************************************** Quotes file - downloaded from www.xuenay.net Version 1.44, updated on the 20th of February 2005. 8 new quotes added since version 1.41 12 new quotes added since version 1.42 32 new quotes added since version 1.43 The first group of quotes (up to the Rygar ones) taken from http://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/wisdom.html . I've mined enough quote collections for jewels to create this file that it'd be a wasted effort to try to list them all at this point. If you think (and are reasonably sure) I've taken quotes from you, go ahead and mail me and I'll credit you in the next version of this file (just use common sense - if I have used one quote of yours, there's probably a kazillion places I could've taken it from. :-P). Quotes do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the compiler... then again, I wouldn't have added quotes I didn't like, would I? Read at your own risk. ************************************** % Disclaimer: We have no wish to offend you unless you're a twit. % If at first you don't succeed, change the rules. % Anarchy - It's not the law, it's just a good idea. % The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. % It's not the principle of the thing. It's the money. % Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy. % All things considered, insanity may be the only reasonable alternative. % Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. % Sincerity is the key. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. % The breakfast of champions is the opposition. % If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed. % Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. % Always do right. This will gratify many people, and astonish the rest. % Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you frantic. % Decadence is its own reward. % An honest politician is one who stays bought. % Organize for anarchy! % Circular definition: see "circular definition." % Help! The paranoids are out to get me! % According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless. % I don't see you, so don't pretend you're there. % Tell the truth and run. % He who hesitates is last. % A wise man knows everything, a shrewd one, everybody. % Moral victories don't count. % All vacations and holidays create problems, except for one's own. % Smile! The Illuminati are watching. % Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs. % All syllogisms have three parts. Therefore, this is not a syllogism. % I'll have to put something into their food to make them forget about this. % We cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you. % Don't steal. The government hates the competition. % Once you give up integrity, the rest is easy! % A Smith and Wesson beats four aces. % I don't suffer from insanity. I revel in it. % Always be smarter than the people who hire you. But never let them know. % The worst thing about censorship is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. % Don't tell any big lies today. Small ones can be just as effective. % Smile! It makes them wonder what you're up to. % For every action there is an equal and opposite government program. % A censor is a man who thinks he knows more than you ought to. % If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research. % The less a politician amounts to, the more he loves the flag. % Age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time. % Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future. % What if this weren't a hypothetical question? % All generalizations are incorrect, including this one. % Join the Illuminati and see the world . . . differently. % Friends come, and friends go, but enemies accumulate. % Beware of the superficially profound. % Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. % All law is codified revenge. % Did you know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary? Look it up. % Hail Eris! All hail Discordia! % If winning doesn't matter, why keep score? % Objectivity is in the eye of the beholder. % Smash the state, and have a nice day. % Abandon all hope ye who PRESS ENTER here. % No good deed goes unpunished. % Thoughts good! Slogans bad! Thoughts good! Slogans bad! % Gotta run, my government's collapsing. % A friend is someone you call to help you move. A real friend is someone you call to help you move a body. % Defeat is worse than death, because you have to live with defeat. % Eschew obfuscation! % Someone you trust is one of us . . . % This is a test. This is only a test. Had this been a real emergency, you would all be dead by now. % NOTE: The mastery of the above mentioned operations will allow the player to advance to the difficult stages / rounds / levels of the game and achieve an increased level of game satisfaction! -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Molgolin: It builds a nest in a den or on a high place. Once it finds Rygar, it will chase him tenaciously. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Rolpher: It lives in the ground. Sensing someone approaching, it comes out and attacks him by rotating itself. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Epolcon: It is a flying dragon which has been living in a primeval mountain. He will attack Rygar by dropping eggs of a snow grouse. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Kinatarnos: Usually it lives at the waterside and throws a piosonous spine by bending itself backward. Turn a spine aside and attack it in a crouched position. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Pragokelis: It is a primitive monster having been brought to life from the dead by Ligar. Attack it in a couched position. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Deathpigor: It lives in the the tower of Garba and has two heads. It attacks Rygar by blowing demonic fire. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Super-robot, Bargan: It was designed for the purpose of having command of the sky of Lapis and is capable of discharging deadly electromagnetic super wave. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Demorobruzer: It has a heavily-equipped tank and advances along a wall. Sometimes it zooms down. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Olbis: It lives in the water. Sensing someone approaching, it comes out, flies high up in the air, and zooms down to attacck. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Physical-strength target: In some cases, the soldier is given what we call "physical-strength target". It increases the physical strength by one unit. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Hyoking: It lives in the ground. Sensing someone approaching, it comes out and attacks him. After that, it goes back into the ground. Its body is covered with hard skin. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Kuzeelar: Though it moves slowly, it attacks Rygar by discharging acid mucus, yuk, yuk. Jump to turn it aside. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Kinohle: It is a manifestation of sand and propagates itself around Garloz. It discharges spores, walking like a crab. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % It is said that in a mysterious island in Garloz, there is a palace where a drago is roaring. The room is called "Drago Room". -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Now you have just read this book through. But the real battle is yet to come. You must bring the brave Rygar to life from the dead in order to make Argool a peaceful land again. We hope you will succeed! -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % If Rygar is defeated by an enemy or his energy gets too low he will die. But don't be discouraged, by pressing the start button you can bring Rygar back to life again, and restart the game from the last point where you left off. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % The sky of the holy place was completely covered with the flying castle of Ligar and his army of dangerous beasts. These animalized soldiers came down from the sky and commited the most atrocious cruelties. In a single day, they established the kingdom of EVIL. -- From the manual of Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Fire bomb: Splits the earth under the target creature. Incinerates anything on path. -- From the manual of Castlevania for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Pork chop: Appears with secret Whip stroke -- From the manual of Castlevania for the Nintendo Entertainment System % Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -- P.J. O'Rourke % While you are away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend, Tom Selleck is kissing your lady, Bart Simpson is making love to your wife. -- Clueless Iraqi radio announcer, Baghdad Betty, trying to demoralize U.S. Gulf War troops. % You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing, it's air support. -- Air Force Colonel David Opfer, complaining to reporters about their coverage of the Vietnam War. % Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life. -- Orrin Hatch, Senator from Utah. % Don't be humble. You're not that great. -- Golda Meir % It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by resorting to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. -- H. L. Mencken % I think that the undecideds could go one way or the other. -- George Bush, 1988 % Honest businessmen should be protected from the unscrupulous consumer. -- Lester Maddox, then governer of Georgia, on why his state should not create a consumer protection agency. % Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. -- Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C. % I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue. -- Richard Nixon, discussing Watergate in 1978 % Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life. -- Brooke Shields, on why she wanted to become spokesperson for a federal antismoking campaign. % It is more profitable for your congressman to support the tobacco industry than your life. -- Jackie Mason % My work is done, why wait? -- Suicide note of Kodak founder George Eastman % Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It's not fair that some men should be happier than others. -- Oscar Wilde % Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. -- Lenny Bruce % Bite the wax tadpole. -- Coca-Cola name as originally translated into Chinese (later changed to "May the mouth rejoice"). % Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave. -- Ad slogan "Pepsi comes alive" as initially translated into Chinese. % If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. -- Senior Pentagon official, explaining why the U.S. military censored footage showing Iraqi soldiers sliced in two by U.S. helicopter fire. % Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway. -- Othal Brand, member of a Texas pesticide review board, on Chlordane. % I have no weakness for shoes. I wear very simple shoes which are pump shoes. It is not one of my weaknesses. -- Imelda Marcos, owner of 3,400 pairs of shoes. % Facts are stupid things. -- Ronald Reagan % Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years, with time off for good behavior? -- New York Senator James H. Donovan commenting on capital punishment. % Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. -- General William Westmoreland on why the media should be controlled in wartime % Commie, despot, monarchy: You get one population free Martial law for the next three A temple is the fifth man's fee -- KrazyHorse % "No man is an Ireland." --Chicago Mayor Richard Daley % "I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." --Vice President Dan Quayle % "Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that." --Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton % "The Internet is a great way to get on the Net." --Presidential candidate Bob Dole % Knowledge: "Knowledge is a three-edged sword. Your side, their side, and the truth." % Life and Death: "It's easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?" % Fairness of Life: "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." % Foolishness: "When others do a foolish thing, you should tell them it is a foolish thing. They can still continue to do it, but at least the truth is where it needs to be." % Technology: "A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles." % Prophesies: "Prophecy is a guess that comes true. When it doesn't, it's a metaphor." % War: "I suppose there'll be a war now, hmm? All that running around and shooting at one another. You would have thought sooner or later it'd go out of fashion." % Farewell, peace be with you. May the forces of evil become confused and lost when on the way to your house. % "Wisdom comes through trial and error. Learn from your mistakes and instruct others." % "I would, from time to time, wonder out loud about the secrets of the universe; but the guy next to my cell has all the answers." % "Trust can be given or earned. It is up to your heart to decide when that is." % "I have traveled the universe, walked amongst the stars, touched the face of god all mighty. But I failed to learn anything from my experience." % "We know the 11 words that can make someone fall in love with you forever, and we know the 14 words that can make them go with out there being any pain. We know how to live rich, how to live poor. We leave now so that knowledge will not be lost in the coming darkness, to make sure that the knowledge we have, will still be there to be taught to others." % "No matter how old you become. No matter how much you learn and teach. No matter how much you strive to make a difference in yourself, you will always be someone's little girl or boy." % A single death is a tragedy, a billion deaths is a statistic. % The best weapon is the one between you ears, always keep it loaded. % My eyebrows are not amused. % All that is gold does not glitter Not all those who wander are lost The old that is strong does not wither Deep roots are not touched by the frost From the shadows a light shall be woken From the ashes a fire shall spring Renewed shall be blade that was broken The crownless again shall be king -- Strider, Lord of the Rings % Twice and twice shall he be marked. Twice to live and twice to die. Once the heron to set his way... Twice the heron to name him true... Once the Dragon for remembrence lost... Twice the Dragon for the price he must pay... The Kareauthon Cycle -- Chancellor Koholos, the Dark Raven % There is no emotion; there is peace. There is ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no death; there is the Force. -- The Jedi Code % "In the end I do not remember my enemies word , but my friends silence. " Martin Luther King Jr. % The wisest of men rule with trust, the dumbest rule with fear. % It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to make him cry % You are like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there. % Focus your mind and you can move mountains. Focus your words and you can move people to to move that mountain. % The universe. Enter at your own peril. % "There are those that say the universe is mad. It creates and its creations destroy. I wager that the universe is not mad. It creates and its creations rebuild that which has been destroyed to teach others not to destroy, but to build." % "What is technology compared to the infinite power of the mind that conjures it up." % "A life lived in fear is a life wasted away." % "Diplomacy means you say something soothing while you pull the trigger, right?" --Wes Janson, The Starfighters of Adumar % The more I study the more I know. The more I know the more I forget. The more I forget the less I know. So why study? % "A duel? Fine, choose your weapon. Swords or pistols? Swords? Okay, I choose pistols." % My own idea rephrased back to me: "Remember, a fair fight only happens because of poor planning on your part." % "The only thing better that fire support is overwhelming fire support." -Major General Thaddus Zools, military commmander of Beat VI % "Where does it say 'You will never get away with this'." % Please don't disturb me while I plot to overthrow you. % Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever. % It is difficult to say what is impossible, for yesterday's dream is today's hope and tomorrow's reality. % Look, we're gonna die regardless, so why not have them keep us company? % "This is our home. We like it. It is nice." --Excerpt from a rousing speech by Commander Tarl before their base was overrun by stormtroopers. % Big guns don't always win. However, if we stand in fron of big guns, we will be lost. % "We're not looting. We are "collecting donations" for the cause." --Lt. Colonel Lokar reaction to cmplaints of Frax Rebel action during the iberation of Bounty % "Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. " -Sun Tzu % "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword." - Jesus Christ % Londo Mollari: Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you. % Luc: Are you really the Emperor? Londo: I sometimes ask myself the same question. Yes, I'm the Emperor. Here, you see? This is the seal of the Centauri Republic. Only the Emperor can wear it. So either I am the Emperor, or I am in a great deal of trouble. Or both. % General Fontaine: We've heard that certain elements of their government want a meeting to discuss finding a way out of this war that doesn't involve the annihilation of Earth. G'Kar: Most progressive of them. % Delenn: John, whenever something comes into our proximity that has to do with the unknown, your eyes light up like two tiny suns. And do you know what words these two tiny lights spell out? Sheridan: What? Delenn: Mine! Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine! Sheridan: Oh, now that is a lie! Delenn: Minbari do not lie. Sheridan: Well then it is slander. Delenn: To be slander, it must be false. That's two down. Sheridan: Well then it's damned inconvenient. Delenn: The truth always is. % Delenn: I look forward to meeting a Vorlon. I've heard much about them that is strange. Jeffrey Sinclair: Such as? Delenn: Do you not have files on the Vorlons? Jeffrey Sinclair: Absolutely, very large files. There's nothing in them, of course. % [Recalling the Battle of the Line.] Jeffrey Sinclair: The sky was full of stars, and every star an exploding ship. One of ours. % Londo Mollari: There was a time when this whole quadrant belonged to us! What are we now? Twelve worlds and a thousand monuments to past glories. Living off memories and stories, and selling trinkets. My god, man! We've become a tourist attraction. "See the great Centauri Republic - open 9 to 5 - Earth time." % Assassin: [to Sinclair] There is a hole in your mind. % On the sixth day, God created the platypus. And God said: let's see the evolutionists try and figure this one out. % It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed - The lips acquire stains - The stains become a warning - It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. % I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear... I will permit it to pass over me and through me. % Sometimes...the wolves are silent and the moon is howling % "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." -- Josef Stalin % People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid. - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard % Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend, and inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx % Always make a model a simple as possible, but never simpler. - Albert Einstein % "Londo, are you deliberately trying to drive me insane?" "The universe is already mad, anything else would be redundant." - Vir and Londo in Babylon 5:"Dust to Dust" % A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert Heinlein % "The deeds of the Finns during the Winter War gave others an example of how a people must fight for its independence." - Colonel General Dimitrij Volkogonov, February 1989 % "The truth was on the side of the Finns when they heroically defended their freedom and their independence." Historian Boris - Sokolov, December 1989 % "I have searched everywhere for that soft twilight which was engraved on my mind forever in the dusk of a Finnish summer night, but I have never experienced it again." - Alexandre Dumas, (1802-1870) % Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy. % My heart is saying "yes", and my mind is saying "whatever, you never listen to me anyway." % ----/-<@ "Wake! for the Golden Cat has put to flight The Mouse of Darkness with his Paw of Light: Which means, in Plain and simple every-day Unoriental Speech - The Dawn is bright. @>-\---- (Oliver Herford: "The Rubaiyat of the Persian Kitten") % "There is no such thing as gravity. The Earth sucks, that is all." % The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment while the unreasonable man adapts his environment to himself. All progress is therefore dependent upon the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw % In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock. -Thomas Jefferson % Customer: "I'm running Windows 95." Tech Support: "Yes." Customer: "My computer isn't working now." Tech Support: "Yes, you said that already." -Pete Zimkowski % My destiny is what I make it out to be, not what others want it to be. % 1968: "With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the US market." -- Business Week, August 2. % "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." - Albert Einstein % "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind, it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate--and quickly." - Robert A. Heinlein % "A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." - Robert A. Heinlein % "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering." - Arthur C Clarke % "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." - Arthur C Clarke % "Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics--you name it--is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what man is--not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be." - Robert A. Heinlein % "Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost." - Rober A. Heinlein % "War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence." - Robert A. Heinlein % "Their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified the mythology of rights... and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can survive." - Robert A. Heinlein % A wolf in sheeps clothing needs professional help. % "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." - Carl Sagan % "There comes a time when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it, or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." - Londo, Chrysalis % Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up these defenses, you build this whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own any more. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love. - Neil Gaiman % Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so. - Bertrand Russell % Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. - Bertrand Russell % The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life. - Bertrand Russell % Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943) % 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 % Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's? - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche % 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 % "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 % "There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it." -- George Bernard Shaw % "Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." -- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903), Maxims for Revolutionists: The Golden Rule % "A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson % 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 % When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects % Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. - Antoine de SaintExupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939 % An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise. - Victor Hugo, Ninetythree, 1874 % "The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." -- Victor Hugo % "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live." -- Oscar Wilde % "Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent." -- Bruno Jasienski (Yasensky) % "We tell lies when we are afraid, . . . afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger." -- Tad Williams, Spoken by Dr. Morgenes, To Green Angel Tower (part of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn) % "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." -- Buddha % "I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to." -- Jimi Hendrix % "The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep." -- Alan Patrick Herbert % "If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." -- Lyndon Baines Johnson % "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 % "The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples." -- Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto % Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat. % "There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he's absolutely free to choose." -- William M. Bulger % "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." -- William James % Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least. % The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws. % When the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box. -- Italian proverb % The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live. - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged % Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true. - Polish proverb % Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. - Ambrose Redmoon % A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools. % Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. - James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making % The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame. - Oscar Wilde % If you can laugh at yourself, you've got a really sick sense of humour. - Jason Q. % Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. % Cigarette, n.: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in between. % Definition of "Just Friends": It means I don't just want you to mourn the loss; I want to remind you of it every day. I want you to suffer. I want you to envy. I want you to die slowly, a bit at a time. And I want you to smile and thank me for it. % There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone or forbid your children to do it. - Monta Crane % The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep. - Clinton aide George Stephanopolous, Larry King Live % One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us. - Virgil A. Kraft % The supernatural is the natural not yet understood. - Elbert Hubbard % The best defense against logic is ignorance. % Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today. - James Dean % Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis ad capul tuum saxum immane mittam. - I have a catapult. Give me all the money or I will fling an enormous rock at your head. % ...I'm just going over to the insurance company and the Russian embassy, man. It's not like I'm going to die out there. % It is not enough to have the courage of your convictions, you must also have the courage to have your convictions challenged. - Christopher Phillips % "Nothing is closer to immortality than a government program." --Ronald Reagan % "Belief gets in the way of learning." - Robert Heinlein % "Of all the strange 'crimes' that human beings have legislated out of nothing, 'blasphemy' is the most amazing, with 'obscenity' and 'indecent exposure' fighting it out for second and third place." - Robert Heinlein % "If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind." - William Clifford % "Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blind faith." - Thomas Jefferson % "If god doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you." % "You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." - Reverend Robert Cromey % "If God created flawed beings, how then can He go on to blame them for their flaws?" - James Halloran % "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony % "I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." - Voltaire % "The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." - Bertrand Russell % "Besides which, one of the trees in Lothlorien has brown leaves, whereas on page 278 of the book it's clearly represented as having yellow leaves, so obviously the film's crap." - Commenting on the LOTR movie % "First, we would not accept a treaty that would not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made sense for the country." -- George W. Bush, April 24, 2001 % "I think there is some methodology in my travels." -- George W. Bush, March 5, 2001 % "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet." -- George W. Bush, Oct. 24, 2000 % "We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease." -- George W. Bush, June 14, 2001 % "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce." -- George W. Bush, April 21, 2001 % "They misunderestimated me." -- George W. Bush, Nov. 6, 2000 % "You've heard Al Gore say he invented the internet. Well, if he was so smart, why do all the addresses begin with "W"?" -- George W. Bush % "If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything!" -- George W. Bush % "If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room care, we're going to have gag orders." -- George W. Bush % "Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it." -- George W. Bush % "I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun." -- George W. Bush % "Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about." -- George W. Bush % "Our priorities is our faith." -- George W. Bush, Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000 % "I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question." -- George W. Bush, in response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000 % "It's a school full of so-called at-risk children. It's how we, unfortunately, label certain children. It means basically they can't learn. ... It's one of the best schools in Houston." -- George W. Bush % ... I've been talking to Vicente Fox, the new president of Mexico... I know him... to have gas and oil sent to U.S.... so we'll not depend on foreign oil... -- George W. Bush, on the first Presidential debate, 10/03/2000 % "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." -- George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000 % "One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected." -- George W. Bush, Los Angeles, Sept. 27, 2000 % "...more and more of our imports are coming from overseas." -- George W. Bush, on NPR's Morning Edition (9/26) % "...I don't need to be *subliminabable*.." -- George W. Bush, Orlando, FL, Sept. 12, when caught using subliminal technique in his dirty ads against Gore % "This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow citizens, I like *interfacing* with them." -- George W. Bush, Outside Pittsburgh, Sept. 8, 2000 % "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers." -- George W. Bush, Houston,Texas, Sept. 6, 2000 % "We don't believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of Americans." -- George W. Bush, Scranton, Pa., Sept. 6, 2000 % "As governor of Texas, I have set high standards for our public schools, and I have met those standards." -- George W. Bush, CNN online chat, Aug.30, 2000 % "I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes." -- George W. Bush, Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 21, 2000 % "We cannot let terriers and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.'' -- George W. Bush % "The American people wants a president that appeals to the angels..." -- George W. Bush in his speech during the GOP convention. Aug/2000 % George W. Bush's new Web site, www.georgewbush.com, states that the No. 3 priority of the campaign is "Putting Education First." -- 7/19... Al Kamen, Washington Post % "He has certainly earned a reputation as a fantastic mayor, because the results speak for themselves. I mean, New York's a safer place for him to be." -- George W. Bush on Rudy Giuliani, The Edge With Paula Zahn, May 18, 2000 % "The fact that he relies on facts says things that are not factual are going to undermine his campaign." -- George W. Bush, New York Times, March 4, 2000 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.) % "I think we agree, the past is over." -- George W. Bush, on his meeting with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000 % "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." -- George W. Bush, Reuters, May 5, 2000 % "My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen." -- George W. Bush, Crawford, Texas, Aug, 13, 2001 (Thanks to Michael Shively.) % "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican." -- George W. Bush, Declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001 % "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.'' -- George W. Bush, Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001 % "My pro-life position is I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness." -- George W. Bush, Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2001 % "Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." -- George W. Bush, Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001 (Thanks to Rachael Contorer.) % "The great thing about America is everybody should vote." -- George W. Bush, Austin, Texas, Dec. 8, 2000 % "I am mindful of the difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. I assured all four of these leaders that I know the difference, and that difference is they pass the laws and I execute them." -- George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2000 % "Anyway, after we go out and work our hearts out, after you go out and help us turn out the vote, after we've convinced the good Americans to vote, and while they're at it, pull that old George W. lever, if I'm the one, when I put my hand on the Bible, when I put my hand on the Bible, that day when they swear us in, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not - to uphold the laws of the land." -- George W. Bush, Toledo, Ohio, Oct. 27, 2000 % "That's a chapter, the last chapter of the 20th, 20th, the 21st century that most of us would rather forget. The last chapter of the 20th century. This is the first chapter of the 21st century. " -- George W. Bush, on the Lewinsky scandal, Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000 % "I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating." -- George W. Bush, U.S. News & World Report, April 3, 2000 (Thanks to Alfred Stanley, Austin, Texas.) % "I cut the taxes on everybody. I didn't cut them. The Congress cut them. I asked them to cut them." -- George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004 % "I wish I wasn't the war president. Who in the heck wants to be a war president? I don't." -- George W. Bush, forgetting that he has launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004 % "I mean, if you've ever been a governor of a state, you understand the vast potential of broadband technology, you understand how hard it is to make sure that physics, for example, is taught in every classroom in the state. It's difficult to do. It's, like, cost-prohibitive." -- George W. Bush, D.C., June 24, 2004 % "If I'm going to die, I'd rather do so in a room with a view." -- Galen the Technomage, Crusade % "You like going nowhere at 120 miles per hour?" "Of course. That's man's natural condition." -- From Crusade % "Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an "axis of evil" threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice." -- Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times % "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." -- Franklin Roosevelt % Paradise is not a place -- it's a state of mind. % Opportunity may knock only once but it passes by your door every day. % Learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. % Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground. % You never know when you're making a memory. % "Man have to marry. If they marry to a good woman, they will be happy. And this is good for man. If they marry to a bad woman, they will become philosopher. And this is good for man too." % "Life is wasted on the living." -- Douglas Adams % "A man never tells you anything until you contradict him." -- George Bernard Shaw % "Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough." -- George Bernard Shaw % "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." -- Rene Descartes % "So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world." -- Immanuel Kant % "I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room." -- Blaise Pascal % "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." -- Plato % "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." -- Bertrand Russell % "I can resist anything but temptation." -- Oscar Wilde % "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple." -- Oscar Wilde % "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." -- Anonymous % "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." -- Douglas Adams % "My nation is the world, and my religion is to do good." -- Thomas Paine % Archaeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental."-- Newsreader, Red Dwarf: Better than Life % Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. % "I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they're writing on a subject I know something about." -- Keith F. Lynch % "So tell me, just how long have you had this feeling that no one is watching you?" -- Christopher Locke: Entropy Gradient Reversals % "The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully." -- Windows NT Server v3.51 % "The war isn't the war between the blacks and the whites, the liberals and the conservatives, or the Federation and the Romulans. It's between the clueful and the clueless." -- an anonymous poster on cypherpunks list % "This seems like a case where we need to shoot the messenger." -- Charlie Kaufman on Cypherpunks list % Are you still here? The message is over. Shoo! Go away! % At first there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light!' Then there was still nothing. But you could see it. % Give your child mental blocks for Christmas. % Invalid thought detected. Close all mental processes and restart body. % One tentacle, one vote. % People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament. % Some people have one of those days. I have one of those lives. % Wit levels low. Attempting to compensate. % "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1866. % "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." -- Commisioner Pravin Lal, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri % "A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." -- John A. Shedd % "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." -- Helen Keller % Combat rating has no effect on attaining the rank of General. -- Star Wars Rebellion, readme notes % It doesn't matter what temperature the room is. It's always room temperature. % See only perfection, express only gratefulness, imagine only what manifestation of perfection you choose next. In this formula is found tranquility, peace, joy. % Your perspective creates your thoughts, and your thoughts create everything. % This can't be dangerous... I've seen it done on TV a million times. % If you were on a plane going the speed of sound and walked from the back of the plane to the front, would you be walking faster than the speed of sound? % Can blind people be dyslexic when they read Braille? % How do you handcuff a one-armed man? % If someone can't see, they're blind and if someone cant hear, they're deaf, so what do you call people who can't smell? % If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be? % If a person owns a piece of land do they own it all the way down to the core of the earth? % What is a male ladybug called? % "Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing - but none of them serious." -- Alan Minter, Boxer % "This is no longer a slum neighborhood. I haven't heard of a Cubs fan being shot in a long time." -- Anonymous Wrigley Field Neighbor, Chicago, IL % "Men, I want you just thinking of one word all season. One word and one word only: Super Bowl." -- Bill Peterson, football coach % "Most cars on our roads have only one occupant, usually the driver." -- Carol Malia, BBC Anchorwoman % "Most lies about blondes are false." -- Cincinnati Times-Star, headline % "If you give a person a fish, they'll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they'll fish for a lifetime." -- Dan Quayle, former U.S. Vice President % "It's time for the human race to enter the solar system!" -- Dan Quayle, former U.S. Vice President on the concept of a manned mission to Mars % 7/5th of all people do not understand fractions. % Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. % Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off NOW. % The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up. % The believer is happy; the doubter is wise. % It takes both sunshine and rain to make a rainbow. % Be a bringer of the light. You *are* that. So be it. % "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -- Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems % "The most important thing, darling, is to live a fabulous life. As long as it's fabulous, I don't care how long it is." - Freddie Mercury % Those who know history are doomed to think that it will repeat itself. % "To get a life you have to lose a life." - Pasi Ojala 19.11.1997 % "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll % The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." --Ronald Reagan, Aug 12, 1986 % "I'm gonna move to a country where they don't allow any immigrant!!" -- Anonymous wannabe racist % "When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives." -- Robert A. Heinlein % "I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring... which makes it like sex." -- Susan Sarandon (as Annie Savoy) in Bull Durham % "We did an article about how to have sex when you live with your parents because so many young Russian couples can't afford to move out," -- Ms. Verbeek, co-editor of the Russian version of Cosmopolitan % "In the process of connecting everything to everything, computers elevate the power of the small player. Instead of enforcing uniformity, they promote heterogeneity and autonomy. Instead of sucking the soul from human bodies, turning computer-users into an army of dull clones, networked computers - by reflecting the networked nature of our own brains and bodies - encourage the humanism of their users. Because they have taken on the flexibility, adaptability, and self-connecting governance of organic systems, we become more human, not less so, when we use them." -- Kevin Kelly % "It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!" -- Nietzsche. % "Your body cannot heal without play. Your mind cannot heal without laughter. Your soul cannot heal without joy." -- Catherine Rippenger Fenwick % Had a life. Never used it. Gave it away to somebody who wanted one. % "Intellectual rigor annoys people because it interferes with the pleasure they derive from allowing their wishes to be the fathers of their thoughts." - George F. Will % "If theory and reality diverges, change reality." - Josef Stalin % Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. --Buddha % "Your whole second paragraph makes you look like a retard since you added a 'Bugger off' with it and you're the first person I've ever seen who was so retarded he actually pretended to be British/English to insult someone when the Brits are like the 3rd easiest people to make fun of. " -- 'Red' at the FFHorizon forums % hi i am very good at irc, i can script and even hack people on irc,but this real good hacker keeps hacking into me and changing my nick, his name is NickServ % tetris is so unrealistic % I have a stupid question: what does "sendmail" do? django: you're right, that is pretty stupid % i was gonna call 911...but i was downloading a file % I spent a minute looking at my own code by accident. I was thinking "What the hell is this guy doing?" % what the fuck is wtf % i beat the internet the end guy is hard % christin: you need to learn how to figure out stuff yourself.. how do i do that % AFK, tornado % LITTLETON, Colo. - Colorado officials plan to try a 15-year-old boy as an adult for allegedly offering a Sony PlayStation to have his aunt killed. is it modded? % hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is. % Sex is like pizza. When it's good, it's good, and when it's bad, it's still pretty good. % Selphie--Unreasonably, impossibly cute. Tanglefooted-puppy, all-eyes-and-ears-kitten cute. I don't think I'd date her, but I'd try to get her to chase a laser pointer. % Id [existence denied] says: everytime i ask someone i don't know on my list, "who're you?", they tell me, "NO IM NOT A WHORE!!" % "The Storyteller system sucks. And I think it was designed to be like that." -- Justin Achilli, designer of Vampire: the Masquerade, White Wolf Games % Statistically, half of the population is under average intelligence. % If you ever feel like you're on the verge of a nervous breakdown, just follow these simple rules: First, calm down; second, come over and wash my car; third, shine all my shoes. There, isn't that better? % "You have no right to tell me that I can't tell other people what to do." -- Dimorier Maximus % You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. - Navajo Proverb % Behind an able man there are always other able men. - Chinese Proverb % A rich man has no need of character. - Hebrew Proverb % Vulnerant omnia, ultima necat. (All the [hours] wound you, the last one kills) - Latin Proverb % When a proud man hears another praised, he feels himself injured. - English Proverb % Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get. - Spanish Proverb % Peace and a well-built house cannot be bought too dearly. - Danish Proverb % It is no time to go for the doctor when the patient is dead. - Irish Proverb % Better a mouse in the pot than no meat at all. - Romanian Proverb % God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers. - Jewish Proverb % If you speak the truth, keep a foot in the stirrup. - Turkish Proverb % A thousand regrets do not cancel one debt. - Turkish Proverb % Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf. - Native American Proverb % Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down. - Chinese Proverb % One kind word can warm three winter months. - Japanese Proverb % The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth. - English Proverb % Lawyers and painters can soon change white to black. - Danish Proverb % Don't live in a town where there are no doctors. - Jewish Proverb % He who doesn't risk never gets to drink champagne. - Russian Proverb % Deceive the rich and powerful if you will, but don't insult them. - Japanese Proverb % Love makes time pass; time makes love pass. - French Proverb % God will be present, whether asked or not. - Latin Proverb % Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm. - Malayan Proverb % Be on your guard against a silent dog and still water. - Latin Proverb % "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw % "When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth." -- George Bernard Shaw % "The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change." -- Alfred North Whitehead % "I am daily ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. Once the realm of ideas is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out." -- Georg Hegel % Throw a lucky man into the sea, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth. - Arab proverb % Work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice and poverty. -- Francois Voltaire % "When resolving office conflicts, remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice." - The Onion % "...Democracy is the worst system there is, except all the other ones" -- Winston Churchill % The trick isn't to break some eggs to make an omlette, it's convincing the eggs to break themselves in order to aspire to omlettehood. % "I want death to find me planting my cabbages." --Michel de Montaigne % A hungry man is not a free man. - Adlai Stevenson % "One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it."-- Gustave Le Bon % "I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world." -- Blaise Pascal % "I'll do whatever I have to do, and let others worry about whether it's wrong or not." --Calvin % bug, n: A son of a glitch. % The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. -- Bertrand Russell % I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others -- Marcus Aurelius % What is the difference between flowers and weeds? Flowers are weeds that the gardener allows to live. Sacrificing some lives to allow the lives he favours to flourish. % History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster...which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence. -- Paul Churchland % Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. - Winston Churchill % Sorry, but the largest map size Civ3 could even hope to support (without an immense amount of re-working) is 4294967296 x 4294967296. Note that this map would have 9223372036854775808 tiles and would eat up 1512633014044183232512 bytes of memory for the tile data ALONE. -- Mike Breitkreutz, Firaxis Games % 'He's a slave.' But he may have the spirit of a free man. 'He's a slave.' But is that really to count against him? Show me a man who isn't a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. -- Seneca % Here's another bunch of ignorant shit: School Uniforms. Bad theory. The idea that if kids wear uniforms to school it helps keep order. Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they're gonna get 'em to look alike too? And it's not a new idea, I first saw it in old news reels from the 1930's, but it was hard to understand 'cause the narration was in GERMAN. -- George Carlin, You're All Diseased % Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive. -- Friedrich Nietzsche % A starling on a nest. A sign in the crate says "Nesting bird. Please do not disturb." If the crate is not closed in a few seconds, the bird will chirp angrily and gesture at the sign with a wing. The crate is otherwise empty. % The Bible is not something to believe it or not believe in. It is simply a record of what other people have believed in. -- Neale Donald Walsch % A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. - Richard Bachman % In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. -- Galileo % A tree never hits an automobile except in self-defence. % Everybody thinks about changing the world, but nobody thinks about changing themselves -- Leon Tolstoi % WARNING: The following story is not appropriate for anyone. It is evil and wrong. Read only if you are of a legal age and at your own risk. Thank you and enjoy. -- Disclaimer found at the beginning of a story in the 'Net % Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy % "What are the 7 deadly sins of Christianity? Gluttony, avarice, sloth, lust... They are urges every man feels at least once a day. How could you set yourself up as the most powerful institution on earth? You first find out what every man feels at least once a day, establish that as a sin, and set yourself up as the only institution capable of pardoning that sin." -- Anton LaVey % "Going to church no more makes you a christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car." -- Garrison Keiler % "I'm often amazed at the way politicians -who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks- are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything." -- Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, Saturday 27 June 1998 % "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." -- Mark Twain % People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it's safer to pick on rich women than biker gangs. % Procrastinate later. % "I find television very educating. Everytime somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." -- Groucho Marx % "Trust in Allah, but tie your camel." -- Arabian Proverb % "I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets." -- David Edison % "When I was told to the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'" -- Quentin Crisp % "There is no idea so good it can't be ruined by a few well-placed idiots." -- Scott Adams % "The story you are about to hear is true, and by true I mean false. It's lies, all of it. But they are entertaining lies, and in the end isn't that what's important? The answer is no." -- Leonard Nimoy, 'The Simpsons' % "Gender affects how teenagers develop sexually, according to a new study." -- The Daily Utah Chronicle, 1-10-1997 % "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school." -- George Bernard Shaw % "Television - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done." -- Ernie Kovacs % "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 interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages." --Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations % Tolerance is the beginning of acceptance. It is not a substitute. -Mike Wong % "The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake." - H.L. Mencken % "Once I lost my kitty, and I asked a police officer to help me find it. He didn't find it, but I couldn't find any private companies to help. This is a market failure and why you need government." - Sean McCarthy % "Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait." -- A. Whitney Brown % "I've been criticized for going over the heads of the Congress. So, what's the fuss? A lot of things go over their heads." -- Ronald Reagan, 1985 % "It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?" -- Terry Pratchett, Mort % "That which is truly wisdom will seem like foolishness to a fool, and that which is truly foolishness will seem like wisdom to a fool." -- Proverbs % Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. -- Alfred North Whitehead % "If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking." Gen. Wm T. Sherman, September 16, 1864. % Today I saw a red-and-yellow sunset and thought, How insignificant I am! Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained. --Woody Allen % We'll let the sunshine come in and shine on us, because today we're happy and tomorrow we'll be even happier. -- Senator Dan Quayle to students at a high school in Miami with the highest dropout rate of the city, 10/26/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92) % "A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves." -- Iris Murdoch, The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited % "A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." -- Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis % The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much. -- Thornton Wilder % We must BE the change we wish to see in the world -- Mahatma Gandhi % Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love. - Albert Einstein % No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously. -- Dave Barry % The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content.-- Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberation % When you have shot and killed a man you have in some measure clarified your attitude toward him. You have given a definite answer to a definite problem. For better or worse you have acted decisively. In a way, the next move is up to him. -- R. A. Lafferty % In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. -- Raymond Chandler % "Sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." -- Lewis Carroll % I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. -- John Stuart Mill, Letter % The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. --Alfred North Whitehead, Quoted in Price's Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead % They came for A, but I didn't say anything, because I wasn't A. Then they came for B, but I didn't say anything, because I wasn't B. Then they came for Y, but I didn't say anything, because I wasn't Y. Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to say anything. % "[A computer is] like an Old Testament god; lots of rules and no mercy." - Joseph Campbell % "If you're not shocked by quantum theory, you don't understand it." -- Neils Bohr % "One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it." -- Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock % Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. % My acceptance of my own insanity has freed me from the limitations of rational thought. % I make no secret of changing my mind on one or two important issues....I've never thought it a virtue to adopt a position and try to get famous as a person who defends that position, like a purveyor of a brand name, like you're selling cornflakes. -- Hilary Putnam, The Philosophers' Magazine, Summer 2001 % "God is dead." -- Nietzsche "Nietzsche is dead." -- God % "Oh, and I'm sorry about the concrete column. His head kinda clipped it when I heaved him out the window." -- Ping-chan % "Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself." -- George Bernard Shaw % Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist. -- Saint Augustine % "The first commandment of ALL religions is to provide a comfortable living for the priesthood." -- Gene Feierstein % "Of course that's vaguely related to American RPG creation [with] absolute good and evil and a clear-cut division betweeen camps. Are you Good (American), Neutral (European) or Evil (others)?" -- /Vindhand % A woman is a lot like beer. They smell good, they look good and you'd step over your own mother to get one. - Homer Simpson, deep thinker on THE SIMPSONS % "One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." --Bertrand Russell % "If the goal of all creatures is to be happy, and I'm happier than you are, we can conclude that I'm more successful than you are, right?" -- Ratbert % "Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work." - Carl Sandburg % "Stun settings are for people who can't commit." - J. Michael Straczynski % Of course I'm out of my mind. It's dark and scary in there! % "The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white." -- Alfred Tarski, The Semantic Conception of Truth % 'So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.' 'When was this?' you'll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. -- Seneca, "Epistulae Morales" % "Men have become the tools of their tools." - Henry David Thoreau % "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 1440 times a day." - Ambrose Bierce % "Look at what Christ said about sin. The sins of the flesh. He said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd! If a man in good health does not experience some kind of sexual reaction when he sees an attractive woman, there is something wrong with him. Paul said some wicked things, but Christ started it." -- Bertrand Russell % "Lincoln's Gettysburg address has 226 words, The Ten commandments has 296 words. The US dept. of agriculture's order setting the price of cabbage has 15,269 words" - Intelligence Advisor, 1993 % "Corporations plus government equals fascism." -- Benito Mussolini % "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography % "His mind is open; yes, it is so open that nothing is retained; ideas simply pass through him." -- Francis Bradley % "When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning." --Reiner Knizia % "He is well paid that is well satisfied." -- Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice" % "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 % "The only sovereign we can allow to rule us is reason." - Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind % "How far he ever proceeded in his composition, I never heard. Probably he was blown to bits in the very moment of deciding upon some ravishing method of indicating the subjunctive. Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures." -J.R.R. Tolkien (on a fellow conlanger he met in WWI) % "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal % "Bigamy is when you have one too many wives, monogamy is pretty much the same thing." -- Oscar Wilde % "Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play." --Montaigne % "As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream." -- William James % "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." -- Thomas Jefferson % "May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies." -- Duc de Villars % "They are stupid and condemned." -- Saddam Hussein, referring to the United States % "If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia." -- Thomas Szasz % “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 are the Americans. We speak with one voice. We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. We will add your industrial and human resources to our own. World opinion is irrelevant. Human life is irrelevant. History is irrelevant. If you attempt to defend yourselves, we will destroy you." -- Bush II of Borg % "When you read a biography, remember that the truth is never fit for publication." -- George Bernard Shaw % "Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden % "Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith." -- Robert A. Heinlein, opening line of Stranger in a Strange Land % "If at first you don't succeed, well, so much for skydiving." -- Victor O'Reilly, Games of the Hangman % "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 % "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." -- Albert Einstein % "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." -- Albert Einstein % "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." -- Albert Einstein % "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." -- Albert Einstein % "How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will." -- Albert Einstein % "The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech."-- Justice Anthony Kennedy % "Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?" -- C. D. Tavares % "Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks." -- Goethe % "Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true." -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche % "In heaven all the interesting people are missing." -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche % "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." -- Peter De Vries % "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo Galilei % "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say." -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle % "Rule a kingdom as though you were cooking a small fish - don't overdo it." -- Lao Tzu % "I share no man's opinions; I have my own." -- Ivan Turgenev % "We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police." -- Jeff Marder % "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try." -- Homer Simpson % In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. (big bang theory). % 'It's easier said than done.' ... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than said, and you'll see that 'it's easier said that 'it's easier done than said' than it is done', which really proves that 'it's easier said than done'. % People in groups tend to agree on courses of action which, as individuals, they know are stupid. % Stupidity condenses in a crowd. -- Finnish proverb % I seriously question the sanity of somebody who uses multiple exclamation marks. % "There's a door." "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think." ~Terry Pratchett, ERIC % Doctor Jack Seward: You want to autopsy Lucy? Van Helsing: No no no, not exactly. I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart. ~BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA % "Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? Is it because we're not the person involved?" -- Mark Twain % "Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." % "There was a prince and a princess living happily in a kingdom. But there was a jealous devil from the dark world, named 'X'. 'X' turned the prince and princess into two stone paddles." -- BAD OMEN % "Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live on nothing but food and water." -- W.C. Fields % Why do I have to click on 'Start' to shut down Windows? % Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes? % Why don't sheep shrink when it rains? % If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress? % I love my country. It's the government that pisses me off. % I brake for... AHHH! NO BRAKES! % If a man is talking in the forest and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong? % Lesbians don't hate men. You have us confused with straight married women. % It is strange, this painless death. Like stepping through a door held politely open for him. It doesn't seem right, somehow; a trivialization of the event. Death ought to be harder to achieve. Better to be hunted down, rooted out, hurting and bloody. Then death would come as a relief. It would be welcome. -- Richard Selzer, "Raising the Dead" % I am not superstitious because it brings bad luck. % Life is not meaningless, it just has a very low signal to noise ratio. -- Karl Kruszelnicki % Man cannot live by food and drink alone. Man must also have the booty, beer, and a Computer connected to no less than a T1 line. % It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. -- Robert Benchley % First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him! -- Ray Bradbury % The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. -- John Campbell % Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer--and if so, why? -- Bennett Cerf % Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and THEN explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with. -- Nancy Ann D % There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't screw it up. -- Raymond Feist % Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. -- Gene Fowler % If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages. -- William Campbell Gault % Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. -- Christopher Hampton % "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." -- Robert A. Heinlein % It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. -- Ernest Hemingway % Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence. -- Samuel Johnson % This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address. -- Barbara Kingsolver % One of my many theories about short stories is that their titles and first lines ought to be memorable, because if not memorable they will not be remembered, and if not remembered the stories will not be reprinted (because no one can find them). -- Damon Knight % Writing is a fairly lonely business unless you invite people in to watch you do it, which is often distracting and then have to ask them to leave. -- Marc Lawrence % "There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write." -- Terry Pratchett % I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit. -- Robert Rankin % A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it to be God. -- Sidney Sheldon % A hint: Unless you want all women to be bisexual, don't let me design the universe. % People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a few well-chosen questions. Bob Shaw has observed that the deadliest questions usually come as a pair: "Have you published anything?" (loosely translated as: I've never heard of you) and "What name do you write under?" (loosely translatable as: I've definitely never heard of you). -- Brian Stableford % Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words--the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered. -- J. Michael Straczynski % The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible. -- Mark Twain % I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways of keeping readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell students to make their characters want something, even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. % The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy The books that people talk about we never can recall And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all. - Carolyn Wells % If the sex scene doesn't make you want to do it - whatever it is they're doing - it hasn't been written right. -- Sloan Wilson % "How many people are on the Internet? By stunning coincidence, the total turns out to be exactly the same as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin." [Paul Andrews, Seattle Times, 14 Jan 96] % 'I think, therefore I am,' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. -- Milan Kundera, Immortality % "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." -- Hermann Göering, Reich-Marshall, at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-46. % These are the same people who say that porn leads to rape, that violence on TV leads to homicide, and that movies like Silence of the Lambs lead to serial murders. Fine, but when your kid drowns trying to walk on water, I wanna see someone blame the f*ing bible. -- Queeb % Every once in a while, it's a good idea to call out 'Computer, end program,' just to check. % Rock is dead!!! Long live paper and scissors! % Sex is that horrible, nasty disgusting thing that you save for the person you love. % Don't apologize for who you are. Make them apologize for not accepting you. % It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. -- Bertrand Russel % I think it unlikely that God would possess so uneasy a vanity as to be offended by my views about his existence. -- Bertrand Russel % No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. -- Bertrand Russel % Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life. -- Bertrand Russel % 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 % One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -- Bertrand Russell % The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf. -- Bertrand Russell % I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong. -- Bertrand Russell % This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them. -- Bertrand Russel % The Internet, billions of electrons with nothing better to do. % My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. % "When I dream, I want a pony." -The Acts of Gord: The Book of Chronicles, Chapter XXI- % I will not sit back and allow, communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. -- General Jack D Ripper, "Dr Strangelove" % i have no capslock and i must scream11111 - acjama % It's an insult to God to believe in God.... So my suspicion is that the people he really loves best now in the twentieth century are probably the atheists and agnostics, because they're the only ones who have ever really taken him seriously. -- Galen Stawson, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4 % For two solid weeks I refused to come to the door or answer the phone while I was reading Don Quixote; based on the quality of the visits and phone calls I generally get, I wish the book had been longer. -- Joe Queenan, Foreword to _The Malcontents_ % "I quote signatures." % "Imagine standing at a street corner and spitting on people to get their attention, then trying to sell them something. Spamming is a better marketing method than that only in that you get punched less often." -- Esa E. Peuha % **** - Hey ape, your planet is dying - **** % A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to 'hunger and thirst' after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes. -- Charlie D. Broad, Attributed % The wash becomes a finish the evening tomorrow at the front desk until 7 o'clock at night of the day. (It becomes the evening tomorrow in the morning even if it has). -- Japanese hotel laundry instructions % Signature should be included in signature patch 1.1 % The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., U.S. v. Schwimmer, 1928 % "Oppression and harassment are a small price to pay to live in the land of the free!" -- Mr.Montogmery Burns in The Simpsons, referring to the USA % "You can't have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam." -- - Terry Jones, MP: S2, Ep25 % The only possible compromise between poison and food is poisoned food. % Every lie, no matter how small, is a declaration of war on reality. % Aim for the moon, even if you miss you'll land among the stars... % The only reason people die is because everyone is doing it. % Your life is what you make it, minus the occasional pitfalls and plus the occasional windfalls, divided by your regrets and multiplied by the people you love along the way. % If a complete stranger gives you an all expense paid trip across the Atlantic, there's most undoubtedly a catch. % Don't assume childhood fairy tales were originally designed for children. % Earth first. We'll strip mine the other planets later. % Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Web and he won't bother you for weeks.. % I doubt, therefore I might be. % The road to hell is paved with good quotations. % "The best defence against the atomic bomb is not to be there when it goes off." –- British army publication % Its not the size of the gun that matters... well, actually it is, but that's beside the point. % "... Nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way." -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt % In a perfect world, schools would have enough money to buy all the books they needed, and the armed-forces would need to have a cake-stall to raise money to buy bombs. % With listening comes wisdom, with speaking repentance. % Procrastination is like masturbation... it's just you screwing yourself. % "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." -- Attributed to Sigmund Freud % Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? -- William James, The Will to Believe % bandwidth, n. 3. On Usenet, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth. -- Jargon File 4.2.0 % abbrev: Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'. -- Jargon File 4.2.0 % ambimouseterous, adj. [modeled on ambidextrous] Able to use a mouse with either hand. -- Jargon File 4.2.0 % Always choose the option that'll most likely blow up in your own face. You never know when a tribe of werebears is going to want to skin you alive, for instance. Those are the Munchausenesque moments you can brag about over beer for years. Of course, sometimes you get bitten by vampires infected with bubonic plague, but on the whole, you have a great time. % The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. -- Randall Jarrell % You do pay a price for stating it simply, namely it's easier for the professionals to misunderstand it. -- John Searle % "Having a hole in the head doesn't always indicate an open mind." -- Jean Michel Jarre % John Lennon died for our sins. % "He's so smart he's dumb." -- Joyce Collier-Brown % "Quote? What do you want a lousy quote for?" -- Eric C. Thompson, on drugs. % It's sad... to see a famly... torn apart... by nothing more.... ....than a pack of wolves % Crayons taste like purple. % I'd do my part to make the world a better place, but murder is illegal. % "It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination." -- quote, Union President, Abraham Lincoln % "That's so healthy it's un-American." -- Random TV show character % "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am." -- Darth Vader % There will be a time traveling seminar two weeks ago. % "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." -- H.P. Lovecraft, the Call of Cthulhu % "What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?" -- Mahatma Ghandi % The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement. % Sex is like air; it's not important unless you aren't getting any. % One good turn gets most of the blankets. % There are two kinds of pedestrians -- the quick and the dead. % Life is sexually transmitted. % An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. % Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die. % It's not hard to meet expenses, they're everywhere. % Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. % If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to everyword you say, talk in your sleep. % I was standing in the park, wondering why frisbees got bigger as they got closer. Then it hit me. % "The human body is the best picture of the soul." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations % What you just read was the word of God. All other opinions are false and their supporters false prophets. % Power corrupts, but I still need electricity. % You know you live in the middle of nowhere when the nearest McDonald's is half an hour away. % Some cry `Allah O Akbar` in the street. And some carry Allah in their heart. % "My arguments had no relevance with the needs of the real world." - Asher % Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet. % "America started out wanting to be Greece and ended up Rome." -- Gore Vidal % "To announce there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else, but it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else." -- Teddy Roosevelt, 1918 % "Wherever wood floats, you will find the British" -- Napoleon % Procrastinators of the world unite!...tomorrow % "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we've been so credulous." -- Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection % Everyone dies but only heroes get to die in a cool way. % "There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it." -- Cicero % "...Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too." -- Alan Cohen, VP of Airespace % "All those who want to die, follow me!" -- Last words of Emperor Constantine XII Palaiologos, before charging the Turkish hordes, on the 29th of May 1453AD. % "... everything I do, I do against Russia. If the West is too stupid to understand this, I´ll have to ally myself with Russia to crush the West before attacking Russia." -- Adolf Hitler % Everything gradually changes, including yourself. So when you search for yourself, how long can you search until what you search for no longer exists? % "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." -- Emma Goldman % "Compress all humans into bricks, build giant wall" -- Machall.com % "Cute is when your personality shines through your looks. Like, when you see someone's personality in the way they walk and you just feel like hugging them every time you see them." -- Natalie Portman % "A glomp is often predatory and lies somewhere in the grey area between a caring embrace, and a flying leap to tackle someone." -- UrbanDictionary.com % "How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish. Just as our birth was the beginning of all things for us, so our death will be the death of them all. That is why it is equally mad to weep because we shall not be alive a hundred years from now and to weep because we were not alive a hundred years ago." -- Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die % there are 2 things i hate in life racists and mexicans % "The trouble with the global village are all the global village idiots." -- Paul Ginsparg. % "The Papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof." -- Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan" % "That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through." -- Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory % "Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Quoted in Newman's The World of Mathematics % "If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: 'He obviously does not know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned'." -- Epictetus, "Enchiridion" % "I breathe fire, therefore I am a dragon." -- Johanna Rinne % "Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil...prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "A fantasy is not even a *wish*, much less an act. There is no such thing as a culpable or shameful fantasy." -- Lady Sally Callahan % "Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again today. Haven't you a telephone?" -- Mark Twain, letter to the Hartford Gas & Electric Company, 1886 % "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." -- John F. Kennedy % "The great thing about the internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally WORTHLESS." -- Grant Morrison % Win if you can, don't bitch if you lose. % "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do." -- B. F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement % "It should probably be a rule of fiction that you never let your characters get away with anything." --"Andy" in alt.writing % ""There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen % "You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "I must confess the the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occured to him." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "Somehow, trying to get Granny Weatherwax and 'panty raid' into the same sentence is beyond me." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % When in doubt, do what the president does - guess. % Q: Why do elves have pointy ears? A: Well, there has to be some point to elves. % "A Finnish soldier does not retreat - he only turns 180 degrees and continues advancing." -- Mellis % "You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as the "sea-story" and then criticizing _that_." -- C. S. Lewis. "An Experiment in Criticism" % "The United States is putting together a Constitution now for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It's served us well for 200 years, and we don't appear to be using it anymore, so what the hell?" -- Jay Leno % The Internet is like a toilet in an insane asylum. You shouldn't be surprised at any weird, disgusting thing you pull out. % "I feel happiness is a challenge, a game of sorts" -- Kyuu Eturautti % "Students learned arithmetic by adding 4 + 28 because April 28 is Mr. Hussein's birthday (an occasion once celebrated with cakes and dancing during four-hour-long parties at schools). They learned their multiplication tables by computing the casualty count of shooting down four American planes with three crew members each." -- New York Times article about former Iraqi schooling % The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television. % "Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some." -- Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980) % "Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Cheese corrupts. Therefore, Knowledge is Cheese." -- keolah at the Nanowrimo forums % "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." -- Buddha % "Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." - Samuel Johnson % "O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet." -- Saint Augustine % "I often long to be simple and good, never say a clever thing again, never bother about subtle points, but give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation--but it is Satan in an angelic form." -- Bertrand Russel, Letters % "If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?" -- Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech % "Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." -- Bertrand Russell, Recent Works on the Principles of Mathematics % "The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism." -- Ludwig von Mises % "i think that homosexuals are gay." -- pissedbmx % By the time you read this you've already read it. % Kent: “But if you REQUIRE the player to roll for this spell, then you're discriminating against players with no hands. Or against players who cannot afford dice.” Harvey: “If you ever have no hands, I am going to laugh at you.” % 'A cucumber is bitter.' Throw it away. 'There are briars in the road.' Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, 'And why were such things made in the world?' -- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations % "I knew he was mortal." -- Anaxagoras, attributed. His response on being told of the death of his son. % "Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?" -- George Wallace % "As far as I'm aware I'm not specifically banned anywhere in the USA, and am rather depressed about it. Surely some of you guys can do something?" -- Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett % "People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett % "It gets worse. I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro." -- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett % "Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it." -- Richard Feynman % "You know what the problem with Hollywood is. They make shit. Unbelievable. Unremarkable. Shit." -- Gabriel Shear, Swordfish % "The Red Army is like sex: when it's great, it's really great, when it's bad, it's embarrasing, and what most people say about it isn't true" -- Vympel's signature on Stardestroyer.net % It is only totalitarian governments that suppress facts. In this country we simply take a democratic decision not to publish them. - Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister % "A sword is a weapon, swordmanship is learning how to kill. No matter what ideals you proclaim, those are the facts, and that is the truth." -- Hiko Seijuro, Rurouri Kenshin % "People flaunt freedom and democracy as though they were religions. They're merrily paving the road to their own destruction." -- Heihachi Mishima, Tekken; the animated motion picture % "I came close to loosing conciousness many times. Only the thought of killing my father kept me going." -- Kazuya Mishima, Tekken; the animated motion picture. % "Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies." -- Francois Voltaire, attributed (on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan) % "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." -- Noam Chomsky, Red and Black Revolution, 1996 % "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland." -- Adolf Hitler, at the creation of the Gestapo % If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work: "Hello. Can't work today, still queer." (Robin Tyler) % "Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States." - George W Bush % "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish." -- Euripides, The Bacchae % "One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us." -- Kurt Vonnegut % "It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing." -- Seneca, Epistles, 88, 45 % A fight to the death between zombies has a few inherent problems. % "She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines – not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality." -- Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost % "It is not easy to become beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye." -- Miss Piggy % "My mother never realized the irony in calling me a son of a bitch." -- Jack Nicholson % “I’ve come to the conclusion that writers, as a group... are lunatics. Except for the really good ones, who are maniacs.” –- William H. Macy at the Independent Spirit Awards % "Let me make sure I am crystal clear on this issue, ok? Heavy metal fans are buying heavy metal records, taking the records home, listening to the records, and then blowing their heads off with shotguns. Where's the problem?" - Denis Leary % "If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." -- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince % "Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much." -- Oscar Wilde % "Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep." -- Albert Camus % "This is not Taiwan. This is Hong Kong! How can you go around hitting people on the head all the time?" -- From the subtitles to a Hong Kong kung fu movie % Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.) % "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." -- Aristotle, Politics % "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed" -- President Dwight D.Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 % It takes both rain and sun to make a rainbow. % "We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me." -- Jack Handy % If I were to ask you for sex, would your answer be the same as your answer to this question? % "The really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway." -- George W. Bush, explaining why he won't tax the rich, Annandale, Virginia, Aug. 9, 2004 % "Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to 'Write What You Know', which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery." -- Joe Haldeman % "Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild / For the world's more full of weeping, than you can understand." -- W.B.Yeats, The Stolen Child % "I had assumed that the function of a moderator was more akin to a sheepdog herding the outlying members than a sniper picking off the fringe." -- Mike Deering inadvertantly sums up SL4's exact philosophy of moderation. % "I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see." -- Winston Churchill, My Early Life % I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV. % "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain % "There's a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone and it's where most of life happens." -- Scott Adams % "I won't talk to my colleagues about philosophy. [.] They are too stupid." -- Colin McGinn, The Times, 13th January 2004 % "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.'" -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space % "The inhabitants are strong and hardy, with bright, intelligent faces, high cheek-bones, yellow hair in early life, and with brown hair in mature age. With regard to their social habits, morals, and manners, all travellers are unanimous in speaking well of them. Their temper is universally mild; they are slow to anger, and when angry they keep silence. They are happy-hearted, affectionate to one another, and honorable and honest in their dealings with strangers. They are a cleanly people, being much given to the use of vapor-baths." -- John Martin Crawford, talking about the Finns % "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." -- Adlai Stevenson % "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, speech during 1952 Presidential campaign