"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken "A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." - Herm Albright "I'm not wringing my hands, I'm drying my nails!" - Margaret Atwood "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." Robert X. Cringely The story goes that a [Russian?] mathematician, suspecting that the government bakery was fraudulently baking undersized loaves, began weighing his weekly bread ration. The result was a normal distribution with a mean that was significantly lower than the official quota, and so he challenged the bakery. Thereafter, the mathematician received only loaves that were greater than or equal to the quota. However, his new distribution of loaves resembled the tail of a normal distribution which was still centered below the quota, and he was able to use this as evidence to challenge the bakery again. "No matter how thin you slice it it's still baloney." - Rube Goldberg One man would look at the glass and say "It's half empty", another man would look at it and say "Get me another beer". "Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." -- Robert Benchley "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson "If you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler." -- Louis Brandeis I like a Blackpool breakfast, me - 20 ciggies and a pot of tea. Lilly Savage MEN WHO HAVE TO TRAVEL LIGHT FIND THE 35 CENT TUBE JUST RIGHT Burma-Shave "You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage." -- (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad) "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us!" - Calvin & Hobbes "A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe" "Just remember, in 10 years no one will care. In fact most people probably don't care right now." -- Conrad E. Muller It's always darkest before you step on the cat. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore "I was raised to be charming, not sincere." -- Cinderella's Prince, "Into the Woods" "Computer experts vastly underestimate the time required to beat the World Champion. Chess experts, on the other hand, vastly overestimate the time involved" [Hans Berliner, 1988] You're one in a million. Which means there are about a thousand people just like you somewhere in China. "Doing STRANGE THINGS in the name of ART, and STRANGER THINGS in the name of CHOCOLATE." - Christina M. Callihan He's a born-again Christian. The trouble is, he suffered brain damage during rebirth. --Anonymous "Most people stumble over the truth, now and then, but they usually manage to pick themselves up and go on, anyway." - Winston Churchill "Dying's easy...comedy's hard." - Nell Gwyn 'Only Six computers will ever be sold in the commercial market' Howard Aiken (The designer of the first IBM computer) "What this country needs is less people telling us what this country needs" "The game of croguet, to which I have given such a large portion of my life, fuses so many different elements: competition, a fine eye, a sharp mind, a firm stroke, a large amount of patience, ability to plan ahead and, by no means the least, a control of one's temper." - Jack R. Osborn The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. -- Alan Ashley-Pitt "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." - Thom DeCarlo Fred: "May I rescue you?" Ginger: "No, thank you. I prefer being in distress." - `Top Hat,' RKO 1935 "Paradigm shifting without a clutch" - Dogbert "We humans are a curious sort... Little girls like dolls and little boys like soldiers. When we grow up, women like soldiers and men like dolls." - Monee C. Kidd "The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad." -Thomas Dolby If DSS is a flop, you can always use that 19" dish as a bird bath, discus, snow sled, chinese hat, hub cap, salad bowl.... Now thats Multimedia! "Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace" - Amelia Earhart "The value of an idea lies in the using of it." - Thomas Edison "What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul" - Joseph Addison Make no friendship with an elephant keeper unless you have room to entertain an elephant. "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo Galilei "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul Erdos "Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure." -Thomas A. Edison "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." - George Santayana "If you eat less and live longer, over time you'll have eaten just as much." - Michael Feldman "There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot." - Steven Wright A fool and his money are...Hey! Where's my wallet? "Football exemplifies the worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings."--George Will Chris (Bride of Frank) "I feel that true freedom lies within, where I shall never find it." -- John S. Hall "Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus." - Francis Crick "A friend is someone who sees through you, and still enjoys the view" - Wilma Askinas Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences "And to this day it still thrills me to know that if I can get the program right it will always work perfectly, every time, just the way I told it to." - Bill Gates "I was an atheist, until I found out I was God." "Blood is a special kind of juice" - Goethe In 1912 an American enthusiast made golfing history, when she took 166 strokes over a 130-yard hole. During the qualifying round of the Shawnee Invitational for Ladies at Shawnewe-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, she confidently approached the sixteenth hole for which four strokes were normally adequate. Her first shot, however, sent the ball into the Binniekill River, an obstacle which many would regard as final. When she saw that it floated she boarded a rowing boat, with her husband at the oars and herself at the prow, wielding a golf club. For one and a half miles her husband rowed and kept count of the occasions upon which she had cause to swipe at it. Eventually, she beached the thing and made her way back through a forest. Fellow competitors had given up hope of ever seeing her again, when they heard the cry of 'fore' and saw the ball fly on the green from a totally unexpected direction. She completed the hole in just under two hours. "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Papers at 184-8. `Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping` -Julius Hare (1795-1855) "..and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere, and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys!!" -HHGTTG "1935 will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future." - Adolf Hitler Honk if you love peace and quiet. "A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one." - Strunk and White "There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for." - Fred Hoyle "As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!" -- Jack Handy Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations? "All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come." -- Victor Hugo Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz "Impoliteness means never having to say you're sorry." "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney "Specialization is for insects." -RAH "The Internet. It just sits there." "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899 "Live as one already dead." --Japanese saying Anybody who thinks a little 9,000-line program that's distributed free and can be cloned by anyone is going to affect anything we do at Microsoft has his head screwed on wrong. -- Bill Gates to George Gilder responding to Java (shortly before licensing Java and dumping Blackbird) "I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." -- J EDGAR HOOVER "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 "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes." - Og Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. - Buster Bunny (Tiny Toons) "I later learned that every state in the Union, with the exception of Nebraska, felt disdain for Kansas." --Louise Brooks "I tried to make it unpleasant for the machine." --G. Kasparov "Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!" -- Kermit the frog Love is a matter of chemistry Sex is a matter of physics But kinkiness requires engineering "Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad." --- Henry Kissinger BTW, did you know that in the 20s one of the grand whopeedoos of the Klan who helped to bring about its reemergence owned a bed sheet company and made a bundle! "The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty." -- James Madison He who laughs last thinks slowest. There's only 1 lawyer in Lawyerville, New York. "A liberal is the guy who leaves the room when a fight starts." --IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood. "I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves." - Andrew Carnegie remember, life is not a test, it is an actual emergency Life is a limited time offer; live it. Q: What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg? A: One's a huge flaming Nazi gasbag, and the other's a dirigible. > Does anyone know the index of refraction for Linoleum? At what wavelength? "I had learned that those who are lying or trying to cover up something generally make a common mistake - they tend to overact, to overstate their case." - Richard Milhous Nixon "Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that no matter how high we achieve, we are never satisfied." - Machiavelli A)bort, R)etry, B)uy a Macintosh? "It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the government have too much or too little power." - James Madison "You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy." --CHARLES MANSON How about slipping out of those wet things and into a dry Martini? - Noel Coward "My friends, it is not good to be without a servant in this world; but to be without a master, it appears, is a still fataler predicament for some." - Thomas Carlyle 2 + 2 never equals 5, even for large values of 2. "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." -- W. Somerset Maugham "There's a 40% chance that I'm a meteorologist." --- J.A. Beran True power and wealth are of the mind. "Darling I missed you" she said, and fired again. "All models are wrong. Some models are useful." -- George Box One dies only once, and it's for such a long time -- Moliere ... MONEY TALKS! ... but all mine ever says is GOODBYE! floggings will continue until morale improves The fundamental particle of morality is called the moron. Mathematicians write symphonies. Scientists create instruments. Engineers build music boxes. The network is the computer... but a very slow one. "God is dead." --Nietzsche "Nietzsche is dead." --God "I cried when I had no hat until I met a man who had no head." - Anonymous "Cochran's even got OJ believing he didn't do it." - Jay Leno "OO is a tool, not a religion, and not a philosophy." - Robert C. Martin Standard opera plot: The tenor and the soprano want to make love, but are prevented by the Baritone. "None of the opinions expressed above are necessarily those of the University of Sheffield Union of Students, the University of Sheffield, Sheffield City Council, Sheffield Clay Pigeon Racing Society, Sheffield Development Corporation, or anyone else in Sheffield. They do however represent the majority view in Barnsley." - Joe Otten "Giving power and money to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke Orthopedist: as strong as an Ox and twice as smart. Let me use my damn OS in peace, OK? I don't knock your OS, don't knock mine, goddamn it. - Colin D. Cashman "One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea" - Walter Bagehot 1826-1877 The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. - Plutarch Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949 The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it's just a tired feeling - Paula Poundstone "You mustn't let it make you conceited. Pride is one of the deadly sins." "And it's better to go for the lively ones." --Christopher Fry The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away. "Mild-mannered programmer/analyst by day, unconscious, mild-mannered programmer/analyst by night..." - Shane Hudson You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back. "Writing is like Prostitution: First you do it for the love of it. Then you do it for a few friends. And finally you do it for money." -- Moliere "...a man of great talent will normally pay less attention to other people's foolishness than would a fool." -Proust "Do not be proud of your knowledge. Listen to the ignorant and the wise. Art has no limit, and no artist's skills are perfect. Truth may lie as hidden in the earth as copper, or it may be found at play upon the lips of maidens bent above their grindstones" - Ptah-hotep, Egyptian teacher,c.2540 BC "If we do not succeed, then we face the risk of failure." -- Dan Quayle, Vice-President of the United States "It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master." -- Ayn Rand "Why did I pick reality?" - Albert Brooks "When you were born you cried, and the world rejoiced. Try to live your life so that when you die you will rejoice, and the world will cry." If You Know What You're Doing, It's Not Research! What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? - Ursula K LeGuin If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically. - Jean Paul Sartre (quoted in _Harpers_, Jan. 1995 p. 25) My music isn't modern, it's merely badly played. - Arnold Schoenberg If it smells, it's biology. If it blows up, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's PHYSICS! I have a secret way to make $1mil from the Internet. I will share my secret for one million dollars. "Sentiment without action is ruination of the soul" "The environment's in trouble -- and the more it suffers, the tougher it is on your skin." --Seventeen Magazine "If I neither say that a thing exists, nor deny it, nor neither, nor both, then it will take a very long time to dispute me" -- Sherpan philosopher ----------------------------------------------------------- sig, sig, bo big, banana fanna fo fig, me my mo mig, sig! ----------------------------------------------------------- - Sarah Biery "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Albert Einstein I want to die peacefully and in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming and in terror like the other passengers in his car. It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it. "Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease." - Elizabeth Kougianos "What really irks them is, it is true a lot of factories are empty, and it seems illogical to them that a country that once produced 160 million metric tons of steel now produces closer to 80 and 90. They can't see the reason is nobody wanted all that steel." - Jeffrey Sachs on Communist economists in Russia "I'm straight but not narrow." - bumper sticker "Steel cures." - surgeon's motto "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." --Tacitus "The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky" -- Solomon Short "Yield to temptation -- it may not pass your way again" - Lazarus Long "Theories are like mice: they pass thru 99 holes, but the 100th stops them." - Voltaire "[Do not] put too much confidence in experimental results until they have been confirmed by theory." ---Sir Arthur Eddington "What's another word for thesaurus?" - Steven Wright A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James "...thought is impossible without an image." - Aristotle, 325 B.C. Die, foul thread! - bruce "One man's trash is another man's trash" "You don't have to be a college graduate to put 2 and 2 together. Spring Break + Drunkenness + Disrespect for rules and authority + Sex in Lifeboats = Trouble." - from a posting to rec.travel.cruises "Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their vorticity, and little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity." - L.F.Richardson "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." - Mark Twain "Bill Clinton's election as President is the worst thing that ever happened to Tyson Foods and the state of Arkansas. It's brought us nothing but headaches and misery." - Tyson spokesman Unix: The only computer virus with a user interface. (such as it is...) "The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots." - Paul Ginsparg "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." - Voltaire "It doesn't matter if you piss a few people off, if you know they're wrong." --George Vukelich "This redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought." - Dennis Moore "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."- Emerson(1803-1882) The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been removed. - Henry Ford "I never entertain wicked thoughts...Wicked thoughts entertain me." "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of the pox !" "That, my Lord, depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress" John Wilkes to The Earl of Sandwich, Parliament, November 1763 "More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." --Woody Allen "Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill "Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none." -- Jules Renard "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." -- Yogi Berra