at Dartmoor Prison today ... A bomb destroyed the toilet block.
 Local residents have complained that, since then, at least twenty inmates
 have been seen going over the wall.
-- Ronnie Barker
%
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
sling: versatile strap dating to biblical times. when david the israelite
descended into the vale of elah, after a hard day of climbing, he used a sling
to slay the philistine goliath.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie.
You have to be different.
-- Tony Bennett
%
I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
I'll be mellow when I'm dead!
-- Weird Al Yankovic
%
What is civilization?  I answer the power of good women.
-- Emerson
%
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before --
except our fingertips will have been singed.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
%
The customer's always right.
 The son-of-a-bitch
 Is probably rich
 So smile with all your might.
-- Noel Coward
%
If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.
-- PKD
%
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities
of the people who live in it.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
-- Edward Abbey
%
For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose,
The best good man with the worst-natured muse.
-- Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
-- An allusion to Horace, Satire x, Book i
%
Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.
-- George Herbert (1593-1633)
-- The Church Militant
%
'And so the obvious phallic symbolism of Wolverine's claws provides a
 counterpoint to the Oedipal blindness motif of Cyclops' ruby visor.'
-- Carl Rigney
%
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are consequences.
-- Robert Ingersoll (Lectures and Essays, 3d Series, Some Reasons Why, iii)
%
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
-- Michelangelo
%
Of all the forces that make for a better world, none is so
indispensable, none so powerful, as hope.  Without hope men are only
half alive.  With hope they dream and think and work.
-- Charles Sawyer
%
Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is
trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved
of leadership.
-- by other people and outer forces or moves them this is of the essence
-- Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960
%
You can't be happy with a woman who pronounces both d's in Wednesday.
-- Peter De Vries
%
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart,
And often took leave, but was loth to depart.
-- Matthew Prior (1664-1721)
-- The Thief and the Cordelier
%
"Everybody is talking about the weather but nobody does anything about it."
-- Mark Twain
%
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
Dear Mrs, Mr, Miss, or Mr and Mrs Daneeka:  Words cannot express the deep
 personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was
 killed, wounded, or reported missing in action
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
%
I'll tell ya how to stay young: Hang around with older people.
-- Bob Hope
%
A kick that scarce would move a horse
  May kill a sound divine.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Yearly Distress
%
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul:
-- Christopher Marlowe (1565-1593)
-- Faustus
%
Edmund! Oh, Edmund, I've awaited your return!
And thank God you did, for I was just thinking...'My God, I die in
  twelve hours. What I really need right now is a hug from a complete
  _prat_.'
-- Percy and Edmund : Money
%
I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same
price for city.  I never write policeman because I can get the same
money for cop.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
That little white ball won't move 'til you hit it, and there's nothing you
 can do after it's gone.
-- Babe Didrikson Zaharias
%
    Cancerians
None: Cancerians would worry themselves to death with
the problem.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Hello, Jane speaking.
-- Jane
%
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his
taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman,
pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon
that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz
bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of
an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege
of putting him to death.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Review of Seybert's Annals of the United States, 1820
%
Always deny your defeats by conservatives.
-- Liberal Rule #36
%
What millions died that Caesar might be great!
-- Campbell
%
My world, and welcome to it
-- Thurber.
%
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
-- Thomas Edison, inventor
%
The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and
seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.
-- Henry Elsworth, US Patent Office, 1844
%
What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 1
%
I said, I've broken my arm in several places.
 He said, Don't go to those places.
-- [Possibly Henry Youngman?]
%
Ever tried to improve your score on the Hacker Test?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Of puns it has been said that they who most dislike them are least able to
utter them.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
%
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to
another.
-- Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 529
%
One of the cheapest ways to design something is not to design it at all.
-- Gordon L. Glegg
%
Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a
very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
You catch yourself balancing a beach ball on the end of your nose.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy!
-- Freddy Krueger.
%
There's so much comedy on television.  Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate
%
Woman was created from the rib of man; Not from his head to be thought
of only, nor from his hand to be owned, nor from his foot to be
beneath, but from under his arm to be protected, from his side to be
equal, and from his heart to be loved. . .
-- Joe Behrmann
%
"I am a good boy.
I am a good man.
I am a good girl."

"What is this, propaganda?"
-- Mae West (My Little Chickadee)
%
Yet I shall temper so
Justice with mercy, as may illustrate most
Them fully satisfy'd, and thee appease.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book x, Line 77
%
I hate the subway. And these guys begging for spare change. They come
 around with their hand out yelling, "Spare a quarter!" They say they can't
 work, so they go, "Spare a quarter, spare a quarter." I've got the
 solution: Make 'em tollbooth clerks.
-- Ron Smith
%
Better late than never.
-- Titus Livius (Livy)
%
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the
problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is
then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the
problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
%
Messengers should neither be headed nor hanged.
-- Proverb
%
The expert judgement of an institution, when the matters involve
continuation of the institution's operations, is totally predictable,
and hence the finding is totally worthless.
-- Robert N. Kharasch
%
Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution, or of a bad memory!
of a constitution so treacherously good, that it never bends till
it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting
drunk, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
-- Colton
%
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about
600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from
Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous
commodity in the context of professional journalism.
-- Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939), journalist
-- Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl, Rolling Stone (Feburary 15, 1973)
%
What PROGRAM are they watching?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
I'd probably be famous now if I wasn't such a good waitress
-- Jane Siberry
%
The nourishment is palatable.
-- Millard Fillmore
%
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling
grenades in people's faces.
-- Paul Fussell
%
Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epistle ii, Book ii, Line 85
%
I must go seek some dew-drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
-- William Shakespeare
%
... If forced to travel on an airplane, try and get in the cabin with
the Captain, so you can keep an eye on him and nudge him if he falls
asleep or point out any mountains looming up ahead ...
-- Mike Harding, The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac
%
TRUMPET
  Musical instrument which is much harder to play than it looks.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.
-- Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab
%
I recognize that a class of criminals and juvenile delinquents has
taken to calling themselves 'hackers', but I consider them irrelevant
to the true meaning of the word; just as the Mafia calls themselves
'businessmen' but nobody pays that fact any attention.
-- Bob Bickford, rab@well.sf.ca.us, 1990
%
Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it
cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.
-- Fran Lebowitz
%
I don't patronize bunny rabbits!
-- Heathers
%
    liberals
Two-one to do it and the other to keep the first one's knee
from jerking.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Whose little body lodg'd a mighty mind.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book v, Line 999
%
Omit needless words.
-- Strunk and White
%
Such a foolish notion, that war is called devotion,
when the greatest warriors are the ones who stand for peace.
-- Holly Near
%
A grapefruit is a lemon that had a chance and took advantage of it.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be
deceived by them.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
She can wade in a drop of dew.  She don't come and I don't follow,
 ..waits backstage while I sing to you.
-- The Grateful Dead
%
Hither, as to their fountain, other stars
Repairing, in their golden urns draw light.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book vii, Line 364
%
    lawyers
It only takes one to change your bulb to his bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Brown Knees.
-- Jeffrey's favorite recipes
%
Friendship is good, a strong stick; but when the hour comes
to lean hard it gives.   In the day of their bitterest need
all souls are alone.
-- Olive Schreiner, (The Story of An African Farm)
%
I am not in the roll of common men.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
DISOBEY, v.t.  To celebrate with an appropriate ceremony the maturity
of a command.

    His right to govern me is clear as day,
    My duty manifest to disobey;
    And if that fit observance e'er I shut
    May I and duty be alike undone.
                                                         Israfel Brown
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
History is the version of past events that people have decided to
  agree upon.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
%
Stick to your inkpots, kid, actors don't eat regularly.
 (Colleague advising cartoonist Milton Caniff to avoid the stage)

 What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.
-- Anonymous
-- Katharine Hepburn
%
Where are we going?  Nowhere.  So what's the rush?
-- The Lost Boys
%
If my soul could get away from this so-called prison...I should hover over the
beauty of our own bright star.  I should study Nature's laws in all their
crossings and unions...But my first journey would be into the inner substance
of flowers.
-- John Muir
%
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 1
%
Fight the good fight.
-- New Testament
-- 1 Timothy vi, 12
%
Like ships, that sailed for sunny isles,
  But never came to shore.
-- Thomas K. Hervey (1799-1859)
-- The Devil's Progress
%
You need not hang up the ivy-branch over the wine that will sell.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 968
%
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
-- Reginald Buller
%
At every trifle scorn to take offense,
That always shows great pride or little sense.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
%
Only new categories escape the stereotyped thinking
associated with old abstractions.
-- McClellan's Law of Cognition
%
My uncle staggered in the other night, loaded. His wife said, "Where have
 you been?" He said, "I bought something for the house." She said, "What did
 you buy for the house?" He said, "A round of drinks."
-- Jimmy Joyce
%
Wander here a whole summer, if you can.  Thousands of God's wild blessings will
search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by
uncounted.
-- John Muir
%
:gun: [ITS: from the `:GUN' command] vt. To forcibly
   terminate a program or job (computer, not career).  "Some idiot
   left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I
   gunned it."  Compare {can}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
How come when you mix water and flour together you get glue ... and then
 you add eggs and sugar and you get cake? Where does the glue go?
-- Rita Rudner
%
Hello Lal. How are you?
Troi...Admiral...Admiral...An Admiral from Starfleet has come to take
  me away. Troi. I am...scared.
You are scared, aren't you.
I feel it. How is this possible?
I don't know.
This is what it means to feel. This is what...means...feel.
-- Troi and Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
Ian:[ No ice, I'm afraid.]
Barbara: Oh, there's some in the fridge.
-- The Romans
%
To make a happy fireside clime
        To weans and wife,--
That is the true pathos and sublime
        Of human life.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Epistle to Dr. Blacklock
%
Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the
resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Do you have a flowchart template?
... Is it unused?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The nature of the universe is the nature of things that are. Now,
things that are have kinship with things that are from the beginning.
Further, this nature is styled Truth; and it is the first cause of
all that is true.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, ix, 1
%
True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body;
the two are ever united.
-- Humboldt
%
The coast was clear.
-- Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
-- Nymphidia
%
The surest way to hit a woman's heart is to take aim kneeling.
-- Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
-- Douglas Jerrold's Wit
%
...Tucker v. Texas, 326 U.S. 517 (1946), in which a statute punishing
door-to-door distribution of literature was held invalid as an
abridgment of freedom of the press.
-- Supreme Court decision quoted by Mike Godwin in comp.org.eff.talk
%
I took up a collection for a man in our office. But I didn't get enough
 money to buy one.
-- Ruth Buzzi
%
Inside, I'm already SOBBING!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
These screamingly hilarious gogs ensure owners of X Ray Gogs to be the life
of any party.
-- X-Ray Gogs Instructions
%
Election time is that period when politicians get
free speech mixed up with cheap talk.
-- J. B. Kidd
%
ZIP
  Object placed in clothing, designed to get stuck at the most
  inconvenient and/or embarrassing times. When placed in men's
  trousers, the humble zip can be lethal, or at least very painful.
  I'm sure I don't need to explain why, but let's just say it makes
  most men wince almost as much as the word "Bobbit". Take care,
  chaps.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
   "Marling - unbeaten in her three victories."
-- Peter O'Sullivan, BBC2 TV
%
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
-- Havelock Ellis
%
There are three kinds of researchers: Those who can do math and those
who cannot.
-- Tom Rusk Vickery
%
Egotist: A man who thinks that if he hadn't been born, people would have
 wondered why.
-- Dan Post
%
In high school my parents told me I ran with the wrong crowd. I was a
 loner.
-- Jeff Shaw
%
From the very beginning dogs set out to please their masters, not the other
 way around ... They were put to work to perform a wide variety of chores.
 And so today's canine community is broken up into such groups as hunting
 dogs, shepherd dogs, military dogs, racing dogs, watchdogs ... Not so with
 cats. All go under the banner of "pet," a word the dictionary defines as
 "any loved and cherished creature," an excellent choice of words from the
 cat's point of view ... Dogs travel hundreds of miles during their lifetime
 responding to such commands as "come" and "fetch." Cats approach people
 only when there is a reason, and not always even then.
-- Stephen Baker
%
Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them,
but like the mariners of the sea,
we chart our course by them.
-- Carl Schurz
%
In any given group, the most will do the least and the least the most.
-- Merle P. Martin
%
'Okay, who stuck the M&Ms in the atom smasher?'
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
Technology is the expression of the society; it is an expression of the
values and the abilities of the people that generate it.  It is indeed a
most revealing indicator of our society.  and the fact is that
technology in turn shapes the values of a society and of its people.
-- George Bugliarello
%
Data: "Timothy, your head movements are counterproductive.  Can you be still?"
Timothy: "But you do it."
Data: "The servo mechanisms in my neck are designed to approximate human
  movements.  I did not realize the effect was so distracting."
Timothy: "I like it."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
And wrinkles, the damned democrats, won't flatter.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto x, Stanza 24
%
Pay no attention to whatever advice you receive.
-- Edward Gorey
%
Forever honour'd, and forever mourn'd.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xxii, Line 422
%
Among what he called his precepts were such as these: Do not stir
the fire with a sword. Do not sit down on a bushel. Do not devour
thy heart.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Pythagoras, xvii
%
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
All inanimate objects can move just enough to get in your way.
-- Young's Law of Inanimate Mobility
%
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson
%
Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes;
Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- The Bard, I, 3, Line 12
%
You cannot make a cheap palace.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
An Architect starts out knowing very little about anything and
is educated to know less and less about more things such that he
ends up knowing nothing about everything.

An Engineer starts out knowing very little about anything and
is educated to know more and more about less and less so that she
ends up knowing everything about nothing.

A Contractor starts out knowing everything about everything but ends up
knowing nothing about anything primarily due to his association with
architects and engineers.
-- ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS AND CONTRACTORS / Their Education
%
Those desiring to make history would be better concerned with their
own biography.
-- Viktor Shklovsky
%
I have seen soldiers panic at the first sight of battle, and a wounded
squire pulling arrows out from his wound to fight and save his dying
horse.  Nobility is not a birth right but is defined by one's action.
-- Kevin Costner, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, 1994
%
"...  For that matter, compare your pocket computer with the massive
jobs of a thousand years ago.  Why not, then, the last step of doing
away with computers altogether?"
-- Jehan Shuman in Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power", 1957 (!)
%

-- It is the "pon farr" the time of mating.
%
He that uses many words for the explaining any subject, doth like
the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
-- Ray
%
Learning without thought is labor lost;
thought without learning is perilous.
-- Confucius
%
When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by
 asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't
 know the answer either.
-- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
The game of life is always called on account of darkness.
-- Solomon Short
%
A lady lost her cat, and took the cat in a little casket up to a big church
 and said, "I want you to bury my cat." And they run her off. She went to
 another church, and they run her off. She took the cat to a Baptist church
 on the edge of town, and told the preacher she couldn't find nobody to hold
 a service for her dead cat. And the man talked to her bad. "How dare you
 think that we bury cats?" She said, "Well, I'm frustrated and I'm prepared
 to give two thousand dollars to whoever gives a service for my cat." And
 the preacher said, "Lady, why didn't you tell me your cat was a Baptist?"
-- Jerry Clower
%
Teach me to feel another's woe,
  To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
  That mercy show to me.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Universal Prayer, Stanza 10
%
The best diplomat I know is a fully armed phaser bank.
-- Montgomery Scott
%
Her air, her manners, all who saw admir'd;
Courteous though coy, and gentle though retir'd;
The joy of youth and health her eyes display'd,
And ease of heart her every look convey'd.
-- George Crabbe (1754-1832)
-- The Parish Register, Part ii, Marriages
%
Man's life is like unto a winter's day,--
Some break their fast and so depart away;
Others stay dinner, then depart full fed;
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, then behold and see!
As we are now, so must you be.
-- Joseph Henshaw (-1678)
-- Horae Sucissive (1631)
%
Torn from their destined page (unworthy meed
Of knightly counsel and heroic deed).
-- John Ferriar (1764-1815)
-- Illustrations of Sterne, Bibliomania, Line 121
%
Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequer'd shade.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- L'Allegro, Line 95
%
Here's a floppy with a tar of a compressed cpio archive... and they say Unix
 is hard to use...
-- Karl
%
    gay men
Hey, don't let's talk about the light bulb, honey, let's
talk about the shade !
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
%
Not long ago, a teaching hospital installed a computer to interview patients
 visiting its Gynecology department. Apparently several of the programmers
 were not familiar with Medicine. One of the questions it asked was, "Are you
 having your monthly period now?" If the answer was 'yes', the computer would
-- send the woman away and make a new appointment in four weeks time.
%
If it is full of bugs - fool them
by giving it a GUI before release
-- Motto of the 90's
%
All authority belongs to the people.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
 >:-( mad, annoyed
-- SMILEY
%
    Leos
None: Leos are so enthusiastic they carry their own
light.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I was sure the old fellow would never make it to the other side of the road
 when I struck him.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
:grunge: /gruhnj/ n. 1. That which is grungy, or that which makes
   it so.  2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in
   other parts of the program.  The preferred term in North America is
   {dead code}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:Suzie COBOL: /soo'zee koh'bol/ 1. [IBM: prob. from Frank
   Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] n. A coder straight out of training
   school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain
   English.  Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to avoid
   accusations of sexism) `Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles)
   `Cobol Charlie'.  2. [proposed] Meta-name for any {code
   grinder}, analogous to {J. Random Hacker}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:FOD: /fod/ v. [Abbreviation for `Finger of Death', originally a
   spell-name from fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice
   and with no regard for other people.  From {MUD}s where the
   wizard command `FOD <player>' results in the immediate and total
   death of <player>, usually as punishment for obnoxious behavior.
   This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod
   the process that is burning all the cycles."  Compare {gun}.

   In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens
   when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in
   flight.  Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of
   what this generally does to the engine.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
If you work on a lobster boat, sneaking up behind people and pinching them is
probably a joke that gets old real fast.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Apparently IBM is not IBM compatible.
-- Andy Tanenbaum
%
:frotz: /frots/ 1. n. See {frobnitz}.  2. `mumble frotz': An
   interjection of mildest disgust.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they point upward from the floor --
especially in the dark.
-- Al Ross
%
I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come.
-- Abraham Lincoln
%
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other man every
right that he claims for himself.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)
%
if you've ever used a weed eater indoors.
-- You may be redneck...
%
The amount of pleasure derived from a cigarette is directly proportional
to the number of the non-smokers in the vicinity.
-- Raj K. Dhawan
%
But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to
thee, to speak these words?  Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the
wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?
-- 2 Kings 18:27 (KJV)
%
And every spring, a new graduating class enters the workforce.  Some have
a well-rounded view of operating systems, but for many there is only Unix.
-- Gord Campbell, InfoAge editorial, Nov 84
%
To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
%
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
-- Emerson
%
I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of
his personality
-- Victor Frankel
%
Many candles can be kindled from one candle without diminishing it.
-- The Midrash
%

-- Politically Incorrect and damn proud of it!
%
 :-V shouting
-- SMILEY
%
ERUDITION, n.  Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

    So wide his erudition's mighty span,
    He knew Creation's origin and plan
    And only came by accident to grief --
    He thought, poor man, 'twas right to be a thief.
                                                           Romach Pute
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I think you ought to know I'm feeling terribly depressed.
-- Douglas Adams
-- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Marvin
%
A thing of custom,--'t is no other;
Only it spoils the pleasure of the time.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
Of course, you know what your great discovery means, don't you Percy?
Perhaps, my lord...
That you, Percy, Lord Percy...are an utter _berk_.
-- Edmund and Percy : Money
%
There is no limit to stupidity.   Space itself is said to be bounded by
its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
-- Gene Wolfe
%
Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.
-- Georges Jacques Danton, addressed to the executioner, 1794
%
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
-- Old Testament
-- Job xxxviii, 2
%
When the night's darkest, the dawn's nearest.
-- Proverb
%
And art made tongue-tied by authority.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- Sonnet lxvi
%
 ::-) wears glasses
-- SMILEY
%
The multitude is always in the wrong.
-- Earl of Roscommon (1633-1684)
-- Essay on Translated Verse, Line 184
%

-- Feminizt logic the original oxymoron.
%
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Poetry, a Rhapsody
%
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
books are well written, or badly written, That is all.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh what were man?--a world without a sun.
-- Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
-- Pleasures of Hope, Part ii, Line 21
%
I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade.  And the good Lord will forgive
me: that's his.
-- Empress Catherine the Great
%
...you see a flock of birds and try to figure out the algorithms that
determine their movement.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
His only fault is that he has no fault.
-- Pliny the Younger (61-105 AD)
-- Letters, Book ix, Letter xxvi, 1
%
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
-- Old Testament
-- Genesis iii, 19
%
I war not with the dead.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book vii, Line 485
%
BEDEVERE: Stand by for attack!!
   [CUT TO enormous army forming up.  Trebuchets, rows of PIKEMEN, siege
   towers, pennants flying, shouts of Stand by for attack!  Traditional
   army build-up shots.  The shouts echo across the ranks of the army.
   We see various groups reacting, and stirring themselves in readiness.]
ARTHUR:   Who are they?
BEDEVERE: Oh, just some friends!
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
 (Start with:)  Hello, this is Adrian; I'm just returning your
 call.
     (Later change it to:)
 Hello, this is Adrian; I'm just returning your call.  If you
 haven't made a call yet, please do so now, because if I try to
 answer a call you haven't even made yet, it could create a
 temporal paradox, which could seriously disrupt the space-time
 continuum, and possibly even cause the entire universe to
 implode.  And you wouldn't want that to happen, now, would you?
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
"common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity
 or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large..."
-- H. P. Lovecraft
%
Humility is one of the finest variations of expressing self-esteem.
-- Norbert Untersteiner
%
I own seven-eighths of all the artists in downtown Burbank!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Absolutum obsoletum.  (If it works, it's out of date.)
-- Stafford Beer
%
Do you know what the VM privilege classes are?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Valeris: "I do not understand this representation."
Spock: "It is a depiction from ancient Earth mythology.  The expulsion from
  Paradise."
Valeris: "Why keep it in your quarters?"
Spock: "It is a reminder to me that all things end."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9522.6
%
Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself.
-- Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
-- Maxim 79
%
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the
entrails of the last priest.
-- Denis Diderot in "Dithrambe sur la fete de rois"
%
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the rights of the
people by the gradual & silent encroachments of those in power than by violent
and sudden usurpations."
-- James Madison, Virginia Conv. 1788
%
Other people's tools work only in other people's yards.
-- Jane Bryant Quinn
-- The First Law of Gardening
%
:Infinite-Monkey Theorem: n. "If you put an {infinite} number
   of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script
   for Hamlet."  (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys
   and a very long period of time.)  This theorem asserts nothing about
   the intelligence of the one {random} monkey that eventually
   comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out
   all the possible *incorrect* versions of Hamlet).  It may be
   referred to semi-seriously when justifying a {brute force}
   method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at
   it, any technical challenge becomes a {one-banana problem}.

   This theorem was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur
   Eddington.  It became part of the idiom of through the classic short
   story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, and many younger
   hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's
   "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You told me about that yesterday.
I know, but I left out a comma.
-- Groucho Marx
%
The piano sounds like a carnival.  The microphone smells like a beer.
 They sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say
 "Man, what are you doing here?"
-- Billy Joel
%
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
%
If you hit two keys on the typewriter, the one you don't want hits the paper.
-- DeVries' Dilemma
%
I'm not bad... I'm just drawn that way.
-- Jessica Rabbit, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?
%
There is nothing to be found in music, only the pleasure of being
 defined by it.
-- Simon Frith
%
Dishonesty, cowardice and duplicity are never impulsive.
-- George Knight
%
"I once knew someone," said Bourdin, "who heard the clock
strike four one day, just as he was falling asleep, and he
counted like this: 'One, one, one, one.' Then, when he
realized how ridiculous that was, he said, 'The clock has
gone crazy: it struck one o'clock four times!' "
-- R Balmes, quoted by Georges Ifrah, "From One to Zero"
%
How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river
flows on.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
%
 :-q trying to touch its tongue to its nose
-- SMILEY
%
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that
makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and
an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
-- Samuel Beckett
%
My cup runneth over.
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm xxiii, 5
%
How to get a head in refrigeration.
-- Jeffrey Dahmers Cookbook
%
The heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act i, Sc. 6
%
Any college that would take your son he should be too proud to go to.
                 - Erma Bombeck

 The best sex education for kids is when Daddy pats Mommy on the fanny when
 he comes home from work.
-- Dr. William H. Masters
%
My girlfriend's father died of throat trouble. They hung him. He used to
 work in a bank. But no matter how much the boss likes you, if you work in a
 bank you can't bring home samples.
-- Eddie Cantor
%
Without slack, life is like a bowl of shit with the handle on the inside
-- Sister Susie the Floozie
%
I met a fool i' the forest,
A motley fool.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act ii, Sc. 7
%
You heard about the man who quit playing golf, then took it up again
 fourteen years later? He found his ball.
-- Bob Kaliban
%
One of the sayings of Diogenes was that most men were within a finger's
breadth of being mad; for if a man walked with his middle finger pointing
out, folks would think him mad, but not so if it were his forefinger.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
I never knew so young a body with so old a head.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
I wish scientists would come up with a way to make dogs a lot bigger,
but with a smaller head.  That way, they'd still be good as watchdogs,
but they wouldn't eat as much.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
When I was a boy, my mother wore a mood ring. Whenever she was in a good
 mood, it turned blue. Whenever she was in a bad mood, it left a big red
 mark in the middle of my forehead.
-- Jeff Shaw
%
Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
-- Roger Babson
%
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he
 was twice married, it never occured to him to verify this statement by
 examining his wives' mouths.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
There is no possible line of conduct which has not at some time and
place been condemned, and which at some other time and place been
enjoined as a duty.
-- William E. H. Lecky (1838-1903)
%
Awww... Cut it out.
-- John Bobbitt
-- Famous Last Words
%

-- Improve response time go home.
%
Maybe I am getting too young for this sort of thing.
-- Tom Baker, INVASION OF TIME
%
It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
And to be swift is less than to be wise.
'T is more by art than force of num'rous strokes.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book xxiii, Line 383
%
At West Point, the cadets had been full of bravado...But bravado was
grounded in ignorance;    true courage was possible only after one gained
the visceral comprehension that death was the potential price of valor.
-- Rick Atkinson, "The Long Grey Line"
%
:black art: n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by
   implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular
   application or systems area (compare {black magic}).  VLSI design
   and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings)
   considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they
   became {deep magic}, and once standard textbooks had been written,
   became merely {heavy wizardry}.  The huge proliferation of formal
   and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related
   technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term
   `black art' and what it describes less common than formerly.  See
   also {voodoo programming}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Sorrows remember'd sweeten present joy.
-- Robert Pollok (1799-1827)
-- The Course of Time, Book i, Line 464
%
Archimedes had stated, that given the force, any given weight might
be moved; and even boasted that if there were another earth, by going
into it he could remove this.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Marcellus
%
 :Uj smoking (and smiling)
-- SMILEY
%
This passage was written by a London reporter on the eve of the England-West
Germany Soccer World Cup final of 1966...

"If, on the morrow, the Germans defeat us at our national sport, be not
dismayed.  For twice in this century, we've defeated them at theirs."
-- From the San Jose Mercury News, 7 July 1990
%
To write well is at once to think well, to feel rightly, and to render
properly! It is to have, at the same time, mind, soul, taste.
-- Buffon
%
ENTHUSIASM, n.  A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of
repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.
Byron, who recovered long enough to call it "entuzy-muzy," had a
-- relapse, which carried him off to Missolonghi.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:gripenet: [IBM] n. A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name for IBM's
   internal VNET system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to
   voice pointed criticism of IBM management that would be taboo in
   more formal channels.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The minority is always in the right.
-- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
%
 (:-( frowning
-- SMILEY
%
My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on
it.
-- Grendel, by John Gardner
%
A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it.
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor
%
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated
by quotations.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
%
    Amish
Amish don't have light bulbs. They bake pies.
Note: The Amish are a people, also known as the "Pennsylvania
Dutch", who mostly (though not exclusively) live in
southeastern Pennsylvania and are noted for their religion.
They adhere to a strict code of living that forbids using
such modern conveniences as electricity and automobiles, and
indeed often look and act as if they were time travelers from
the early nineteenth century (they drive around in horse and
buggy carts). They are descended from German Protestant
immigrants of that time (hence the "Dutch" as the immigration
people misunderstood "Deutsch", the answer they gave for
nationality). Their quaint lifestyle draws many people to SE
PA every year, where they often have a chance to sample their
sweet pies and cakes. Hence the joke.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A writer mustn't shift your point of view.
-- Writing Rule 06
%
Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong
as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer
than any flame.
-- Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB)
%
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God
 is crying."  And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him
 is "Probably because of something you did."
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of
the people are right more than half of the time.
-- E. B. White
%
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
-- Publilius Syrus
%
HOLY
  Something containing a lot of holes, such as the Bible.

I'M
  going to get struck down for that one, aren't I? Or at the very
  least, lose both the remaining Christian subscribers.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely
 essential.
-- Will Cuppy
%
Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences;
whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
Now I'm concentrating on a specific tank battle toward
 the end of World War II!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Advice after injury is like medicine after death.
-- Danish proverb
%
Hell is other people.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
%
Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor
ought to be to set off that spark in one another.
-- Kenny Ausubel
%
"Lock the door."
"And *HOPE* they don't have blasters."
-- Han
-- Leia
%
It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my
passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to
have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with
the basket of fruit! ... I put all the things I like into my pictures. The
things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
-- Pablo Picasso
%
    of me
Three. One to change it, one to make up a joke about it, and
one to spend the next 6 months going round telling it to
everyone.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Computer: "Please enter program."
Scott: "The android at the bar said you could show me my old ship.  Let me see
  it!"
Computer: "Insufficient data.  Please specify parameters."
Scott: "The Enterprise!  Show me the Bridge of the Enterprise, you chattering
  piece of--"
Computer: "There have been five Federation ships with that name.  Please
  specify by registry number."
Scott: "N-C-C-1-7-0-1.  No bloody 'A', 'B', 'C', or 'D'."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
their faces.
-- May your daughters' hair grow thick, black, and abundant all over
%
Cervantes smil'd Spain's chivalry away.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Don Juan, Canto xiii, Stanza 11
%
What are friends for?
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon
%
Data: "These quarters were obviously intended for one crewman, sir.  There is
  but a single sleeping space."
Picard: "I'm sure the Klingons found it amusing to put us in here together."
Data: "Since I do not require sleep, I propose you take the...shelf, sir.  I am
  content to stand."
Picard: "Very well, Mister Data, thank you."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
There is no one orthodoxy which is the enemy of democracy.
All of them are.
-- James Higgins
%
The post office announced today that it is going to issue a stamp
 commemorating prostitution in the United States. It's a ten-cent stamp, but
 if you want to lick it, it's a quarter.
-- Chevy Chase
%
Don't worry, Mr.B. I have a cunning plan to solve the problem.
Yes, Baldrick, let us not forget that you tried to solve the problem
  of your mother's low ceiling by cutting off her head...
-- Baldrick and Edmund : Amy and Amiability
%
MOUTH, n.  In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of
the heart.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
We must overact our part in some measure,
in order to produce any effect at all.
-- William Hazlitt, "On Cant and Hypocrisy"
%
That large utterance of the early gods!
-- John Keats (1795-1821)
-- Hyperion, Book i
%
Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
-- Maryon Pearson
%
:Reading Habits:
Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction.
The typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific
American", "Co-Evolution Quarterly", and "Smithsonian".  Hackers often
have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to
talk about it as much.  Many hackers spend as much of their spare time
reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep
shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.
-- Einstein
%
Should I incapacitate him, Commander?
-- Worf, "The Survivors", stardate 43152.4
%
"Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none.  For we grieve only for
what has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen."
-- Pliny the Younger
%
Do you own an up-to-date copy of any operating system manual?
... *every* operating system manual?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Even if you had the guts, you'd only be doing me a favor.
-- Greg Sutton (the oil man), INFERNO
%
 You're growing tired.  Your eyelids are getting heavy.  You feel
 very sleepy now.  You are gradually losing your willpower and
 your ability to resist suggestions.  When you hear the tone you
 will feel helplessly compelled to leave your name, number, and a
 message.
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
All resistance is useless.
-- Cyberleader, The Moonbase
%
smokies: little cigars, cigarettes, etc.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
%
Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And Love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But Hating, my boy, is an Art.
-- Odgen Nash (1902-1971)
%
Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910)
%
To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.
-- Alexander Pope
%
    laboratory heads (senior researchers, etc.)
change a light bulb?
Five; one to change the light bulb, the other four to stand
around arguing whether he/she is taking the right approach.
-- How many
-- does it take to
%
I stand by all the misstatements that I've made.
                   (reported in Esquire, 8/92)
-- Vice President Dan Quayle to Sam Donaldson, 8/17/89
%
 ($) speculation on why Vanderbilt is in the SEC
-- SMILEY
%
In the drinking well
 Which the plumber built her,
 Aunt Eliza fell
 We must buy a filter
-- Harry Graham
%
the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated.
-- The Messiah will come.  There will be a resurrection of the dead all
-- Rabbi Meir Kahane
%
if your wife really admires your mother's tattoos.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Uhura: "This isn't reality...this is fantasy!"
-- "STIII:TSFS", Stardate 8210.3
%
Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect?  There's a frood who really knows
where his towel is.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
A beer doesn't have to sleep with the windows open.
-- Men vs. Beer
%
 :-( mad
-- SMILEY
%
y.
-- Bill Vaughan
%
 0-( scuba diver with a broken mask
-- SMILEY
%
If a child lives with approval, he learns to like himself.
-- Dorothy Law Nolte
%
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
-- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne
%
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is
the source of all true art and all science.  He to whom this emotion is
a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead:  his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein
%
I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.
-- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
%
At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement,
especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
-- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being
-- John Keats (1795-1821)
%
Y'know, every once in a while, when you look off into the distance,
 you can see a shimmering in the atmosphere's coefficient of refraction,
 as someone, someone small and slow on the horizon, gets a clue.
-- Blair Houghton, who's yet to get one
%
When a thing is done, it's done. Don't look back.
Look forward to your next objective.
-- George Marshall, U.S. Army general
%
When outrageous expenditures are divided finely enough, the
public will not have enough stake in any one expenditure to squelch it.
Enough guppies can eat a treasury.
-- The Guppy Law
-- Corollary
%
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and
discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are
one's mistakes.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
 (:<) blabber mouth
-- SMILEY
%
Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding
-- Mahatma Ghandi
%
We can invent only with memory.
-- Alphonse Karr
%
:fd leak: /F-D leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a
   {core leak}, in which a program fails to close file descriptors
   (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually
   runs out of them.  See {leak}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do
without servility to mobs or monarchs...
-- Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)
%
Heavy the sorrow that bows the head
When love is alive and hope is dead.
-- W. S. Gilbert
%
The green mantle of the standing pool.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act iii, Sc. 4
%
I am gender neuter, inadequate.
-- Lal, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
Ten thousand years from now, the only story this civilization will
tell will be in its junk piles- so observe what is important!
-- Richard N. Farmer
%
But war 's a game which were their subjects wise
Kings would not play at.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book v, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 187
%
:filk: /filk/ [from SF fandom, where a typo for `folk' was
   adopted as a new word] n.,v. A popular or folk song with lyrics
   revised or completely new lyrics, intended for humorous effect when
   read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF conventions.  There is a
   flourishing subgenre of these called `computer filks', written by
   hackers and often containing rather sophisticated technical humor.
   See {double bucky} for an example.  Compare {grilf},
   {hing} and {newsfroup}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Picard: "This culture will be assimiliated."
Hugh: "They do not wish it."
Picard: "Irrelevant."
Hugh: "They will resist us.
Picard: "Resistance is futile.
Hugh: "Resistance is *not* futile.  Some have escaped."
Picard: "They will be found.  It is inevitable.  All will be assimilated.".
Hugh: "Must Geordi be assimilated?"
Picard: "Yes."
Hugh: "He does not wish it.  He would rather die than be assimilated."
Picard: "Then he will die."
Hugh: "No, Geordi must not die.  Geordi is a friend."
-- "I, Borg", Stardate unknown
%
Always stay in with the outs.
-- David Halberstan
%
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye:
Give him a little earth for charity!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VIII
-- Act iv, Sc. 2
%
If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
-- Leo Rogers' Commentary
%
We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.
-- Titus Livius
%
The problem with trying to keep everything a secret
is that eventually you will succeed.
-- Jen-Hsun Huang
%
Europe was created by history.  America was created by philosophy.
-- Margaret Thatcher
%
There is nothing permanent except change.
-- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.)
%
I joined scientology at a garage sale!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow
into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own
freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off
like autumn leaves.
-- John Muir, American Naturalist (1838-1914)
%
I see gr-reat changes takin' place ivry day,
but no change at all ivry fifty years.
-- Finley Peter Dunne
%
picket, snow: rank and file member of union internationale des
associations d'alpinisme publicly protesting grievances in the
dead of winter.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
Is Saul also among the prophets?
-- Old Testament
-- 1 Samuel x, 11
%
Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.
-- Nicolai Lenin
%
Ever speed up a system by removing a jumper?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The world makes men free. Whoever cannot express himself is a slave.
-- Ludwig Feuerbach
%
Real Men are NOT afraid to say: Fuck OFF, you're Not my type.
-- Drieux
%
There goes the parson, O illustrious spark!
And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- On observing some Names of Little Note
%
The abundance of things engenderth disdaifulness.
-- Proverb
%
Then farewell Horace, whom I hated so,--
Not for thy faults, but mine.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 77
%
From the moment I picked your book up until I put it down I was convulsed with
 laughter.  Some day I intend reading it.
-- "The Book of Insults", Groucho Marx, 1890-1977
%
An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own
 physician.
-- Barach's Rule
%
Tehee quod she, and clapte the wyndow to.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer
%
"Cards? Luxury!  I was at the smithy 18 hours a day forging gears for my
analytical engine, Ada working her fingers to the bone assembling them
on shafts.  I used to dream of the day when I would finally get it all
put together so that I could finally play 'Wumpus'."
-- Babbage
%
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
-- Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
%
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
-- Margaret Fuller
%
Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns.
I am thankful thorns have roses.
-- Alphonse Karr, French journalist
%
There is NO defense against the attack of the KILLER MICROS
-- Eugene Brooks
%
You can't be optimistic with a misty optic.
-- Peter Campbell
%
A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she
dares.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%
When in doubt, escape.
-- Guess Who (knowbudy@oro.net), referring to regular expressions in awk
%
Why should a man whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex
facts. Seek simplicity and distrust it.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
%
:heads down: [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for
   so long that everything outside the focus area is missed.  See also
   {hack mode} and {larval stage}, although this mode is hardly
   confined to fledgling hackers.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Trust me, I'm a consultant.
-- Famous Last Words
%
:YA-: [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost
   invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set
   by UNIX `yacc(1)' (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler).  See
   {YABA}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
    people
Five. A Black, a Jew, two women, and a cripple...
Note: topical to the resignation of Interior secretary James
Watt in 1983
Note: Probably the only really good light bulb joke of 1984.
-- How many
-- does it take to throw away a one WATT bulb??
%
In any crowd of spectators at least
one will suggest that razor blades could be attached to the disc.  ("You
could maim and kill with that thing.")
-- The Eighth Commandment of Frisbee
-- Dan Roddick
%
We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.
-- John Adams
%
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 5
%
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the
cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
%
Men stare at those parts of the female anatomy which carry the subcutaneous
fat necessary for childbearing and lactation. This is not news.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Of Banishment
%
:LISP: [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from
   `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. AI's mother
   tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists
   and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of
   code as data and vice-versa.  Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in
   the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still
   in use except FORTRAN.  Accordingly, it has undergone considerable
   adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite
   different in detail from the original LISP 1.5.  The dominant HLL
   among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne
   with {C}.  See {languages of choice}.

   All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return
   values; this, together with the high memory utilization of LISPs,
   gave rise to Alan Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar
   Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything
   and the cost of nothing".

   One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example
   that most newer languages, such as {COBOL} and {Ada}, are full
   of unnecessary {crock}s.  When the {Right Thing} has already
   been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer
   languages.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedence, loyalty, and the
 importance of turning around three times before lying down.
-- Robert Benchley
%
Watch out when the auctioneer calls some nineteenth-century wine "a
 graceful old lady whose wrinkles are starting to show through layers of
 makeup." That means the wine is undrinkable, and some fool will spend $500
 for it.
-- Robert Parker
%
Every man who is high up likes to think he has done it all himself,
and the wife smiles and lets it go at that.
-- J.M. Barrie
%
In every instance, we found that the best-run companies
stay as close to their customers as humanly possible.
-- Thomas Peters
%
See if the man has lipstick on his face.
-- How can you tell if two adults eating dinner at a restaurant are in love?
-- Sandra, age 7
%
To achieve the impossible dream, try going to sleep.
-- Joan Klempner
%
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor
doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
-- Alvin Toffler
%
From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come
all the many particulars.
-- Heraclitus
%
Warwick, peace,
Proud setter up and puller down of kings!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
Pardek: "How could they know of this location?  Someone has betrayed
us!" Spock: "Yes, you did." Pardek: "Spock, we've been friends for
eighty years." Spock: "It is the only logical conclusion.  You asked
me to come to Romulus, you  arranged the meetings with the proconsul.
 And you knew that Picard and Data  had returned to the surface with
new information."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
To steal information from a person is called plagarism.  To steal
    information from the enemy is called gathering intelligence.
-- Murphy's Military Laws, #48
%
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
%
Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit.  Surely
it is worth while to be one, and to feel that the census of the universe
would be incomplete without counting you.  Surely there is grandeur in knowing
that in the realm of thought you are without a chain; that you have the right
to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls or fences, or
prohibited places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that
your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you
hold all in fee, and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatsoever; that
in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from
the ignorant tyranny of majorities.  Surely it is worth something to feel that
there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods,
to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage.  Surely it
is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can devise no prison,
no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas
cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with
fire.  Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that
within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds
and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), "The Free Soul"
%
They say you shouldn't say nothin' about the dead unless it's good. He's
 dead. Good.
-- Moms Mabley
%
It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever
it be, pays any regard to human affairs.
-- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD)
-- Natural History, Book ii, Sect. 20
%
However, on religious issures there can be little or no compromise.
There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious
beliefs.  There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than
Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being.
But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf
should be used sparingly.  The religious factions that are growing
throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom.
They are trying to force government leaders into following their position
100 percent.  If you disagree with these religious groups on a
particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of
money or votes or both.  I'm frankly sick and tired of the political
preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be
a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D."  Just who do
they think they are?  And from where do they presume to claim the
right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?  And I am even more angry as
a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who
thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll
call in the Senate.  I am warning them today:  I will fight them every
step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all
Americans in the name of "conservatism."
-- Senator Barry Goldwater, from the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981
%
Worf! You're a romantic!
It is among the Klingons that love poetry achieves its fullest flower.
-- Dr. Pulaski and Worf, "Up the Long Ladder", stardate 42823.2
%
 :_) after a fight where his nose was smashed in
-- SMILEY
%
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
-- Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire (1649-1720)
-- Essay on Poetry
%
...[I] put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee, Jr., High Flight
%
'Good morning Mistress Ploppy', he'd say..and _I'd_ say..'Good morning,
  _Mr_ Ploppy'...!!!!
 .......The long winter evenings must just _fly_ by...
-- Mrs Ploppy and Edmund : Head
%
...you start dreaming in Tetris and trying to rearrange the furniture so
it all fits neatly against one wall.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
..  are the STEWED PRUNES still in the HAIR DRYER?
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Play like you've got guts coming out of your ears.
-- Paul "Bear" Bryant
%
Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs
of a swinish multitude.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- Reflections on the Revolution in France, Vol. iii, p. 335
%
Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket
or a left.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool.
-- Calvin & Hobbes
%
The totality is present even in the broken pieces.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
Burnt Sienna. That's the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas.
-- Ken Weaver
%
The Quark bomb, formerly the Johnny Cyclops bomb, after the President of the
same name...
-- Whoops Apocalypse
%
If you want to do it, do it!
-- Francesco Scavullo (from his father)
%
In every work of genius we recognise our rejected thoughts.
-- Emerson's Observation
%
How glorius a greeting the sun gives the mountains!  To behold this alone is
worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over.
-- John Muir
%
HARMONISTS, n.  A sect of Protestants, now extinct, who came from
Europe in the beginning of the last century and were distinguished for
the bitterness of their internal controversies and dissensions.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I was standing on the corner of the street, as quiet as quiet could be. When
 a great big ugly man came up--and tied his horse to me.
-- Bea Lillie
%
This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.
-- Solomon Short
%
A monied aristocracy in our country ... has already set the government
at defiance.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
%
If it can go wrong it will, while HE'S out of town.
-- Mrs. Murphy's Law
%
    Leos
Leos don't change light bulbs, although sometimes their
agents get a Virgo in to do it for them while they're
out.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when.
You can only decide how you're going to live now.
-- Joan Baez
%
They might find me interesting.
Baldrick, I find the General Northern and Metropolitan sewage
  system interesting, but that doesn't mean that I want to put on
  some rubber gloves and pull things out with a pair of tweezers.
-- Baldrick and Edmund : General Hospital
%
Peace through superior firepower.
-- The Peddler, "Arsenal of Freedom", stardate 41798.2
%
Dolendi modus, timendi non item.
[To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.]
-- Bacon, Of Seditions and Troubles
%
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it.
-- Old Testament
-- Ecclesiastes xii, 7
%
    Dylan fans
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. The answer is
blowin' in the wind.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iv, Sc. 1
%
The best rules to form a young man are, to talk little, to hear much,
to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's
own opinions, and value others that deserve it.
-- Sir William Temple
%
Why is the sky black?
-- Lal to Data, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead
of theories to suit facts.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes: Scandal in Bohemia"
%
:WOMBAT: [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. Applied to problems
   which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and
   unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved.  Often used
   in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'.  See
   also {crawling horror}, {SMOP}.  Also note the rather different
   usage as a metasyntactic variable in {{Commonwealth Hackish}}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book v, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 733
%
Kristin: "Do you have any clothes around here I could borrow?  At least until I
  figure out where the swimming pool is?"
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
1) It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.
-- from Mad magazine, sometime in the 1960s
%
This contract doesn't include a Sanity Clause. Everyone knows, there ain't no
Sanity Clause.
-- Groucho Marx
%
There is no delight the equal of dread, as long as it is somebody else's.
-- Clive Barker
%
If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
-- The Third Law of Computer Programming
%
Picard: "How're you feeling?" Scott: "I don't know.  How am I feeling?"
Beverly: "Other than a few bumps and bruises, I'd say you feel fine
for a man of  a hundred and forty-seven." Scott: "And I don't feel
a day over a hundred and twenty."
-- "Relics", Stardate Unknown
%
When a program is working perfectly the programmer will not know
what the heck is going on.
-- Murphy's Sixth Law of Programming
%
Toroidal carbohydrate modules?  Make mine glazed!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
%
I want you to see Peel, Stanley, Graham, Sheil, Russell, Macaulay,
Old Joe, and so on. They are all upper-crust here.
-- Thomas C. Haliburton (1796-1865)
-- Sam Slick in England, Chap. xxiv
%
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the
thinking.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
%

-- They told me to get a life I got a computer instead.
%
...wondering which of the brothers to blame
 and watching for pigs on the wing.
-- Pink Floyd
%
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
-- Charles Darwin
%
Two rules we should always have ready,--that there is nothing good
or evil save in the will; and that we are not to lead events, but
to follow them.
-- Epictetus (c. 60 AD)
-- In what Manner we ought to bear Sickness,
-- Discourses, Book iii, Chap. x
%
Fired that the house rejects him, "'Sdeath! I 'll print it,
And shame the fools."
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires, Line 61
%
Perhaps the male has become an artist in the creation of many hidden ways
of killing himself.
-- Herb Goldberg, The Hazards Of Being Male
%
 := | Baboon
-- SMILEY
%
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
-- K. Trout
%
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a
lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his
entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
-- Edward Abbey
%
That will depend, my lord, on whether I embrace your principles or
your mistress.
-- John Wilkes
%
So to the hardware shop for Things Of Stone And Wood
But if I didn't want a 2x4 then I was out of luck
And finally down dark Fitzroy Street looking for Queen
But to my horror, they would only offer me a fu
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Ah, Captain. I hope you're going to conduct yourself with a little
  more decorum this time.
No, I'm going to conduct myself with no decorum. Shove off.
-- Nurse Brown and Edmund : General Hospital
%
I remind you that humans are only a tiny minority in this galaxy.
-- Spock, "The Apple," stardate 3715.6.
%
That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- Tam o' Shanter
%
Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts.
-- Dryden
%
Believing is seeing.
-- Disimoni's Rule of Cognition
%
"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and
by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He
ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only
as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes
ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of
political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state
of nature.
-- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
-- A Vindication of Natural Society, Vol. i, p. 15
%
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
-- Carl Jung (1875-1961)
%
I am as a weed
Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam to sail
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iii, Stanza 2
%
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and
 not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
-- Sir Francis Bacon 1561-1626
%
For your convenience, we recommend courageous,
 efficient self-service.
-- In a Hong Kong supermarket
%
What precious drops are those
Which silently each other's track pursue,
Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?
-- John Dryden (1631-1700)
-- The Conquest of Granada, Part ii, Act iii, Sc. 1
%
"I hate it when them foreigners can't speak English good."
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they
are untrue
-- Bertrand Russell
%
If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian
control of the military.
-- Harry S. Truman
%
Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.
-- Libbie Fudim
%
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense
-- E. E. Cummings (1894-1963)
%
Children are all foreigners.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
    feminists
Seventy. One to change it while the others make a 69.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful
to them, to praise which deceives them.
-- La Rochefoucauld
%
You can't look at a girl without wondering what her tail would look like.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
'Freeways are the cathedrals of our times,' someone said. Not me, but
    someone did.
-- David Byrne
%
My grandfather gave me a watch.  It doesn't have any hands or numbers.  He says
 it's very accurate.  I asked him what time it was.  You can guess what he told
 me.
-- Steven Wright
%
Kirk: "All right, Lieutenant, you can come down from Mount Olympus now."
-- "Who Mourns For Adonais?", Stardate 3468.1.
%
For neatness, always draw the curves first, and afterwards plot the data.
-- Finagle's Third Rule
%
Have you ever posted a flame?
... Ever flame a cross-posting?
... Ever flame a flame?
... Do you flame regularly?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of.
-- Geri Weitzman
%
The man who rows the boat seldom has time to rock it.
-- Bill Copeland
%
The sweet remembrance of the just
Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust.
-- Tate and Brady
-- cxii, 6
%
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant
church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
-- Thomas Paine
%
They that govern most make the least noise. You see, when they row
in a barge, they do that drudgery work, slash and puff, and sweat,
but he that governs sits quietly at the stern, and is scarce seen to stir.
-- Selden
%
Well-languaged Daniel.
-- William Browne (1590-1645)
-- Britannia's Pastorals, Book ii, Song 2
%
When must dispute has past,
We find our tenets just the same as last.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
%
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
%
Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will
establish yourself as an expert.
-- Ryan's Law
%
Picard: "What will you do now?" Romulan #2: "What we have always done.
 Continue to teach, pass on the ideals to  a new generation, work
for the day when new thoughts may be spoken aloud." Picard: "The Federation
will welcome that day."
-- "Unification II", Stardate 45245.8
%
A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered,
"In silence."
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Archelaus
%
Riker: "First Officer's Log, Stardate 44001.4.  The Borg ship has resumed its
  course towards Earth.  We are unable to pursue, pending repairs to the
  Enterprise."
-- "The Best Of Both Worlds Part II", Stardate 44001.4
%
< After Gorman says, "Hicks, meet me at the south lock. We're coming in." >
[sarcastically] "He's coming in. I feel safer already."
-- Hudson, "Aliens"
%
    There is the truth, and there are lies, and there is nothing on Earth or in
the Netherhells that does not fall under one of these two headings, with the
exception of politics.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. LXXXVIII
%
The simple realization that there are other points of view is the
beginning of wisdom. Understanding what they are is a great step.
The final test is understanding why they are held.
-- Charles M. Campbell
%
I have other fish to fry.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iv, Chap. xxxv
%
Picard: "Mister LaForge...schtep on it."
-- "The Big Goodbye", Stardate unknown
%
What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do
the unnecessary.
-- Richard Harkness, The New York Times, 1960
%
I believe that man will not endure; he will prevail.
-- William Faulkner
%
ZOO
  Generally a large location where a number of animals are kept,
  often against their will. Designers of fenceless zoos need to be
  very careful when estimating the width and depth of the trenches
  against how far some of the more enthusiastic animals with sharp
  teeth can jump. A miscalculation could result in long searches for
  bits of zoo visitors inside various animals' stomachs.
      Security at zoos should always be a priority. Last year at
  Melbourne Zoo, five hooligans broke into the zoo at night and
  taught some of the gorillas how to do the long jump. Then the four
  of them showed the tigers how to climb out of their cages, and the
  one that was left was found feeding arms to the killer whales.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
-- Samuel Johnson
%
It's not the drunken drivers who cause the trouble here; it's these young
 guys in their little German cars, switching lanes and giving each other
 the finger.
-- Highway Patrolman in Santa Clara County
%
Many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
There really is no substitute for holding the reins.
-- Picard to Riker, "The Icarus Factor", stardate 42686.4
%
You always sleep *face down* (think about it!).
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should
not hesitate to prefer the latter.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
A plague of sighing and grief! It blows a man up like a bladder.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't
deal drugs.  When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because
I know I'm innocent.  When they took the second amendment, I said
nothing because I don't own a gun.  Now they've come for the first
amendment, and I can't say anything at all.
-- Tim Freeman
%
Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgment hoodwink'd.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- The Task, Book vi, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 101
%
COTHAM ROAD, KEW: Outbound traffic restricted to tram tracks from Uvadale
Grove to Florence Avenue until about January 2007.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA.
%
Facts are stubborn things.
-- Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
-- Translation of Gil Blas, Book x, Chap. 1
%
There was a power outage at a department store yesterday.
 Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.
-- Steven Wright
%
This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Locksley Hall, Line 75
%
OPPOSE, v.  To assist with obstructions and objections.

    How lonely he who thinks to vex
    With bandinage the Solemn Sex!
    Of levity, Mere Man, beware;
    None but the Grave deserve the Unfair.
                                                     Percy P. Orminder
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Ill-chosen abstraction is particularly evident in the design of the ADA
runtime system. The interface to the ADA runtime system is so opaque that
it is impossible to model or predict its performance, making it effectively
useless for real-time systems.
-- Marc D. Donner and David H. Jameson.
%
The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not
designed for people who walk on their hands.
-- John Irving, "The World According to Garp"
%
A leading authority is anyone who has guessed right more than once.
-- Frank A. Clark
%
Then here's to the City of Boston
the town of the cries and the groans.
Where the Cabots can't see the Kabotschniks,
And the Lowells won't speak to the Cohns.
-- Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.) (1881-1960)
%
ARTHUR:  Bloody peasant!
DENNIS:  Oh, what a give away.  Did you here that, did you here that, eh?
         didn't you?
-- That's what I'm on about did you see him repressing me, you saw it
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature.  Everything is made of
one hidden stuff.
-- Emerson
%
Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book!
-- Job xix. 23
%
The secret of life is that we grow old without growing wise.
-- John LeCarre
%
I was a test-tub baby. All the other kids were in test tubes. And I was in
 a three-liter Coke bottle.
-- Billy Elmer
%
No one knows how he'll act under pressure.
-- Sulu, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," stardate 5730.2.
%
Troi: "So, you're no longer human."
Timothy: "'I am an android.'"
Troi: "When did this happen?"
Timothy: "I've always been an android."
-- "Hero Worship", Stardate 45397.3
%
If the danger seems slight, then truly it is not slight.
-- Francis Bacon
%
The chief pleasure (in eating) does not consist in costly seasoning, or
exquisite flavor, but in yourself.  Do you seek sauce by sweating?
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.)
%
That's a nice dress - could I talk you out of it?
-- Pick up line
%
Asked what he gained from philosophy, he answered, "To do without
being commanded what others do from fear of the laws."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Aristotle, xi
%
If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people
 do.  Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
"Americans will buy anything, as long as it doesn't
 cross the thin line between cute and demonic."
-- Ian Shoales
%
We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
-- Eduardo Galeano
%
The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies
spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
-- Thoughts on Various Subjects
%
Plagiarism: The only "ism" Hollywood believes in.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
We are in this world to help each other.
-- Sister Alma
%
A happier home is but an earlier heaven.
-- Thomas S. Monson
%
To date, the firm conclusions of Project Blue Book are:
1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and evaluated by the
   Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that
   sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments
   or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and
3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as
   UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles.
  to 1965, as quoted by James Randi in Flim-Flam!
-- the summary of Project Blue Book, an Air Force study of UFOs from 1950
%
But all thing which that shineth as the gold
Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told.
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (1328-1400)
-- The Chanones Yemannes Tale, Line 16430
%
Ah, what's this? Unless I'm much mistaken, a hammer and a chisel!
You are much mistaken.
...A pencil and a miniature trumpet.
-- Edmund and Baldrick : Corporal Punishment
%
:peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer
   BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute
   address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any
   {HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it).  Much hacking on
   small, non-MMU micros consists of `peek'ing around memory, more
   or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
   interesting stuff.  Long (and variably accurate) lists of such
   addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list,
   the}}).  The results of `poke's at these addresses may be highly
   useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total
   {lossage} (see {killer poke}).

   Since a {real operating system} provides useful, higher-level
   services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on
   micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
   groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is
   diagnostic of the {newbie}.  (Of course, OS kernels often have to
   do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if
   unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
   indirect through it.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
VIRTUES, n.pl.  Certain abstentions.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
PENITENT, adj.  Undergoing or awaiting punishment.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It's like trying to find a fart in a jaccuzi.
-- Lister
%

-- Therapists are expensive, but friends long as you PAY!
%
Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
%
Have you ever written
... a compiler?
... an operating system?
... a device driver?
... a text processor?
... a display hack?
... a database system?
... an expert system?
... an edge detector?
... a real-time control system?
... an accounting package?
... a virus?
... a prophylactic?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
GALAHAD:   Camelot ...
LAUNCELOT: Camelot ...
GAWAIN:    It's only a model.
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
I am thankful for one leg.   To limp is no disgrace --
 I may not be number one, but I can still run the race.
-- B.C.
%

-- Never mind the grass roots It's the flowering head that are interesting.
%
Counter:
An area over which martini's are served.
-- Computing Definition
%
Variables won't.
-- Troutman's Programming Postulate #5
%
I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff.
-- Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639)
-- Preface to the Elements of Architecture
%
Words with a "k" in them are funny. If it doesn't have a "k," it's not
 funny.
-- Neil Simon
%
:multitask: n. Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for
   computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but
   see {thrash}).  The term `multiplex', from communications
   technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same
   time), is used similarly.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Ytterbium:  A rare and inconsequential element, named after the
   village of Ytterby, Sweden (not to be confused with
   Iturbi, the late pianist and film personality, who
   was actually Spanish, not Swedish).  Ytterbium is
   used mainly to fill block 70 in the periodic table.
   Iturbi was used mainly to play Jane Powell's father.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
Heaven gives its favourites--early death.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 102
%
For my sister's 40th birthday, I sent her a singing mammogram.
-- [Imitation] Steven Wright
%
I know that Deformed.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act iii, Sc. 3
%
". . . Eye of Newt, toe of frog . . ."
-- believed to be the first recipe for an explosive mixture
-- ...the forerunner of gunpowder
%
Riches cover a multitude of woes.
-- Menander
%
If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the
 American flag and talk about the Constitution.
-- Matthew S. Quay
%
Where's the Coke machine?  Tell me a joke!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Information travels more surely to those with a lesser need to know.
-- Charles P. Boyle
%
In the darkness of future pasts the magician longs to see one chance
 between two worlds.    Fire, walk with me.
-- One-armed Mike, from Twin Peaks
%
Concern should drive us into action not into depression.
-- Karen Horney
%
Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address.
-- Lane Olinghouse
%
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.
-- Marshal Bosquet
%
Remember always: a wise man walks with his head bowed, humble
    like the dust.
-- Master Po
%
"It's amazing! All natural laws can be reduced to one simple, unifying
equation!"
"Really? What is it?"
"Already my powerful brain is bored with such simple problems and is now
working on why girls are so obnoxious."
-- Calvin and Hobbes, "Calvin and Hobbes"
%
Where everyone wants to come as early as possible,  then necessarily  by
 far the larger part must come too  late
-- Lichtenberg
%
That very law which moulds a tear
And bids it trickle from its source,--
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.
-- Samuel Rogers (1763-1855)
-- On a Tear
%
Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet.
-- Mae West
%
Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps;
And pyramids are pyramids in vales.
Each man makes his own stature, builds himself.
Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids;
Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall.
 - Night Thoughts, Night vi, Line 309
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Suffocating together ... would create heroic camaraderie.
-- Khan Noonian Singh, "Space Seed," stardate 3142.8.
%
You Threw Up on the Carpet of My Love.
-- Lewis Grizzard
%
There taught us how to live; and (oh, too high
The price for knowledge!) taught us how to die.
-- Thomas Tickell (1686-1740)
-- On the Death of Mr. Addison, Line 81
%
His heart and hand both open and both free;
For what he has he gives, what thinks he shows;
Yet gives he not till judgment guide his bounty.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Troilus and Cressida
-- Act iv, Sc. 5
%
 (:-& Rosicrucian
-- SMILEY
%
When I was growing up, my mom wanted me to become a priest, which I think
 is a tough occupation. Can you imagine giving up your sex life and then
 once a week people come in to tell you all the highlights of theirs?
-- Tom Dreesen
%
Aryse ye technoSerfs! Let us seek out the bloated aristocrats,
and roast them in their own juice
upon the fires of righteousness and justice!
-- Dan, rabble rousing the contractors
%
 (Darth Vader voice:)  Speak, worm!
-- Answering machine madness - science fiction
%
Well, I used to look like this when I was young, and now I still do.
-- Yogi Berra
%
"Sylvester Stallone does Hamlet:
'To be, or what?'"
-- Robin Williams
%
I'm pretending that we're all watching PHIL SILVERS
 instead of RICARDO MONTALBAN!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Eisenhower!!  Your mimeograph machine upsets my stomach!!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
 8-O "Omigod!!" (done after "rm -rf *" ?)
-- SMILEY
%
Nothing average ever stood as a monument to progress.  When progress
is looking for a partner it doesn't turn to those who believe they
are only average.  It turns instead to those who are forever searching
and striving to become the best they possibly can.  If we seek the
average level we cannot hope to achieve a high level of success.
Our only hope is to avoid being a failure.
-- A. Lou Vickery
%
We ought to be very grateful that we have tools.  Millions of years ago
people did not have them, and home projects were extremely difficult.
For example, when a primitive person wanted to put up paneling, he had
to drive the little paneling nails into the cave wall with his bare
fist, so generally the paneling wound up getting spattered with
primitive blood, which isn't really all that bad when you consider how
ugly paneling is to begin with.
-- Dave Barry, The Taming of the Screw
%
:chug: vi. To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}.  "The disk is
   chugging like crazy."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow
is uneducated the day after.
-- Newton D. Baker
%
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
-- Plato, The Republic. Book II. 377B
%
It wasn't raining when Noah Built the ark.
-- Howard Ruff, business consultant
%
...there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends
are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data
available to the so-called normal mind.  This is one such period,
if you haven't noticed already.
-- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
%
A moral, sensible, and well-bred man
Will not affront me,--and no other can.
-- William Cowper (1731-1800)
-- Conversation, Line 193
%
This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future,--two eternities!
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Lalla Rookh, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan
%
Who drank my beer while I was in the rear?
-- Chuck Murphy.
%
There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowels of the earth, many
a fair pearl laid up in the bosom of the sea, that never was seen,
nor never shall be.
-- Bishop Hall (1574-1656)
-- Contemplations, Book iv, The veil of Moses
%
Saavik: "Begging the admiral's pardon, General Order Fifteen, 'No flag officer
  shall beam into a hazardous area without armed escort.'"
Kirk: "There's no such regulation."
Saavik: [Gives Kirk the "Yes there is" look]
Kirk: "All right, join the party."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
LaForge: "I wonder why you're the only one on board?" Data: "I have
expended considerable thought with respect to my apparent  uniqueness
among the crew." LaForge: "Any conclusions?" Data: "Several possibilities
suggest themselves.  I may represent an entire  *race* of artificial
lifeforms.  If so there may be a home planet for others  of my kind,
a shared history and a culture of which I am not presently aware."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
The arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
-- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
%
A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as
a vine to bear grapes again in season.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, v, 6
%
1980, Sarah, if you want to get off.
-- Dr. Tom Baker, PYRAMIDS OF MARS
%
Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.
-- Confucius
%
McCoy: "Spock's contaminating this boy, Jim."
-- "Who Mourns For Adonais?", Stardate 3468.1.
%

-- You can tell fantasy from reality if it sucks it's real!
%
PRO:  Not going to your family picnic.
CON:  No more free money from all your stupid rich bitch relatives.
-- Pros and Cons of Death
%
Peace on Earth.  Wish you were here.
-- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, Christmas Card greetings...
%
A thorn in the flesh.
-- New Testament
-- 2 Corinthians xii, 7
%
To be free is to have achieved your life.
-- Tennessee Williams
%
:baroque: adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on
   excessive.  Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has
   many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is
   less extreme and not pejorative in itself.  "Metafont even has
   features to introduce random variations to its letterform output.
   Now *that* is baroque!"  See also {rococo}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 10. "Our other starship separates into 3 pieces!"
 9.   "One photon torpedo can ruin your whole day... Think about it."
 8.  "HONK if you've slept with commander Riker!"
 7.  "Guns don't kill people... Class 2 phasers do!"
 6.  "Zero to warp 9.7 in 13 seconds!"
 5.  "CAUTION... We have a trigger happy klingon at tactical."
 4.  "If you can read this... Don't you think you're a wee bit too close?"
 3.  "Have you hugged a Ferengi today?"
 2.  "We brake for cubes!"
 1.  "Wesley on board!"
-- Top Ten BumperStickers on the U.S.S. Enterprise
%
Good but rarely came from good advice.
-- Lord Byron
%
   In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate
objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds.  After the revocation
of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was
condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard for its value,
was spared.  However, to expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers,
it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way
of symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands.  Thereafter it
was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again
relapse into sin.  Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was
reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St.
Bartholomew.  But when the governer sent in the bill for the bell to the
parish authorities, they declined to settle it, alleging that the bell, as
a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take advantage of the law lately
passed by the king, which allowed all new converts a delay of three years in
paying their debts.
-- Sir James G. Frazer, _Folklore In The Old Testament_
%
I think...that in a week from now, you will be less in the mood for
  being amusing.
At least when I'm in the mood, I _can_ be amusing.
-- Ludwig and Edmund : Chains
%
Half a bee, philosophically, must ipso facto half not bee.  But can it be an
 entire bee, if half the bee is not a bee, due to some ancient injury?
-- Monty Python
%
Think twice before you speak to a friend in need.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:reincarnation, cycle of: n. See {cycle of reincarnation}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The judge is condemned when the criminal is acquitted.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 407
%
:case and paste: [from `cut and paste'] n. 1. The addition of a new
   {feature} to an existing system by selecting the code from an
   existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes.  Common in
   telephony circles because most operations in a telephone switch are
   selected using `case' statements.  Leads to {software bloat}.

   In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by
   Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of
   text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in elsewhere.
   The term is condescending, implying that the programmer is acting
   mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to
   integrate the code for two similar cases.

   At DEC, this is sometimes called `clone-and-hack' coding.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
The light of other days
And all their glories past.
-- Alfred Bunn (1790-1860)
-- Song
%
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know:
the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have
sought and found how to serve.
-- Albert Schweitzer
%
Carried about with every wind of doctrine.
-- New Testament
-- Ephesians iv, 14
%
if your favorite Chinese meal comes from La Choy.
-- You may be redneck...
%
When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been
mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I
was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has
revealed to me.
-- John Wesley
%
"Close Encounters of the Third Grade."
-- Woody Allen's new movie
%
To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem.
-- Marshall L. Smith
%
Do you know what the penalty is for disobeying orders, Blackadder?
Um...courtmartial followed by immediate cessation of chocolate rations?
-- Cpt. Darling and Edmund : Corporal Punishment
%
'T is slight, not strength, that gives the greatest lift.
-- Thomas Middleton (1580-1627)
-- Michaelmas Term, Act iv, Sc. 1
%
 {(:-) wearing toupee
-- SMILEY
%
Life to you is a bold and dashing responsibility
-- a Mary Chung's fortune cookie
%
How sweet an Ovid, Murray was our boast!
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Dunciad, Book iv, Line 169
%
We have two hands.  What's wrong with having one of them on the
mouse?
-- Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex expert, in defense of on-line sex,
-- in Web magazine
%
Ahead groove factor 5! Yeah!
-- Holly in Red Dwarf 'Thanks for the Memory'
%
"Gregor Wass, your presence intimidates me to the point of humiliation.
Would you care to strike me?"
-- Saturday Night Live
%
We should not introduce errors through sloppiness, we should
do it carefully and systematically.
-- E.W. Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming  (p. 56)
%
The diagnostics produced by C  itself  are  intended  to  be
self-explanatory.   Occasional  obscure messages may be produced
by the preprocessor, assembler, or loader.
-- Unix Manual, cc(1)
%
Thoreau was no band-leader. The sound of all those different drummers makes it
hell to organize a parade.
-- Solomon Short
%
There's nothing funny about a funeral. Except in the South ... Southerners
 are naturally humorous. The funeral procession started by and everybody got
 quiet, put their hand over their heart, and I whispered to this ol' boy,
 "Who died?" He said, "The one in the first car."
-- Jerry Clower
%
It's [the world's] shape has the rounded appearance of a perfect
sphere.  This is shown first of all by the name of 'orb' which is
bestowed upon it by the general consent of mankind.  ...[O]ur eyesight
also confirms this belief, because the firmament pre
sents the aspect of a concave hemisphere equidistant in every direction,
which would be impossible in the case of any other figure.
-- Gaius Plinius Secundus, Natural History, 77 A.D.
%
What? `Bend over if I want the magic sword'?
-- Famous Last Words
%
Khan: "There she is!  There she is!  Ah!  But not so wounded as we were led to
  believe.  So much the better!"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
The American government is making nuclear weapons like there's no
tomorrow.
-- Emo Philips
%
Never do anything for the first time.
-- Paul Herbig
%
    Democratic presidential candidates from 1988
(Richard Gephart) It doesn't matter whether the bulb is
changed or not; it only matters that the new bulb was
made in the US of A. Taiwan and South Korea have put up
massive barriers to importing US light bulbs; we'll see
how they like it when their bulbs cost $10,000 to screw
in here.
-- How many
-- did it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown
 with great force.
-- Dorothy Parker
%
"Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of
 dynamos.  Between them, they have ensured that one
 shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one
 will work at anything worthwhile."
-- Arnold Toynbee
%
FIDDLE, n.  An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a
horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.

    To Rome said Nero:  "If to smoke you turn
    I shall not cease to fiddle while you burn."
    To Nero Rome replied:  "Pray do your worst,
    'Tis my excuse that you were fiddling first."
                                                            Orm Pludge
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Or whispering with white lips, "The foe! They come! they come!"
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iii, Stanza 25
%
Silence is better than unmeaning words.
-- Pythagoras
%
Epitaph: A belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been
 permanently discontinued.
-- Irvin S. Cobb
%
Seems human enough to me.
       stardate 43539.1
-- Guinan after stabbing Q's hand with a fork, "Deja Q",
%
If you are ever in an S&M relationship, make damn sure you are the S.
-- Someone's mother to them
%
Who to patch up his fame, or fill his purse,
Still pilfers wretched plans, and makes them worse;
Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known,
Defacing first, then claiming for his own.
-- Charles Churchill (1731-1764), The Apology, Line 232
%
Minister, have you finished with  that re-drafted re-draft of the
draft proposal yet?
No Humphrey, do you need it back?
Yes minister, I'm afraid it needs re-drafting!
-- Yes, Minister - P.Jay and A. Lynn
%
I love you, and I want to EAT YOUR BRAIN!
-- Return of the Living Dead
%
Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers,
Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it into the Academy, and said,
"This is Plato's man." On which account this addition was made to
the definition,--"With broad at nails."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book ix, Line 725
%
Mixed metaphors are a pain in the ass and ought to
   be thrown out the window.
-- Writing Rule 27
%
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these, A youth of labor
with an age of ease.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
%
Coming up, Beavis seeks out his biological mother, but she changes her DNA
in order to avoid him.
-- Commercial break from "Beavis and Butthead"
%

-- Biggest security gap an open mouth.
%
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages--as if the savages
weren't dangerous enough already.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Hey! You're Italian! What? You're Jewish? Love your nails!!!
-- Zappa
%
What is aristocracy?  A corporation of the best, of the bravest.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
%
All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills
after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
-- Anonymous
%
The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas.
-- Judge John Kane, US District Court
%
I am reading Henry James ... and feel myself as one entombed in a
block of smooth amber.
-- Virginia Woolf
%
To do great work work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
-- Samuel Butler
%
PROPHECY, n.  The art and practice of selling one's credibility for
future delivery.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I didn't think; I experimented.
-- Wilhelm Roentgen
%
brake bar: tavern near a climbing area where everyone stops after a hard day
climbing. see barometer.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
 Hi.  This is Kevin and Diana's vacuum cleaner.  Their appliances
 have switched jobs again, and I get to answer the phone 'cause
 my old job sucked.  So leave a message after you hear the beep,
 and you can be sure it's in the bag.
-- Answering machine madness - machine theme
%

-- It's only a hobby ... only a hobby ... only a NO, IT'S MY LIFE!!!
%
Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land, but
because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because
it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually
self-destructive.
-- J. B. S. Haldane
%
Thousands of engineers can design bridges.....,but the great
engineer is the man who can tell whether the bridge.....should
be built at all.
-- Eugene C. Grace
%
 HISTORY:  Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the
 present day, concentrating especially but not exclusively on its
 social, political, economic, religious, and philosophical impact on
 Europe, Asia, America, and Africa.  Be brief, concise, and specific.
-- Life Studies 101 (Bob Pasker <rbp@NETCOM.COM>)
%
We admire people for reasons; we love them without reasons.
-- Scottish proverb
%
I was in a bar the other night, hopping from barstool to barstool, trying to
 get lucky---but there wasn't any gum under any of them.
-- Emo Phillips
%
:vaxherd: n. /vaks'herd/ [from `oxherd'] A VAX operator.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Its not easy having a good time
"Try Disneyland on acid!"
-- Dr. Frank'N'Furter
-- The audience
%
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face.
-- William Shakespeare
%
Alas! by some degree of woe
  We every bliss must gain;
The heart can ne'er a transport know
  That never feels a pain.
-- Lord Lyttleton (1709-1773)
-- Song
%
What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.
-- Jean Paul Richter
%
:slack: n. 1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used
   to store useful information.  The techspeak equivalent is `internal
   fragmentation'.  2. In the theology of the {Church of the
   SubGenius}, a mystical substance or quality that is the
   prerequisite of all human happiness.

   Since UNIX files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable
   wastage in the last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix
   has no slack".  See {ha ha only serious}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
-- Howe's Law
%
 0-) scuba diver
-- SMILEY
%
As that the walls worn thin, permit the mind
To look out thorough, and his frailty find.
-- Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)
-- History of the Civil War, Book iv, Stanza 84
%
If the human brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be
so simple that we could not.
-- W. A. Clouston
%
    radio astronomers
None. They are not interested in that short wave stuff.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb.
%
Now, telephone companies are not stupid, at least for large values of
 'stupid'.
-- Michael O'Brien (Mr. Protocol)
%
Show me a good sportsman and I'll show you a player I'm looking to trade.
-- Leo Durocher
%
Our creature comforts.
-- Mathew Henry (1662-1714)
-- Commentaries, Psalm xxxvii
%
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies.
-- Christopher Marlowe (1565-1593)
-- The Passionate Shepherd to his Love
%
Kirk: "No..."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Don't even think of parking here!
-- Sign outside the Jailhouse in Orofino, Idaho.
%
With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons, and their change,--all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glist'ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful ev'ning mild; then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glist'ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful ev'ning mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 639
%
A kiss is a rosy dot over the 'i' of loving.
-- Cyrano de Bergerac
%
Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
And stand secure amidst a falling world.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
-- Horace, Ode iii, Book iii
%
Before you have sex you have to be elected to a high government position.
-- Zippy
%
I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I
  thought:  What the hell good would that do?
-- Ronnie Shakes
%
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Il Penseroso, Line 159
%
Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.)
%
:spoo: n. Variant of {spooge}, sense 1.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
People working in the private sector should try to save money.
There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.
-- Augustine's Law Number LII
-- Norman R. Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta
%
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
-- Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
-- Farewell! But whenever you welcome the Hour
%
Never shell out into DOS when yr drunk.
-- Chris Pirillo (chris@lockergnome.com)
%
Bureaucrat, n.:
       A person who cuts red tape sideways.
-- J. McCabe
%
And love is sometimes violent
 And violence has no constraint
-- Swans "The Golden Boy who was Swallowed by the Sea"
%
A blessed companion is a book,--a book that fitly chosen is a life-long friend.
-- Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
-- Books
%
Unless you put your money to work for you, you work for your money.
-- Joe Miller
%
A good reputation is more valuable than money.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 108
%
When things are at their darkest, pal, it's a great man who can kick back
 and party.
-- Olin Shivers
%
Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.
-- David Garrick (1716-1779)
-- Prologue to the Gamesters
%
Do you know what the following stand for?
... DASD
... Emacs
... ITS
... RSTS/E
... SNA
... Spool
... TCP/IP
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
Men in great place are thrice servants,--servants of the sovereign
or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
-- Of Great Place
%
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman
 a rope oven an abyss.
-- Friedrich W. Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathutra"
%
There is only one beautiful child in the world, and every mother has it.
-- Stephen Leacock
%
    Sparts
You can't CHANGE a light bulb!
Note: Sparts = Spartacus Youth League, a leftist fringe group
that believes in violent revolution. Attributed to Michael
Anderson '83, a student activist at Harvard.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Do you know the end of the epoch?
... Have you celebrated the end of an epoch?
... Did you have to rewrite code?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a
 list of the hundred best books.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
%
If EasyFlow doesn't work: tough. If you lose millions because EasyFlow
messes up, it's you that's out the millions, not us. If you don't like this
disclaimer: tough. We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided
by law, up to and including nothing. This is basically the same disclaimer
that comes with all software packages, but ours is in plain English and
theirs is in legalese. We didn't want to include any disclaimer at all, but
our lawyers insisted.
-- Disclaimer from Haventree Softwares's Easy Flow package
%
...you are having a bad dream (being chased by space aliens, etc.) and you
wake up, only to have another bad dream and realize that you are STILL
dreaming, and had been dreaming you were dreaming, so you wake up again,
and finally wake up once more and realize you were nested four levels deep
in dreaming you were dreaming.  It is bad enough to recognize that you were
in a strange recursi6on, but then there is this really horrible thought "If
I had experienced a stack overflow would I have been permanently
unable to wake up?".  Then you KNOW you are finally awake and have been
hacking too long.
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
:raster burn: n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at
   low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics
   monitors.  See {terminal illness}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a
 miser, better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick
 room.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
%
Value yourself.  The only people who apprecaite a doormat are people
with dirty shoes.
-- Leo F. Buscaglia
%
When you divide people into us and them, you automatically become on
   one of them.
-- Solomon Short
%

-- Behind every successful man, there is a woman urging him on.
-- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3.
%
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iv, Sc. 3
%
The buck stops with the guy who signs the cheques.
-- Rupert Murdoch
%
PREDICAMENT, n.  The wage of consistency.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
There 's daggers in men's smiles.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
The biggest growth industry in UNIX is promoting standards.
-- Rikki Kirzner, Dataquest.
%
The last good thing I saw on tv was the off switch.
-- J. Craig Brunson (craig@ukpr.uky.edu)
%
PHOENIX
  This shouldn't be in here. It just sounds like it starts with an F.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
ORATORY, n.  A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the
understanding.  A tyranny tempered by stenography.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?
-- Edward G. Robinson ("Little Caesar")
%
This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when
they're in trouble And I am not.
-- A. E. Housman
%
Even though a number of people have tried,
no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.
-- Jean Kerr
%
:swizzle: v. To convert external names, array indices, or references
   within a data structure into address pointers when the data
   structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also
   called `pointer swizzling'); this may be done for speed in
   chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of
   name lookups into pointer dereferences).  The converse operation is
   sometimes termed `unswizzling'.  See also {snap}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
My house is made out of balsa wood.  When no one is home across the street,
except the little kids, I go out and lift my house up over my head.  I tell
them to stay out of my yard or I'll throw it at them.
-- Steven Wright
%
Whenever one word or letter can change the entire meaning of a sentence,
the probability of an error being made will be in direct proportion
to the embarrassment it will cause.
-- Bob Considine
%
We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
%
 :-(((((  SORRY
-- SMILEY
%
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.
-- Old Testament
-- Isaiah xlii, 3
%
In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought
be present; "I am rising to a man's work."
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, v, 1
%
Many go out for wool, and come home shorn themselves.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part ii, Book iv, Chap. xxxvii
%
The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me.
-- Nicol Williamson
%
The best way to get on in the world is to make people believe it's to their
 advantage to help you.
-- Jean de La Bruyere
%
Success provides more opportunities to say things than the number
of things a pundit has worth saying.
-- Douglas Pike
%
:eyeball search: n.,v. To look for something in a mass of code or data
   with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some
   sort of pattern matching software like {grep} or any other
   automated search tool.  Also called a {vgrep}; compare
   {vdiff}, {desk check}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control.
-- Pink Floyd
%
It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong,
It is not what we read but what we remember that makes us wise,
It is not what we earn but what we save that makes us rich,
It is not what beliefs we hold but what we do with those beliefs
that make us what we are.
-- Old Chinese misquotation.
%
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Romeo and Juliet
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
There is more difference within the sexes, than between them.
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett
%
Not officially speaking for my company.
-- DISCLAIMER
%
6. They keep showing the Rodney King beatings over and over.
When are they going to get new episodes?
-- Dan Quayle's Top 10 TV complaints
%
What is ambition? 'Tis a glorious cheat. Angels of light walk not
so dazzlingly the sapphire walls of heaven.
-- Willis
%
Theorem: Every horse has an infinite number of legs

 Horses have an even number of legs.  Behind they have two legs,
 and in front they have fore legs.  This makes six legs, which is
 certainly an odd number of legs for a horse.  The only number
 that is both odd and even is infinity.  Therefore, horses have an
 infinite number of legs.
-- From "On the Nature of Mathematical Proofs", Joel Cohen
%
Oh SH*T!
-- Famous Last Words
%
Any pre-cut equipment is too short. This is specially true of optic fiber
 cables with expensive connectors at both ends.
-- Vuilleumier's First Law
%
Furbling, v.:
Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank
even when you are the only person in line.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must
be the process of putting them in.
-- Dykstra's Observation
%
I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you,
and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor
pray with you. What news on the Rialto?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice
-- Act i, Sc. 3
%
In short, members of the United States Congress enjoy more job security
than members of the Supreme Soviet.
-- CNN: 7 Nov 1990, 12:15 AM EST
%
Poetry withers and dries out when it leaves music, or at least imagined
 music, too far behind it.    Poets who are not interested in music are, or
  become, bad poets.
-- Ezra Pound
%
The melancholy truth was that his glorious golden head had nothing in it.
-- Cecil Woodham Smith
%
I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed.   Except perhaps
the time I found out that M&Ms really *do* melt in your hand ...
-- Peter Oakley
%
In the economic sense, our socialism was more like state capitalism
... Marx had never dreamed of anything of the sort ... Soviet Russia
had broken with everything in her history that was revolutionary,
and had got onto the usual rails of great-power imperialism.
-- Svetlana Alliluyeva
%
    Freudians
Two. One to hold the ladder and one to change the penis. Oops!
I mean, er, the light bulb.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans
are smoking less.
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 1990 (reported by IPS, 8/14/92)
%
What think you, my lord, of...'love'?
...You mean rumpy-pumpy?
-- Kate and Edmund : Bells
%
:creep: v. To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably.  In hackish usage
   this verb has overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the
   creeping horrors of low-budget monster movies.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Emotions are alien to me.  I'm a scientist.
-- Spock, "This Side of Paradise," stardate 3417.3.
%
...speech is the least deceptive mirror of the mind.
-- Erasmus
%
For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrowers,
among good authors is accounted Plagiare.
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Iconoclastes, xxiii
%
My little spirit, see,
Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 5
%
My puppys' cuter than your puppy
-- NYAH NYAH
%
Remember that man's life lies all within this present, as 't were
but a hair's-breadth of time; as for the rest, the past is gone, the
future yet unseen. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is
the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD)
-- Meditations, iii, 10
%
In a suitable temperature, an egg becomes a chicken, and there are no
 chickens born of stones.
-- Mao Zedong
%
Hand me that piano.
-- Things you never hear people say
%
"Happily, I read English."
   [Draws sword] "Then read it happily."
-- Exchange in the 1950s production of IVANHOE
%
The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind
-- John Allston
%
One lie does not cost you one truth, but the truth.
-- Friedrich Hebbel
%
The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.
-- Epicurus
%
him.
-- You may easily play a joke on a man who likes to argue agree with
-- Ed Howe
%
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women
pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
-- Wernher von Braun
%
if both your dog and your wallet are on a chain.
-- You may be redneck...
%
> The Independent quotes this from The Progressive, Sept. 1990:
>
> Louisiana State Rep. Carl Gunter, explaining why abortion should
> not be permitted even when the pregnancy results from incest:
> 'The way we get thoroughbred horses is through inbreeding.   With
> incest, you could get super-smart kids.'

This undoubtedly explains State Representative Gunter's visibly high
intelligence...
-- Lefty (lefty@twg.com)
%
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
-- The Constitution of the United States of America Amendment 1, 1791
%
    Jewish mothers in law
(cue typical accent, shoulders hunched...)
None, they'll just sit in the dark, they know you can't
be bothered to do a simple thing like change a light
bulb for them, and after all they've done for you...
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Have you ever received a case of beer with your computer?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
The overwhelming prerequisite for the greatness of an artist
is that artist's death.
-- Thiessen's Law of Art
%
Be a good girl
You've gotta try a little harder
That simply wasn't good enough
To make us proud
I'll live through you
I'll make you what I never was
If you're the best, then maybe so am I
Compared to him, compared to her
Im doing this for your own damn good
You'll make up for what I blew
What's the problem...why are you crying?
-- Alanis Morissette
%
O happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread!
-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
-- The Faerie Queene, Book i, Canto i, St. 9
%
The king of terrors.
-- Old Testament
-- Job xviii, 14
%
ELOQUENCE, n.  The art of orally persuading fools that white is the
color that it appears to be.  It includes the gift of making any color
appear white.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
:Eric Conspiracy: n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named
   Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
   talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the
   numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.  There do indeed
   seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than
   the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are
   correlated in some arcane way.  Well-known examples include Eric
   Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under {indent style})
   and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has heard from about
   fifteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric
   Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more
   than one site.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I'm not that easy to get rid of.
-- Turlough, MAWDRYN UNDEAD
%
Anybody who acts normal nowadays, they're probably just not well. I'm
 telling you, I just don't understand. If I go too fast, I'll run into
 something. If I go too slow, something'll run into me.
-- Moms Mabley
%
Poverty is the mother of crime.
-- Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (490-575)
%
Any president should have the right to shoot
at least two people a year without explanation.
-- Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) [discussing the press]
%
The meek shall inherit shit.
-- David Lee Roth
%
A man is never astonished that he doesn't know what another does, but he is
surprised at the gross ignorance of the other in not knowing what he does.
-- Haliburton
%
Go call a coach, and let a coach be called;
And let the man who calleth be the caller;
And in his calling let him nothing call
But "Coach! Coach! Coach! Oh for a coach, ye gods!"
-- Henry Carey (1663-1743)
-- Chrononhotonthologos, Act ii, Sc. 4
%
From the errors of others a wise man corrects his own.
-- Publius Syrus
%
'T is a very fine thing to be father-in-law
To a very magnificent three-tailed Bashaw!
-- George Colman, the Younger (1762-1836)
-- Blue Beard, Act ii, Sc. 5
%
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing
is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because
philosophy is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing
nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-- John W. Gardner
%
STALE: to take feloniously.  "Thou shalt not stale!"
-- Texan Dictionary
%
I am, therefore I am.
-- Akira
%
Did you not know, then, that to-day Lucullus sups with Lucullus?
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Lucullus
%
The radiologists' national flower is the hedge.
-- Bernstein's Precept
%
I saw a man with a wooden leg, and a real foot.
-- Steven Wright
%
Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
:feature key: n. The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on
   its keytop; sometimes referred to as `flower', `pretzel',
   `clover', `propeller', `beanie' (an apparent reference to the
   major feature of a propeller beanie), {splat}, or the `command
   key'.  The Mac's equivalent of an {alt} key (and so labeled on
   on some Mac II keyboards).  The proliferation of terms for this
   creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.

   Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that
   appears on the feature key.  Its oldest name is `cross of St.
   Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative
   motif.  Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to
   mark sites of historical interest.  Apple picked up the symbol from
   an early Mac developer who happened to be Swedish.  Apple
   documentation gives the translation "interesting feature"!

   There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this
   symbol.  It technically stands for the word `sev"ardhet'
   (interesting feature) many of these are old churches. Some Swedes
   report as an idiom for it the word `kyrka', cognate to English
   `church' and Scots-dialect `kirk' but pronounced /shir'k*/ in
   modern Swedish.  Others say this is nonsense.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Mental Ground Zero:
 The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping
of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X
%
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking
them.
-- Jane Austen
%
GNU, n.  An animal of South Africa, which in its domesticated state
resembles a horse, a buffalo and a stag.  In its wild condition it is
something like a thunderbolt, an earthquake and a cyclone.

    A hunter from Kew caught a distant view
        Of a peacefully meditative gnu,
    And he said:  "I'll pursue, and my hands imbrue
        In its blood at a closer interview."
    But that beast did ensue and the hunter it threw
        O'er the top of a palm that adjacent grew;
    And he said as he flew:  "It is well I withdrew
        Ere, losing my temper, I wickedly slew
        That really meritorious gnu."
                                                           Jarn Leffer
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Only ten people in the world now understand the theory of relativity.
Each of my 33 friends thinks they are among that ten.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
I want that glib and oily art,
To speak and purpose not.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Lear
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
-- Dave Barry
%
    Methusalem might be half an hour in telling what o'clock
it was: but as for us postdiluvians, we ought to do everything
in haste; and in our speeches, as well as actions, remember
that our time is short.
-- Sir Richard Steele
%
Any government, like a family, can for a year spend more than it earns. But
you and I know that a continuance of that habit means the poorhouse.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
%
Commander, what are your intentions towards my daughter?
Your DAUGHTER? Nice to meet you.
-- Data and Riker, "The Offspring", stardate 43657.0
%
The other line moves faster.
-- Ettorre's Observation
%
Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with
was made up of idiots.  Remember?  One of them was always getting
pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the
farmhouse to alert the other ones.  She'd whimper and tug at their
sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: Do
you think something's wrong?   Do you think she wants us to follow her?
What is it, girl?, etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week.   What with all the time these people spent pinned under
the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops
whatsoever.  They probably got by on federal crop supports, which
Lassie filed the applications for.
-- Dave Barry
%
The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first
one was useless.
-- Nicolas Chamfort
%
I have a good eye, uncle; I can see a church by day-light.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
SIREN, n.  One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt
to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave.  Figuratively, any
lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing
performance.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
TIM: But follow only if you are men of valour.  For the entrance to this cave
     is guarded by a monster, a creature so foul and cruel that no man yet has
     fought with it and lived.  Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its
     lair ...
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Since I gave up hope, I feel a lot better.
-- Steve Taylor
%
ME, paranoid? Why do you ask?!
-- Victor Kostrikin
%
That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows
returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball.
-- Bill Veeck
%
That saying which I hear commonly repeated,--that time assuages sorrow.
-- Terence (185-159 BC)
-- Heautontimoroumenos, Act iii, Sc. 1, 12, (421.)
%
    Perot supporters
None, they all just quit and go home!
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
-- The Beatles
%
What must be, shall be; and that which is a necessity to him that
struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.
-- Seneca
%
Given enough time, what you put off doing today will eventually get
done by itself.
-- G. Gestra
%
Companies should spend money keeping ahead of the competition,
not suing it.
-- Jon Titus
%
A man's body is 70% water.  However, a dolphin's body is 0% water, so
dolphins have to live in the ocean.
-- Steve Connelly
%
Act in your pauses.
-- Ellen Terry (to Cedric Hardwicke)
%
A man who studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
%
Ignorance transcends architecture.
-- James Gaskin
%
Out, damned spot! out, I say!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
I ne'er could any lustre see
In eyes that would not look on me;
I ne'er saw nectar on a lip
But where my own did hope to sip.
-- Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
-- The Duenna, Act i, Sc. 2
%
Function point analysis
 cost modelling a program by what it won't do,
 rather than by how big it won't be
-- Glossary of Software Engineering Terms
%
The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie.
-- Lenny Bruce
%
My mother wants grandchildren, so I said, "Mom, go for it!"
-- Sue Murphy
%
As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try
making it round this time.
-- Mike Dennison
%
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to
 put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau
%
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them.  It
requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-- Alfred North Whitehead, 'Science and the Modern World' 1925
%
No creature smarts so little as a fool.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Prologue to the Satires, Line 84
%
 All generalizations are bad.
-- Grammar rules for the unenlightened
-- Corollary: All statements must be specific.
%
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man
it is time that occupies the same role.
-- Marshall McLuhan
%
'only thing worse than watchin' a bad movie is being in one.
-- Elvis
%
Champion not lost causes, but noble ones. Become addicted to them.
Identify with people, not data, or institutions, or theories.
Identify with tomorrow. Always remain empathic with the young.
-- Robert F. Kennedy
%
Gloomy as night he stands.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Odyssey of Homer, Book xi, Line 749
%
The quality of a department is inversely proportional to the number
of courses it lists in its catalogue.
-- Professor Joel Hildebrand
%
The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,
nor a favored few booted and spurred , ready to ride them legitimately,
by the grace of God.
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1826
%
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- Essay on Criticism, Part ii, Line 166
%
The best way to keep money in perspective is to have some.
-- Louis Rukeyser
%
The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with
 judiciously placed print statements.
-- Brian Kernighan [1978]
%
 +:-) priest
-- SMILEY
%
Man, at bottom, is not entirely guilty, since he did not begin history,
nor entirely innocent, since he continues it.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
-- Notebooks I (1935-42)
%
Troi: "Mister Dokachin, we must find this ship and you're the only one who can
  help us."
Dokachin: "Who are you?"
Troi: "Deanna Troi, ship's counselor."
Dokachin: "He probably figures that we don't get to see a lot of handsome women
  out this way.  And someone like you might get a little more coorporation from
  me.  He's probably right."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45240.6
%
Thriftless ambition, that wilt ravin up
Thine own life's means!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act ii, Sc. 4
%
Our government...teaches the whole people by its example.  If the
government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it
invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
%
IBM had a PL/I,
Its syntax worse than JOSS:
And everywhere this language went,
It was a total loss.
-- The Great Quux June 1973
%
My sister's a Vassar graduate. Super-sophisticate. She used to drive with
 her legs crossed.
-- Ed Bluestone
%
Immortality.  I notice that as soon as writers broach this
question they begin to quote.  I hate quotations.  Tell me what you
know.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journals May 1849
%
There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
-- Russell Baker
%
least not on the outside.
-- RED-SKIN, n.  A North American Indian, whose skin is not red at
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%

-- There is no fool like an old fool you can't beat experience.
-- Jacob Braude
%
The impossible is often the untried.
-- Jim Goodwin
%
if you have ever financed a tattoo.
-- You may be redneck...
%
When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple.  Take
it and copy it.
-- Anatole France
%
Our congressmen are the finest body of men money can buy.
-- Morey Amsterdam (written for Will Rogers)
%
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.
-- James Joyce
%
 "It's eight o'clock, sir!"
 "Why the devil didn't you tell me that before?"
-- Overheard in hotel
%
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is
that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond
this they have not legitimacy.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
%
OPERA
  For centuries now, Opera has been the foremost method of
  humiliation available to the security forces. It began in the late
  1600s, when peasant rebels were made to dress up as ridiculously
  fat people and get up on wooden planks in front of hundreds of
  their peers and shout the same things over and over and over, to a
  musical accompaniment.
      By the time the French Revolution came rolling along, it was
  the aristocrats who were forced to the stage to sing, gesticulate
  wildly and loudly perform plays devised to spread Revolutionary
  propaganda.
      Nowadays, Opera has been driven underground, but is still
  carried out by the perverse, the deviant, and those with very big
  tits (both men and women), their audiences made up almost
  exclusively of establishment figures.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
If four or five guys tell you that you're drunk, even though you know you
 haven't had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little
 while.
-- Joseph Schenck
%
We are now enjoying total mutual interaction in an imaginary hot tub...
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Business has only two basic functions marketing and innovation.
-- Peter Drucker
%
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the
unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy, you
may find in them a harness and a drain. Would that you could meet the sun
and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment.
-- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
%
Why would a haddock kill itself?  Why am I even asking that question?
         - Lister, when they discover the suicides in
-- Red Dwarf 'Back to Reality'
%
Excuse me, while I kiss the sky...
-- Jimi Hendrix
%
Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
  'T is only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
  And simple faith than Norman blood.
-- Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
-- Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Stanza 7
%
THESIS
  A work of great knowledge and thorough research on a very obscure
  subject, which upon publication is put in a library somewhere and
  never read again by anyone of great importance, except other thesis
  writers.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
BUGS
Rejects any file with the string "IBM" in it.
This is  considered to be a feature by some.
-- dvips Manual Page
%
O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
  And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
  Across the sands o' Dee!
-- Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
-- The Sands of Dee
%
Sarek: "I gave Spock the benefit of experience, of logic!  He never listened.
  Never listened."
Picard: "It has been suggested that Spock might have defected."
Sarek: "Never!  I will accept many things, but never that!"
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45235.4
%
...your digital alarm clock goes off and you think "Bloody Macs!"
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
%
One out of suits with fortune.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
 :?) philosopher
-- SMILEY
%
To get a tail-up.
-- Cliches for merfolk
%
Get reelected.
-- First Law of Office Holders
%
Never cite sources whether they exist or not.
-- Liberal Rule # 3
%
Sits the wind in that corner?
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Much Ado about Nothing
-- Act ii, Sc. 3
%
If the critics unanimously take exception to one particular scene it is
 advisable to move that scene to a more conspicuous place in the program.
-- Noel Coward
%
... primitive structure [Scotty].  Insufficient safeguards built in.
  Breakdown can occur from many causes.  Self-maintenance systems low
  reliability.
-- Nomad, "The Changeling," stardate 3541.9.
%
They call us "coaches." The job is to remind your wife to breathe. Think
 about that for a second. You realize exactly how worthless I am in this
 thing? When was the last time you had to be reminded to breathe? It's like
 saying, "Digest!" ... My baby, "Hesitation Klein," took twenty hours of
 labor to come out. They used a plunger at the end.
-- Robert Klein
%
Small changes can have a big impact (or: what a difference an a makes).
-- Axiom 1, Corollary 1C
-- Ralph Keyes, The Rules of misquotation
%
We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
-- Bishop Berkeley
%
When the well is dry, we know the worth of oil.
-- Poor Jimmy's Almanac
%
What a horrible way to die.
       stardate 42625.4
-- Worf referring to dying while sleeping, "The Royale",
%
An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men
who must be watched.
-- Brodrig
%
My mind is my own church.
-- Thomas Paine
%
She's a nice girl and all, but she's just a few sandwiches short of a good
 picnic.
-- Ms. Opal
%
Speak out. You've got to speak out against the madness.
-- Steven Stills
%
Then, gently touching my face, she hesitated for a moment as her incredible
eyes poured forth into mine love, joy, pain, tragedy, acceptance, and peace.
"'Bye for now," she said warmly.
-- Thea Alexander (2150 A.D.)
%
Get back to your stations!
We're beaming down to the planet, sir.
-- Kirk and Mr. Leslie, "This Side of Paradise," stardate 3417.3
%
Why does it hurt when I pee?
My balls feel like a pair of maracas!
I got it from the toilet seat!
It jumped right up and grabbed my meat!
-- Frank Zappa, Lyrics to "Joe's Garage"
%
It were better to perish than to continue schoolmastering.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
%
When an opponent come forward, move in and greet him;
if he wants to pull back, send him on his way.
-- Morihei Ueshiba
%
What UNIVERSE is this, please??
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
Study to be quiet.
-- New Testament
-- 1 Thessalonians iv, 11
%
"(The Chief Programmer) personally defines the functional and performance
 specifications, designs the program, codes it, tests it, and writes its
 documentation... He needs great talent, ten years experience and
 considerable systems and applications knowledge, whether in applied
 mathematics, business data handling, or whatever."
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
%
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete
failure.
-- Edward Abbey
%

-- Have blaster will travel.
%

-- Short quotes are like fences Both make good neighbors.
%
Epicurean cooks
Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Antony and Cleopatra
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act v, Sc. 1
%
There is always more dirty laundry than clean laundry.
If it's clean, it isn't laundry.
-- Walker's Law of the Household
-- Clive's Rebuttal to Walker's Law
%
Q2: "Now you and I both know that the Calamarian would've eventually
destroyed  the Enteprise to get to you.  And that's really why you
left, right?" Q: "It was a teeny bit selfless, wasn't it?" Q2: "Eew,
yeah, and there's my problem!  See, I can't go back to the Qontinuum,
 and tell them that you committed a selfless act just before you did!
 If I do,  there's going to be questions, there's going to be explanations,
for  centuries!"
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
    The more efficient computers become at inducing new
knowledge, the more widely that knowledge will be applied,
even in matters of life and death.  It is essential that such
knowledge be open to inspection.  This means that designers of
learning systems have a public duty to use comprehensible
performance.  Otherwise we run the risk of generating truly
"unknowable knowledge."
-- description languageseven if that means sacrificing
-- Richard Forsyth
-- Machine Learning for Expert Systems
%
you do your work.  Nothing.  Only that.  Whatever else you are,
will come from that.  It's the only measure of human value.  All
the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just
so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their
virtues.  The code of competence is the only system of morality
that's on a gold standard.
-- ... there's nothing of any importance in life except how well
-- Francisco d'Anconia
%
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming
feature.  They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%
"There's a large amount of evidence saying that the man's point of view is
largely irrelevant."
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the
 part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of.
-- They Might Be Giants
%
Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are
 you won't either.
-- Joseph Fischer
%
Good customers are rarer than latinum! ... Treasure them!
-- Quark
%
It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity, and fanaticism
when they come separately.  When you get all three together
it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve one's
sanity.
-- Adam Dalgliesh, in Devices and Desires, by P.D. James.
%
A fool and his money are soon parted.  What I want to know is how
they got together in the first place.
-- Cyril Fletcher, BBC radio program 28 May 1969
%
Hey there ugly Borg dude! ^&*&*#$%!@ NO CARRIER
-- Famous Last Words
%
 .---... ABBA fan
-- SMILEY
%
"After checking my original notes, it appears that I spent most of last
 class lying to you.  You may not find that surprising.  I will now
 attempt to correct any misinformation that resulted.  This you will
 probably find very surprising."
-- A CS Prof. teaching UNIX
%
I got a job--looking for one. I been out of work so long I forgot what kind
 of work I'm out of.
-- Robin Harris
%
There is a place for a decisive gamble where you know your enemy
and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all
against an unknown enemy is boldness in itself.
-- Bel Riose
%
[Normal jeans]  These are your pants.
[Bell bottoms]  These are your pants on drugs. Now don't do them.
-- Denis Leary
%
    Reagans
What light bulb?
Note: Topical to Reagan's apparent poor memory.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Is it true that you smoke eight to ten cigars a day?

That's true.

Is it true that you drink five martinis a day?        That's true.

Is it true that you still surround yourself with beautiful young women?

That's true.

What does your doctor say about all of this?

My doctor is dead.
-- George Burns
%
En:   The universal bidentate ligand used by coordination
   chemists.  For years, efforts were made to use ethylene-
   diamine for this purpose, but chemists were unable
   to squeeze all the letters between the corners of
   the octahedron diagram.  The timely invention of
    en in 1947 revolutionized the science.
-- The Ultimate Scientific Dictionary
%
  "Never mind what I said," the Lord spake.  "Doth thou
listen to every crazy idea that comes thy way?" And
  "I jokingly suggest thou sacrifice Isaac and thou
immediately runs out to do it."
  And Abraham fell to his knees, "See, I never know
when you are kidding."
  And the Lord thundered, "No sense of humor.  I can't
believe it."
-- Abraham grew ashamed.  "Er not really... no."
-- Without Feathers Woody Allen
%
Thy children like olive plants
-- Old Testament
-- Psalm cxxviii, 3
%
Nice shoes. Wanna f*ck?
-- Pick up line
%
1. Work Hard: hard work is the best investment a man can make.
2. Study Hard: Knowledge enables a man to work more intelligently and
effectively.
3. Have Initiative: Ruts often deepen into graves.
4. Love Your Work: Then you will pleasure in mastering it.
5. Be Exact: Slipshod methods bring slipshod results.
6. Have The Spirit Of Conquest: Thus you can successfuly battle and
overcome difficulties.
7. Cultivate Personality: Personality is to a man what perfume is to the
flower.
8. Help And Share With Others: The real test of business greatness lies in
giving opportunity to others.
9. Be Democratic: Unless you feel right toward your fellow men, you can
never be a successful leader of men.
10: In All Things Do Your Best: The man who has done his best has done
everything. The man who has done less than his best has done nothing.
-- The Ten Commandments Of Success
-- Charles M. Schwab
%
And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung
that cometh out of man, in their sight...Then he [the Lord!] said unto
me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt
prepare thy bread therewith.
-- Ezek. 4:12-15 (KJV)
%
Kids have *never* taken guidance from their parents.       If you could
travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the
original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate
teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for
grubs and berries like dad primate.  Then you'd see the primate
teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves.
                    Do
-- Dave Barry, Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
%
O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- Sophonisba, Act iii, Sc. 2
%
She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
-- Old Testament
-- Judges v, 25
%
 (Annoying radio announcer's voice:)  Congratulations!  You have
 reached 555-1234, perhaps one of the most obnoxious answering
 machine messages in the greater Seattle area!  If you don't know
 who you are dialing, HA!  If you DO know who you are dialing,
 you were probably expecting something like this!
-- Answering machine madness - playing with the caller
%
"However, due to terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire
invasion fleet was swallowed by a small dog."
-- HGttG
%
It's a scientific fact that if you stay in Calafornia you loose one
 point of your IQ for every year.
-- Truman Capote, from Breakfast at Benny's
%
:whizzy: [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a {cuspy} program;
   one that is feature-rich and well presented.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Kato, what is going on in that little yellow brain of yours?
                         in reference to a priceless white
                         Steinway piano.
-- Chief Inspector Clouseau,
%
Wisdom is the gray hair unto men, and an unspotted life is old age.
-- Old Testament
-- Wisdom of Solomon iv, 8
%
Aristippus said that a wise man's country was the world.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Aristippus, xiii
%
W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only
cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic.  This
advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued
after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like
_epixoriambikos_.  Still, it is now thought by the learned that other
agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been
concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise
of "the grandeur that was Rome."  There can be no doubt, however, that
by simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our
civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It is not fit the public trusts should be lodged in the hands of any,
till they are first proved and found fit for the business they are
to be entrusted with.
-- Mathew Henry (1662-1714)
-- Commentaries, Timothy iii
%
That politics has a bearing on business confidence is unproven.
-- Mark Epernay
%
I'm writing a book.  I've got the page numbers done.
-- Steven Wright
%
He wrecked his car, he lost his job. And yet throughout his life, he took
 his troubles like a man; he blamed them on his wife.
-- Frank Connors
%
Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you
 can only rage impotently against your persecutors.
-- Woody Allen
%
Meaning is the play, or interplay, of light.
-- A. Storch
%
My friend Lance would call me up. He goes, "Bob ... the first guy that gets
 your daughter--wouldn't that freak you out?" "No, Lance, that would not
 freak me out, Lance." "First guy who gets your daughter wouldn't bother you
 at all?" I said, "No, I hope my daughter experiences everything that there
 is in life." "First guy wouldn't bother you?" I said no. He said, "What
 would?" I said, "Number 200."
-- Bob Goldthwait
%
One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability
to distinguish our needs from our greeds.
-- Don Robinson, quoted in "Reader's Digest", 1963
%
:gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a
   mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early
   1980s.  It seems the designers of all those {spiffy} touch-menu
   systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their
   arms in front of their faces making small motions.  After more than
   a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and
   touch screen and feels like one afterwards.  This is now considered
   a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "Remember
   the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is this going to fly in
   *real* use?".
-- oversized -the operator looks like a gorilla while using the
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Fools!  Idiots!  Don't they realize that they are dealing with forces beyond
 comprehension!
-- Doctor Science
%
Look with thine ears.
-- Shakespeare
%
"There are two types - those who hate the 8086 architecture, and liars."
-- ...understanding Intel Architecture...
%
Megaton Man:    "LOOK at them!  Helpless, tender creatures, relying on
                ME, waiting for ME to make my move!"

(from below):   "Move your ASS, Fat-head!"

Megaton Man:      "It is a MANDATE, and I am DUTY BOUND to OBEY!"
-- Megaton Man
%
:wank: /wangk/ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from
   Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as
   {hack} is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or
   person or the result of such cleverness.  May describe (negatively)
   the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get
   supper!") or (more positively) a {wizard}.  Adj.  `wanky'
   describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or
   algorithm).  Conversations can also get wanky when there are too
   many wanks involved.  This excess wankiness is signalled by an
   overload of the `wankometer' (compare {bogometer}).  When the
   wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed,
   or all non-wanks will leave.  Compare `neep-neeping' (under
   {neep-neep}).  Usage: U.S. only.  In Britain and the Commonwealth
   this word is *extremely* rude and is best avoided unless one
   intends to give offense.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
It's better to not be where the news is.
-- General Rule #6
%
To stay ahead, you must have your next idea waiting in the wings.
-- Rosabeth Moss Kanter
%
Kirk: "Damn it!  Damn it!  Damn it all to hell!  Out of all the...
 Son of a..."
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
A beast, that wants discourse of reason.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion
that make horseraces.
-- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), from Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar(1894)
%
It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is
better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
-- Lazarus Long
%
< After Ripley rescues the remaining troops with the APC and suggests that
  they nuke the site from orbit, Burke tries to stop this plan >
"Hey maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got
 our ASSES kicked pal!"
-- Hudson, "Aliens"
%
Warning to Lawyers: Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity.
-- Charles A. Beardsley
%
It is said that the Limbic system of the brain controls the four Fs:
-- Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Reproduction
%
The difference between a man and a boy is, a boy wants to grow up to be a
 fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant monster fireman.
-- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
%
        "I can do a score of things that can't be done.  I can find a
thing I cannot see, and see a thing I cannot find.  The first is time,
and the second is spots before my eyes.  I can touch a thing I cannot
feel, and feel a thing I cannot touch.    The first is your heart, and
the second is sad and sorry."
-- James Thurber (1894-1961), "The Thirteen Clocks"
%
Troi: "It seems you have an advocate, Q."
Data: "I am merely stating the facts, Counselor."
-- "Deja Q", Stardate 43539.1
%
Two, ten, eleven. Eyes, fingers, toes.
-- Gomez Addams
%
All television is children's television.
-- Richard P. Adler
%
It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked in
chemistry for not knowing what we later found to be untrue.
-- quoted in Robert L. Weber, Science With a Smile (1992)
%
    gnomes
Ohwedon'tuselightbulbsanymoreaswemadevastimprovementsonthat
inventionlongagowhenmyGreatgrandfatherdiscovered...
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light light bulb?
%
I want to dress you up as TALLULAH BANKHEAD and cover you with
 VASELINE and WHEAT THINS..
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
I have to fulfill my potential.
-- I'd love to, but...
-- 40 of 101 Easy Ways To Say NO
%
It's a classic Pinzer maneuver; it can't fail against a bunch of
ten-year-olds!
-- Herman in "Bart the General", from The Simpsons
%
Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.
-- Robert Browning (1812-1890)
-- Paracelsus, Part v
%
No man can lose what he never had.
-- Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
-- The Complete Angler, Part i, Chap. v
%
Never trust a preacher with more than 2 suits.
-- Lenny Bruce
%
I don't believe in a no-win scenario.
-- James T. Kirk
%
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
-- Aristotle
%
Everybody is someone else's weirdo.
-- Dijkstra
%
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one!
-- Lizzie Borden was acquitted of murdering her father
-- and stepmother on 4 Aug. 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts
%
True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known
until it be lost.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
%
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), A Midsummer Night's Dream
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
Kirk: "They destroyed the Simulator Room and you with it."
Spock: "The Kobayashi Maru scenario frequently wreaks havoc with students and
  equipment.  As I recall, you took the test three times yourself.  Your final
  solution was shall we say...unique."
Kirk: "It had the virtue of never having being tried."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.3
%
First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.
-- Greek saying
%
There's still much to do, still so much to learn.
-- Picard, "The Neutral Zone", stardate 41986.0
%
For the rule of the wise over the less wise to be advantageous ...
it must come about by a process of consent. And the requirement of
consent can be understood only in the light of, and by recognition
of, natural equality.
-- Harry V. Jaffa
%
They've got drive-by shootings in Philadelphia now.  Where they park to
reload, I don't know.
-- Professor Ralph Noble, RPI, Psychology of Motivation, Fall 1991
%
As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very
pleasurable---until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are
 perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust.
-- Lawrence Dalzell
%
Deprived of sight, unable to read, this is perhaps the greatest loss to the
 blind person. I'm blind, but I am able to read thanks to a wonderful new
 system known as broil. I'm sorry--I'll just feel that again ...
-- Peter Cook
%
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment
of the sage.
-- Edward Abbey
%
She was ugly! She was known as a two-bagger. That's a girl who's so ugly,
 when you go out with her you put a bag over your head in case the bag over
 her head breaks. She was so ugly, you look in the dictionary under "ugly"
 and you see her picture. Me, I was a very ugly baby. When the doctor cut
 the cord, he hung himself. My old man, he didn't like my looks. He carried
 around a picture of the kid that came with the wallet. He made me sleep in
 the kitchen naked to get rid of the roaches.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
%
if every socket in your house breaks a fire code.
-- You may be redneck...
%
When politicians claim they will build you a "pie in the sky" --
remember whose dough they will be using.
-- Lucille J. Goodyear
%
This Thanksgiving is gonna be a special one. My
 mom says I don't have to sit at the card table.
-- Jim Samuels
%
There must be an ideal world, a sort of mathematician's paradise
where everything happens as it does in textbooks.
-- Bertrand Russell
%
When they are at Rome, they do there as they see done.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subsect. 1
%
Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.
-- Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)
%
CAUTION: This vehicle stops at red lights.
-- Seen on a bumper sticker
%
    The government of England was a limited mockery.  Henry VIII found walking
difficult because he had an abbess on his knee.  Queen Elizabeth was the "Vir-
gin Queen."  As a queen she was a success.  When Elizabeth exposed herself be-
fore her troops, they all shouted "hurrah."  Then her navy went out and
defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
-- Richard Lederer, The world According to Student Bloopers
%
There are three stages in the killing of the astrophysicist:
   (1) the early stage, when his body successfully resists the tidal forces;
   (2) the intermediate stage, when it is gradually succumbing; and
   (3) the final stage, when it has been completely overwhelmed.
                  _Gravitation_
-- The fate of a man who falls into the singularity at r = 0
%
    Israelis
Six-four to storm the room and take control of it, one to
forcibly eject the old bulb, and another one to screw it in.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.
-- Mother Teresa
%
cache: (1) pocket money. (2) frozen assets.
-- "An Alphabet for Mountaineers", Climbing 1982
%
What is a robot you ask?  Well, the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
holds the definition.

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus
designed to do the work of a man.  The marketing division of Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun
To Be With'.  The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the
marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of
mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution
comes', with a footnote to effect that the editors would welcome
applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics
correspondent.
        Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that
had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years
in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the
wall when the revolution came'
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
If it wasn't for this terrible war, Neville would still be here
  today, sniffling his little nose, and going, 'eek'.
On the other hand, if he hadn't died, I wouldn't have been able
  to insert a curtain rod in his bottom and use him as a dishmop.
-- Baldrick and Edmund : Goodbyeee...
%
They also say that God is an animal immortal, rational, perfect, and
intellectual in his happiness, unsusceptible of any kind of evil,
having a foreknowledge of the universe and of all that is in the universe;
however, that he has not the figure of a man; and that he is the creator
of the universe, and as it were the Father of all things in common,
and that a portion of him pervades everything.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Zeno, lxxii
%
Science has made gods of us before we were even worthy of being men.
-- Jean Rostand
%
:bzzzt, wrong: /bzt rong/ [USENET/Internet] From a Robin Williams
   routine in the movie "Dead Poets Society" spoofing radio or
   TV quiz programs, such as *Truth or Consequences*, where an
   incorrect answer earns one a blast from the buzzer and condolences
   from the interlocutor.  A way of expressing mock-rude disagreement,
   usually immediately following an included quote from another
   poster.  The less abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for
   playing" is also common; capitalization and emphasis of the
   buzzer sound varies.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:TCB: /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back.  An intermittent or
   difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to
   neglect or {shotgun debugging}.  Compare {heisenbug}.  Not to
   be confused with: 2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official'
   jargon term from the {Orange Book}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Fear not, but trust in Providence,
  Wherever thou may'st be.
-- Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839)
-- The Pilot
%
SLANG, n.  The grunt of the human hog (_Pignoramus intolerabilis_)
with an audible memory.  The speech of one who utters with his tongue
what he thinks with his ear, and feels the pride of a creator in
accomplishing the feat of a parrot.  A means (under Providence) of
setting up as a wit without a capital of sense.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
    My specific goal is to revolutionize the future of the
species.  Mathematics is just another way of predicting the
future.
-- Ralph Abraham
%
"We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call
free enterprise," said Cash McCall, "but when one of our citizens
show enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do
our best to make him feel that he ought to be ashamed of himself."
-- Cameron Hawley
%
 :<) from an Ivy League School
-- SMILEY
%
Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana; he is almost lost
that built it.
-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
-- Dedication to Urn-Burial, Chap. v
%
Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
-- John Wooden
%
Women give to men the very gold of their lives.
Possibly; but they invariably want it back in such very small change.
-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
%
I have a life outside the FIDOnet.
-- FIDO lie  #II
%
I knew the gun was loaded but I didn't think he'd kill.
-- Glen Frey
%
There is also a thriving independent student movement in
Poland, and thus there is a strong possibility (though no
guarantee) of making an EARN-Poland link, should it ever come
about, a genuine link - not a vacuum cleaner attachment for a
Bloc information gathering apparatus rationed to trusted
apparatchiks.
-- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing
-- a gateway from EARN (European Academic Research Network) to Poland
%
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Prudence
%
:hop: 1. n. One file transmission in a series required to get a
   file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network.  On
   such networks (including {UUCPNET} and {FidoNet}), an
   important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the
   shortest path between them, which can be more significant than
   their geographical separation.  See {bang path}. 2. v. To log in
   to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to
   foovax to FTP that."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more
excellent if good; if meager, muddy vapid, and sour, both are fit only to
engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous and sparkling, they improve the
taste, expand the heart, and are worthy of being introduced at the symposium
of the gods.
-- Colton
%
If you anticipate bus delays by leaving your house thirty minutes
early, your bus will arrive as soon as you reach the bus stop or
when you light up a cigarette, whichever comes first.
-- John Corcoran
%
 :-~) has a cold
-- SMILEY
%
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
-- Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter
%
In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective
that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance,
he no longer deserves victory.
-- Gen. Douglas MacArthur
%
:restriction: n. A {bug} or design error that limits a program's
   capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can
   quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a {feature}.  Often
   used (esp. by {marketroid} types) to make it sound as though
   some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all
   along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a
   nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are
   almost invariably false).

   Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a
   quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a
   power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1.  If you impose a limit of
   the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason
   (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less
   {flamage} for it.  Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are
   always especially suspect.
-- 17 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number -on
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
 =8-> a nerd smiley that's unbearably pleased with itself
-- SMILEY
%
Age ... is a matter of feeling, not of years.
-- George William Curtis
%
T.F. Eccles
A froody dude who knows where his towel is.
-- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Troi: "Reg?  May I join you?"
Barclay: "Of course, please.  Sit down, Counselor."
Troi: "Hard at work."
Barclay: "I'm getting prepared for tomorrow's meeting in Engineering.  We're
  planning our repair strategy."
Troi: "I really enjoyed the scene you just performed."
Barclay: "Hmm.  You're a very forgiving audience."
Troi: "Not at all.  I thought you were brilliant."
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
Shakes his ambrosial curls, and gives the nod,--
The stamp of fate, and sanction of the god.
-- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
-- The Iliad of Homer, Book i, Line 684
%
Human, do you know how interesting it is, this thing you describe?
Avata does not have a god. How is it that you have a god? Avata has
Self, has the universe. But you have a god. Where did you find this god?
-- Frank Herbert
%
    drummers
One .. Two, and a-one two three four
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
My life is a soap opera, but who has the rights?
-- MadameX
%
Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by
a thousand arguments.
-- Nathaniel Emmons
%
Nuns - No sense of humor.
-- HIGHLANDER
%
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest,
 for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
-- Andres Segovia
%
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night,
I can see paradise by the dashboard light.
-- Meatloaf
%
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
-- Jack Paar
%
Cucumbers don't get TOO excited.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
Now comes the mystery.
-- Last words of Henry Ward Beecher, 8 March 1887.
%
Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his
friends.  People fall in love with the most appalling people.  Take a
cool, appraising glance at his pals.
-- Cynthia Heimel
%
Heck I reckon you wouldn't even be human if you didn't have some pretty
 strong feelings about nuclear war.
-- Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
%
    believable, competent, "just right for the job" presidential
candidates
It's going to be a dark 4 years, isn't it?
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Think of the poorest person you have ever seen
and ask if your next act will be of any use to him
-- Gandhi's epitaph
%
Who said you could do what you do?
-- Red Hot Chili Peppers
%
[A]s for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which
has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the
fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met),
it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances
that have been traversed by us...  For those who undertook circumnavigation,
and turned back without having achieved their purpose, say that they
were made to turn back, not because of any continent that stood in
their way and hinde red their further advance, inasmuch as the sea
still continued open as before, but because of their destitution and
loneliness.
-- Strabo, Geography, ca. 7 B.C.
%
Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors)
-- "101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR"
%
A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles
of beer.  If one of those bottles should happen to
fall, it would shake the very foundations of the Universe.
-- from Mauve'Bib's "The Seven Pillows of Wisdom,"
-- edited by the Princess Serutan
%
America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
-- Allen Ginsberg
%

-- Support wildlife vote for an orgy.
%
Under capitalism, man exploits man.
 Under Communism, it's just the opposite.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's
safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government
contract.
-- Alan Shepherd, one of the Apollo astronauts
%
I'm an idealist.  I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
-- Carl Sandburg
%
We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine,
    But search of deep philosophy,
    Wit, eloquence, and poetry;
Arts which I lov'd, for they, my friend, were thine.
-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
-- On the Death of Mr. William Harvey
%
The standing miracle of this visible world is little thought of, because always
before us...For man himself is a greater miracle  than any miracle done through
his instrumentality.
-- St Augustine
%
If you don't know whether a mushroom is edible or not, you cook it all up,
 and you take a little bit and then you leave it until the next day and
 watch to see if there are any bad effects. If there aren't any, you eat a
 little more, and presently you know something.
-- John Cage
%
The most important thing in life is to love someone. The second most
important thing in life is to have someone love you. The third most
important thing is to have the first two happen at the same time.
-- Howie Schneider
%
And when with envy Time, transported,
  Shall think to rob us of our joys,
You 'll in your girls again be courted,
  And I 'll go wooing in my boys.
-- Thomas Percy (1728-1811)
-- Winifreda (1720)
%
Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
-- Charles Reade
%
Man, were he not corrupted by Governments, is naturally the friend of
Man, and that human nature is not of itself vicious.
-- Thomas Paine
%
He that hath love in his breast hath spurs in his sides.
-- Herbert
%
    women with PMS
None. You can do it yourself, dammit.
-- How many
-- does it take to screw in a light bulb?
%
A rascally yea-forsooth knave.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act i, Sc. 2
%
The distance between the ticket counter and you plane is directly
proportional to the weight of what you are carrying and inversely
proportional to the time remaining before takeoff.
-- Gary Witzenburg
%
ARTHUR:        I command you as King of the Britons to stand aside!
BLACK KNIGHT:  I move for no man.
-- The Quest for the Holy Grail (Monty Python)
%
No.  Not even in the face of Armageddon.  Never compromise.
-- Rorschach's only, fatal principle, from WATCHMEN
%
My wife insists on turning off the lights when we make love. That doesn't
 bother me. It's the hiding that seems so cruel.
-- Jonathan Katz
%
To live long, it is necessary to live slowly.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
%
 %+{ lost a fight
-- SMILEY
%
Let zeal be ever present, but hesitation absent.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
%
Work is the crabgrass of life, but money is the water
that keeps it green.
-- Sam's Axiom (2)
%
History is only a confused heap of facts.
-- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of chesterfield (1694-1773)
-- Letter to his son, Feburary 5th, 1750
%
Anything for a quiet life.
-- Title of a play by Middleton
%
"It's commode huggin' time in the valley"
-- Stupid country song titles #10
%
 >>-O-> General Custer
-- SMILEY
%
Barclay: "We could repair all of the reactors, simultaneously, instead of 'one-
  by-one'."
Picard: "'Simultaneously'?  All eighteen?"
Barclay: "Yes."
LaForge: "But the Argus computer is inoperable"
Barclay: "Not entirely.  The core memory is still intact.  We could program a
  completely new control system."
Data: "An interesting suggestion, Lieutenant.  However, that approach would
  require more time than our original plan.  At least seven weeks."
Barclay: "I could have it ready for you in two days."
Riker: "What?!"
-- "The Nth Degree", Stardate 44705.3
%
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because
he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
-- Voltaire
%
Good to be merie and wise.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. ii
%
Test the government, not the people; that's what democracy is all
 about.
-- Abby Hoffman
%
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
-- Parker's Law
%
Computer: "Commanding Officer, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  Executive Officer,
  Commander Keiran MacDuff.  Second Officer, Commander William Riker.
  Operations Officer, Lieutenant Commander Data.  Chief Medical Officer, Doctor
  Beverly Crusher.  Ship's Counselor, Lieutenant Commander Deanna Troi.  Chief
  Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Geordi LaForge.  Security Chief, Lieutenant
  Worf.  Helm Officer, Ensign Ro Laran."
-- "Conundrum", Stardate 45494.2
%
The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so.
-- Boileau
%
I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.
-- Excerpt from insurance form.
%
A cucumber doesn't have hands when it's desperate.
-- Reasons why cucumbers are better than men
%
Where God hath a temple, the Devil will have a chapel.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Sect. 4, Memb. 1, Subsect. 1
%
Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist.
-- Abbie Hoffman
%
ARMOR, n.  The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a
blacksmith.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money amongst
 themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.
-- Christina Stead
%
The biggest things are always the easiest to do because there is no
competition.
-- William Van Horne
%
 This is Fred.  We are not...  excuse me a moment, please.  Put
 your sister down.  PUT YOUR SISTER DOWN!  (Sound of window
 breaking.)  Great!  What a mess.  I'll have to get back to you
 later.
-- Answering machine madness - family fun
%
I wanted to change the world.  But I have found that the only thing
one can be sure of changing is oneself.
-- Aldous Huxley
%
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull
his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you
understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send
signals here, they receive them there.  The only difference is that
there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio
%
It is well to moor your bark with two anchors.
-- Publius Syrus (42 BC)
-- Maxim 119
%
Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false
tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on.
But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it
alone really belongs to us.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
%
Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics.
-- French Proverb
%
I think the first duty of society is justice.
-- Alexander Hamilton
%
Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous
incarnations or from a "universal mind" (the repository of all past
wisdom and creativity) not only are implausible but also unfairly
demean the stunning achievements of individual human brains.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness:
-- Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer,
-- Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171
%
If something goes wrong, it is more important to talk about who is
going to fix it, than who is to blame.
-- Francis J. Gable
%
 +-(:-) Religious leader
-- SMILEY
%
Let those that merely talk and never think,
That live in the wild anarchy of drink.
-- Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
-- Underwoods. An Epistle, answering to One that asked to be sealed
-- of the Tribe of Ben
%
The crime that goes unpunished
 is a passionate progenitor.
-- Confucius Says
%
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
-- Richard Burton (1577-1640)
%
Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.
-- Moritz Guedemann
%
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty.
It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon the king.
-- Theodore Parker
%
:feetch feetch: /feech feech/ interj. If someone tells you about
   some new improvement to a program, you might respond: "Feetch,
   feetch!"  The meaning of this depends critically on vocal
   inflection.  With enthusiasm, it means something like "Boy, that's
   great!  What a great hack!"  Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it
   means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more unnecessary and
   complicated thing".  With a tone of resignation, it means, "Well,
   I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be done".
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
Who stemm'd the torrent of a downward age.
-- James Thomson (1700-1748)
-- The Seasons, Summer, Line 1516
%
And if it please you, so; if not, why, so.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Two Gentlemen of Verona
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.
-- Edward Abbey
%
Many things happen between the cup and the lip.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part ii, Sect. 2, Memb. 3
%
We don't eat pork. But we like raw snake meat.
We are the piglets family.
-- The Piglets
%
Murder is a crime.  Describing murder is not.  Sex is not a crime.
 Describing sex is.
-- Gershon Legman
%
Puns are for children - not for readers who are groan.
-- Writing Rule 34
%
:despew: /d*-spyoo'/ [USENET] v. To automatically generate a
   large amount of garbage to the net, esp. from an automated posting
   program gone wild.  See {ARMM}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
:prepend: /pree`pend'/ [by analogy with `append'] vt. To
   prefix.  As with `append' (but not `prefix' or `suffix' as a
   verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not
   the original word (or character string, or whatever).  "If you
   prepend a semicolon to the line, the translation routine will pass
   it through unaltered."
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
You don't have to explain something you never said
-- Calvin Coolidge
%
I hope they never find out that lightning has a lot of vitamins in it, because
 do you hide from it or not?
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
The only ones who have a right to live are those not yet born.
-- Yossarian, Rio Bisbee Band
%
He used to say that other men lived to eat, but that he ate to live.
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Socrates, xvi
%
The bookish theoric.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Othello
-- Act i, Sc. 1
%
You finish the last page of Moby Dick with a big smile on your face.
-- You know you should be swimming when . . .
%
:feature shock: [from Alvin Toffler's book title "Future
   Shock"] n. A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted
   with a package that has too many features and poor introductory
   material.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me
 she was in labor for thirty-six hours. I don't even want to do anything
 that feels good for thirty-six hours.
-- Rita Rudner
%
Your dedication and tireless work on the hostage thing, with Central
America, really gave me cause for great pride in you and thanks.  Get
some turkey, George Bush.
-- A thanksgiving letter to Oliver North, 1985
%
Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!
-- Old Testament
-- Numbers xxiii, 10
%
Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
-- Lieberman's Law
%
There comes a time when a wizard must put his fate totally in the hands of
another. This takes great courage, and great faith in the ability of others to
perform some function that is beyond you. But there are benefits to this course
of action as well. Should this task reach a successful conclusion, it will show
you the worthiness of your fellow beings, and lead you to trust in the
providence of the universe. And, of course, should the task not be successful,
there is always someone else to blame.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. XXVII
%
"You think you're God!"
"Well, I gotta model myself after somebody!"
-- Woody Allen, "Manhattan"
%
I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a
 fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his.  Then he'd spin it round and
 round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out,
 "Tadpoles!  Tadpoles is a winner!"  We all thought he was crazy.  But then, we
 had some growing up to do.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
There are things that are known and things that are unknown. In between
    are doors.
-- William Blake
%
Man, n.:
      An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks
        he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.  His
    chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own
        species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent
       rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
It never hurts to help!
-- Eek the Cat.
%
Normal is boring.
-- Fido Dido
%
What a foul smell, indeed, a gymnasium has! How it suggests a mixture of
 Salvation Army, elephant house, and county jail.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will
gradually, without even noticing it, live your way in the answer.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
%
    Thatcherites
None. It's up to the private sector to provide the finance for it.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her ploughshare o'er creation.
 - Night Thoughts, Night ix, Line 167
-- Edward Young (1684-1765)
%
Often enough, statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive,
but what they concel is vital. Don't put any faith in what statistics tell
you until you have carefully examined what these statistics do not tell you.
-- Aaron Levenstein
%
You can't make up anything anymore.  The world itself is a satire.
All you're doing is recording it.
-- Art Buchwald
%
Have you ever seen the dawn?
... Twice in a row?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
My friend Winnie is a procrastinator.  He didn't get his birthmark until he was
 eight years old.
-- Steven Wright
%
How will be live?
You'll learn to build houses to keep warm.  You'll work. ... Humans
  have survived under worse conditions.  It's a matter of evolution.
Give it time.
-- Kara the Eymorg and Kirk, "Spock's Brain," stardate 5432.3.
%
Nine-track tapes and seven-track tapes
        And tapes without any tracks;
Stretchy tapes and snarley tapes
       And tapes mixed up on the racks --
            Take hold of the tape
         And pull off the strip,
               And then you'll be sure
               Your tape drive will skip.

-- Uncle Colonel's Cursory Rhymes
%
A decade after Vietnam, we still cannot understand why "their"
Salvadorans fight better than "our" Salvadorans.  It is not a matter of
their training or their equipment.  It has to do with the quality of the
society we are asking them to risk death defending.  The metaphor of the
domino obscures this reality, and the cost our self-imposed blindness
is high.  San Salvador is closer to Saigon than to Munich.
-- William LeoGrande (NYT 3/9/83)
%
Falstaff. What wind blew you hither, Pistol?
Pistol. Not the ill wind which blows no man to good.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry IV
-- Act v, Sc. 3
%
Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?
-- John Milton (1608-1674)
-- Paradise Lost, Book ii, Line 681
%
HUMORIST, n.  A plague that would have softened down the hoar
austerity of Pharaoh's heart and persuaded him to dismiss Israel with
his best wishes, cat-quick.

    Lo! the poor humorist, whose tortured mind
    See jokes in crowds, though still to gloom inclined --
    Whose simple appetite, untaught to stray,
    His brains, renewed by night, consumes by day.
    He thinks, admitted to an equal sty,
    A graceful hog would bear his company.
                                                        Alexander Poke
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
California is a fine place to live--if you happen to be an orange.
-- Fred Allen
%
Thus times do shift,--each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.
-- Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
-- Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve
%
Have you solved the halting problem?
... Correctly?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
-- Wendell Berry
%
I am wealthy in my friends.
-- Shakespeare
%
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those
who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
%
Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your
editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
-- Mark Twain
%
Kirk: "Chekov..."
Chekov: "I'm...sorry, Admiral."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
TAIL, n.  The part of an animal's spine that has transcended its
natural limitations to set up an independent existence in a world of
its own.  Excepting in its foetal state, Man is without a tail, a
privation of which he attests an hereditary and uneasy consciousness
by the coat-skirt of the male and the train of the female, and by a
marked tendency to ornament that part of his attire where the tail
should be, and indubitably once was.  This tendency is most observable
in the female of the species, in whom the ancestral sense is strong
and persistent.  The tailed men described by Lord Monboddo are now
generally regarded as a product of an imagination unusually
susceptible to influences generated in the golden age of our pithecan
past.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
-- William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
-- Thanatopsis
%
The light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long,
 and you have burned so very, very bright, Roy!
-- Doctor Eldon Tyrell, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
%
...you "woke up" this morning and thought, "I'll checkpoint here, snooze a
bit more and then revert to checkpoint."  A while later you go up another
consciousness notch and realize that you hadn't checkpointed successfully
-- You know you've been hacking too long when...
-- - "Oh, of course.  I didn't have the keyboard."
%
We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth
-- Act iii, Sc. 2
%
Have you ever received a Fax or a photocopy of a floppy?
-- from THE HACKER TEST
%
To go through an entire lifetime without a psychedelic experience is sort of
 like driving a mercedes all your life,  and never pushing that one button on
 the dashboard to see what it does.
-- Terence McKenna
%
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would
not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you
gave me.'
-- Erma Bombeck
%
Girls just want to have fun.
-- Cyndi Lauper
%
I Do Everything For Jesus.
-- Mother Teresa, The Five Fingers Rule
%
While the grasse groweth the horse starveth.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. xi
%
If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people.
-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
%
On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar
off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which,
for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height
of her glory is not to be compared,--a power which has dotted over
the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts,
whose morning drum-beat, following the sun,
-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
-- Speech, May 7, 1834, p. 110
%
Anyone who doesn't believe as you do is a fascist.
-- Liberal Rule #16
%
:admin: /ad-min'/ n. Short for `administrator'; very commonly
   used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge
   on a computer.  Common constructions on this include `sysadmin'
   and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site
   contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically
   on news).  Compare {postmaster}, {sysop}, {system
   mangler}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
%
...whether it is better to spend a life not knowing what you want or to
spend a life knowing exactly what you want and that you will never have it.
-- Richard Shelton
%
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any force,
that thoughts rule the world.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-- Progress of Culture
%
I used to worry about what life was for - now being alive
seems sufficient reason.
-- Joanna Field
%
"Spending programs are now 'investments,' taxes are 'contributions,' and
these are the same people who say _I_ need a dictionary?"
-- Dan Quayle 2/19/93
%
 (Annoying flute music in background:)  Good day, Jim.  Your
 contact, Linda, is not available right now.  Your mission,
 should you choose to accept it, is to leave your name, number,
 and a brief message at the tone.  This tape will self-destruct
 in thirty seconds.  Good Luck, Jim.
-- Answering machine madness - authority figures
%
O Miss Bailey!
Unfortunate Miss Bailey!
-- George Colman, the Younger (1762-1836)
-- Love laughs at Locksmiths, Act ii, Song
%
a regular course of instruction but comes of the reading of occult
books, or by nature.  This latter is commonly designated as folk-lore
and embraces popularly myths and superstitions.  In Baring-Gould's
_Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_ the reader will find many of these
traced backward, through various people son converging lines, toward a
common origin in remote antiquity.  Among these are the fables of
"Teddy the Giant Killer," "The Sleeping John Sharp Williams," "Little
Red Riding Hood and the Sugar Trust," "Beauty and the Brisbane," "The
Seven Aldermen of Ephesus," "Rip Van Fairbanks," and so forth.  The
fable with Goethe so affectingly relates under the title of "The Erl-
King" was known two thousand years ago in Greece as "The Demos and the
Infant Industry."  One of the most general and ancient of these myths
is that Arabian tale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Rockefellers."
-- LORE, n.  Learning particularly that sort which is not derived from
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
I would advise anyone who wished to obtain a favor from a minister to
 approach him with a mournful air rather than a lighthearted one. No one
 likes to see those who are happier than himself.
-- Nicolas Chamfort
%
There is no racial bigotry here.  Here you are all equally worthless.
-- FULL METAL JACKET
%
Khan: "Where is she?"
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Eerie, Indiana.  The Last Testament of Marshall Teller.  I had come to
 the end of the line.  Hunted. Lost.  Nowhere to hide.  And then I
 saw - home.  The safest place there is.  But like everything else,
 it turned out to be fake.
-- Marshall, "Reality Takes a Holiday", Eerie Indiana
%
    One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is
receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay.  I have pasted
together the following "history" of the world from certifiably genuine student
bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eight grade
through college level.  Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.
-- Richard Lederer, The world According to Student Bloopers
%
Look ere ye leape.
-- John Heywood (c. 1565)
-- Proverbes, Part i, Chap. ii
%
An older student came to Otis and said, "I have been to see
 a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of
 pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate and stayed awake nights seeking
 enlightenment. I have given up everything I was asked to give up and I
 have suffered, but I have not been enlightened. What should I do?"
 Otis replied, "Give up suffering."
-- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
%
Promises and pie crust are made to be broken
-- Jonathan Swift
%
Kirk: "Mister Chekov, I think you've earned your pay for the week."
-- "Who Mourns For Adonais?", Stardate 3468.1.
%
The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized
society, must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
-- Samuel Hendel
%
A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.
-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
%
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act v, Sc. 2
%
The difference between a child and a hacker is the amount he
flames about his toys.
-- Ed Schwalenberg
%
Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few
 simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'.
-- John Sladek
%
When the legislature decides the rules of buying and selling,
the first thing to be bought will be the legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
%
Better to sink beneath the shock
Than moulder piecemeal on the rock.
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- The Giaour, Line 969
%
If there 's a hole in a' your coats,
        I rede ye tent it;
A chiel 's amang ye takin' notes,
        And, faith, he 'll prent it.
-- Robert Burns (1759-1796)
-- On Captain Grose's Peregrinations through Scotland
%
If you are a fatalist, what can you do about it?
-- Ann Edwards-Duff
%
"Be of good cheer," said Diogenes; "I see land."
-- Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD)
-- Diogenes, vi
%
There are two kinds of books: those that no one reads and those that no one
ought to read.
-- H. L. Mencken
%
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
  Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray'd,
  A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow
  A momentary bliss bestow.
-- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
-- On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Stanza 2
%
When people say that the desert is lifeless, it just makes me want to grab them
 by the collar and yell, "Why you stupid, stupid bastard!"  Then I drive them
 out into the desert to where the circus is, and point out the many forms of
 zebra and clown life.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
%
A sane environment in one in which there is room to be crazy. A crazy
environment is one in which there is no room to be sane.
-- Solomon Short
%
Purchase not friends with gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such
will cease to love.
-- Fuller
%
You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar
-- Act ii, Sc. 1
%
Klingon Ambassador: "The Chancellor of the High Council is *dead*!  The result
  of an *unprovoked* attack, while he travelled to see *you* on a flag* of
  *truce* on a mission of *peace*!  Captain Kirk was legally arrested for the
  crime.  May I remind you that he and *Doctor McCoy* boarded Kronos One of
  their own free will?  None of these facts are in dispute, Mister President."
UFP President: "I have ordered a full-scale investigation.  In the meantime..."
Klingon Ambassador: "'In the meantime', we expect the Federation to abdige by
  the Articles of *Interstellar Law* which you claim to cherish!  Kirk and
  Doctor McCoy will stand trial for the assassination of Chancellor Gorkon!"
-- "STVI:TUC", Stardate 9523.8
%
The burden is equal to the horses strength.
-- The Talmud
%
The Mets were great in 'sixty eight,
The Cards were fine in 'sixty nine,
But the Cubs will be heavenly in nineteen and seventy.
-- Ernie Banks
%
Carol: "David, why don't you show Doctor McCoy and the lieutenant our idea of
  food?"
David: "But we can't just sit here."
Kirk: "Oh yes we can."
-- "STII:TWOK", Stardate 8130.4
%
Sarek: "Is that you...Picard?"
Picard: "Hello, old friend."
-- "Unification I", Stardate 45235.4
%
The price of justice is freedom.
-- Judge Dredd
%
IT IS BELIEVED THAT
I think
-- Research definitions
%
Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that his arguments smelt
of the lamp.
-- Plutarch (46-120 AD)
-- Life of Demosthenes
%
I just had my entire INTESTINAL TRACT coated with TEFLON!
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%
CORPORAL, n.  A man who occupies the lowest rung of the military
ladder.

    Fiercely the battle raged and, sad to tell,
    Our corporal heroically fell!
    Fame from her height looked down upon the brawl
    And said:  "He hadn't very far to fall."
                                                         Giacomo Smith
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
You'll find in no park or city A monument to a committee.
-- Victoria Pasternak
%
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
You attach this bungee cord, where...?
-- Famous Last Words
%
Marriage is the only union that cannot be organized.
Both sides think they are management.
-- Abley's Explanation
%
The professional wizard, it is said, should always watch his hands.
Actually, the truly professional wizard should watch a great many other things
as well, including the reactions of his audience, the door or window that
constitutes the nearest exit, and, perhaps most important, the constantly
fluctuating interest rates on his retirement account in the First Bank of
Vushta.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Vol. VI
%
Language is by its very nature a communal thing;
 that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise
-- that which is common to you, me and everybody.
-- Ernest Hulme, Speculations
%
So on the tip of his subduing tongue
All kinds of arguments and questions deep,
All replication prompt, and reason strong,
For his advantage still did wake and sleep.
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect and different skill,
Catching all passion in his craft of will.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnets & other Poetry
-- A Lover's Complaint, Line 120
%
The divine guidance often comes when the horizon is the blackest.
-- Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi
%
So wise so young, they say, do never live long.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Richard III
-- Act iii, Sc. 1
%
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
-- The Merchant of Venice (1596-1598) act 1, sc. 3
%
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor
of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated,
it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
-- Oscar Wilde
%
Out of the shadow of night, the world rolls into light. It is
daybreak everywhere.
-- Longfellow
%
The point is plain as a pike-staff.
-- John Byrom (1691-1763)
-- Epistle to a Friend
%
    egotists
One. He holds onto the light bulb, and waits for the world to
revolve around him.
-- How many
-- does it take to change a light bulb?
%
I may not here omit those two main plagues and common dotages of human
kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of
people; they go commonly together.
-- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
-- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsect. 13
%
...the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality
tools is essential to meet ever increasing demands for software.
-- M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson and B. A. Tague
%
if you buy a new house & have to remove the wheels.
-- You may be redneck...
%
Bell, Book and candle.
-- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
-- Don Quixote, Part i, Book iii, Chap. iv
%
It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you
might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as
important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost ...
-- Richard Bach, Spoken by Leslie Parrish, The Bridge Across Forever
%
The world is governed by opinion.
-- Thomas Hobbes
%
USHER
  Formerly a person who would escort the audiences to their seats,
  cinema ushers are now relegated to clearing out the snogging
  teenagers in the back-row who haven't realised the film has ended.
  If you ever feel intimidated by over-zealous ushers, just look them
  in the eye and try to estimate how much more money you earn.(*)
      (*) If you don't, then accusing them of fascist leanings may be
  the correct course of action. Or not.
-- Daniel Bowen's TOXIC CUSTARPEDIA
%
The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse
into greatness.... This and no other is the root from which tyranny springs.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.), "The Republic"
%
The road to hell is paved with NAND gates.
-- J. Gooding
%
"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls--the world."
-- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
-- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iv, Stanza 145
%
