linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/fortunes-rickmoen

Text File | 2002-11-15 | 48KB | 1,581 lines

Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering the
farmer's daughter.
                        -- Julias H. Comroe

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New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any
other reason but because they are not already common.
                        -- John Locke

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It is common sense to take a method and try it.  If it fails,
admit it frankly and try another -- but, above all, try something.
                        -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.
                        -- Swift

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Cheops's Law:
    Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

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Now is the time that men work quietly in the fields, and women
weep softly in the kitchen; the Legislature is in session, and
no man's property is safe.
                        -- Daniel Webster

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Knowledge is of two kinds:  We know a subject ourselves,
or we know where we can find information upon it.
                        -- Samuel Johnson

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For 'tis a truth well known to most,
that whatsoever thing is lost,
we seek it, ere it come to light,
in every cranny but the right.
                        -- William Cowper

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This is a lot like gluing fangs on a hamster and calling it a lion.
The hamster people will come to expect too much, and the lion people
will NOT be fooled.
                        -- Jeff Duntemann

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You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being
too trusting.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.
                        -- Wilson Mizner

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Don't be so humble - you're not that great!
                        -- Golda Meir

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Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it
in private and wash your hands afterwards.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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If you think nobody cares you're alive, try missing a couple of payments!
                        -- Earl Wilson

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Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds,
bursting with its own corrections.  You can keep your
sterile truth for yourself.
                        --  Vilfredo Pareto

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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
                        -- George Bernard Shaw

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Be good and you will be lonesome.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Common sense is instinct.  Enough of it is genius.
                        -- George Bernard Shaw

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Never try to out-stubborn a cat.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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A billion here, a billion there; sooner or later it adds up to real money.
                        -- Sen. Everett Dirksen

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Truth is the most valuable thing we have.  Let us economize it.
                        -- Mark Twain

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

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Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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Bradley's Bromide:
    If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a
    committee... that will do them in.

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Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime.
For a first offense, that is.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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Isn't it strange?  The same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers
take economists seriously.
                        -- Cincinnati Enquirer

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Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that
gets the work done.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Age is not important, unless you're a cheese.
                        -- Helen Hayes

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Read over your compositions, and when you meet with a passage that
you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
                        -- Samuel Johnson

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Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children.
                        -- Mark Twain

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A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of
acquiring it, is but the Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps
both.
                        -- James Madison

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A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it left.
                        -- R.E. Atkinson

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There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence
of any sort against it.  Soon enough you will know.  So why fret about it?
                        -- Lazarus Long

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Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves,
and how little we think of the other person.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
                        -- Jane Ellice Hopkins

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Self-denial is indulgence of a propensity to forego.
                        -- Ambrose Bierce

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

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Never appeal to a man's "better nature".  He may not have one.  Invoking his
self-interest gives you more leverage.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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Fleas can be taught nearly everything that a Congressman can.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Eternity is a terrible thought.  I mean, where's it going to end?
                        -- Tom Stoppard

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When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to
have the old man around -- but, when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished
at how much he had learned in seven years.
                        -- Mark Twain

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A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly,
without freedom, it will never be anything but bad.
                        -- Albert Camus

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A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
                        -- Ogden Nash

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My conscience is more trouble and bother to me than anything else
I started with.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Experience is a great advantage.  The problem is that when you get
the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.
                        -- Jimmy Connors

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Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person
you meet reminds you of someone else.
                        -- Ogden Nash

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If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
                        -- Louis Armstrong

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It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet;
the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the
other members.
                        -- E.B. White

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If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
                        -- Mark Twain

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I am not a politician, and my other habits are good.
                        -- "Artemus Ward" (Charles Farrar Browne)

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.
                        -- Mark Twain

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The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure.  Now, if I were a
grave-digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for
with a great deal of enjoyment.
                        -- Douglas Jerrold

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

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Avoid, as you would a plague, a clergyman who is also a businessman.
                        -- St. Jerome

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

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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the
people are right more than half of the time.
                        -- E.B. White

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Take calculated risks.  That is quite different from being rash.
                        -- George S. Patton

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Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
                        -- H.L. Mencken

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The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
                        -- Albert Einstein

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Life is just one damned thing after another.
                        -- Frank Ward O'Malley

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Education is... hanging around until you've caught on.
                        -- Robert Frost

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When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
                        -- Winston Churchill

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It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.
                        -- Mark Twain

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You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for
freedom and truth.
                        -- Henrik Ibsen

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Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used 'til they are seasoned.
                        -- John Haynes Holmes

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Everyone has his day, and some days last longer than others.
                        -- Winston Churchill

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Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
                        -- Winston Churchill

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Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
                        -- Mark Twain

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It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble.
It's the things we know that ain't so.
                        -- Artemus Ward (1834-67), U.S. journalist

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Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.
                        -- Charles Kettering

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In Paris, they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did
succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Where were you when the page was blank?
                        -- Truman Capote (responding to a critic)

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Make things as simple as possible -- but no simpler.
                        -- Albert Einstein

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A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
                        -- Joseph Stalin

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.
                        -- Albert Einstein

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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even
ordinarily respectable.
                        -- H.L. Mencken

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I very rarely think in words at all.  A thought comes, and I may try
to express it in words afterwards.
                        -- Albert Einstein

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Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do,
and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
                        -- Mark Twain

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The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
                        -- Horace Walpole

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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence
of the improbable.
                        -- H.L. Mencken

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Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
                        -- John Stuart Mill

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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
                        -- Mark Twain

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

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The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not
make himself a nuisance to other people.
                        -- John Stuart Mill

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To promise not to do a thing is the surest way to make a body
want to go and do that very thing.
                        -- Mark Twain

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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
                        -- H.L. Mencken

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Give me charity and continence, but not just now.
                        -- St. Augustine

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Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous.
In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
                        -- Winston Churchill

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There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned home the previous night.
                        -- Arthur Henry Reginald Buller

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If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it.
                        -- Calvin Coolidge

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The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from
one graveyard to another.
                        -- J. Frank Dobie

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Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
                        -- Dorothy Parker

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Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.
                        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Few people think more than two or three times a year.  I have made an
international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
                        -- George Bernard Shaw

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Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good
example.
                        -- Mark Twain

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It's not that I'm superstitious; it's just that your body never
outgrows its need for small, yellow, stuffed ducks.
                        -- Linda Ellerbee

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If you are going to play the game properly, you'd better know every rule.
                        -- Barbara Jordan

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I couldn't hit a wall with a six-gun, but I can twirl one.
It looks good.
                        -- John Wayne

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It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.
                        -- Mick Jagger

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Be wary of strong drink.  It can make you shoot at
tax collectors -- and miss.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes.  Keep this in mind;
it may offer a way to make him your friend.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer.
                        -- Edward R. Murrow

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Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
                        -- Lazarus Long

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If not I, who?  If not now, when?
                        -- Rabbi Hillel

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...It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it
is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists
have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of
smell.
                        -- Ambrose Bierce

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Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
                        -- H. L. Mencken

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In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last
resort of the scoundrel.  With all due respect to an enlightened but
inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.
                        -- Ambrose Bierce

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Frisbeetarianism:
    The belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof
    and gets stuck.

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Hofstadter's Law:
    It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take
    Hofstadter's Law into account.

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It is bad luck to be superstitious.
                        -- Andrew W. Mathis

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Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
    It's on the other side.

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The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.

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Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls, and You Will Pay Only the
Station-to-Station Rate.

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Sex is not the answer.  Sex is the question.  "Yes" is the answer.

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Everything is sweetened by risk.
                        -- Alexander Smith

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A very intelligent turtle
Found programming Unix a hurdle.
    The system, you see,
    Ran as slow as did he,
And that's not saying much for the turtle.

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It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so
ingenious.

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Brooks's Law:
    Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

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Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:
    There's always one more bug.

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Watson's Law:
    The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the
    number and significance of any persons watching it.

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Sattinger's Law:
    It works better if you plug it in.

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It is high time, it seems to me, that a moral game law were passed
for the presentation of the wild and vagrant feelings of human nature.
                        -- Alexander Smith

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If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
                        -- Harry S Truman

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Weinberg's Second Law:
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
    then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
                        -- Charlie McCarthy

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

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California is a fine place to live -- if you happen to be an orange.
                        -- Fred Allen

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Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
                        -- H.L. Mencken


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Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore
I think that I am."
                        -- Ambrose Bierce

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

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It is almost always worth while to be cheated; people's little
frauds have an interest that more than repays what they cost us.
                        -- Logan Pearsall Smith

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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have
to alter it every six months.
                        -- Oscar Wilde

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The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly
is to fill the world with fools.
                        -- Herbert Spencer

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Orthodoxy is my doxy -- heterodoxy is another man's doxy.
                        -- William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester

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

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I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
                        -- Ashleigh Brilliant

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My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
                        -- Ashleigh Brilliant

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All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
                        -- Ashleigh Brilliant

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If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
                        -- Albert Einstein

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If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
                        -- Pope John Paul I

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War is cruel, and you cannot refine it.
                        -- General William Tecumseh Sherman

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Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
                        -- Voltaire

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Against stupidity the very gods
themselves contend in vain.
                        -- Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

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Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought;
it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will it or not.
                        -- Sir George Savile, Marquis of Halifax

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The problem with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like
Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the
moment he sees there is something wrong 'til he understands exactly
what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!
                        -- Richard Feynman

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Politics is the science of how who gets what, when, and why.
                        -- Sidney Hillman

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The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves
is very small indeed.
                        -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
                        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to
do nothing else.
                        -- William Hazlitt

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The problem with computers is you play with them.
                        -- Richard Feynman

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Crime like virtue has its degrees.
                        -- Jean Baptiste Racine

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A bumper of good liquor
will end a contest quicker
than justice, judge, or vicar.
                        -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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

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Be just before you're generous.
                        -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.
                        -- Will Rogers

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Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them and try to help
them out.  But pompous fools -- guys who are fools and are covering
it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are
with all this hocus-pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND!
                        -- Richard Feynman

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Myrtle Mae, you have a lot to learn, and I hope you never learn it.
                        -- Veta Louise Simmons, character in "Harvey"
                           (from the play by Mary C. Chase)

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I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork.  It's useless to fight
the forms; you've got to kill the people producing them.
                        -- Vladimir Kabaidze, General Director,
                           Ivanovo Machine Works, Moscow.

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One of these days....  After all, irritation is the mother of invention.
I guess I just haven't gotten irritated enough yet.
                        -- George Price

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

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The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.  Man is
unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.  The marriage of
the two is a force beyond calculation.
                        -- Leo Cherne

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If only God would give me a clear sign!  Like making a large
deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
                        -- Woody Allen

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Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
                        -- Tom Stoppard

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If you wish to make a man your enemy, tell him simply, "You are wrong."
This method works every time.
                        -- Henry C. Link

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In the pursuit of happiness, the difficulty lies in knowing when
you have caught up.
                        -- R.H. Grenville

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Entia non sunt multiplicanta praeter necessitatem.  [No more things
should be assumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.]
                        -- William of Ockham (attr.)

%%
Adam
Had 'Em.
                        -- (Anon.)  World's shortest poem, on the
                           subject of microbes.

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Nobody ever lost any money underestimating the intelligence of the
American people.
                        -- H.L. Mencken

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The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
                        -- Oscar Wilde

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Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
                        -- Oscar Wilde

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An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
                        -- George Bernard Shaw

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God is on the side not of the heavy batallions, but of the best shots.
                        -- Voltaire

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An intellectual wants to be listened to.  He wants to instruct and to be
taken seriously.  It is more important to him to be important than to be
free, and he would rather be persecuted than ignored.  Typical
intellectuals feel oppressed in a democratic society where they are left
alone, to do as they please.  They call it jester's license, and they
envy intellectuals in Communist countries who are persecuted by
governments that take intellectuals seriously.
                         -- Eric Hoffer, in "The True Believer"

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I don't mind where people make love, so long as they don't do it in the
street and frighten the horses.
                         -- Mrs. Patrick Campbell

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Men willingly believe what they wish.
                         -- Julius Caesar

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The past is a foreign country:  They do things differently there.
                         -- L.P. Hartley

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Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
                         -- Leo C. Rosten, speaking of W.C. Fields

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Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to
take you in.
                         -- Robert Frost

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Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
                         -- Robert Frost

%%
An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have
a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
                         -- George Eliot

%%
And now, here's a joke for us psychics....
...
...
...
...we know who we are!
                          -- Robin Williams

%%
A district attorney in New York City has stated that in sixteen years of
dealing with homocide cases, he has only encountered two defendants who
would not talk to the investigators.  The two were acquitted.
                          -- Charles E. O'Hara, detective

%%
When I'm dead,
I hope it may be said:
"His sins were scarlet,
But his books were read."
                          -- Hillaire Belloc

%%
Too much counterpoint; what is worse, Protestant counterpoint.
                          -- Thomas Beecham, speaking of Bach

%%
Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.
                          -- Max Beerbohm

%%
Heedless of grammar, they all cried, "That's him!"
                          -- Rev. R.H. Barham, "Misadventures at Margate"

%%
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.
                          -- Charles Babbage (parodying Tennyson)

%%
Oh, life is a glorius cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.
                          -- Dorothy Parker

%%
Never be a pioneer.  It's the Early Christian that gets
the fattest lion.
                          -- Saki (H.H. Munro)

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

%%
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!
                          -- Florynce Kennedy

%%
Admiration:  Our polite recognition of others' resemblance to
ourselves.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
Advertising is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
                          -- Fred Allen

%%
In our country, we have those three unspeakably precious things:
freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to
practice either.
                          -- Mark Twain

%%
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid
moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder at the
possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing.
                          -- Gamal Abdel Nasser

%%
Animals have these advantages over man: they have no theologians to
instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts
lawsuits over their wills.
                          -- Voltaire

%%
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
                          -- H.L. Mencken

%%
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger
pain the second time around.
                          -- Herb Caen

%%
Christ died for our sins.  Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by
not committing them?
                          -- Jules Feiffer

%%
Communism is like one big phone company.
                          -- Lenny Bruce

%%
Conservative, n.  A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than are lies.
                          -- Nietzsche

%%
Corporation, n.  An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit
without individual responsibility.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.
                          -- George Bernard Shaw

%%
Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the
majority is blissfully ignorant.
                          -- John Simon

%%
The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment
by the corrupt few properly describes the institution of Democracy.
                          -- George Bernard Shaw

%%
One of the most common of all diseases is diagnosis.
                          -- Karl Kraus

%%
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that
lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
                          -- Anton Chekhov

%%
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of
prejudices.
                          -- Laurence J. Peter

%%
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from
experience.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.
                          -- Groucho Marx

%%
Faith, n.  Belief without evidence, in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not
prove anything.
                          -- Nietzsche

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

%%
Always forgive your enemies -- nothing annoys them so much.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each
other.
                          -- Eric Hoffer, in "The True Believer"

%%
Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.
                          -- Mortimer Adler

%%
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign:
that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
                          -- Jonathan Swift

%%
The good die young -- because they see it's no use living if you've got
to be good.
                          -- John Barrymore

%%
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good
example.
                          -- Mark Twain

%%
A government is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.
                          -- James Reston

%%
Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be
believed.
                          -- I.F. Stone

%%
History repeats itself; that's one of the things wrong with history.
                          -- Clarence Darrow

%%
Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
                          -- Fran Lebowitz

%%
Insanity.....A perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
                          -- R.D. Laing

%%
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism.  By giving us
the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance
of the community.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
Justice, n.  A commodity that in a more or less adulterated condition the
State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes, and
personal service.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
Lawyer:  One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
                          -- H.L. Mencken

%%
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you
are an exceptionally good liar.
                          -- Jerome K. Jerome

%%
Liberal:  A power worshipper without power.
                          -- George Orwell

%%
A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
                          -- Robert Frost

%%
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole
girl.
                          -- Stephen Leacock

%%
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most
insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required
to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting
condition until death do them part.
                          -- George Bernard Shaw

%%
Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without
ability.
                          -- George Bernard Shaw

%%
Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
                          -- Bertrand Russell

%%
The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds,
and the pessimist knows it.
                          -- J. Robert Oppenheimer

%%
A paranoiac is a man who knows a little of what's going on.
                          -- William Burroughs

%%
Patience, n.  A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
Pessimist, n.  One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
Pray, v.  To ask the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a
single petitioner who confesses his unworthiness.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
                          -- William James

%%
Psychoanalysis makes quite simple people feel they're complex.
                          -- S.N. Behrman

%%
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanical religion,
and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for
happiness.
                          -- H.L. Mencken

%%
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
                          -- Lily Tomlin

%%
Randomness scares people.  Religion is a way to explain randomness.
                          -- Fran Lebowitz

%%
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new
bureaucracy.
                          -- Franz Kafka

%%
If Geraldo Rivera is the first journalist in space, NASA can test the
effect of weightlessness on weightlessness.
                          -- Anonymous

%%
Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who
can't talk for people who can't read.
                          -- Frank Zappa

%%
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market
award for achievement.  It is frequently in the nature of a warm
personal gesture by the individual to himself.
                          -- John Kenneth Galbraith

%%
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
                          -- George Bernard Shaw

%%
Sex:  The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the
expense damnable.
                          -- Lord Chesterfield

%%
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
                          -- Wilson Mizner

%%
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
                          -- Karl Kraus

%%
It is not enough to succeed.  Others must fail.
                          -- Gore Vidal

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

%%
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious
attractiveness of others.
                          -- Oscar Wilde

%%
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
                          -- Frank Zappa

%%
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.
                          -- Rita Mae Brown

%%
Paul's First Law:
    You can't fall off the floor.

%%
First Law of Bicycling:
    No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.

%%
Dentist, n.  A prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls
coins out of one's pockets.
                          -- Ambrose Bierce

%%
If bankers can count, why do they have eight windows and only four
tellers?

%%
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.

%%
Poul's Second Law:
    Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, won't hate it.

%%
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
                          -- Mark Twain

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

%%
Where I come from, there's nothing in the "middle of the road" but a
yellow line and dead armadillos.
                          -- Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture

%%
Ginsberg's Theorem:
    1. You can't win.
    2. You can't break even.
    3. You can't even quit the game.
(a paraphrase of the three laws of thermodynamics)

%%
Hartley's Second Law:
    Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.

%%
I really hate this damned machine.
I wish that they would sell it:
It never does quite what I want,
But only what I tell it.

%%
Slick's Third Law of the Universe:
    There are two types of dirt --
    the dark kind, which is attracted to light objects, and
    the light kind, which is attracted to dark objects.

%%
Worst Vegetable of the Year: the brussels sprout.

This is also the worst vegetable for next year.

%%
It's not that I'm afraid to die.  I just don't want to be there when it
happens.
                          -- Woody Allen

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

%%
Conway's Law:

    In any organisation, there will always be one person who knows
    what is going on.

    This person must be fired.

%%
Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
                          -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"

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

%%
The Viking's Reminder:  Always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn.

%%
Psychiatrists say that mental illness affects one out of four people.
Check three friends:  If they're OK, you're it.

%%
He who hesitates is frost.
                          -- Innuit proverb

%%
When the mouse laughs at the cat, there is a hole nearby.
                          -- Nigerian proverb

%%
Means are just ends in the making.
                          -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

%%
True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.
                          -- Claude Bernard

%%
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so
much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give
us so much power.
                          -- Bertrand Russell

%%
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable --
but there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
                          -- H. L. Mencken

%%
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
                          -- Alfred North Whitehead

%%
Clarke's Third Law:
    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Lazarus Long's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law:
    One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.

%%
Clarke's First Law:
    When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
    possible, he is almost certainly right.  When he states that
    something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law:
    When, however, the lay public rallies around an idea that is
    denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that
    idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly
    scientists are then, after all, probably right.

%%
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are
sick in fortune -- often the surfeit of our own behavior -- we make
guilty of our own disasters the sun, moon and the stars: as if we
were villians by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars
and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and
all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable
evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the
charge of a star!"
                          -- Edmund, in _King Lear_

%%
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
                          -- Niels Bohr

%%
Madness takes its toll.  Please have exact change.

%%
Fast. Good. Cheap.  Pick any two.
                          -- Solomon Short

%%
To summarize the summary of the summary:  People are a problem.
                          -- Russell Wallace

%%
"Live long and prosper."  -- Vulcan proverb
"...and eat well."        -- Jewish addendum to Vulcan proverb
"Feast on your enemies!"  -- Klingon interpretation of Jewish addendum to
                            Vulcan proverb

%%
O Lord, protect me from those to whom You speak directly.
                          -- Anonymous

%%
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
                          -- Grouch Marx

%%
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental,
and should not be construed.
                          -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

%%
Colvard's Logical Premises:  All probabilities are 50%.  Either a
thing will happen or it won't.

Colvard's Unconscionable Commentary:  This is especially true when
dealing with someone you're attracted to.

Grelb's Commentary:  Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you.

%%
The society that scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it's an exalted activity
will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.... Neither its
pipes nor its theories will hold water.
                          -- John Gardner

%%
There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon.
   For he said "It appears
   That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune."
                          -- Arthur Eddington

%%
And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?"

They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of
our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very
selfhood revealed."

And Jesus replied, "What?"

%%
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
                          -- Winston Churchill

%%
This is a one-line proof... if we start sufficiently far to the left.
                          -- Cambridge University Math Department

%%
In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies.  In a Russian comedy, everybody
dies too.  But they die happy.
                          -- Barry Farber, in the Journal
                             of Petroleum Technology

%%
Football combines two of the worst things about American life.
It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
                          -- George Will

%%
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and
deserve to get it good and hard.
                          -- H.L. Mencken

%%
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drillin' rights on
that man's head.
                          -- Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture,
                             concerning the policies of President George Bush
                             (the elected one, not the Supreme Court selectee)

%%
In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented
six feet downward and covered with dirt.
                          -- Blair P. Houghton

%%
Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.
                          -- Fred Friendly, former head of CBS News

%%
In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments--there are
consequences.
                          -- Robert G. Ingersoll

%%
Loyalty is the marrow of honor.
                          -- Paul von Hindenburg

%%
Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.
                          -- Friedrich II ("the Great") Hohenzollern of Prussia

%%
It's not the one bullet with your name on it that you
have to worry about; it's the twenty thousand-odd rounds
labeled "occupant".
                          -- Murphy's Laws of Combat

%%
Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
                          -- Henry Spencer

%%
Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in
human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
                          -- Mitch Radcliffe

%%
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old;
seek what they sought.
                          -- Basho

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

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

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

%%
People don't buy three-eighths-inch drill bits. People buy
three-eighths-inch holes.
                          -- Michael Porter

%%
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which
side he's on.
                          -- Joseph Heller, "Catch 22"

%%
Have you noticed that, when we were young, we were told that
"everybody else is doing it"  was a  really stupid reason to do
something, but now it's the standard reason for picking a particular
software package?
                          -- Barry Gehm

%%
Luge strategy?  Lie flat and try not to die.
                          -- Tim Steeves

%%
The Hacker Ethos:  If it doesn't work, fix it; if it does work, take it
apart.

%%
If a traveller were informed that such a man was leader of the House of
Commons, he may well begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an
insect.
                          -- Benjamin Disraeli, speaking of Lord John Russell