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- dummy
- \Q: What is the smallest part in a LADA?
- A: The owners brain.
- \Q: Why do LADA's have heated rear windscreens?
- A: To keep your hands warm when your pushing them.
- \Q: How do you double the value of a LADA?
- A: Fill it up with petrol.
- \Q: What's pink, 18 inches long, and makes a grown woman scream?
- A: Crib death.
- \Q: Why won't Mexicans let their children marry Puerto Ricans?
- A: Because their children would be to lazy to steal.
- \Sticks and stones may break my bones,
- but whips and chains excite me!
- \Assembly language:
- Language of choice for Scrabble players. allows the smallest and
- fastest routines to be written in five months instead of one. Extra
- points for variable names rich in Q's and Z's.
- \Basic:
- Language of choice by non-programmers.
- \Bulletin board:
- Mechanism to allow the socially autistic to masquerade as real people
- and communicate with one another by posting clever near-random
- commentary on a remote computer.
- \C:
- Short for "chutzpah", a quality needed before tacling even the more
- simplest program with this language. C is also the symbol for the
- speed of light, but that has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly
- one can learn or use the language. C encourages self-documenting
- structured programming through construct such as
-
- (*wnd->func)(*++addr)
-
- which means call the routine whose address is stored in the "func"
- part of the structure pointed to by "wnd", and pass to it the contents
- of the cell pointed to by the pointer in "addr" after it (the pointer,
- not the contents) has been incremented. Or something like that.
- \Clone:
- An acronym standing for "Copied Low-cost Optimal Non-IBM Equipment".
- Often used as a cure for the dreaded Big Blue. Texas, land of
- independent self-styled individualists, is current "Siliclone Valley"
- where imagination is limited only by IBM.
- \Consultant:
- Unemployed computer expert.
- \Demo:
- A method of program testing that tends to isolate numerous
- non-reproducible program behaviors. Fixing said abnormalities is
- difficult because they only appear when the debugging software is not
- loaded, and when severeal potential buyers are watching.
- \EISA:
- Chinese for "we copied it without duplicating it". Inscrutable
- alternative to Micro Channel Architecture, (MCA)>; backed by everybody
- but IBM.
- \Gang of Nine:
- Originally the Gang of None, this is a group of 100+ coming-of-age
- companies marked by their new-found willingness to tell IBM jokes in
- public, their unwillingness to pay IBM bus royalties. Answer: EISA,
- MCA, and Greyhound. Question: name two dogs and a bus.
- \Hackers:
- A programmer who grew up tapping out Morse Code on a ham radio, and
- has never forgiven IBM for not putting a front switch panel on the
- original PC.
- \IBM:
- Standards proposing organization. IBM develops hardware architectures,
- and builds slow underpowered prototypes for other companies to improve
- upon. See Clone.
- \Local Area Network (LAN):
- High-tech cousin of the mainframe nominally designed to allow people
- toshare information and snoop into personal letters and resumes queued
- for the laser printer. True rationale is to (a) sell hardware, and (b)
- build data processing (DP) empires. When a DP operation runs smoothly,
- it gets no attention from money-laden-management. LAN's purchased by
- "technology visionaries" to "increase power and future capacity"
- guarantee anomalous problems for years to come. Tech-terrified
- managersare told that bonuses "to keep our valuable people" and more
- hardware budget are the only solutions to the problems. Blackmail buys
- electronic mail.
- \Micro Channel Architectures (MCA):
- IBM's new bus that carries information in 32-bit packets. The first
- bus developed solely by lawyers, it is considered copy-proof (the
- theory being that no one would want anything created by lawyers). The
- bus is actually 48 bits wide, but the lawyers take 1/3 of anything
- they work on. A not-so-subtle attemt to limit the market to IBM.
- \Microsoft:
- Contract programming house for IBM, and primary sustainer of the clone
- market. IBM pays MS to write fancy software, then MS tweaks it a
- little, slaps the MS logo on it, and sells it to all the clone folks
- so they can keep competing with IBM. There is no truth to the rumour
- that former Mafioso procure the IBM contracts for MS. All products are
- given generic names (Word, Project, Works, Windows, etc.) to (a)
- confuse everybody unless (b) the name "Microsoft" is constantly
- repeated. Made the founder $300,000,000+ in one day.
- \NeXT:
- Experimental computer backed by Ross Perot and powered by charisma.
- The main problem is that few homes or offices have charisma outlets.
- Name-wise reminiscent of the "The Last One", an old CP/M program
- so-named because it was powerful enough to create all your future
- application programs (making it the last program you would have to
- buy). It was also powered by charisma.
- \Novice:
- A person who talks about learning Basic, and spend all of his/her time
- trying to get into the joke and adult message bulletin boards.
- \Ph.D:
- A user with more sense than money. Ph.D's generally have elegant
- solutions to problems that don's exist. The (top-down, of course)
- solutions always work because they have never been programmed. (Stands
- for piled high and deep, as in B.S., M.S., Ph.D = bull s..t,
- more s..t, etc. ed.)
- \A hooker accidently hits on a vice cop who's just about to go off-shift,
- he really wants to avoid the paperwork of processing this bimbo now,
- preferring to go home and eat his dinner. The hooker says: "Anything you
- can name with 3 words, $100..eh?" The vice cop nods, but gives her an
- address on a piece of paper and says: "How about tomorrow, this address -
- same deal?" The tart agrees, and in fact shows up at the vice cop's house
- the following day. The cop hands her $100, shows her his badge and says:
- "Paint my house."
- \Q: Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?
- A: He had no guts!
- \Kinky is using a feather, perverted is using the whole chicken.
- \You know you've been spending too much time with a computer when your
- friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a '++' to fix it.
- \Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped desing. Unlike most
- automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage, nor any of the
- numerous idiot lights wich plague the modern driver. Rather, if the
- driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the
- dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's
- wrong."
- \Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
- \Capitalism is the uequal distribution of Wealth.
- Cummunism is the equal distribution of Poverty.
- \After the quake, you have the
-
- Stanford _piecewise_ Linear Accelerator
-
- \Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.
- \The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants;
- instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the
- variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used
- instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies
- modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
- -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
- \Reality is for people who can't handle Science Fiction.
- \Forget about searching for the truth, settle for a good fantasy.
- \Do unto your data that which you can undo.
- \On a clear disk you can seek forever.
- \"To be or not to be that is the question.":
- any programmer knows the answer $2b or (not $2b) is $ff.
- \Q: What is the Brooklyn alphabet?
- A: Fuckin' A, fuckin' B, fuckin' C, etc.
- \Q: What is the meaning of life?
- A: Life is a fatal, sexually transmitted disease.
- \A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
- -- Herbert Prochnow
- \Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
- A: A good start!
- \Q: How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?
- A:His lips are moving.
- \Q: What is the difference between a deag dog in the road and a dead
- lawyer in the road?
- A: There are skid marks in front of the dog.
- \Q: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a lawyer?
- A: An offer you can't understand.
- \Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a vampire?
- A: A vampire only sucks blood at night.
- \The common symptoms of swine flu are: High fever, upset stomach,
- occasional cramps and an irresistable urge to fuck in the mud.
- \A black boy says to his mother:
- "Mom, why do I have the biggest penis in the 2nd grade? Is it because
- I'm black?"
- She says:
- "No. It's because you're seventeen."
- \The three stages of man
-
- Tri-weekly
- Try-weekly
- Try-weakly.
- \Reporter to Mahatma Gandhi:
- "Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?"
- Gandhi:
- "I think it would be a good idea."
- \Q: What's pink and hard in the morning?
- A: The Financial Times crossword.
- \English Tourist: Hello. Do you farm around here?
- Cornish Farmer: Aye.
- English Tourist: Fantastic day isn't it?
- Cornish Farmer: Aye.
- English Tourist: Have you lived here all of your life?
- Cornish Farmer: Not yet.
- \Q: What's the most painful part of a sex change operation for a man?
- A: The removal of the brain and the widening of the mouth!
- \Q: What do you call a LADA with a turbo?
- A: A Skoda.
- \Q: What's red and silver and bumps into walls?
- A: A baby with forks in its eyes.
- \Q: What is brown and taps on the window?
- A: A baby in a microwave.
- \Q: What lies at the bottom of the sea and whimpers?
- A: A nervous wreck.
- \In the old days in Finland, all young men had to go through some rites
- of passage to show that they were REAL FINNISH MEN. The usual set
- consisted of three tests: 1) Empty a full bottle of vodka without pause,
- 2) Go out in the forest to kill a bear with bare hands, and 3) rape a
- woman.
- When Pekka had reached the age of the rites of passage, he had no
- trouble at all with the vodka. He disappeared into the forest, and came
- back three days later, with clothes torn and blood dripping from several
- wounds. Then he said: "Now where's the woman I have to kill?"
- \Fairy tales: horror stories for children to get them used to reality.
- \Jury: Twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
- \A sailor walks into a bar with a wooden leg, hook hand and an eye patch
- over his eye. He and the barman starts to talk:
- Barman: "What happened to you?"
- Sailor: "Well, a whale bit off my leg, I was in a sword fight and lost my
- hand, and then a bird sh*t in my eyes."
- Barman: "You don't lose your eye even if a bird sh*ts in it!"
- Sailor: "It's easy when you have had the hook for only one week!!!"
- \Q: What's six foot long, grey and floats in the ocean?
- A: Moby's dick.
- \On an airplane (probably in the first class) a man says to the
- stewardess "I'll give you $5000 if I can bite your breast." The
- stewardess is scared and goes to the captain and tells him about this.
- But the captain says "$5000? Why not? Go for it!" So she sits on the
- man's lap and he starts undressing her, touching her, fundling her,
- kissing her ... (you name it). After ten minutes (or so) the stewardess
- becomes impatient and says "Would you please bite my breast now?" But the
- man says "Oh no, that's to expensive."
- \The latest sports news:
-
- Real Madrid 1 - Surreal Madrid Fish
- \Q: What are the four words you don't want to hear while making love?
- A: "Honey, I'm home!"
- \Q: What's red and climb up a womans leg?
- A: A homesick abortion.
- \There was this man in a restaurant who had ordered some soup. But the
- waiter kept him waiting (what else does a waiter do). The guy sitting
- next to him *did* have a dish with soup in front of him on the table, but
- he wasn't eating it. So our man takes this dish with soup and starts
- eating. When he's almost finished he noticed a dirty hairy comb on the
- bottom of the dish, so he pukes all the soup back into the dish.
- Says the guy next to him: "That's just as far as I got."
- \My wife just got pregnant ... She took seriously what was poked at her
- in fun!
- \Q: What is green, has four legs and would kill you if it fell out of a
- tree?
- A: A billiard table.
- \Q: What's red and invisible?
- A: Bloody Nothing!
- \Q. What's red and read?
- A: A sentence with a period.
- \Jesus is on the ferry across the dead sea when the ferryman says "It'll
- be 40 sestetrii (Roman coin) for the crossing."
- "Bugger that," says Jesus, "I'll walk."
- \Mary and Joseph at the door to the inn:
- "Do you have a room for the night?"
- Innkeeper: "You've got to be joking - it's Christmas!"
- \Children at the front seat cause accidents,
- accidents at the back seat cause children!
- \A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants
- to go.
- \If I can be of any help, you're in worse trouble than I thought.
- \Q: What's the definition of Australian foreplay?
- A: "Are you awake Sheila?"
- \1: Did you hear what happened to the guy who couldn't keep up payments
- to his exorcist?
- 2: No, what?
- 1: He was repossessed.
- \Q: What's stiff and excites women?
- A: Elvis Presley.
- \Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
- When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more
- easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger
- have handled this?"
- \Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you
- don't think.
- \Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and the
- instruction afterwards.
- \These two strings walk into a bar and sits down. The bartender says, "So
- what'll it be?"
- The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quaqg fulk boorg jdk^Cjf
- dLkjk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
- "Please excuse my friend," the second string says. "He isn't null-
- terminated."
- \A cucumber and a tomato meet in a saladbar.
- Cucumber: "Gee, how come you look so red?"
- Tomato: "I saw the salad dressing."
- \The more beautiful the woman is who loves you, the easier it is to leave
- her with no hard feelings.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Nothing improves with age.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \No matter how many times you've had it, if it's offered take it, because
- it'll never be quite the same again.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex has no calories.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex takes up the least amount of time an causes the most amount of
- trouble.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \There is no remedy for sex but more sex.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex appeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or
- how long it is going to last.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Virginity can be cured.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \When a man's wife learns to understand him, she usually stops listening
- to him.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \The qualities that most attract a woman to a man are usually the same
- ones she can't stand years later.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex is dirty only if it is done right.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \When the lights are out, all women are beautiful.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't
- either.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sow your wild oats on Saturday night -- Then on Sunday pray for crop
- failure.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \The game of love is never called off on account of darkness.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused
- the trouble in the garden.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Before you find your handsome prince, you got to kiss a lot of frogs.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \There may be some things better than sex, and some things worse than
- sex. But there is nothing exactly like it.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Love your neighbour, but don't get caught.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \If the effort that went in research on the female bosom had gone into
- our space program, we would now be running hot-dog stands on the moon.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Love is a matter of chemistry, sex is a matter of physics.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \One good turn gets most of the blankets.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \You cannot produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Love is the triumph of imagination ove intelligence.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Never argue with a woman when she's tired -- or rested.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he
- couldn't.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \What matters is not the length of the wand, but the magic in the stick.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \It is better to be looked over than overlooked.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation; the other eight are
- unimportant.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Smile, it make people wonder what you are thinking.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \There is no difference between a wise man and a fool when they fall in
- love.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Never go to bed mad, stay up and fight.
- -- Murphy's laws on sex
- \Academe: An ancient school were morality and philosophy were taught.
- Academy: A modern school where football is taught.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Accuse: To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a
- justification of ourselves for having wronged them.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have
- their hands so deeply inserted into each others' pockets that they
- cannot separately plunder a third.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Back: That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate
- in your adversity.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Backbite: To speak of a man as you find him; when he can't find you.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Bait: A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind
- is beauty.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Beauty: That power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a
- husband.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Belladonna: In Italian, a beautiful lady. In English, a deadly poison. A
- striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that
- you do not entertain.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Cannon: An instrument used in the rectification of national boundaries.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Cat: A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked
- when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely
- inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his
- neighbour. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as
- they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without
- individual responsibility.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Education: That wich discloses to the wise and disguises from the fool
- their lack of understanding.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Egoist: A person of low taste, more interested in themselves than in me.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Eulogy: Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and
- power, or the consideration to be dead.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Female: One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Forefinger: The finger commonly used in pointing out two malefactors.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Guillotine: A machine which makes the Frenchman shrug his shoulders with
- good reason.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly
- thrust into somebody's pocket.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Happiness: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery
- of another.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Hatred: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Helpmate: A wife, or bitter half.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Incompatibility: In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the
- taste for domination.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Influence: In politics, a visionary 'quo' given in return for a
- substantional 'quid'.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Intimacy: A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their
- mutual destruction.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Labor: One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious posessions.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Liver: A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious
- with.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Love: A temporary insanity cureable either by marriage or by removal of
- the influences under which he incurred the disorder... It is
- sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than the
- patient.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Marriage: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master,
- a mistress, and slaves, making (in all) two.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worthwhile.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Mine: Belonging to me if I can hold or seize it.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Miracle: An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable,
- as in beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four
- aces and a king.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Mouth: In man, the gateway to the soul. In woman, the outlet of the
- heart.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Pedestrian: The variable (and audible) part of a roadway.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be nullified on behalf of a
- single petitioner, admittedly unworthy.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Price: Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear of conscience in
- demanding it.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Politeness: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation
- with least harm to the patient.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Rear: In American military affairs, that exposed part of the army that
- is nearest to Congress.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Recollect: To recall with additions something not previously known.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Reporter: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with
- a tempest of words.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of
- God, Fate, Fortune, Luck, or one's neighbour. In the days of
- astrology, it was customary to unload it upon a star.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Riot: A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent
- bystanders.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Rope: An obsolescent appliance for reminding assassins that they too are
- mortal. It is put about the neck and remains in place one's
- whole life long.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic
- producer from the greed of his customer.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of
- himself and a wreck of his country.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \Witch: (1) an ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with
- the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in
- wickedness a league beyond the devil.
- -- Ambrose Bierce: "The Devil's Dictionary"
- \If you don't have something good to say about someone.........
- let's hear it.
- \A house divided.........
- is a duplex.
- \Behind every big man .....
- is a big behind
- \The truth always falls on deaf ears.....
- at least thats what I've heard
- \And the lion will lie down with the sheep.....
- but the sheep won't get very much sleep
- \Two wrongs don't make a right.......
- but three lefts do
- \No man is an island........
- except for Raymond Burr
- \Idle hands are the devils playthings....
- busy hands will make you go blind
- \A man with no vision......
- should'nt drive
- \ADA: Something you need to know the name of to be an Expert in
- Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA
- awareness."
- \Bug: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect.
- The activity of "debugging," or removing bugs from a program, ends when
- people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed.
- \Cache: A very expensive part of the memory system of a computer that no
- one is supposed to know is there.
- \Design: What you regret not doing later on.
- \Documentation: Instructions translated from Swedish by Japanese for
- English speaking persons.
- \Economies of Scale: The notion that bigger is better. In particular,
- that if you want a certain amount of computer power, it is much better
- to buy one biggie than a bunch of smallies. Accepted as an article of
- faith by people who love big machines and all that complexity. Rejected
- as an article of faith by those who love small machines and all those
- limitations.
- \Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.
- \Information Center: A room staffed by professional computer people whose
- job it is to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
- \Information Processing: What you call data processing when people are so
- disgusted with it they won't let it be discussed in their presence.
- \Machine-independent program: A program that will not run on any machine.
- \Meeting: An assembly of computer experts coming together to decide what
- person or department not represented in the room must solve the problem.
- \Minicomputer: A computer that can be afforded on the budget of a
- middle-level manager.
- \Office Automation: The use of computers to improve efficiency in the
- office by removing anyone you would want to talk with over coffee.
- \On-line: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a
- computer.
- \Pascal: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in
- his grave if he knew about it.
- \Performance: A statement of the speed at which a computer system works.
- Or rather, might work under certain circumstances. Or was rumored to be
- working over in Jersey about a month ago.
- \Priority: A statement of the importance of a user or a program. Often
- expressed as a relative priority, indicating that the user doesn't care
- when the work is completed so long as he is treated less badly than
- someone else.
- \Quality control: Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out
- of hand and add to the cost of its manufacture or design.
- \Regression analysis: Mathematical techniques for trying to understand
- why things are getting worse.
- \Strategy: A long-range plan whose merit cannot be evaluated until
- sometime after those creating it have left the organization.
- \Systems programmer: A person in sandals who has been in the elevator
- with the senior vice president and is ultimately responsible for a phone
- call you are to receive from you boss.
- \Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is
- why several of us died of tuberculosis.
- \Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word
- itself: "Mankind." Basically, it's made up of two separate words -
- "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's
- why so is mankind.
- \I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they
- don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with
- some good ideas.
- \It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
- \I guess we were all guilty, in a way. We all shot him, we all skinned
- him, and we all got a complimentary bumper sticker that said, "I Helped
- Skin Bob."
- \I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is
- they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff,
- then, when somebody comes up, act like they just woke up and go, "What
- was THAT?!"
- \The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
- \Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite
- and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny
- plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like
- ambition.
- \I'd rather be rich than stupid.
- \If you were a poor Indian with no weapons, and a bunch of conquistadors
- came up to you and asked where the gold was, I don't think it would be a
- good idea to say, "I swallowed it. So sue me."
- \If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger,
- screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man,
- I guess I'm a coward.
- \I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every
- culture, is the story of Popeye.
- \When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if
- they ever press charges.
- \What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to
- save a solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.
- \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.
- \Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of
- striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.
- \I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon
- was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand,
- pretending like he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.
- \To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I guess it
- goes back to the time we went to the circus and a clown killed my Dad.
- \As I bit into the sweet, tangy nectarine, and tasted the juices running
- down my chin, I looked down, and realized that it wasn't a nectarine at
- all, but a HUMAN HEAD!
- \You know, some white coral, painted brown, and attached to the skull
- with some common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.
- \I have always wondered way they always refer to toilet paper as facial
- quality. I am not going to use it on my face, (although there are
- some who think I do anyway!).
- \To me, boxing is like ballet except that there's no music or
- choreography, and the dancers hit each other.
- \In our yodeling class, we discourage new students from yodeling right
- off. You see, we *build* to that.
- \If you're a horse, and someone climbs on your back, falls off, and
- then climbs on again, I think you should buck him off.
- \I think a good story would be about a clown who makes people laugh, but
- inside he is really sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.
- \Anytime something screeches across the room, and latches onto someone's
- neck, and the guy screams, and tries to get it off, I have to laugh,
- because what *is* that thing?
- \Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the
- world is not the lion, or even an elephant. It's a shark, riding on an
- elephant's back, trampling and eating everything it sees.
- \The most dangerous animal in the world is not the tiger, or the shark,
- or the elephant... it is a shark riding on the back of an elephant,
- trampling and eating everything they see.
- \"I don't care who you are, Fatso. Just get those reindeer off my roof."
- \"Is there any intelligent life in this planet?"
- "No. I'm just visiting in here."
- \"Let me think...I wonder if an anvil will drop like an apple?"
- -- Tradition tells us these are the last words of sir Isaac Newton
- \"Make love, not war."
- "I'm married, I do both."
- \"So when I die, the first thing I will see in Heaven is a score list?"
- \"This calls for a particularly subtle blend of psychology and extereme
- violence."
- -- Vivian, "The Young Ones"
- \"Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
- -- Sledgehammer
- \"What are you doing?"
- "Examining the world's major religions. I'm looking for something
- that's light on morals, has lots of holidays, and with a short
- initiation period."
- \"What is your operation plan?"
- "Just get violent, babe. Just get violent."
- -- Dempsey & Makepeace
- \"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't
- believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears,
- "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful
- God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
- -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
- \"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last,
- "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"
- "What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
- "I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
- Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.
- -- A. A. Milne, "Winnie the Pooh"
- \"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
- "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
- -- Lewis Carrol
- \...and sometimes a piercer drops by.
- \355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible
- simulation.
- \43rd Law of Computing:
- Anything that can go wr -- Core dumped
- \Do me now and I'll owe you one.
- \A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than
- a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
- -- Mahatma Ghandi
- \A CONS is an object which cares.
- -- Bernie Greenberg.
- \A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did
- on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
- -- Thomas Ybarra
- \A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
- \A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere,
- is having fun.
- \A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
- -- Carl Sandburg
- \A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
- responsibility at the other.
- \A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman
- out of a divorce.
- -- Don Quinn
- \A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you have
- turned into a pile of dust.
- \A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have
- enlightened him with ours.
- \A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well
- as afterward.
- \A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from
- the poor to protect them from each other.
- \A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete
- than expexted; a carefully planned project will take only twice as long.
- \A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
- \A chiseler is a man who goes stag to a wife-swapping party.
- \A chubby man with a white beard and a red suit will approach you soon.
- Avoid him. He's a Commie.
- \A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
- won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
- -- Bill Vaughan
- \A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
- -- Herbert Prochnow
- \A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working
- 20 years make.
- \A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
- \A conservative is a man who believes that nothing \should be done for
- the first time.
- -- Alfred E. Wiggam
- \A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never
- learned to walk.
- -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- \A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what
- time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.
- \A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper.
- -- Dyer
- \A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern.
- -- Edgar A. Shoaff
- \A day for firm decisions!! Or is it?
- \A day without sunshine is like night.
- \A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a
- fur coat.
- \A diplomat is man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never
- her age.
- -- Robert Frost
- \A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way
- that you will look forward to the trip.
- \A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about
- whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments,
- they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor
- said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was
- made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply
- incredible surgical feat."
- The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden
- itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that,
- the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been
- an architect."
- The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said,
- "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
- \A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
- -- Ogden Nash
- \A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
- -- Winston Churchill
- \A fool must now and then be right by chance.
- \A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block
- of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an
- elephant.
- \A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch
- dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
- -- Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature"
- \A genius is a queer who can whistle while he works.
- -- Bobby Knight
- \A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet
- (sort of).
- \A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
- rearranging their prejudices.
- -- William James
- \A hand in a bird is worth two on 'er bush.
- \A hard man is good to find.
- \A joke is like watching a woman get out of a car --
- sometimes you see it and sometimes you don't.
- -- Max Miller
- \A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
- in than some that do.
- -- Dennis M. Ritchie
- \A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist, and too rich to be
- a communist.
- \A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon. Buy the negatives at
- any price.
- \A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I.
- I believe everything positively stinks.
- -- Lew Col
- \A man needs a mistress, just to break the monogamy.
- \A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
- \A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
- \A mind is a wonderful thing to waste.
- \A mushroom cloud has no silver lining.
- \A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which removes
- most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to doing
- nothing. Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous
- amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner. Certain hardware
- limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in
- the larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient
- power-down sequence.
- An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the building,
- which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has bugs in it,
- since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer cool.
- \A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
- \A nymph hits you and steals your virginity.
- \A penny saved is a penny.
- \A penny saved is ridiculous.
- \A person who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely
- called a liberal.
- \A priest asked: What is Fate, Master?
- And he answered:
- It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.
- It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.
- It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City
- to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns
- have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.
- And that is Fate? said the priest.
- Fate...I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.
- That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know
- what Freight was too.
- -- Kehlog Albran
- \A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
- -- George Eliot
- \A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
- \A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis
- of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite
- series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric
- precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from
- inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical
- accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality
- for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly
- defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the
- information in the first place.
- -- IEEE Grid news magazine
- \A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results
- blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon.
- -- Steel City News
- \A reactionary is a man whose political opinions
- always manage to keep up with yesterday.
- \A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket
- and rejoices that the system works.
- \A rumor has it that rumors are just rumors.
- \A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard.
- -- Prof. Steiner
- \A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.
- \A successful [software] tool is one that was used
- to do something undreamed of by its author.
- -- S. C. Johnson
- \A toast to the kisses you've snatched and vice-versa.
- \A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse
- by blowing first.
- \A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene
- triangle.
- \A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
- \A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature
- replaces it with.
- -- Tennessee Williams
- \A virgin is chaste.
- \A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without
- getting nervous.
- \A winner never quits. A quitter never wins.
- \A witty saying proves nothing.
- -- Voltaire
- \A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent
- to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact
- remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one
- reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell.
- It is for this group of beings that the magician learns the subtleties
- of using indirect spells. It also does no harm, in dealing with these
- matters, to carry a large club near your person at all times.
- -- "The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII"
- \A woman is like a dresser...some man always goin' through her drawers.
- -- Blind Lemon Pledge
- \A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social
- pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate
- woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without
- love, without virtue, without sex.
- -- Balzac
- \A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
- in God.
- \AMAZING BUT TRUE...
- If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end
- across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.
- \AMAZING BUT TRUE...
- There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were
- spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
- \APL hackers do it in the quad.
- \APL is a write-only language. I can write programs
- in APL, but I can't read any of them.
- -- Roy Keir
- \Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.
- \About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
- -- Herbert Hoover
- \Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western
- religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of
- Western science.
- -- Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"
- \A woman drove me to drink, and I didn't even have the courtesy to
- thank her.
- \According to my best recollection, I don't remember.
- -- Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo
- \According to the latest official figures,
- 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
- \Achilles' Biological Findings:
- (1) If a child looks like his father, that's heredity.
- If he looks like a neighbor, that's environment.
- (2) A lot of time has been wasted arguing over what came
- first -- the chicken or the egg. It was undoubtedly the rooster.
- \Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
- \Admittedly, there are a lot of things that are better than sex,
- and a lot more that are worse; but there's nothing quite like it...
- \After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
- \After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known
- quotations.
- -- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
- \After an instrument has been assembled, extra
- components will be found on the bench.
- \After living in New York, you trust nobody,
- but you believe everything. Just in case.
- \After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access
- cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
- \Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
- -- Friedrich Schiller
- \Aide to Raygun: Sir, the poor are outside protesting your budget cuts.
- Raygun himself: Tell them they'll have to help themselves.
- Aide to Raygun: Sir, the Pentagon wants another $30 billion.
- Raygun himself: Tell them to help themselves.
- \All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
- \All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
- importance.
- \All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
- -- Ashleigh Brilliant
- \All a hacker needs is a tight PUSHJ, a loose pair
- of UUOs, and a warm place to shift.
- \All extremists should be taken out and shot.
- \All hope abandon, ye who enter here!
- -- Dante Alighieri
- \All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more
- specific.
- -- Jane Wagner
- \All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
- \All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
- \All progress is based upon a universal innate desire
- on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
- -- Samuel Butler
- \All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
- -- E. Rutherford
- \All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right
- hands.
- -- Saint Patrick
- \All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
- \All the passions make us commit faults; love makes
- us commit the most ridiculous ones.
- -- La Rochefoucauld
- \All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
- -- Sean O'Casey
- \All things are possible except skiing thru a revolving door.
- \All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat,
- All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot;
- Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings,
- He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings.
- All things sick and cancerous, All evil great and small,
- All things foul and dangerous, The Lord God made them all.
- Each nasty little hornet, Each beastly little squid.
- Who made the spikey urchin? Who made the sharks? He did.
- All things scabbed and ulcerous, All pox both great and small.
- Putrid, foul and gangrenous, The Lord God made them all.
- -- Monty Python's Flying Circus
- \All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for
- fun. Money's just the way we keep score.
- \All's well that ends.
- \Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back.
- \Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.
- \Always talk to your wife while you're
- making love...if there's a phone handy.
- \Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing
- that way.
- \Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
- -- Charlie McCarthy
- \Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it.
- \An Army travels on her stomach.
- \An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine,
- but because people refuse to see it.
- -- James Michener, "Space"
- \An authority is a person who can tell you more
- about something than you really care to know.
- \An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
- \An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
- \An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less
- until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
- \An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
- \An older student came to Otis and said, "I have been to see
- a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of
- pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate and stayed awake nights seeking
- enlightenment. I have given up everything I was asked to give up and I
- have suffered, but I have not been enlightened. What should I do?"
- Otis replied, "Give up suffering."
- -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
- \Anarchy may not be a better form of government,
- but it's better than no government at all.
- \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?"
- \And as we stand on the edge of darkness
- Let our chant fill the void
- That others may know
- In the land of the night
- The ship of the sun
- Is drawn by
- The grateful dead.
- -- Tibetan "Book of the Dead" ca. 4000 BC.
- \And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
- \And the fully armed nuclear warheads, are, of course,
- merely a courtesy detail.
- \And the northern lights commenced to glow.
- And she said, with a tear in her eye,
- "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."
- -- Frank Zappa, "The Story of Nanook and the Fur Trapper"
- \Ankh if you love Isis.
- \Anthony's Law of Force:
- Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
- \Anthony's Law of the Workshop:
- Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least
- accessible corner of the workshop.
- Corollary:
- On the way to the corner, any dropped tool
- will first strike your toes.
- \Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
- my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any
- resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic.
- The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold
- them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of
- the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god
- coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism
- is beyond the scope of this article.)
- \Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a
- larger object.
- \Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient
- to exactly the point of most pressure.
- -- Milt Barber
- \Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
- -- Rich Kulawiec
- \Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
- rigged demo.
- \Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- -- Arthur C. Clarke
- \Any time things appear to be going better,
- you have overlooked something.
- \Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't
- the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
- -- Robert Benchley
- \Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
- -- Publilius Syrus
- \Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
- -- Samuel Goldwyn
- \Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby"
- has never tried taking candy from a baby.
- -- Robin Hood
- \Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
- \Anything labeled "NEW" and/or "IMPROVED" isn't. The label means
- the price went up. The label "ALL NEW", "COMPLETELY NEW", or "GREAT NEW"
- means the price went way up.
- \Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
- \Anytime things appear to be going better, you've overlooked something.
- \Apple owners do it with mice.
- \Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your
- shoes.
- -- Mickey Mouse
- \Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
- (1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
- (2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
- (3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.
- \Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to
- measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you
- imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
- -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- \Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
- -- Paul Gauguin
- \Arthur's Laws of Love:
- (1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you
- remind them of someone else.
- (2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be
- delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of
- yourself in person.
- \Artistic ventures highlighted. Rob a museum.
- \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
- \As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error.
- -- Weisert
- \As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
- \As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
- wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
- to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
- that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
- finding mistakes in my own programs.
- -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
- \As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that
- there is always a future in Computer Maintenance.
- -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
- \Assassins do it from behind.
- \At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is
- not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where
- it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.
- -- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow
- \At no time is freedom of speech more precious than
- when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
- -- Marshall Lumsden
- \At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
- find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
- the computer.
- \Audacity, and again, audacity, and always audacity.
- -- G. J. Danton
- \Avoid reality at all costs.
- \BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'.
- \Bad men live that they may eat and drink,
- whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
- -- Socrates
- \Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
- \Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they point upward
- from the floor -- especially in the dark.
- \Barth's Distinction:
- There are two types of people: those who divide people
- into two types, and those who don't.
- \Baruch's Observation:
- If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
- \Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you
- think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?
- (1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
- (2) Advising the President.
- (3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
- -- David Letterman
- \Be braver -- you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
- \Be careful when eating bananas. Monsters might slip on the peels.
- \Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
- -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
- \Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and
- took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his
- followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and
- there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing.
- "Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his
- commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your
- Purpose in Life, anyway?"
- Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The
- Chinese ideogram for No-Thing.)
- Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened.
- Primarily because nobody understood Chinese.
- -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
- \Before he went off to the wars, King Arthur locked his lovely wife,
- Guinevere, into her chastity belt. Then he summoned his loyal friend and
- subject Sir Lancelot. "Lancelot, noble knight," said Arthur, "within this
- sturdy belt is imprisoned the virtue of my wife. The key to this chaste
- treasure I will entrust to only one man in the world. To you."
- Humbled before this great honor, Lancelot knelt, received his king's
- blessing and took charge of the key. Arthur mounted his steed and rode off.
- Not half a mile from his castle, he heard hoofbeats behind him and turned
- to see Sir Lancelot riding hard to catch up with him.
- "What is amiss, my friend?" asked the king.
- "My lord," gasped Lancelot, "you have given me the wrong key!"
- \Beifeld's Principle:
- The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and
- receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when
- he is already in the company of:
- (1) a date
- (2) his wife
- (3) a better looking and richer male friend.
- \Being ugly isn't illegal. Yet.
- \Bend over and take it like a man!
- \Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence.
- -- Time Bandits
- \Better leave the dungeon, otherwise you might get hurt badly.
- \Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
- -- Leonard Brandwein
- \Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
- \Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
- tried it.
- -- Donald Knuth
- \Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
- finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of
- murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
- their ignorance the hard way.
- -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"
- \Beware of the minotaur. He's very horny!
- \Beware of the potion of nitroglycerin - it's not for the weak of heart.
- \Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted.
- Bill Is Inncocent!
- \Biology is the only science in which multiplication
- means the same thing as division.
- \Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic.
- \Blessed are the meek for they shall inhibit the earth.
- \Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
- \Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
- \Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier.
- \Blore's Razor:
- Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.
- \Boling's postulate:
- If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it.
- \Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom:
- Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because
- it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
- \Bombeck's Rule of Medicine:
- Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
- \Boob's Law:
- You always find something in the last place you look.
- \Booze is the answer. I don't remember the question.
- \Boren's Laws:
- (1) When in charge, ponder.
- (2) When in trouble, delegate.
- (3) When in doubt, mumble.
- \Bradley's Bromide:
- If computers get too powerful, we can organize
- them into a committee -- that will do them in.
- \Brain fried -- Core dumped
- \Brook's Law:
- Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
- \Brooke's Law:
- Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
- discovers something which either abolishes the system or
- expands it beyond recognition.
- \Bus error -- passengers dumped.
- \But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
- system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
- analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
- -- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"
- \By doing just a little every day, you can gradually
- let the task completely overwhelm you.
- \By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact,
- it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to
- invent.
- -- R. Emerson
- \By working faithfully eight hours a day,
- you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve.
- -- Robert Frost
- \Byte your tongue.
- \CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..
- \Cahn's Axiom:
- When all else fails, read the instructions.
- \Canada Bill Jone's Motto:
- It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
- Supplement:
- A .44 magnum beats four aces.
- \Caution: breathing may be hazardous to your health.
- \Cave(wo)men all belong to the same club.
- \Celebrate Hannibal Day this year. Take an elephant to lunch.
- \Chapter 1
- The story so far:
- In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
- of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
- \Chaste makes waste.
- \Cheer Up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate.
- \Children are natural mimic who act like their parents
- despite every effort to teach them good manners.
- \Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency
- they're going to catch you in next.
- -- Franklin P. Jones
- \Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
- And that's what parents were created for.
- -- Ogden Nash
- \Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually
- repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
- \Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law:
- When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
- \Christianity has not been tried and found wanting;
- it has been found difficult and not tried.
- -- G. K. Chesterton
- \Churchill's Commentary on Man:
- Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most
- of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
- \Clark Kent is a transvestite.
- \Coito ergo sum.
- \College is like a woman -- you work so hard to get in,
- and nine months later you wish you'd never come.
- \Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
- \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.
- \Communists do it without class.
- \Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
- \Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
- Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
- -- Gilb
- \Confucious say:
- fool man climb tree to get cherries; wise man spread limbs.
- man who fishes in other man's well often catch crabs.
- man who go to bed with sex problem wake up with solution in hand.
- man who live in glass house should bathe in the basement.
- man who lose key to girlfriend's apartment get no new key.
- man who make love on ground have piece on Earth.
- man who marry girl with no bust has right to feel low down.
- man who pull out too fast leave rubber.
- man who screws near graveyard is fucking near dead.
- man with hole in pocket feel cocky all day.
- woman who cooks carrots and pees in same pot very unsanitary.
- woman who ride bicycle peddle ass around town.
-
- Confucius say too much.
- -- Recent Chinese Proverb
- \Conquering Russia should be done steppe by steppe.
- \Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
- -- H. L. Mencken
- \Conserve energy -- make love more slowly.
- \Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal
- it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
- -- Titus Maccius Plautus
- \Consultants are mystical people who ask a company
- for a number and then give it back to them.
- \Conway's Law:
- In any organization there will always be one person
- who knows what is going on.
- This person must be fired.
- \Cox's Philosophy:
- Life's a bitch, then you die.
- \Crime does not pay...as well as politics.
- -- A. E. Newman
- \Cunnilingus is next to godliness.
- \Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you?
- First you rape, then you pillage!!
- \David was just a shepherd who liked to get his rocks off in leather.
- \DeVries' Dilemma:
- If you hit two keys on the typewriter, the one you don't want hits the
- paper.
- \Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also
- easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
- \Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
- \Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
- \Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
- -- R. Geis
- \Death is nature's way of saying 'Howdy'.
- \Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
- \Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by
- the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
- -- G. B. Shaw
- \Descend in order to meet more decent monsters.
- \Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a
- conventional thing to happen to him.
- -- John Barrymore's dying words
- \Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
- \Divers do it deeper.
- \Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.
- \Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you.
- Their tastes may not be the same.
- -- George Bernard Shaw
- \Do not drink coffee in early a.m. It will keep you awake until noon.
- \Do not meddle in the affairs of the wizards
- for they are crunchy and good with ketchup.
- \Do not meddle in the affairs of the wizards
- for they are subtle and quick to anger.
- \Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out if it alive.
- \Do something big -- fuck a giant.
- \Do something unusual today. Pay a bill.
- \Do what comes naturally now. Seethe and fume and throw a tantrum.
- \Do you want to visit hell? Dig a *very* deep hole.
- \Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say.
- \Don't drink when you drive -- you might hit a bump and spill it.
- \Don't feed the bats tonight.
- \Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep till noon.
- \Don't play hack at your work, your boss might hit you.
- \Don't remember what you can infer.
- -- Harry Tennant
- \Don't shoot until you're sure you both aren't on the same side.
- \Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice,
- Unless you get a good percentage of her price...
- -- Tom Lehrer
- \Don't speak about Time, until you have spoken to him.
- \Don't tell any big lies today. Small ones can be just as effective.
- \Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you.
- They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
- \Down with categorical imperative!
- \Draft beer, not people.
- \Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
- \Drinking might affect your health.
- \Drinking potions of booze may land you in jail if you are under 21.
- \Drive defensively. Buy a tank.
- \Ducharm's Axiom:
- If you view your problem closely enough you will
- recognize yourself as part of the problem.
- \Ducharme's Precept:
- Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
- \Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production
- of great leaders has been discontinued.
- \Dungeon expects every monster to do his duty.
- \Dust is an armor of poor quality.
- \Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice
- to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
- -- W. Somerset Maughm
- \Earn cash in your spare time -- blackmail your friends.
- \Eat 10 cloves of garlic and keep all humans at a two-square distance.
- \Eat the rich -- the poor are tough and stringy.
- \Education kills by degrees.
- \Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature
- to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
- -- Bellamy Brooks
- \Ehrman's Commentary:
- (1) Things will get worse before they get better.
- (2) Who said things would get better?
- \Einstein rules relatively ok.
- \Emersons' Law of Contrariness:
- Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do
- what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
- \Enjoy every minute. There's plenty of time to be dead.
- \Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain
- things which otherwise require harder thinking.
- -- Jerome Lettvin
- \Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.
- -- Menander
- \Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman
- without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.
- -- Robert Benchley
- \Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.
- -- Poor Richard
- \Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.
- -- Kehlog Albran
- \Ever notice that even the busiest people are
- never too busy to tell you just how busy they are?
- \Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.
- \Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for
- which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
- \Every program is a part of some other program, and rarely fits.
- \Every solution breeds new problems.
- \Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure
- is no guarantee of eventual success.
- \Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
- \Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had
- to be taught how not. So it is with the great programmers.
- \Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic
- formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the
- scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact
- wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of
- existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to
- discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the
- problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the
- mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all,
- one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely
- different way...
- \Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately,
- no one we know belongs.
- \Excellent day to have a rotten day.
- \Excellent time to become a missing person.
- \Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you
- recognize a mistake when you make it again.
- -- F. P. Jones
- \FLASH! Intelligence of mankind decreasing. Details at...uh, when
- the little hand is on the....
- \Faith is the quality that enables you to eat blackberry jam
- on a picnic without looking to see whether the seeds move.
- \Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
- -- Nietzsche
- \Famous last words:
- "Don't worry, I can handle it."
- "You and what army?"
- "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop."
- \Fie for shame, you lascivious, lewd, lecherous,
- libidinous, lustful, licentious, dirty bum!!
- \Fifth Law of Procrastination:
- Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has
- the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
- \Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
- \Finagle's Creed:
- Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
- \Finagle's first Law:
- If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
- \Finagle's fourth Law:
- Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve
- it only makes it worse.
- \Finagle's second Law:
- No matter what the anticipated result, there will
- always be someone eager to
- (a) misinterpret it
- (b) fake it
- (c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory.
- \Finagle's third Law:
- In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
- beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
- Corollaries:
- (1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
- (2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really
- don't want to hear, will see it immediately.
- \Fine day to throw a party. Throw him as far as you can.
- \Fine day to work off excess energy. Steal something heavy.
- \First Law of Bicycling:
- No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
- \First Law of Hacking: leaving is much more difficult than entering.
- \First Law of Socio-Genetics:
- Celibacy is not hereditary.
- \First Rule of History:
- History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.
- \Flee at once, all is discovered.
- \Flirting is the gentle art of making a man feel pleased with himself.
- -- Helen Rowland
- \For any remedy there is a misery.
- \For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and
- wrong.
- -- H. L. Mencken
- \For the first time we have a weapon that nobody has used
- for thirty years. This gives me great hope for the human race.
- -- Harlan Ellison
- \Fourth Law of Applied Terror:
- The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology
- instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria.
- Corollary:
- Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do
- except study for that instructor's course.
- \Fourth Law of Hacking: you will find the exit at the entrance.
- \Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
- Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
- \Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
- -- H. H. Williams
- \G's Third Law:
- In spite of all evidence to the contrary, the entire universe
- is composed of only two basic substances: magic and bullshit.
- H's Dictum:
- There is no magic...
- \Gautama Principle:
- You cannot cross a river in two leaps.
- \George Orwell was an optimist.
- \George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry tree, but
- he also admitted doing it. Now, do you know why his father didn't
- punish him? Because George still had the axe in his hand.
- \Ginsberg's Theorem:
- (1) You can't win.
- (2) You can't break even.
- (3) You can't even quit the game.
- Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem:
- Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem
- meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's
- Theorem. To wit:
- (1) Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
- (2) Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
- (3) Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
- \Give a man free hands and you'll know where to find them.
- -- Mae West
- \Give me the Luxuries, and the Hell with the Necessities!
- \Give thought to your reputation. Consider
- changing name and moving to a new town.
- \God bless Atheism.
- \God gives us relatives; thank goodness we can chose our friends.
- \God is Dead
- -- Nietzsche
- Nietzsche is Dead
- -- God
- Nietzsche is God
- -- Dead
- \God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.
- \God is a polytheist.
- \God is an atheist.
- \God is big, so don't fuck with him.
- \God isn't dead -- She was never born.
- \God isn't dead, He just couldn't find a parking place.
- \God isn't dead, He's just trying to avoid the draft.
- \God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on
- where to go.
- "Why not go to Jupiter?" asked St. Peter.
- "No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God.
- "Well, how about Mercury?"
- "No, it's too hot there."
- "Okay," said St. Peter, "What about Earth?"
- "No," said God,"They're such horrible gossips. When I was
- there 2000 years ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're
- still talking about it."
- \Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad
- example.
- -- La Rouchefoucauld
- \Good day for overcoming obstacles. Try a steeplechase.
- \Good day to let down old friends who need help.
- \Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.
- \Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
- -- George Saunders' dying words
- \Gordon does it in a Flash.
- \Got Mole problems?
- Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23
- \Grain grows best in shit.
- -- Ursula K. LeGuin
- \Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
- \Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly
- noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.
- \Gray's Law of Programming:
- 'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same
- time as 'n' tasks.
- Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law:
- 'n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks.
- \Grinnell's Law of Labor Laxity:
- At all times, for any task, you have not got enough done today.
- \Grub first, then ethics.
- -- Bertolt Brecht
- \H. L. Mencken's Law:
- Those who can -- do.
- Those who can't -- teach.
- Martin's Extension:
- Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
- \Hackers do it bottom-up.
- \Hackers do it with all sorts of characters.
- \Hackers do it with bugs.
- \Hackers do it with fewer instructions.
- \Haggis:
- Haggis is a kind of stuff black pudding eaten by the Scots and
- considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human
- consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf
- or other animal's inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed
- and boiled in maw in the sheep's intestinal stomach-bag and...
- [Excuse me a minute. Ed.]
- \Hail to the sun god
- He's such a fun god
- Ra! Ra! Ra!
- \Half Moon tonight. (At least it's better than no Moon at all.)
- \Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly
- thrust into somebody's pocket.
- \Handy Guide to Modern Science
- (1) If it's green or it wriggles, it's biology.
- (2) If it stinks, it's chemistry.
- (3) If it doesn't work, it's physics.
- \Hang gliders come down very slowly.
- \Hanlon's Razor:
- Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- \Hard reality has a way of cramping your style.
- -- Daniel Dennett
- \Harris's Lament:
- All the good ones are taken.
- \Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab:
- Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.
- \Hartley's First Law:
- You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
- on his back, you've got something.
- \Harvard Law:
- Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure,
- temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism
- will do as it damn well pleases.
- \Have a good meal today: eat a minotaur.
- \Having nothing, nothing can he lose.
- -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
- \He who enters his wife's dressing room is a philosopher or a fool.
- -- Balzac
- \He who findeth sensuous pleasures in the bodies of lush, hot, pink
- damsels is not righteous, but he can have a lot more fun.
- \He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much
- a master of the world as he who is ready to die.
- -- Giacomo Leopardi
- \He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
- -- Lao Tsu
- \He who trains his tongue to quote the learned
- sages, will be known far and wide as a smart ass.
- -- Howard Kandel
- \He's just a politician trying to save both his faces.
- \Hear about...
- the doctor that prescribed sex for insommia? His patients didn't
- get any more sleep, but they had more fun staying awake.
- \Hear about...
- the girl with the big wardrobe who started with just a little slip?
- \Hear about...
- the guy who took a course in exotic lovemaking and announced
- that he'd never be able to face his girl again?
- \Hear about...
- the guy who was an incurable romantic until penicillin came along?
- \Heaven can wait.
- \Heisenberg may have done it.
- \Heisengberg might have been here.
- \Heller's Law:
- The first myth of management is that it exists.
- Johnson's Corollary:
- Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization.
- \Help! I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory!
- \Her kisses left something to be desired -- the rest of her.
- \History has the relation to truth that theology
- has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.
- -- Lazarus Long
- \Hitting is the lingua franca in these regions.
- \Hoare's Law of Large Problems:
- Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
- \Hofstadter's Law:
- It always takes longer than you expect, even when
- you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
- \Hog Weighing Method:
- (1) Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse.
- (2) Put the hog on one end of the plank.
- (3) Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly
- balanced.
- (4) Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
- -- Robert Burns
- \Horngren's Observation:
- Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
- \How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on.
- \Howe's Law:
- Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
- \Hugh Hefner is a virgin.
- \Humility is the first of the virtues -- for other people.
- -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- \Hummingbirds never remember the words to songs.
- \Hungry? There is an abundance of food on the next level.
- \Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
- The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
- to.....to........uh..............
- \Hypocrisy is the vaseline of social intercourse.
- \I am an atheist, thank God!
- \I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country
- what it once was...an arctic wilderness.
- -- Steve Martin
- \I call Christianity the *one* great curse, the *one* great intrinsic
- depravity, the *one* great instinct for revenge for which no expedient
- is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, *petty* -- I call it
- the *one* mortal blemish of mankind.
- -- Friedrich Nietzsche
- \I came; I saw; I fucked up.
- \I can resist anything but temptation.
- \I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
- -- Joe Walsh
- \I choked Linda Lovelace.
- \I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
- -- Isaac Asimov
- \I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.
- -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- \I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.
- -- Ashleigh Brilliant
- \I don't mind arguing with myself.
- Its when I lose that it bothers me.
- -- Richard Powers
- \I don't want to bore you, but there's nobody else around for me to bore.
- \I drink to make other people interesting.
- -- George Jean Nathan
- \I hate it when people call me paranoid. It makes me feel persecuted.
- \I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.
- -- Kehlog Albran
- \I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
- but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
- -- Albert Einstein
- \I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.
- -- Ashleigh Brilliant
- \I never fail to convince an audience that the best thing they could do
- was to go away.
- \I own my own body, but I share.
- \I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.
- -- Cicero
- \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.
- \I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of
- oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
- commerce.
- -- J. Edgar Hoover
- \I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity
- when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such
- blasphemous nonsense!
- -- George Bernard Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"
- \I smell a maze of twisty little passages.
- \I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse
- than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.
- -- Frank Zappa
- \I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
- \I want a girl that can swallow my pride.
- -- Frank Zappa, "Jewish Princess"
- \I wish you humans would leave me alone.
- \I wished, I never wished a wand of wishing. (Wishful thinking)
- \I wouldn't advise playing catch with a giant.
- \I wouldn't mind dying -- it's that business of having
- to stay dead that scares the shit out of me.
- -- R. Geis
- \I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
- \I'd like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he's working
- on now.
- \I'm never through with a girl until I've had her three ways.
- -- J. F. Kennedy
- \I'm not afraid of work...
- I can even sleep beside it.
- \I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am.
- It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get.
- \I'm prepared for all emergencies but totally unprepared for everyday life.
- \I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you.
- \I've had one child. My husband wants to have another.
- I'd like to watch him have another.
- \I've told you a million times not to exaggerate.
- -- The Young Ones
- \If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
- -- Roy Santoro
- \If God doesn't destroy San Francisco,
- He should apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
- \If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.
- \If God had intended Men to Smoke, He would have put Chimneys in
- their Heads.
- \If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
- \If God had wanted people to give blow jobs, he wouldn't have given
- them teeth.
- \If God had wanted us to use the metric system,
- Jesus would have had 10 apostles.
- \If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
- As Dame Fortune did intend,
- Murphy would be there to tell me
- The pot's at the other end.
- -- Bert Whitney
- \If Reagan is the answer, it must have been a VERY silly question.
- \If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake
- him up.
- \If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular
- error.
- -- John Kenneth Galbraith
- \If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.
- \If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only
- four tellers?
- \If it doesn't have recursive function calls, Real Software Engineers
- don't program in it.
- \If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
- \If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
- \If men couldn't fuck there'd be a bounty on their heads.
- \If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.
- \If only I could get that wonderful feeling
- of accomplishment without having to accomplish anything.
- \If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for
- reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
- -- Einstein
- \If someone had told me I would be Pope
- one day, I would have studied harder.
- -- Pope John Paul I
- \If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input,
- an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.
- \If the odds are a million to one against something
- occurring, chances are 50-50 it will.
- \If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that
- will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
- \If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it.
- -- Edward A. Murphy Jr.
- \If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.
- If thy dick offends thee, whack it off.
- \If voting should change anything, there would be a law against it.
- \If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where
- we are headed.
- \If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.
- -- Chekhov
- \If you are too cute some monsters might be tempted to embrace you.
- \If you can believe ten impossible things before breakfast,
- then you should join:
- The Church of Counterfactual Belief
- The Church of Counterfactual Belief has been set up to cater to all who
- don't allow demonstrable truth to get in the way of their beliefs. In
- addition to creation science and the flatness of the earth, the
- following beliefs have been certified by Pope Duane as Church dogma:
- that there is a hole in the Earth at the North Pole from which UFOs come.
- that pi equals precisely 3.000.
- that sex can be enjoyed only by blacks and homosexuals.
- that Billy Joe Wilson (Hoopla, Miss.) has successfully squared the circle.
- the circle.
- that Harry Truman is still president, and doing a fine job.
- that pi equals precisely 22/7.
- Several other important counterfactual beliefs are presently being
- studied, including Reaganomics, A.I., and that the moon landings were
- done in a Hollywood special effects studio. These will be the subject
- of a forthcoming Papal Bull...
- \If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
- -- J. Paul Getty
- \If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
- \If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
- \If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
- -- Harry S. Truman
- \If you disassemble and assemble something a couple of times,
- you will have two of them.
- \If you drink, don't park. Accidents make people.
- \If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
- \If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
- \If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you;
- but if you really make them think they'll hate you.
- \If you meet somebody who tells you that he loves you more than anybody
- in the whole wide world, don't trust him. It means he experiments.
- \If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a
- procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will
- promptly develop.
- \If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But
- this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine,
- is somehow enobled and none dare criticize it.
- \If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens
- tomorrow!
- \If you think nobody cares if you're alive,
- try missing a couple of car payments.
- -- Earl Wilson
- \If you think sex is a pain in the ass, try different position.
- \If you want to feel great, you must eat something real big.
- \If you would keep a secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.
- \Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.
- -- Robert Burton
- \Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.
- -- Robert G. Ingersoll
- \Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
- -- Jules de Gaultier
- \Imbesi's Law with Freeman's Extension:
- In order for something to become clean, something else must
- become dirty; but you can get everything dirty without getting
- anything clean.
- \Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant.
- \In Christianity neither morality nor religion come
- into contact with reality at any point.
- -- Friedrich Nietzsche
- \In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented
- six feet downward and covered with dirt.
- -- Blair P. Houghton
- \Peter Principle:
- In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetency.
- \In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
- are to be treated as variables.
- \In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble.
- -- Alan Perlis
- \Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.
- \Interfere? Of course you should interfere!
- Always do what you're best at, I say.
- \Iron Law of Distribution:
- Them that has, gets.
- \Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
- -- Mae West
- \Is there a Life before Death?
- \Issawi's Laws of Progress:
- The Course of Progress:
- Most things get steadily worse.
- The Path of Progress:
- A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
- \It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
- \It is a sad commentary on today's society that this fortune has to be
- classified as "offensive" simply because it contains the word "fuck".
- \It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to
- program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in
- organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be
- self-critical?
- -- Alan Perlis
- \It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a
- pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the
- sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
- -- Voltaire
- \It is bad luck to be superstitious.
- -- Andrew W. Mathis
- \It is easier for a camel to pass through
- the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.
- -- Kehlog Albran
- \It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than
- vice versa.
- \It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
- \It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
- \It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting
- because if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a
- lot of people.
- -- Dolph Sharp
- \It is impossible to defend perfectly
- against the attack of those who want to die.
- \It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so
- ingenious.
- \It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the
- problem.
- \It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
- -- Gore Vidal
- \It is one of the superstitions of the human mind
- to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
- -- Voltaire
- \It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the
- lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as
- high as the eagle?
- \It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
- -- Hawkwind
- \It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
- -- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
- \It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a
- warning to others.
- \It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the
- flag.
- \It seems you keep overlooking a sign reading "No trespassing"!
- \It takes a brave man to admit his mistakes.
- Especially in a paternity hearing.
- \It takes a special kind of courage
- to face what we all have to face.
- \It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing,
- but I couldn't give up becuase by that time I was too famous.
- \It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The
- Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
- -- Edith Hamilton, "The Greek Way"
- \It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
- \It's Fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour!
- -- Macy's
- \It's all a matter of life and death, so beware of the undead.
- \It's better to be pissed off than pissed on.
- \It's not the ups and downs of love, it's the ins and outs.
- \It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain
- what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess.
- -- Roger Noe
- \Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet!
- \Jenkinson's Law:
- It won't work.
- \Jesus Saves,
- Moses Invests,
- But only Buddha pays Dividends.
- \Jesus died for your sins. Make it worth his time.
- \Jesus was killed by a Moral Majority.
- \Johnson's First Law:
- When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will
- do so at the most inconvenient possible time.
- \Jone's Law:
- The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to
- blame it on.
- \Jone's Motto:
- Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
- \Jones' First Law:
- Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of
- endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an
- obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the
- importance of their original contribution.
- \Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
- \Just because your doctor has a name for your condition
- doesn't mean he knows what it is.
- \Just do it!
- \Just once, I wish we would encounter
- an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.
- -- The Brigader, from Dr. Who
- \Justice is incidental to law and order.
- -- J. Edgar Hoover
- \Katz' Law:
- Man and nations will act rationally when all other
- possibilities have been exhausted.
- \Keep America beautiful. Swallow your beer cans.
- \Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis.
- \Kicking the terminal doesn't hurt the monsters.
- \Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
- -- Muad'dib
- \Kinkler's First Law:
- Responsibility always exceeds authority.
- \Kinkler's Second Law:
- All the easy problems have been solved.
- \Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
- \LAGNAF:
- Let's All Get Naked And Fuck!
- \LISP-programmers say: "Guess how many parentheses are needed to do this!"
- Prolog-programmers say: "How can I do it in reasonable time ?"
- C-programmers say: "Can You guess what this->program does ?"
- Forth-programmers say: "third stack in is what Guess ?"
- Basic-'programmers' say: "Where did I goto hell ?"
- Fortran- and Cobol-slaves cry: "How can I do this ?"
- \Laissez Faire Economics is the theory that if each acts like a vulture,
- all will end as doves.
- \Large cats can be dangerous, but a little pussy never hurt anyone.
- \Large increases in cost with questionable increases in
- performance can be tolerated only in race horses and women.
- -- Lord Kalvin
- \Laugh at your problems; everybody else does.
- \Law of Communications:
- The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications
- between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased
- area of misunderstanding.
- \Law of Probable Dispersal:
- Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
- \Law of Selective Gravity:
- An object will fall so as to do the most damage.
- Jenning's Corollary:
- The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is
- directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
- Law of the Perversity of Nature:
- You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the
- bread to butter.
- \Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom:
- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats --
- approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
- \Learn how to spell. Play Hack.
- \Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
- \Legalize free-enterprise murder: why should governments have all
- the fun?
- \Leibowitz's Rule:
- When hammering a nail, you will never hit your
- finger if you hold the hammer with both hands.
- \Leprechauns hide their gold in a secret room.
- \Let Jesus be your anchor!
- So when Satan rocks your boat, throw Jesus overboard!
- \Let your fingers do the walking on the yulkjhnb keys.
- \Let's face it: this time you're not going to win.
- \Lewis's Law of Travel:
- The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone,
- ever.
- \Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
- -- Gauguin
- \Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
- \Life is like a penis: when it's soft you
- can't beat it, and when it's hard you get fucked.
- \Life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread
- you have, the less shit you have to eat.
- \Life is the childhood of our immortality.
- -- Goethe
- \Life is too important to take seriously.
- -- Corky Siegel
- \Life may have no meaning -- or even worse, it may have
- a meaning of which I disapprove.
- \Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
- \Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.
- \Lisp programmers do it recursively.
- \Lisp programmers have to be bound (to-do 'it)...
- \Living on Earth may be expensive, but it
- includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
- \Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been
- attempted before.
- \Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools.
- -- Henry David Thoreau
- \Lockwood's Long Shot:
- The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street
- aren't one in a million, but once would be enough.
- \Logic is a systematic method of coming
- to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
- \Looking for a monster -- use a staff of monster summoning.
- \Loose bits sink chips.
- \Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- -- William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer-Night's Dream"
- \Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving
- devices the world has ever seen.
- \Love cannot be much younger than the lust for murder.
- -- Sigmund Freud
- \Love comes in spurts.
- -- Devo, "Please Please"
- \Love does not make the world go around, just up and down a bit.
- \Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the
- real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
- -- Goethe
- \Love is just for now...herpes lasts forever.
- \Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes.
- \Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
- -- Louise Beal
- \Love will make you forget time, and time will make you forget love.
- \Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what
- you're up to.
- \Lowery's Law:
- If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
- \Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:
- There's always one more bug.
- \Machines certainly can solve problems, store information,
- correlate, and play games -- but not with pleasure.
- -- Leo Rosten
- \Maier's Law:
- If the facts don't conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.
- Corollaries:
- (1) The bigger the theory, the better.
- (2) The experiment may be considered a success if no more than
- 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to
- obtain a correspondence with the theory.
- \Main's Law:
- For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
- \Maintainer's Motto:
- If we can't fix it, it ain't broke.
- \Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
- -- Lily Tomlin
- \Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms
- with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
- -- Samuel Butler
- \Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to
- somebody else -- unless it is an enemy.
- -- Albert Einstein
- \Many a wife thinks her husband is the world's greatest lover.
- But she can never catch him at it.
- \Many nice things suck.
- \Many pages make a thick book.
- \Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to
- get in, and those inside desperate to get out.
- -- Montaigne
- \Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
- -- Voltaire
- \Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.
- -- R. Drabek
- \Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they
- translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something
- entirely different.
- -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- \Mathematicians do it in groups.
- \Mathematicians do it in theory.
- \Mathematicians take it to the limit.
- \Matter cannot be created or destroyed,
- nor can it be returned without a receipt.
- \May the Carrier be with you.
- \May the Source be with you...always.
- \Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
- -- R. S. Barton
- \McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom:
- If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95.
- \Measure twice because you can only cut once.
- \Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
- \Meet yourself! Commit suicide and type "hack"
- \Memory fault -- core...uh...um...core...Oh dammit, I forget!
- \Memory flaw - core dumped.
- \Micro Credo:
- Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.
- \Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get
- you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles.
- \Miksch's Law:
- If a string has one end, then it has another end.
- \Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
- -- Groucho Marx
- \Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
- -- Groucho Marx
- \Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
- -- Russell Baker
- \Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
- \Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
- If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and
- be implemented it wasn't worth doing.
- \Monday is an awful way to spend one seventh of your life.
- \Money can't buy happiness -- but somehow it's more
- comfortable to cry in a Porsche than in a Lada.
- \Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
- \Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
- \Money is the root of all evil.
- \Money is the sixth sense that makes it possible
- to enjoy the five others.
- \Monsters come from nowhere to hit you everywhere.
- \Monsters sleep because you are boring, not because they ever get tired.
- \Most legislators are so dumb that they couldn't pour piss out
- of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.
- \Most monsters prefer minced meat. That's why they are hitting you.
- \Most of the bugs in Hack are on the floor.
- \Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
- -- Frank Zappa
- \Most rumors are just as misleading as this one.
- \Mr. Cole's Axiom:
- The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant;
- the population is growing.
- \Much ado Nothing Happens.
- \Murphy's Law of Research:
- Enough research will tend to support your theory.
- \Murphy's Law:
- If anything can go wrong, it will.
- \My girlfriend's favorite erotic position is bending over my credit cards.
- \My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
- \My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
- -- Christopher Morley
- \NEWS FLASH!!
- Today the East German pole-vault champion became the West
- German pole-vault champion.
- \Naeser's Law:
- You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof.
- \Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of
- conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the
- fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he
- is most likely to be creamed?
- -- Solomon Short
- \Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
- God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.
- It did not last; the devil howling "Ho!
- Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
- \Need money? Sell your corpses to a tin factory.
- \NetHack is a fantasy, in fact you're dreaming.
- \NetHack is addictive. Too late, you're already hooked.
- \Never be led astray onto the path of virtue.
- \Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
- \Never eat more than you can lift.
- -- Miss Piggy
- \Never go into the dungeon at midnight.
- \Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
- \Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
- \Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
- -- Salvor Hardin, "Foundation"
- \Never make anything simple and efficient when
- a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.
- \Never mind the monsters hitting you: they just replace the charwomen.
- \Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
- -- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977
- \Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
- \Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
- There might be a law against it by that time.
- \Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower.
- \Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.
- \Never trust anybody whose arm is bigger than your leg.
- \Never try to outstubborn a cat.
- -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
- \Never use "etc." -- it makes people think there is more where
- there is not or that there is not space to list it all, etc.
- \Never use your best weapon to engrave a curse.
- \Never worry about theory as long as the machinery
- does what it's supposed to do.
- -- R. A. Heinlein
- \Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
- \Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law:
- A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
- \Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules:
- The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of
- the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
- \Nirvana? Thats the place where the powers that be and their
- friends hang out.
- -- Zonker Harris
- \No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a
- camel -- anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform
- effectively under such difficult conditions.
- -- Laurence J. Peter
- \No good deed goes unpunished.
- -- Clare Boothe Luce
- \No guest is so welcome in a friend's house that
- he will not become nuiscance after three days.
- -- Titus Maccius Plautus
- \No man in the world has more courage than
- the man who can stop after eating one peanut.
- -- Channing Pollock
- \No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.
- -- E. W. Howe
- \No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in
- the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
- \No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee,
- when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your
- direction, and almost none will be returned to the source.
- -- John L. Shelton
- \No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid.
- \No proper program contains an indication which as an operator-applied
- occurrence identifies an operator-defining occurrence which as an
- indication-applied occurrence identifies an indication-defining
- occurrence different from the one identified by the given indication as
- an indication-applied occurrence.
- -- ALGOL 68 Report
- \No, "Eureka" is Greek for "This bath is too hot."
- -- Dr. Who
- \Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition.
- \Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations:
- Negative expectations yield negative results.
- Positive expectations yield negative results.
- \Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
- \Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
- \Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none.
- -- William Shakespeare
- \Not all rumors are as misleading as this one.
- \Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly
- and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
- -- Professor W.
- \Not until a program has been in production for at least
- six months will the most harmful error then be discovered.
- \Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
- \Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up.
- \Nothing is better than Sex.
- Masturbation is better than nothing.
- Therefore, Masturbation is better than Sex.
- \Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
- -- Andrew Young
- \Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which
- millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
- -- Nero Wolfe
- \Nothing recedes like success.
- -- Walter Winchell
- \Nymphs are blondes. Are you a gentleman?
- \O'Riordan's Theorem:
- Brains x Beauty = Constant.
- Purmal's Corollary:
- As the limit of (Brains x Beauty) goes to infinity,
- availability goes to zero.
- \O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
- Murphy was an optimist.
- \OK, now let's look at four dimensions on the blackboard.
- -- Dr. Joy
- \Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
- \Official Project Stages:
- (1) Uncritical Acceptance
- (2) Wild Enthusiasm
- (3) Dejected Disillusionment
- (4) Total Confusion
- (5) Search for the Guilty
- (6) Punishment of the Innocent
- (7) Promotion of the Non-participants
- \Ogden's Law:
- The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
- \Oh John, let's not park here.
- Oh John, let's not park.
- Oh John, let's not.
- Oh John, let's.
- Oh John.
- Oh.
- \Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
- -- Trotsky
- \Old hackers never die: young ones do.
- \Old programmers never die. They just branch to a new address.
- \Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.
- \Oliver's Law:
- Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
- \On Brassieres:
- Russian : Uplifts the masses -- Salvation Army : Raises the fallen
- American: Makes mountains out of molehills
- \On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are
- created jerks.
- -- H. Allen Smith, "Let the Crabgrass Grow"
- \On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:
- "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
- -- Wolfgang Pauli
- \Once upon a girl there was a time...
- \Once you've tried to change the world you find
- it's a whole bunch easier to change your mind.
- \One good reason why computers can do more work than people is
- that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
- \One homunculus a day keeps the doctor away.
- \One nice thing about egotists: they don't talk about other people.
- \One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
- lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
- their C programs.
- -- Robert Firth
- \One planet is all you get.
- \Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.
- \Operation coded OVERKILL has started now.
- \Operators mount anything.
- \Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
- Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
- -- Mike Adams
- \Osborn's Law:
- Variables won't; constants aren't.
- \Others look to you for stability, so hide when you bite your nails.
- \Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend: and inside a dog,
- it's too dark to read.
- -- Groucho Marx
- \Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.
- \Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated.
- \PLUNDERER'S THEME
- (to Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius)
- Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.
- If you do the things we say, then you'll soon rule the nation.
- Kill your foes and enemies and then kill your relations.
- Pillage, rape, and loot and burn, but all in moderation.
- \POLITICIAN: From the Greek 'poly' ("many") and the French 'tete'
- ("head" or "face," as in 'tete-a-tete': head to head or face to face).
- Hence 'polytetien', a person of two or more faces.
- -- Martin Pitt
- \Paradise is exactly like where you are right now...
- only much, much better.
- -- Laurie Anderson
- \Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
- \Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life.
- \Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one.
- \Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy
- to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
- -- D. J. Hicks
- \Pardo's First Postulate:
- Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
- Arnold's Addendum:
- Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats.
- \Parker's Law:
- Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
- \Parkinson's Fifth Law:
- If there is a way to delay in important decision,
- the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
- \Parkinson's Fourth Law:
- The number of people in any working group tends to increase
- regardless of the amount of work to be done.
- \Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.
- \Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
- -- Eric Hoffer
- \Paul's Law:
- You can't fall off the floor.
- \Paulg's Law:
- In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save.
- \People usually get what's coming to them...unless it's been mailed.
- \People who claim they don't let little things bother them
- have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.
- \People who have no faults are terrible;
- there is no way of taking advantage of them.
- \People will accept your ideas much more readily if you
- tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.
- \Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
- [Confound those who have said our remarks before us.]
- -- Aelius Donatus
- \Peter's Law of Substitution:
- Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves.
- \Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny.
- \Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
- -- John Keats
- \Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
- -- Don Marquis
- \Plastic... Aluminum... These are the inheritors of the Universe!
- Flesh and Blood have had their day... and that day is past!
- -- Green Lantern Comics
- \Pohl's law:
- Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
- \Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even
- where there is no river.
- -- Nikita Khrushchev
- \Politicians do it to everyone.
- \Poverty begins at home.
- \Predestination was doomed from the start.
- \Press any key to start formatting the hard disk.
- \Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
- It's on the other side.
- \Printers do it by wrinkling the sheets.
- \Procrastinators do it tomorrow.
- \Prostitution is the only business where you can go
- into the hole and still come out ahead.
- \Pryor's Observation:
- How long you live has nothing to do with how long you are
- going to be dead.
- \Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill.
- Check three friends. If they're ok, you're it.
- \Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check
- \Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
- \Putt's Law:
- Technology is dominated by two types of people:
- Those who understand what they do not manage.
- Those who manage what they do not understand.
- \Q: Do you know how to tell a Polack at a cockfight?
- A: He's the only one with a duck.
- Q: Do you know how to tell an Aggie at a cockfight?
- A: He's the only one who bets on the duck.
- Q: And do you know how to tell the Mafia is at the cockfight?
- A: The duck wins!
- \Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is?
- A: One per person.
- \Q: How can you tell when a WASP is sexually aroused?
- A: By the stiff upper lip.
- \Q: How do you play religious roulette?
- A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck
- by lightning first.
- \Q: How do you tell if you're making love to a nurse, a schoolteacher,
- or an airline stewardess?
- A: A nurse says: "This won't hurt a bit." A schoolteacher says:
- "We're going to have to do this over and over again until we get it right."
- An airline stewardess says: "Just hold this over your
- mouth and nose, and breath normally."
- \Q: How do you tell that your roommate's gay?
- A: When his cock tastes like shit.
- \Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
- A: None. The Universe spines the bulb, and the Zen master stays out
- of the way.
- \Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
- A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb
- itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective
- reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a
- maudlin cosmos of nothingness.
- \Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
- A: None: "We'll fix it in software."
- Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
- A: None: "We'll document it in the manual."
- Q: How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
- A: None: "The user can work it out."
- \Q: How many lesbians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
- A: Ten. One to do it, and nine to talk about how gratifying
- it was without a man.
- \Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
- A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub
- with brightly colored machine tools.
- \Q: How much money do you give to a 900 foot Jesus?
- A: As much as he wants.
- \Q: If Tarzan was Jewish, and Jane was a princess, what would Cheetah be?
- A: A fur coat.
- \Q: What can you use used tampons for?
- A: Tea bags for vampires.
- \Q: What do you call couples that use that rhythm method?
- A: Parents.
- \Q: What is "SMOORPLAY"?
- A: It's what SMURFS do before they SMUCK, of course!
- \Q: What's buried in Grant's tomb?
- A: A corpse.
- \Q: What's the difference between erotic and kinky?
- A: Erotic is when you use a feather.
- Kinky is when you use the whole bird...
- \Q: What's the difference between hard and dark?
- A: It stays dark all night.
- \Q: What's the last thing that goes through
- a grasshopper's mind when he hits your windshield?
- A: His ass.
- \Q: Where does virgin wool come from?
- A: Ugly sheep.
- \Q: Why did God invent booze?
- A: So ugly men could get laid too.
- \Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together?
- A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home.
- \Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
- (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
- \Quigley's Law:
- Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small,
- will attempt to use it.
- \Quote of The Day:
- '
- \RULES OF EATING -- THE BRONX DIETER'S CREED
- (1) Never eat on an empty stomach.
- (2) Never leave the table hungry.
- (3) When traveling, never leave a country hungry.
- (4) Enjoy your food.
- (5) Enjoy your companion's food.
- (6) Really taste your food. It may take several portions to
- accomplish this, especially if subtly seasoned.
- (7) Really feel your food. Texture is important. Compare,
- for example, the texture of a turnip to that of a brownie.
- Which feels better against your cheeks?
- (8) Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal.
- (9) Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You
- can always eat it later.
- (10) Avoid any wine with a childproof cap.
- (11) Avoid blue food.
- -- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet"
- \Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
- \Read the manual before entering the cave -
- You might get killed otherwise.
- \Reality corrupts. Absolute reality corrupts absolutely.
- \Reality is for people who lack imagination.
- \Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.
- \Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.
- -- Alvy Ray Smith
- \Rejection:
- When you're masturbating and your hand falls asleep.
- \Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
- -- Anatole France
- \Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,
- it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
- -- Bertrand Russell
- \Relying on a dog might turn you in a dog addict.
- \Remember, if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat.
- \Renning's Maxim:
- Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
- \Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what
- do you think of Western Civilization?
- Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
- \Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
- -- Werner von Braun
- \Resisting temptation is easier when you think you'll
- probably get another chance later on.
- \Revenge is sleeping with your enemy's wife.
- Sweet revenge is the realization that she's a lousy lay.
- \Rhode's Law:
- When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
- circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly,
- empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied,
- inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically
- guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience,
- expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal
- comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above,
- be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and
- adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally,
- immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes
- advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.
- \Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.
- -- Steven Wright
- \Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention
- Unless the results are known in advance,
- funding agencies will reject the proposal.
- \Row (3x) that boat gently down the stream, Charon (4x),
- death is but a dream.
- \Rudin's Law:
- If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will
- do it every time.
- \Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London:
- Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall
- be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind
- person shall be deemed to be a cat.
- \Rule of Creative Research:
- (1) Never draw what you can copy.
- (2) Never copy what you can trace.
- (3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
- \Rule of Defactualization:
- Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
- \Rule of Feline Frustration:
- When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly
- content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom.
- \Rule of the Great:
- When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
- thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
- \Rules:
- (1) The boss is always right.
- (2) When the boss is wrong, refer to rule 1.
- \Run away to fight another day.
- \Santa Claus wears a Red Suit,
- He must be a communist.
- And a beard and long hair,
- Must be a pacifist.
- What's in that pipe that he's smoking?
- -- Arlo Guthrie
- \Satellite Safety Tip #14:
- If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck.
- \Sattinger's Law:
- It works better if you plug it in.
- \Sauron is alive in Argentina.
- \Save a forest -- eat a beaver.
- \Save a mouse -- eat a pussy.
- \Save energy: be apathetic.
- \Save the whales -- harpoon a Honda.
- \Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
- \Schapiro's Explanation:
- The grass is always greener on the other side --
- but that's because they use more manure.
- \Schizophrenia beats being alone.
- \Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
- \Scientists were preparing an experiment to ask the ultimate question.
- They had worked for months gathering one each of every computer that
- was built. Finally the big day was at hand.All the computers were
- linked together.They asked the question, "Is there a God?".Lights
- started blinking, flashing and blinking some more.Suddenly, there
- was a loud crash, and a bolt of lightning came down from the sky,
- struck the computers, and welded all the connections permanently
- together."There is now", came the reply.
- \Scott's first Law:
- No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right.
- \Scott's second Law:
- When an error has been detected and corrected, it will
- be found to have been wrong in the first place.
- Corollary:
- After the correction has been found in error, it will be
- impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation.
- \Screw up your courage! You've screwed up everything else.
- \Second Law of Business Meetings:
- If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you
- will pick the wrong one.
- Corollary:
- If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it wrong, anyway.
- \Second Law of Hacking: first in, first out.
- \Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.
- -- James Thurber
- \Self Test for Paranoia:
- You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's
- your own fault.
- \Serocki's Stricture:
- Marriage is always a bachelor's last option.
- \Sex discriminates against the shy and ugly.
- \Sex is dirty, but only if you do it right.
- \Sex is low in calories, and *oooh* that aftertaste!
- \Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer.
- -- Swami X
- \Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation...
- the other eight are unimportant.
- -- Henry Miller
- \Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.
- -- M. C. Reed.
- \Sex is what women have and men want.
- \Shaw's Principle:
- Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool
- will want to use it.
- \She's fine, upstanding, and wonderful laying down.
- \She's the kind of woman you could fall madly in bed with.
- \Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you
- a man who is playing golf with his boss.
- \Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change.
- \Silverman's Law:
- If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
- \Simon's Law:
- Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.
- \Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while
- they're alive.
- -- John Sloan
- \Since we're all here, we must not be all there.
- -- Bob "Mountain" Beck
- \Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor):
- That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to,
- or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you
- should have gotten.
- \Slang is language that takes off its coat,
- spits on its hands, and goes to work.
- \Slick's Three Laws of the Universe:
- (1) Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check.
- (2) A quarter-ounce of chocolate = four pounds of fat.
- (3) 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.
- \So far as I can remember, there is not one word
- in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
- -- Bertrand Russell
- \So, if there's no God, who changes the water?
- -- New Yorker cartoon of two goldfish in a bowl
- \Sodd's Second Law:
- Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to
- occur.
- \Sodomy is a pain in the ass.
- \Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
- -- Ed Howe
- \Some people live life in the fast lane.
- You're in oncoming traffic.
- \Some points to remember [about animals]:
- (1) Don't go to sleep under big animals, e.g., elephants, rhinoceri,
- hippopotamuses;
- (2) Don't put animals with sharp teeth or poisonous fangs down the
- front of your clothes;
- (3) Don't pat certain animals, e.g., crocodiles and scorpions or dogs
- you have just kicked.
- -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
- \Some women are like musical glasses.
- To keep them in tune they must be wet.
- -- Samuel Coleridge
- \Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
- -- Lily Tomlin
- \Sometimes, you just gotta say "What the fuck."
- -- Risky Business
- \Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword.
- \Speak softly and carry a big stick.
- \Speak softly and carry a megawatt laser.
- \Speak softly and carry the Staff of Archmage.
- \Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman.
- -- Dave Millman
- \Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.
- \Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading:
- The visibility of an error is inversely proportional
- to the number of times you have looked at it.
- \Spelling is a lossed art.
- \Stability itself is nothing else than a more sluggish motion.
- \Statisticians do it with 95% confidence.
- \Statisticians probably do it.
- \Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy:
- Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink.
- \Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming
- Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
- \Stult's Report:
- Our problems are mostly behind us. What we
- have to do now is fight the solutions.
- \Sturgeon's Law:
- 90% of everything is crud.
- \Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting
- out of the way before it is understood.
- \Success is like a fart -- only your own smells nice.
- -- James P. Hogan
- \Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
- \Support wildlife -- vote for an orgy.
- \Support your local police force -- steal!!
- \Sure he's sharp as a razor...he's a two-dimensional pinhead!
- \Surprise your boss. Get to work on time.
- \Swipple's Rule of Order:
- He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
- \Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind
- when he has a hole in his head.
- \Take a long worm from the rear, according to its mate it's a lot more fun.
- \Take everything in stride. Trample anyone who gets in your way.
- \Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to
- your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms,
- and they'll call you crazy.
- -- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"
- \Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
- -- Euripides
- \Talkers are no good doers.
- -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI"
- \Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
- -- Friedrich Nietzsche
- \Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when
- he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway.
- \Teachers do it with class.
- \Teamwork is essential -- it allows you to blame someone else.
- \Technological progress has merely provided us with
- more efficient means for going backwards.
- -- Aldous Huxley
- \Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe
- and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint
- on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
- \Test makers do it:
- (a) sometimes
- (b) always
- (c) never
- \Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones.
- \That girl could suck the chrome off a bumper.
- \That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all.
- \That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them.
- -- Dorothy Parker
- \The Abrams' Principle:
- The shortest distance between two points is off the wall.
- \The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development:
- To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program,
- take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one,
- and convert to the next higher units.
- \The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility
- of assembly language with the readability of assembly language.
- \The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost would never throw the Devil
- out of Heaven as long as they still need him as a fourth for bridge.
- -- Letter in New Libertarian Notes #19
- \The Fifth Rule:
- You have taken yourself too seriously.
- \The First Rule of Program Optimization:
- Don't do it.
- \The Gods don't like competition.
- \The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences
- The one who has the gold makes the rules.
- \The Heineken Uncertainty Principle:
- You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.
- \The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member
- of the group divided by the number of people in the group.
- \The Israelites were all waiting anxiously at the foot of the mountain,
- knowing that Moses had had a tough day negotiating with God over the
- Commandments. Finally a tired Moses came into sight.
- "I've got some good news and some bad news, folks," he said. "The
- good news is that I got Him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery's
- still in."
- \The Kennedy Constant:
- Don't get mad -- get even.
- \The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor,
- to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- -- Anatole France
- \The Leprechaun Gold Tru$t is no division of the Magic Memory Vault.
- \The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab
- as much as we could with both of them.
- -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
- \The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to
- the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
- -- Macaulay, "History of England, I"
- \The Real Man's Arctic Breakfast:
- Ingredients: one bottle of whisky, ten pounds of raw meat.
- Throw the meat to huskies.
- Drink the whisky.
- \The Real Man's Bloody Mary:
- Ingredients: vodka, tomato juice, Tobasco, Worcestershire
- sauce, A-1 steak sauce, ice, salt, pepper, celery.
- Fill a large tumbler with vodka.
- Throw all the other ingredients away.
- \The Roman Rule
- The one who says it cannot be done should never
- interrupt the one who is doing it.
- \The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!):
- Don't do it yet.
- -- Michael Jackson
- \The Story of Creation or The Myth of Urk
- In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,
- and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
- was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be
- registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried;
- and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data
- Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening
- and there was morning, one interrupt...
- -- Rico Tudor
- \The Street finds its own uses for technology.
- -- William Gibson
- \The air is positively magic in here. Better wear a negative armor.
- \The beginning of terror is the suspicion of ones own mortality.
- The end of terror is the surety of it.
- \The best defense against logic is ignorance.
- \The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time.
- \The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't
- reuse time.
- -- Merrick Furst
- \The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up
- in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.
- \The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding
- bureaucracy.
- \The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly
- greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed
- inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner
- party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
- -- H. L. Mencken
- \The chief cause of problems is solutions.
- \The chief danger in life is that you may take too may precautions.
- -- Alfred Adler
- \The church is near but the road is icy;
- the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.
- -- Russian Proverb
- \The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
- -- Elbert Hubbard
- \The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
- \The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
- \The defense attorney was hammering away at the plaintiff:
- "You claim," he jeered, "that my client came at you with a broken bottle in
- his hand. But is it not true, that you had something in YOUR hand?"
- "Yes," he admitted, "his wife. Very charming, of course, but
- not much good in a fight."
- \The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
- -- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
- \The devil finds work for idle circuits to do.
- \The early worm gets the bird.
- \The easiest way to figure the cost of living is
- to take your income and add ten percent.
- \The economy depends about as much on economists as
- the weather does on weather forecasters.
- -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann
- \The end of the human race will be that it
- will eventually die of civilization.
- -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- \The end of the world will occur at 3:00 p.m., this Friday,
- with symposium to follow.
- \The fact that it works is immaterial.
- -- L. Ogborn
- \The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
- -- Abbie Hoffman
- \The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth
- of management is that success equals skill.
- -- Robert Heller
- \The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving
- your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do.
- -- McCloctnik the Lucid
- \The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
- -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI", Part IV
- \The goal of Computer Science is to build something that
- will last at least until we've finished building it.
- \The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.
- The goal of nature is to build better mice.
- \The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines.
- They gave him love and he invented marriage.
- \The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who
- make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians
- have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine
- man in the bonds of Hell.
- -- St. Augustine
- \The good die young -- because they see it's no use living if you've got
- to be good.
- \The greatest lies of all time:
- (1) I love you.
- (2) This won't hurt a bit.
- (3) The Mercedes is paid for.
- (4) The check is in the mail.
- (5) I was just going to call you.
- (6) I've always worn cowboy boots.
- (7) I swear I won't come in your mouth.
- (8) Of course I'll respect you in the morning.
- (9) We have a really challenging assignment for you.
- (10) I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
- \The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.
- -- Robert G. Ingersoll
- \The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
- -- Albert Einstein
- \The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is
- flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see.
- -- Monty Python
- \The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of
- its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
- \The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats
- a strange protein -- it rejects it.
- -- P. Medawar
- \The idea is to die young as late as possible.
- -- Ashley Montagu
- \The identical is equal to itself, since it is different.
- -- Franco Spisani
- \The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.
- -- Henry Kissinger
- \The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with
- the square of the number of participants.
- -- Adam Walinsky
- \The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching
- train.
- \The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.
- \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
- \The meek can have the Earth -- rest of us have other plans.
- \The meek shall inherit the Earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
- \The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the
- klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."
- "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?"
- "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?"
- \The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
- -- R. Bach, "Illusions"
- \The more laws and order are made prominent,
- the more thieves and robbers there will be.
- -- Lao Tsu
- \The moss on the tree does not fear the talons of the hawk.
- \The most common form of marriage proposal: "YOU'RE WHAT!?"
- \The number of people watching you is directly
- proportional to the stupidity of your action.
- \The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
- \The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon.
- -- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over"
- \The only thing that stops God from sending
- another flood is that the first one was useless.
- -- Chamfort
- \The only thing we learn from history is that
- we learn nothing from history.
- -- Hegel
- I know guys can't learn from yesterday...
- Hegel must be taking the long view.
- -- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar"
- \The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up
- until 5 or 6 p.m.
- \The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- -- Niels Bohr
- \The past always looks better than it was.
- It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
- -- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
- \The pleasure is momentary,
- The position ridiculous,
- The expense damnable.
- -- Chesterfield, on sex
- \The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to
- constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every
- appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA
- statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This
- also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
- -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
- \The probability of someone watching you is
- proportional to the stupidity of your action.
- \The problem...is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
- \The quality of a blow-job is determined by the
- length of sheet you have to pull out of your ass.
- \The revolution will not be televised.
- \The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
- -- Emerson
- \The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
- -- Justice Douglas
- \The ripest fruit falls first.
- -- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"
- \The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with
- sloppy analysis!
- \The secret of happiness is total disregard of everybody.
- \The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood
- as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all.
- The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in
- the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in
- twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive.
- "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached
- everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a
- fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one --
- and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city."
- "How?" demanded Fafhrd.
- Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know."
- -- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar"
- \The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
- -- Noelie Alito
- \The so-called lessons of history are for the most part
- the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
- -- Max Lerner
- \The superfluous is very necessary.
- -- Voltaire
- \The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling
- their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from
- the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to
- ascribe to the other side a consistency, forsight and coherence that
- its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind men can do
- enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.
- -- Henry Kissinger
- \The surest sign that a man is in love is when he divorces his wife.
- \The thief
- Left it behind --
- The moon at the window.
- -- Ryokan
- \The three most important parts of a stove: lifter, leg, and poker.
- \The three sexual positions during preganancy.
- During the first four months: Missionary style
- During the second four months: Doggie style
- And during the last month: Coyote style
- Coyote style?
- You sit by the hole and howl.
- \The time spent on any item of the agenda [of a finance
- committee] will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
- -- C. N. Parkinson
- \The trouble with being punctual is that people think
- you have nothing more important to do.
- \The trouble with doing something right the first time
- is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
- \The trouble with money is it costs too much.
- \The truth of a proposition has nothing to do
- with its credibility. And vice versa.
- \The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
- \The universe does not have laws --
- it has habits, and habits can be broken.
- \The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination --
- but the combination is locked up in the safe.
- -- Peter DeVries
- \The value of a program is directly proportional to the weight of
- its output.
- \The very first essential for success is a perpetually
- constant and regular employment of violence.
- -- Adolph Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
- \The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
- Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts
- to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to
- be one of the facts that needs altering.
- -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"
- \The volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.
- -- Jerry Brown
- \The wages of sin are high --
- unless you know someone who does it for nothing.
- \The warning message we sent the Russians was
- a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
- -- Alexander Haig
- \The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market
- is to start with a large fortune.
- \The world is coming to an end! Repent and return those library books!
- \The world's as ugly as sin,
- And almost as delightful
- -- Frederick Locker-Lampson
- \Theft from a single author is plagiarism.
- Theft from two is comparative study.
- Theft from three or more is research.
- \There are many ways to say "I love you", but fucking is the fastest.
- \There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or
- a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
- -- Gloria Steinem
- \There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both
- plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis;
- and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again,
- don't we all?
- \There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells
- and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated
- pools here and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving
- them parched for wonder. There are also those who believe that if you
- stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it will increase your
- intelligence.
- -- "The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII"
- \There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
- -- Disraeli
- \There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away
- from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone
- loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor.
- \There are three things I always forget. Names, faces --
- the third I can't remember.
- -- Italo Svevo
- \There are three ways to get something done:
- (1) Do it yourself.
- (2) Hire someone to do it for you.
- (3) Forbid your kids to do it.
- \There are two sides to every divorce: yours and the shithead's.
- \There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
- make is so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
- other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
- deficiencies.
- -- C. A. R. Hoare
- \There are two ways to write error-free programs.
- Only the third one works.
- \There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through
- a suitable application of high explosives.
- \There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
- -- Henry Kissinger
- \There has been an alarming increase in the number
- of things you know nothing about.
- \There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself
- to be burned for an opinion.
- -- Anatole France
- \There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not
- wave in a vacuum.
- -- Arthur C. Clarke
- \There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- -- Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977
- \There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
- -- G. B. Shaw
- \There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes.
- \There is nothing so easy but that it becomes
- difficult when you do it reluctantly.
- -- Publius Terentius Afer
- \There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
- -- C. S. Lewis, "The Chronicles of Narnia"
- \There was something about her I liked,
- but I couldn't put my finger on it.
- \There's a fine line between courage and foolishness.
- Too bad its not a fence.
- \There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to.
- \There's no future in time travel.
- \There's no heavier burden than a great potential.
- \There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
- -- Dr. Who
- \There's no real need to do housework --
- after four years it doesn't get any worse.
- \They make a desert and call it peace.
- -- Tacitus
- \They told me I was gullible...and I believed them!
- \They're only trying to make me look paranoid.
- \They're unfriendly, which is fortunate, really.
- They'd be difficult to like.
- -- Avon
- \Things are more like they used to be than they are now.
- \Think of your family tonight.
- Try to crawl home after the computer crashes.
- \Think sideways!
- -- Edward De Bono
- \Third Law of Hacking: the last blow counts most.
- \This fortune cookie is property of Fortune Cookies, Inc.
- \This is the Leprechaun Law: every purse has a price.
- \This limerick is --SO--FILTHY-- that it would offend you. So I'll put
- "di-dah" for the filthy words:
- Di-dah, di-dah, di-dah di-dah,
- Di-dah di-dah di-dah, di-dah;
- di-dah di-dah di-dah?
- Di-dah di-dah di-dah.
- Di-dah di-dah, di-dah di-fuck.
- \This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside,
- but to be hurled with great force.
- -- Dorothy Parker
- \This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.
- -- Hofstadter
- \This will be a memorable month --
- no matter how hard you try to forget it.
- \Those of you who think you know everything are
- very annoying to those of us who do.
- \Those who can't write, write manuals.
- \Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
- \Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will
- make violent revolution inevitable.
- -- John F. Kennedy
- \Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are
- men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
- without the roar of its many waters.
- -- Frederick Douglass
- \Thou shalt not omit adultery.
- \Though a program be but three lines long,
- someday it will have to be maintained.
- -- The Tao of Programming
- \Time is nature's way of making sure that
- everything doesn't happen at once.
- \To a Real Woman, every ejaculation is premature.
- \To be is to do.
- -- I. Kant
- To do is to be.
- -- A. Sartre
- Do-be-do-be-do.
- -- F. Sinatra
- \To be is to do.
- -- I. Kant
- To do is to be.
- -- A. Sartre
- Yabba-Dabba-Doo!
- -- F. Flinstone
- \To be or not to be.
- -- Shakespeare
- To do is to be.
- -- Nietzsche
- To be is to do.
- -- Sartre
- Do be do be do.
- -- Frank Sinatra
- \To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore
- this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to
- offer in response is based on information available to make no such
- statement.
- \To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and
- whatever you hit, call it the target.
- \To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
- \To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System.
- \To err is human, to moo bovine.
- \To generalize is to be an idiot.
- -- William Blake
- \To get something done, a committee should consist of
- no more than three men, two of them absent.
- \To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
- -- Thomas Edison
- \To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.
- \To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.
- -- W. Churchill, on Korean War negotiations
- \To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job
- will take the longest and cost the most.
- \To the systems programmer, users and applications serve
- only to provide a test load.
- \To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question...or is it?
- \Today is a good day to bribe a high-ranking public official.
- \Today is a good day to die.
- -- An apache warrior proverb
- \Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
- \Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest.
- \Too clever is dumb.
- -- Ogden Nash
- \Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.
- -- Mae West
- \Too often I find that the volume of paper expands
- to fill the available briefcases.
- -- Governor Jerry Brown
- \Travel important today; Internal Revenue men arrive tomorrow.
- \Trolls are described as rubbery: they keep bouncing back.
- \Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
- -- Henrik Tikkanen
- \Try hacking in the wee hours: you will have more room.
- \Try not to have a good time...This is supposed to be educational.
- -- Charles Schulz
- \Try to be the best of whatever you are, even if what you are is no good.
- \Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done,
- is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written
- in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and
- pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer),
- defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the
- absolutely perfect future.
- -- Amrom Katz
- \Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance.
- \Trying to establish voice contact...please yell into keyboard.
- \Turnaucka's Law:
- The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.
- \Tussman's Law:
- Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.
- \Twenty percent of zero is better than nothing.
- -- Walt Kelly
- \Two can live as cheaply as one for half as long.
- -- Howard Kandel
- \Two is not 3 -- not even for large values of 2.
- \Two percent of zero is almost nothing.
- \Two things I like the best in life -- hot cars and fast women.
- \Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
- \UFO's are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
- \Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb:
- Never use your thumb for a rule. You'll either hit it
- with a hammer or get a splinter in it.
- \Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
- just man is also a prison.
- -- Henry David Thoreau
- \Under capitalism, man exploits man.
- Under Communism, it's just the opposite.
- -- John Kenneth Galbraith
- \Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something,
- it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic...
- \Unnamed Law:
- If it happens, it must be possible.
- \Using a morning star in the evening has no effect.
- \Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
- and paradise is when you have none.
- -- Doug Larson
- \Vail's Second Axiom:
- The amount of work to be done increases in proportion
- to the amount of work already completed.
- \Van Roy's Law:
- An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
- \Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
- 1. If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once.
- 2. If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points.
- \Vidi, vici, veni.
- (I saw, I conquered, I came.)
- \Vila: "I think I have just made the biggest mistake of my life."
- Orac: "It is unlikely. I would predict there are far greater mistakes
- waiting to be made by someone with your obvious talent for it."
- \Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
- -- Salvor Hardin
- \Virtue is its own punishment.
- \Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously
- moving from where you left them to where you can't find them.
- \Vote anarchist!
- \WARNING from H.M. Govt: Quaffing may be dangerous to your health.
- \Wanted: shopkeepers. Send a scroll of mail to:
- Mage of Yendor/Level 35/Dungeon.
- \War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
- -- Charles Edward Montague
- \War is menstruation envy.
- \Warning: end of file 'fortunes' reached.
- \Wasting time is an important part of living.
- \Watson's Law:
- The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to
- the number and significance of any persons watching it.
- \We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it.
- -- Whole Earth Catalog
- \We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which
- divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being
- correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
- -- Niels Bohr
- \We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
- -- Walt Kelly, "Pogo"
- \We are on the verge: Today our program proved
- Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
- -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- \We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved.
- \We can embody the truth, but we cannot know it.
- -- Yates
- \We can't really be wrong if we're just following Gods orders
- You know, He wrote this book here
- And in this book He says that He made us to be just like Him
- So if we're dumb, then God's dumb (and perhaps a little ugly on the side)
- -- Frank Zappa
- \We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
- -- Vroomfondel
- \We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at hand.
- -- James Watt
- \We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand
- the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!
- \We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some
- of our best friends are trying to kill us.
- \We took some pictures of the girls, but they weren't developed.
- \We've just recieved the results of a survey conducted to ascertain the
- various reasons men get out of bed in the middle of the night. According
- to the report, 2% are motivated by a desire to visit the bathroom, and
- 3% have an urge to raid the refrigerator. The other 95% get up to go home.
- \Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise.
- -- John Heywood
- \Weiler's Law:
- Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
- \Weinberg's First Law:
- Progress is made on alternate Fridays.
- \Weinberg's Principle:
- An expert is a person who avoids the small errors
- while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
- \Weinberg's Second Law:
- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
- then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
- \Weiner's Law of Libraries:
- There are no answers, only cross references.
- \Welcome thy neighbor into thy fallout shelter.
- He'll come in handy if you run out of food.
- -- Dean McLaughlin.
- \Were there no women, men might live like gods.
- -- Thomas Dekker
- \Westheimer's Discovery:
- A couple of months in the laboratory can
- frequently save a couple of hours in the library.
- \Wethern's Law:
- Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.
- \What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility.
- \What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
- -- WOP, "War Games"
- \What color is a chameleon on a mirror?
- \What fools these mortals be.
- -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
- \What good is having someone who can walk on water
- if you don't follow in his footsteps?
- \What is a magician but a practising theorist?
- -- Obi-Wan Kenobi
- \What is mind? No matter.
- What is matter? Never mind.
- -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
- \What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?
- -- Bertold Brecht
- \What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do.
- \What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is
- that there's nothing to compare it with.
- \What one fool can do, another can.
- -- Ancient Simian Proverb
- \What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
- -- Ursula K. LeGuin
- \What the fuck, over?
- \What the hell, go ahead and put all your eggs in one basket.
- \What use is magic if it can't save a unicorn?
- -- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"
- \What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
- -- Wittgenstein
- \What's another word for Thesaurus?
- -- Steven Wright
- \What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?
- -- The Doctor
- \Whatever is not nailed down is mine.
- What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
- -- Collis P. Huntingdon
- \When God created man, She was only testing.
- \When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
- -- Charles Merrill Smith
- \When God endowed human beings with brains,
- He did not intend to guarantee them.
- \When a banker jumps out of a window, jump after him --
- that's where the money is.
- -- Robespierre
- \When a female has tears in her eyes the one who cannot see is the male.
- \When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,
- it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
- -- Samuel Johnson
- \When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog along to see
- the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain
- relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
- -- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
- \When all other means of communication fail, try words.
- \When are you buttheads gonna learn that you can't oppose
- Gestapo tactics *with* Gestapo tactics?
- -- Reuben Flagg
- \When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America
- before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours."
- -- Vine Deloria, Jr.
- \When choosing between evils, I always
- like to take the one I've never tried before.
- -- Mae West
- \When in doubt, use brute force.
- -- Ken Thompson
- \When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
- -- Dylan Thomas
- \When someone says "I want a programming language in which I
- need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
- \When the blind lead the blind they will both fall over the cliff.
- -- Chinese proverb
- \When the candles are out all women are fair.
- -- Plutarch
- \When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.
- -- Jon Carroll
- \When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
- -- Hunter S. Thompson
- \When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground.
- -- Old Jewish saying
- [How come there aren't ever any "New Jewish sayings?" Ed.]
- \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 continuously until death do them part.
- -- George Bernard Shaw
- \When we are planning for posterity, we ought to
- remember that virtue is not hereditary.
- -- Thomas Paine
- \When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut.
- \When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly.
- \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
- \When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
- -- Winston Churchill, On formal declarations of war
- \When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by
- asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't
- know the answer either.
- -- Edgar R. Fiedler
- \When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
- -- The Wall Street Journal
- \When you've seen one nuclear war, you've seen them all.
- \Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really".
- -- Dave Parnas
- \Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say
- what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
- -- John Kenneth Galbraith
- \Whether you can hear it or not
- The Universe is laughing behind your back.
- -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
- \While anyone can admit to themselves they were wrong,
- the true test is admission to someone else.
- \While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens,
- ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.
- -- Boccaccio
- \While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.
- \While it may be true that a watched pot never boils, the one
- you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove.
- -- Edward Stevenson
- \While money can't buy happiness, it certainly
- lets you choose your own form of misery.
- \While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position.
- \While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction
- of their correctness never does.
- \While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still
- very reassuring to know that it's still there.
- \Who cares if it doesn't do anything? It was made with our new
- Triple-Iso-Bifurcated-Krypton-Gate-MOS process.
- \Who needs friends when you can sit alone in your room and drink?
- \Who's on first?
- \Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
- \Why are you wasting time reading fortunes?
- \Why be a man when you can be a success?
- -- Bertold Brecht
- \Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until
- we use the ones we have?
- \Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?
- \Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of
- movement unless it was to avoid responsibility with?
- \Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?
- -- Lily Tomlin
- \Why marry a virgin? If she wasn't good enough for
- the rest of them then she isn't good enough for you.
- \Williams and Holland's Law:
- If enough data is collected, anything may be
- proven by statistical methods.
- \Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as
- it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.
- \With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand
- miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and
- still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no
- such thing as progress.
- -- Ransom K. Ferm
- \Wizards do it background &
- \Wombat's Laws of Computer Selection:
- (1) If it doesn't run Unix, forget it.
- (2) Any computer design over 10 years old is obsolete.
- (3) Anything made by IBM is junk. (See number 2)
- (4) The minimum acceptable CPU power for a single user is a
- VAX/780 with a floating point accelerator.
- (5) Any computer with a mouse is worthless.
- -- Rich Kulawiec
- \Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination.
- -- Graffito in a women's restroom
- \Work fascinates me...
- I can sit and watch it for hours.
- \Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
- \Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish
- and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer
- if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and
- and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and
- and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?
- \Writers do it between periods.
- \X-rated movies are all alike...the only thing they
- leave to the imagination is the plot.
- \Xerox does it again and again and again and...
- \Xerox never comes up with anything original.
- \Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall
- fear no evil, for I can string 6 primitive monadic and dyadic operators
- together.
- -- Steve Higgins
- \Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context.
- \Yes, but every time I try to see things your way, I get a headache.
- \Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably
- still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
- -- Snoopy
- \Yield to Temptation...it may not pass your way again.
- -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
- \You are heading for head-stone for sure.
- \You are just the kind of bad food some monsters like to digest.
- \You are not drunk if you lie under the table. When you
- no longer order from there, then you are drunk.
- \You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
- \You are without a doubt a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief,
- a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking,
- pimping, pocketpicking, thrice double-damned, no-good son-of-a-bitch.
- \You can create your own opportunities this week.
- Blackmail a senior executive.
- \You can find sympathy, in the dictionary, right near shit and suicide.
- \You can get a genuine Amulet of Yendor by doing the following:
- -- more --
- \You can get more of what you want with a kind word and
- a gun than you can with just a kind word.
- -- Bumper Sticker
- \You can learn many things from children.
- How much patience you have, for instance.
- -- Franklin P. Jones
- \You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular.
- \You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
- \You can't carve your way to success without cutting remarks.
- \You can't get rid of a cursed plate mail with a can-opener.
- \You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
- -- Steven Wright
- \You can't teach people to be lazy --
- either they have it, or they don't.
- -- Dagwood Bumstead
- \You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
- \You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.
- \You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
- \You come out of a woman and you spend the rest
- of your life trying to get back inside.
- -- Heathcote Williams
- \You could get a new lease on life -- if only you didn't need the first
- and last month in advance.
- \You don't have to be crazy to live in this planet -- but it helps.
- \You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable
- and trustworthy. A pity that it's totally undeserved.
- \You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex.
- \You have the capacity to learn from mistakes. You'll learn a lot today.
- \You hear the fortune cookie's hissing!
- \You humans are all alike.
- \You know the great thing about TV? If something important happens
- anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night,
- you can always change the channel.
- -- Jim Ignatowski
- \You know you've been spending too much time on the computer when your
- friend misdates a check, and you suggest adding a "++" to fix it.
- \You may be recognized soon. Hide.
- \You never know how many friends you have until
- you rent a house on the beach.
- \You offend Shai-Hulud by sheathing your crysknife without having
- drawn blood.
- \You should emulate your heros, but don't
- carry it too far. Especially if they are dead.
- \You should never bet against anything in science
- at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1.
- -- Ernest Rutherford
- \You should never wear your best trousers when
- you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
- -- Henrik Ibsen
- \You think Oedipus had a problem -- Adam was Eve's mother.
- \You tread upon my patience.
- -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
- \You will be Told about it Tomorrow. Go Home and Prepare Thyself.
- \You worry too much about your job. Stop it.
- You're not paid enough to worry.
- \You're going into the morgue at midnight????
- \You're never too old to become younger.
- -- Mae West
- \You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
- -- Dean Martin
- \You're not my type. For that matter, you're not even my species!!
- \You've been leading a dog's life. Stay off the furniture.
- \Your fault -- core dumped
- \Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.
- \Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
- \Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor:
- People are always available for work in the past tense.
- \f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd.
- \f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmn.
- \gy-ro-scope: A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and
- also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpindicular to each
- other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two
- mutually perpindicular axes results from application of torque to the
- other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus
- offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any
- torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.
- -- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
- \Moses, returning from the mountain, spoke to his people:
- "The good news is we got them down to ten."
- "The bad news is that adultery is still one of them."
- \We have them just where they want us.
- -- James T. Kirk
- \"I'd rather have Lockheed deliver the mail than ride around in
- a plane built by the post office."
- \"I figure I'm pretty good with the bullshit but I love listening
- to an expert. Keep talking."
- \"Money can't buy happiness but it can certainly rent it for
- a couple of hours."
- \"The meek shall inherit the Earth after we're done with it."
- \"Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life down here."
- -- James T. Kirk
- \Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from
- mediocre minds.
- -- Albert Einstein
- \Time flies when you don't know what you're doing.
- \Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.
- \We are the people our parents warned us about.
- \Don't take life too seriously. You'll never get out of it alive.
- \Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself.
- \How much sin can I get away with and still go to heaven?
- \There is intelligent life on Earth, but I'm just visiting.
- \Power means not having to respond.
- \Never kick a man unless he's down.
- \We should forgive our enemies, but only after they've been taken
- out and shot.
- \The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that
- you've got it made.
- \I'm not as dumb as you look.
- \I'd like to help you out. Which way did you come in?
- \Everyone needs belief in something. I believe I'll have another beer.
- \How can I love you if you won't lie down?
- \You can find sympathy between shit and syphilis in the
- dictionary.
- \To err is human. To forgive is unusual.
- \Only those who attempt the absurd can acheive the impossible.
- \I'm not going deaf. I'm ignoring you.
- \I'm the person your mother warned you about.
- \How can I tell you I love you when you're sitting on my face?
- \God is dead and I want His job.
- \I can tell you're lying. Your lips are moving.
- \Our parents were never our age.
- \Nothing was ever accomplished by a reasonable person.
- \Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
- \In the country of the blind the one eye'd man is king.
- \He who laughs last has not been told the terrible truth.
- \It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
- \When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad I'm better.
- -- Mae West
- \I'm really enjoying not talking to you, so let's not talk again
- real soon, okay?
- \He who laughs last didn't get the joke.
- \Obviously the only rational solution to your problem is suicide.
- \Death is the greatest kick of all. That's why they save it for last.
- \I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.
- \I think I could fall madly in bed with you.
- \I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with
- the lost.
- \Yesterday was the deadline on all complaints.
- \Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.
- \I worship the ground that awaits you.
- \The future isn't what it used to be.
- \I wish you were a beer.
- \I want to live forever or die in the attempt.
- \Love means telling you why you're sorry.
- \Love your enemies. It'll make 'em crazy.
- \Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
- \I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
- \I'm having a party in my pants. Want to come?
- \Why be difficult when with a bit of effort you can be impossible?
- \Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
- \A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine.
- \Bureocrats do not change the course of the ship of state. They
- merely adjust the compass.
- \You can get more with a kind word and a gun than
- you can with a kind word.
- \Don't think of organ donations as giving up part of yourself to
- keep a total stranger alive. It's really a total stranger giving
- up almost all of themselves to keep part of you alive.
- \Drink wet cement: Get Stoned.
- \Kite fliers keep it up longer.
- \If you don't know what you're doing, do it neatly.
- \An easily understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a
- complex, incomprehesable truth.
- \You have a right to your opinions. I just don't want to hear them.
- \Eat a live toad in the morning and nothing worse will happen to
- you for the rest of the day.
- \Nuke the whales
- \Join the Army: travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting,
- unusual people and kill them.
- \We'll get along fine as soon as you realize I'm God.
- \Life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less
- shit you have to eat.
- \I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference.
- \Those of you who think they know everything are very annoying to
- those of us who do.
- \It's not that you and I are so clever, but that the others are
- such fools.
- \If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
- \I'm not cynical. Just experianced.
- \The torture never stops.
- \Ignore alien orders.
- \I know you think you uderstood what I said, but what you heard
- was not what I meant.
- \I don't have a drinking problem.
- I drink
- I get drunk
- I fall down
- No problem
- \It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.
- \I'm for lust.
- \Bullshit Detector. When alarm sounds, please re-engage your brain.
- \There are no errors in this book, except this one.
- \Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it: Satie
- \An advertisement offers to make your fortune, instructions sent on
- receipt of $1. The reply is -- "Do as we do."
- \Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious: Ionesco
- \In principle I am against principles: Tristan Tzara
- \All generalizations are dangerous, even this one: Dumas fils
- \The golden rule is that there are no golden rules: G. B. Shaw
- \Every exit is an entry somewhere else: Tom Stoppard
- \Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.
- -- Karl Marx
- \The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground: Buddha
- \The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on
- the flyswatter: Lichtenberg
- \At the moment of meeting, the parting begins.
- \God loves everyone in the world who doesn't love himself. Does God love
- God?: Teilhard de Chardin
- \I'm still an atheist, thank God: Luis Bunuel
- \Substance is one of the greatest of our illusions: Eddington
- \No light, but rather darkness visible: Milton
- \What is the sound of one hand clapping?: Zen Buddhism
- \The handleless axe without a blade: Lichtenberg
- \What happens to your fist when you open your hand?: Zen Buddhism
- \What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?: Bertolt Brecht
- \My reputation grows with every failure: Shaw
- \The exception proves the rule.
- \Shop sign: We buy anything saleable.
- \A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.
- \If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense
- confusion?: Seng-Ts'an
- \The more you know, the less you think you know.
- \Mr. X was disappointed to find no suggestion box in the clubhouse
- because he would like to put a suggestion in it about having one.
- \That mythical island, whose inhabitants earned a precarious living by
- taking in each other's washing: Lewis Carroll
- \"The candidate had allowed television cameras into his hotel suite to
- watch him watch television."
- \Where everyone wants to come as early as possible, then necessarily by
- far the larger part must come too late: Lichtenberg
- \Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em and little
- fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum: Augustus de Morgan
- \The hour which gives us life begins to take it away: Seneca
- \Who shall stand guard over the guards themselves?: Juvenal
- \Living means dying: Engels
- \What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? An
- inconceivable disturbance.
- \All modern thought is permeated by the idea of thinking the unthinkable:
- Michel Foucault
- \A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms: George Wald
- \The chicken was the egg's idea of getting more eggs: Samuel Butler
- \The day is the same length as anything that is the same length as it:
- Lewis Carroll
- \Hasten slowly: Suetonius
- \Achilles cannot defeat the tortoise if he thinks of space and time: Paul
- Valery
- \To endure what is unendurable is true endurance: Japanese proverb
- \It is in changing that things find repose: Heraclitus
- \Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: Alphonse Karr
- \There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy: Swift
- \We can't leave the haphazard to chance: N.F. Simpson
- \When Po-chang was asked about seeking for the Buddha nature: "It's much
- like riding an ox in search of the ox"
- \He spent his last shilling on a purse.
- \I have always taken the tips of my fingers for the beginning of her
- hair: Edmond Jabes
- \He lifted himself up by his own bootstraps.
- \The book above all others in the world which should be forbidden is a
- catalogue of forbidden books: Lichtenberg
- \It is no good trying to teach people who need to be taught: Aleister
- Crowley
- \A solipsist is like the man who gave up turning round because whatever
- he saw was always in front of him: Ernst Mach
- \A banker will lend you money only if you can prove you don't need it.
- \What are husbands for, but to keep our mistresses?: George Moore
- \Extremes meet: Louis-Sebastien Mercier
- \A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows: John
- Hall Wheelock
- \"Extremes meet," as the whiting said with its tail in its mouth: Thomas
- Hood
- \One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need money
- the most, are the very ones that never have it: Finley Peter Dunne
- \A poor man sells his saucepan to buy something to put in it.
- \If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make
- a wonderful living: Yiddish proverb
- \The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food:
- Russian proverb
- \The dearer a thing is, the cheaper as a general rule we sell it: Samuel
- Butler
- \Money costs too much: Lew Archer
- \The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has
- got, and not till then: William Ralph Inge
- \Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine: Louis
- Aragon
- \You get the best view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower, because you can't
- see the Eiffel Tower from there.
- \No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one: Nathaniel Hawthorne
- \Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he awoke, if
- he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now
- dreamt he was a man.
- \Coming events cast their shadows before.
- \You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are
- continually flowing on: Heraclitus
- \Tomorrow never comes.
- \You cannot step into the same river once: Cratylus
- \The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity:
- Miguel de Unamuno
- \The superfluous, a very necessary thing: Voltaire
- \Only the ephemeral is of lasting value: Ionesco
- \Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold:
- Thomas Hobbes
- \The thing that astonished him was that cats should have two holes cut in
- their coat exactly at the place where their eyes are: Lichtenberg
- \We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it: Dwight D.
- Eisenhower
- \Isn't the best defence always a good attack?: Ovid
- \Another victory like that and we are done for: Pyrrhus
- \Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy: N.F.Simpson
- \He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser:
- Nietzsche
- \The child is father of the man: Wordsworth
- \The clan of those without a clan: Robert Lebel
- \Youth is wasted on the young: G.B. Shaw
- \"My friend Jones will vouch for me." "How do we know that he can be
- trusted?" "Oh, I assure you he can."
- \Can't see the wood for the trees.
- \P.S. If you don't receive this letter, it must have miscarried:
- therefore I beg you to write and let me know.
- \Can't see for looking.
- \Trying to define humour is one of the definitions of humour: Saul
- Steinberg
- \The biter bit.
- \When independence of principle consists in having no principle on which
- to depend: C.C. Colton
- \They must have the defects of their qualities: Balzac
- \"Be spontaneous!"
- \Who is worse shod than the shoemaker's wife?
- \In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he
- learns most: Epicurus
- \Boredom -- the desire for desires: Leo Tolstoy
- \A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears:
- Montaigne
- \Many would be cowards if they had courage enough: Thomas Fuller
- \The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness: Daniel
- Boorstin
- \The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it: Wilde
- \Work expands to fill the time available for its completion: Parkinson's
- Law
- \Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so: J.S. Mill
- \The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan
- \Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow: Wilde
- \I'm saying nothing and I'm saying it: John Cage
- \Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little: Epicurus
- \He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a
- pit: Ernest Bramah
- \A ring is a hole with a rim round it.
- \The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between
- the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides: Schnabel
- \You were conspicuous by your absence: Lord John Russell
- \There is nothing like worrying about the bowels opening to stop them
- opening: Dr. Clark Kennedy
- \Bad is never good until worse happens: Danish proverb
- \Life imitates art far more than art imitates life: Wilde
- \Art lies in concealing art.
- \How to paint a perfect painting -- make yourself perfect and then just
- paint naturally: Robert M. Pirsig
- \Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth: Picasso
- \An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed:
- Constable
- \In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false:
- Degas
- \"When you say `hill'," the Queen interrupted, "I could show you hills,
- in comparison, with which you'd call that a valley": Carroll
- \Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth: Alan
- Watts
- \It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
- \To Wilde, a book on Italian literature showed a "want of knowledge that
- must be the result of years of study."
- \If you turn on the light quickly enough you can see what the dark looks
- like.
- \There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire
- absence of thought: Samuel Butler
- \The field cannot well be seen from within the field: Emerson
- \No region can include itself as well: Whitehead
- \Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed:
- Southern Californian Oracle
- \How can you tell the dance from the dancer?
- \Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is
- hard to discover and hard to attain: Heraclitus
- \The French for London is Paris: Ionesco
- \What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? -- They are the
- _irrefutable_ errors of mankind: Nietzsche
- \God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump: Pascal
- \If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I
- am not I, and you are not you: Hassidic rabbi
- \Consciousness is that which it is not, and is not that which it is:
- Sartre
- \If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I
- think I don't know: R.D. Laing
- \If you think you're free, there's no escape possible: Baba Ram Dass
- \The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else
- of the same name: Aldous Huxley
- \It was always thus; and even if 'twere not, 'twould inevitably have been
- always otherwise: Dean Lattimer
- \The word "dog" does not bite: William James
- \Much that is inexpressible would be hardly worth expression, if one
- could express it: Lichtenberg
- \It is as if I were attempting to trace with the point of a pencil the
- shadow of the tracing pencil: Nathaniel West
- \In Leningrad freezing point is called melting point.
- \Include me out: Sam Goldwyn
- \This is the beginning of the end: Talleyrand
- \Abstainer -- a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying
- himself a pleasure: Ambrose Bierce
- \Less is more: Robert Browning
- \The little I know, I owe to my ignorance: Sacha Guitry
- \"I'm so glad I don't like asparagus," said the small girl to a
- sympathetic friend. "Because if I did, I should have to eat it --and I
- can't bear it!": Lewis Carroll
- \ A young and studious monk went his teacher and said,
- "Teach me all about the Buddha nature." His teacher pushed him
- on the ground. The next day the student returned to his teacher,
- saying, "I am wiser today than yesterday. Teach me about the
- Buddha nature." The teacher clobbered him again.
- This went on for days until finally the young student
- could stand it no more. He tearfully left the monastery and
- went back to his temple at home. There he told the chief monk what
- had happened. The chief monk said, "You are really stupid! That
- monk was kinder to you than a grandmother!"
- The young student went back to the monastery, and found
- his teacher. He threw the teacher on the ground. His teacher got
- up and said, "Now I will teach you about the Buddha nature."
- \ One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out
- of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have
- gotten out of the net, I'll tell you."
- \ A monk said to Joshu, "Your stone bridge is widely
- renowned, but coming here I find only a heap of rocks."
- Joshu said, "You see only the stones and not the
- bridge."
- The monk said, "What is the bridge?"
- Joshu said, "What do you think we are walking on?"
- \ Some professors asked a monk to lecture to them on
- spiritual matters. The monk ascended a podium, struck it once
- with his stick, and descended. The academics were dumb-
- founded. The monk asked them, "Do you understand what I have
- told you?" One professor said, "I do not understand."
- The monk said, "I have concluded my lecture."
- \ A student said to the chief monk, "Help me to
- pacify my mind!"
- The chief monk said, "Bring your mind over here and
- I will pacify it."
- The student said, "But I don't know where my mind is!"
- The monk replied, "Then I have already pacified it."
- \ A monk said to Joshu, "I have just entered this
- monastery. Please teach me."
- "Have you eaten your breakfast?" Joshu asked.
- "Yes, I have," replied the student.
- "Then you had better wash your bowl."
- \ A monk asked Nansen, "Is there any great spiritual
- teaching that has not been preached to the people?"
- Nansen said, "There is."
- "What is the truth that has not been taught?"
- "Nothing," Nansen replied.
- \ A young monk asked his teacher, "What is the true
- spiritual nature of life?"
- His teacher picked up a bowl of water and threw it
- in the student's face, saying "Go wash out your mouth!"
- \ If you meet a person on the path, do not greet him
- with words or silence.
- How will you greet him?
- \ A monk, taking a bamboo stick, said to the people,
- "If you call this a stick, you fall into the trap of words,
- but if you do not call it a stick, you contradict facts.
- So what do you call it?"
- At that time a monk in the assembly came forth.
- He snatched the stick, broke it in two, and threw the pieces
- across the room.
- \ A monk sat with his three students. He took out his
- fan and placed it in front of him, saying, "Without calling
- it a fan, tell me what this is."
- The first said, "You couldn't call it a slop-bucket."
- The master poked him with his stick.
- The second picked up the fan and fanned himself. He too
- was rewarded with the stick.
- The third opened the fan, laid a piece of cake on it,
- and served it to his teacher. The teacher said, "Eat your cake."
- \ The chief monk at the monastery was looking for someone
- to replace him. He called the monks together and placed in front
- of them a water bottle. He said, "Without calling this a water
- bottle, tell me what it is."
- One monk said, "You couldn't call it a block of wood."
- Another poured himself a drink.
- Just then the cook walked into the room and kicked the water
- bottle over. The cook was made head of the monastery.
- \ Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream.
- One said to the other, "I wish I were a fish. They are
- so happy." The other replied, "How do you know whether
- fish are happy or not? You're not a fish." The first
- said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether or
- not I know how fish feel?"
- \ The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said,
- "I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I
- train myself, so as to find it?"
- Said the master, "There is no mind, so you cannot put
- it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself
- for it."
- "If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find, why
- do you have these monks gather before you every day to study
- Zen and train themselves for this study?"
- "But I haven't an inch of room here," said the
- master, "so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue,
- so how could I call them together or teach them?"
- "Oh, how can you talk like this?" said Doko.
- "But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can
- I lie to you?"
- Then Doko said sadly, "I cannot follow you. I cannot
- understand you."
- "I cannot understand myself," said the master.
- \ Joshu asked the teacher Nansen, "What is the True Way?"
- Nansen answered, "Every way is the true Way."
- Joshu asked, "Can I study it?"
- Nansen answered, "The more you study, the further from
- the Way."
- Joshu asked, "If I don't study it, how can I know it?"
- Nansen answered, "The Way does not belong to things seen:
- nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to
- things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find
- yourself on it, open yourself as wide as the sky."
- \ A master was asked the question, "What is the Way?" by a
- curious monk.
- "It is right before your eyes," said the master.
- "Why do I not see it for myself?"
- "Because you are thinking of yourself."
- "What about you: do you see it?"
- "So long as you see double, saying 'I don't,' and
- 'you do,' and so on, your eyes are clouded," said the
- master.
- "When there is neither 'I' nor 'you,' can one see it?"
- "When there is neither 'I' nor 'you,' who is the one
- that wants to see it?"
- \ Has a dog a Buddha-nature?
- This is the most serious question of all.
- If you say 'yes' or 'no'
- You lose your own Buddha-nature.
- \ A wandering monk saw on his travels a gigantic old oak
- tree standing in front of the door of a monastery. Under it sat
- the chief monk. The traveler called out to him, "This is a useless
- tree! If you wanted to make a ship, it would soon rot. If you
- wanted to make tools, they would soon break. You can't do anything
- useful with this tree, and that's why it has become so old."
- The chief monk replied, "Keep your mouth shut! What do
- you know about it? You compare this tree to your cultivated trees;
- your orange, pear and apple trees, and all others that bear fruit.
- Even before they can ripen their fruit, people attack and violate
- them. Their branches are broken, their wings are torn. Their
- own gifts bring harm to them, and they cannot live out their
- natural span. If this tree had been useful in any way, would it
- have ever reached this size? You useless mortal man, what do you
- know about useless trees?"
- \ Two monks went fishing in an electron river. The
- first monk drew out his network, and out flopped a hacker.
- The second monk cried, "The poor hacker! How can it live
- outside of the network?" The first monk said, "When you
- have learned to live outside the network, then you will know."
- \ What is the vector which is orthogonal to itself?
- \A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen
- objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer
- scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration
- needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects...
- \ THE STORY OF CREATION
- or
- THE MYTH OF URK
-
- In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,
- and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
- was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be
- registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried;
- and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data
- Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening
- and there was morning, one interrupt...
-
- -- Rico Tudor
- \A computer, to print out a fact,
- Will divide, multiply, and subtract.
- But this output can be
- No more than debris,
- If the input was short of exact.
- -- Gigo
- \Brooke's Law:
- Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn
- fool discovers something which either abolishes the
- system or expands it beyond recognition.
- \Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
- -- Ambrose Bierce
- \Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
- account be allowed to do the job.
- -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- \"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
- -- Ashleigh Brilliant
- \"You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable
- proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do."
- \Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may
- revitalize the corner saloon.
- \All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own
- importance.
- \Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be
- taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.
- \Everyting should be built top-down, except the first time.
- \"If you have to hate, hate gently"
- \Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!
- \After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
- on the bench.
- \A bather whose clothing was strewed
- By breezes that left her quite nude,
- Saw a man come along
- And, unless I'm quite wrong,
- You expected this line to be lewd.
- \A beat schizophrenic said, "Me?
- I am not I, I'm a tree."
- But another, more sane,
- Shouted, "I'm a Great Dane!"
- And covered his pants leg with pee.
- \A mathematician named Hall
- Has a hexahedronical ball,
- And the cube of its weight
- Times his pecker's, plus eight
- Is his phone number -- give him a call..
- \Once sat herself down on a molehill.
- A curious mole
- Nosed into her hole --
- Ms. Vogel's ok, but the mole's ill.
- \A pretty young maiden from France
- Decided she'd "just take a chance."
- She let herself go
- For an hour or so
- And now all her sisters are aunts.
- \A remarkable race are the Persians;
- They have such peculiar diversions.
- They make love the whole day
- In the usual way
- And save up the nights for perversions.
- \A team playing baseball in Dallas
- Called the umpire blind out of malice.
- While this worthy had fits
- The team made eight hits
- And a girl in the bleachers named Alice.
- \A wanton young lady from Wimley
- Reproached for not acting quite primly
- Said, "Heavens above!
- I know sex isn't love,
- But it's such an entrancing facsimile."
- \A wanton young lady from Wimley
- Reproached for not acting quite primly
- Said, "Heavens above!
- I know sex isn't love,
- But it's such an entrancing facsimile."
- \A widow who fancied a man some
- Was diddled three times in a hansome.
- When she clamored for more
- Her young man became sore
- And exclaimed "My name's Simpson not Samson."
- \A worried young man from Stamboul
- Founds lots of red spots on his tool.
- Said the doctor, a cynic,
- "Get out of my clinic;
- Just wipe off the lipstick, you fool!"
- \An architect fellow named Yoric
- Could, when feeling euphoric,
- Display for selection
- Three kinds of erection --
- Corinthian, ionic, and doric.
- \He hated to mend, so young Ned
- Called in a cute neighbor instead.
- Her husband said, "Vi,
- When you stitched up his torn fly,
- Did you have to bite off the thread?"
- \In the Garden of Eden sat Adam,
- Massaging the bust of his madam,
- He chuckled with mirth,
- For he knew that on earth,
- There were only two boobs and he had 'em.
- \Said a horny young girl from Milpitas,
- "My favorite sport is coitus."
- But a fullback from State
- Made her period late,
- And now she has athlete's fetus
- \Said a swinging young chick named Lyth
- Whose virtue was largely a myth,
- "Try as hard as I can,
- I can't find a man
- That it's fun to be virtuous with."
- \My back aches, my pussy is sore;
- I simply can't fuck any more;
- I'm covered with sweat,
- And you haven't come yet,
- And my God, it's a quarter to four!
- \There once was a couple named Kelley,
- Who lived their life belly to belly.
- Because in their haste
- They used Library Paste,
- Instead of Petroleum Jelly.
- \There once was a freshman named Lin,
- Whose tool was as thin as a pin,
- A virgin named Joan
- From a bible belt home,
- Said "This won't be much of a sin."
- \There once was a hacker named Ken
- Who inherited truckloads of Yen
- So he built him some chicks
- Of silicon chips
- And hasn't been heard from since then.
- \There once was a lady from Exeter,
- So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
- One was even so brave
- As to take out and wave
- The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.
- \There once was a plumber from Leigh,
- Who was plumbing his maid by the sea,
- Said she, "Please stop plumbing,
- I think someone's coming!"
- Said he, "Yes I know love, it's me."
- \There once was a queen of Bulgaria
- Whose bush had grown hairier and hairier,
- Till a prince from Peru
- Who came up for a screw
- Had to hunt for her cunt with a terrier.
- \There once was a Scot named McAmeter
- With a tool of prodigious diameter.
- It was not the size
- That cause such surprise;
- 'Twas his rhythm -- iambic pentameter.
- \There once was a young man named Gene
- Who invented a screwing machine
- Concave and convex
- It served either sex
- And it played with itself in between.
- \There was a bluestocking in Florence
- Wrote anti-sex pamphlets in torrents,
- Till a Spanish grandee,
- Got her off with his knee,
- And she burned all her works with abhorrence.
- \There was a gay countess of Bray,
- And you may think it odd when I say,
- That in spite of high station,
- Rank and education,
- She always spelled cunt with a "k".
- \There was a young fellow named Bliss
- Whose sex life was strangely amiss,
- For even with Venus
- His recalcitrant penis
- Would never do better than t
- h
- i
- s
- .
- \There was a young girl from Hong Kong
- Whose cervical cap was a gong.
- She said with a yell,
- As a shot rang her bell,
- "I'll give you a ding for a dong!"
- \There was a young girl named Sapphire
- Who succumbed to her lover's desire.
- She said, "It's a sin,
- But now that it's in,
- Could you shove it a few inches higher?"
- \There was a young girl of Angina
- Who stretched catgut across her vagina.
- From the love-making frock
- (With the proper sized cock)
- Came Tocata and Fugue in D minor.
- \There was a young girl of Darjeeling
- Who could dance with such exquisite feeling
- There was never a sound
- For miles around
- Save of fly-buttons hitting the ceiling.
- \There was a young lad name of Durcan
- Who was always jerkin' his gherkin.
- His father said, "Durcan!
- Stop jerkin' your gherkin!
- Your gherkin's for ferkin', not jerkin'.
- \There was a young lady from Maine
- Who claimed she had men on her brain.
- But you knew from the view,
- As her abdomen grew,
- It was not on her brain that he'd lain.
- \There was a young lady named Clair
- Who possessed a magnificent pair;
- At least so I thought
- Till I saw one get caught
- On a thorn, and begin losing air.
- \There was a young lady named Hall,
- Wore a newspaper dress to a ball.
- The dress caught on fire
- And burned her entire
- Front page, sporting section, and all.
- \There was a young lady named Twiss
- Who said she thought fucking a bliss,
- For it tickled her bum
- And caused her to come
- .siht ekil gniyl ylbatrofmoc elihW
- \There was a young lady of Norway
- Who hung by her toes in a doorway.
- She said to her beau
- "Just look at me Joe
- I think I've discovered one more way."
- \There was a young man from Bel-Aire
- Who was screwing his girl on the stair,
- But the banister broke
- So he doubled his stroke
- And finished her off in mid-air.
- \There was a young man named Crockett
- Whose balls got caught in a socket.
- His wife was a bitch,
- And she threw the switch,
- As Crockett went off like a rocket.
- \There was a young man of Cape Horn
- Who wished he had never been born,
- And he wouldn't have been
- If his father had seen
- That the end of the rubber was torn.
- \There was a young man of St. John's
- Who wanted to bugger the swans.
- But the loyal hall porter
- Said, "Pray take my daughter!
- Those birds are reserved for the dons."
- \There was a young whore from kaloo
- Who filled her vagina with glue.
- She said with a grin,
- "If they pay to get in,
- They can pay to get out again too!"
- \There was an old man of the port
- Whose prick was remarkably short.
- When he got into bed,
- The old woman said,
- "This isn't a prick; it's a wart!"
- \There was an old pirate named Bates
- Who was learning to rhumba on skates.
- He fell on his cutlass
- Which rendered him nutless
- And practically useless on dates.
- \ ``It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is
- sure to find out next morning it was someone else.'' --
- Rogers
- \ ``If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.'' --
- Chekhov
- \ ``The most happy marriage I can picture would be the
- union of a deaf man to a blind woman.'' -- Coleridge
- \ ``Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as
- happy in the arms of a chambermaid as a duchess.'' --
- Dr. Johnson
- \ ``If a man hears much that a woman says, she is not
- beautiful.'' -- Haskins
- \ ``A man does not look behind the door unless he has
- stood there himself.'' -- Du Bois
- \ ``A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of
- the house.'' -- Moliere
- \ ``Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a
- confusion of the real with the ideal never goes
- unpunished.'' -- Goethe
- \ ``In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.''
- -- Butler
- \ ``A woman may very well form a friendship with a man,
- but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little
- physical antipathy.'' -- Nietzsche
- \ ``Men who cherish for women the highest respect are
- seldom popular with them.'' -- author unknown
- \ ``Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us
- from achieving them.'' -- Dumas
- \ ``Nature has given women so much power that the law has
- very wisely given them little.'' -- Dr. Johnson
- \ ``The great question... which I have not been able to
- answer... is, "What does a woman want?'' -- Freud
- \ ``Home life as we understand it is no more natural to
- us than a cage is to a cockatoo.'' -- Shaw
- \ ``Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside
- desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get
- out.'' -- Montaigne
- \ ``For a male and female to live continuously together
- is... biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural
- condition.'' -- Robert Briffault
- \ ``Marriage is low down, but you spend the rest of your
- life paying for it.'' -- Baskins
- \ A wedding is a funeral where a man smells his own
- flowers.
- \ A man is not complete until he is married -- then he is
- finished.
- \ Marriage is a rest period between romances.
- \ Marriage is the sole cause of divorce.
- \ Marriage is a trip between Niagra Falls and Reno.
- \ Marriage is an institution -- but who wants to live in
- one?
- \ Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of
- person your spouse would have really preferred.
- \ Marriage is the triumph of imagination over
- intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope
- over experience.
- \ Marriage is not a word; it is a sentence.
- \ Trust everybody ... then cut the cards.
- \Two wrongs are only the beginning.
- \If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
- \To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your
- principles.
- \Exceptions prove the rule ... and wreck the budget.
- \Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.
- \Quality assurance dosen't.
- \The tough part of a Data Processing Manager's job is that users don't
- really know what they want, but they know for certain what they don't
- want.
- \Exceptions always outnumber rules.
- \To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is
- research.
- \No one is listening until you make a mistake.
- \He who hesitates is probably right.
- \The ideal resume will turn up one day after the position is filled.
- \If somthing is confidential, it will be left in the copier machine.
- \One child is not enough, but two children are far too many.
- \A clean tie attracts the soup of the day.
- \The hardness of the butter is in direct proportion to the softness of
- the butter.
- \The bag that breaks is the one with the eggs.
- \When there are sufficient funds in the checking account, checks take
- two weeks to clear. When there are insufficient funds, checks clear
- overnight.
- \The book you spent $20.95 for today will come out in paperback tomorrow.
- \The more an item costs, the farther you have to send it for repairs.
- \You never want the one you can afford.
- \Never ask the barber if you need a haircut or a salesman if his is a good
- price.
- \If it says "one size fits all," it dosen't fit anyone.
- \You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
- \The colder the X-ray table, the more of your body is required on it.
- \Love letters, business contracts and money due you always arrive three
- weeks late, whereas junk mail arrives the day it was sent.
- \When you drop change at a vending machine, the pennies will fall nearby,
- while all other coins will roll out of sight.
- \The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.
- \Experience is somthing you don't get until just after you need it.
- \Life can be only understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
- \Interchangable parts won't.
- \No matter which way you go, it's uphill and against the wind.
- \If enough data is collected, anyghing may be proven by statistical
- methods.
- \Work is accomplished by those employees who have not reached their
- level of incompetence.
- \Progress is made on alternative Fridays.
- \No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in
- session.
- \The hidden flaw never remains hidden.
- \As soon as the stewardess serves the coffee, the airline rencounters
- turbulence.
- \For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
- \People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either
- of them being made.
- \A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
- \When reviewing your notes for a test, the most important ones will be
- illegible.
- \A free agent is anything but.
- \The least experienced fisherman always catches the biggest fish.
- \Never do card tricks for the group you play poker with.
- \The one item you want is never the one on sale.
- \The telephone will ring when you are outside the door, fumbling for your
- keys.
- \If only one price can be obtained for a quotation, the price will be
- unreasonable.
- \"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting."-Alan Dean Foster "To the
- Vanishing Point"
- \The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe:
- \All my life I said I wanted to be someone...I can see now that
- I should have been more specific.
- \"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -Bill Davidsen
- \"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
- 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
- that the world is flat!" - anon
- \ "Women and cats do as they dammed well please.
- Men and dogs had best learn to live with it..."
-
- Alan Holbrook
- \"I'm at the corner of Walk and Don't Walk...."
- \ Two obviously high-class old ladies are strolling down a city
- street when they run across a grizzled, ragged old derelict
- lying drunk in the gutter, covered with garbage, sewer water
- running all over him. "Hmmmph," sniffs one of the old ladies
- haughtily. "Cleanliness is next to godliness. William Shakespeare!"
-
- The drunk opens one yellowed, rheumy old eye, stares at her
- balefully, and replies, "Fuck you. Tennessee Williams..."
- \A retired dentist who loves to fish. "Open wide," he mutters to
- the unseen fish as he waits for a tug on the line. "Now bite down.
- This may sting just a little bit."
- \"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." -- Sigmund Freud
- \"a woman is only a woman,
- but a good cigar is a smoke"
- \War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of
- things. The decayed and degraded state of
- moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that
- Nothing is worth war is much worse. The per-
- son who has nothing for which he is willing
- to fight, nothing which is more important
- than his own personal safety, is a miserable
- creature and has no chance of being free unless
- made and kept so by the exertions of better
- men than himself.
- --- John Stewart Mill
- \Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You
- should do your duty in all things. You can never do more, you should
- never wish to do less.
- General Robert E. Lee
- \We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of
- no confusion.
- -- Ronald Graham, "Rudiments of Ramsey Theory"
- \ I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance
- in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a
- most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted,
- baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a
- fricassee, or a ragout.
- -- Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
- \ Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had
- become socially correct for girls.
- -- Tom Wolfe, "Bonfire of the Vanities"
- \He, in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have
- ravished her, if she had not, by a timely compliance, prevented him.
- -- Henry Fielding, "Jonathan Wild"
- \In the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, it's often useful to have a
- nice, solid piece of wood in your hands.
- -- Ian Faith, manager of Spinal Tap
- \All obvious theorems are true.
- -- Pommersheim's Principle
- All true theorems are obvious.
- -- Keane's Kriterion
- \Ya gotta feel sorry for all them convicts in New Hampshire, stampin'
- out license plates that say "Live free or Die."
- -- ???
- \I'm a clown. That's my sole mechanism of defense. Very few people
- will go out of their way to punish a clown.
- -- ???
- \He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains
- a fool forever.
- -- Old Chinese saying
- \ Monty Python
-
- "In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and
- healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to
- the death for it."
- \ Ripping Yarns
-
- "Mind you, not as bad as the night Archie Pettigrew ate some
- sheep's testicles for a bet...God, that bloody sheep kicked him..."
- \"It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of
- gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
- "Hit it."
- \ Pink Panther
-
- "Kato, what is going on in that little yellow brain of yours?"
-
- -- Chief Inspector Clouseau, in reference to a priceless white\
- Steinway piano.
- \ Dave Barry
-
- Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes
- on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists
- and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and
- not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a
- useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter.
- We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is
- second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little
- scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds
- if we felt like it.
- \ The Odd Couple
-
- "A penny for your thoughts?"
- "A dollar for your death."
- \ The Princess Bride
-
- "Inconceivable!"
- "You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think
- it does."
- \ Daffy Duck
-
- "Ho! Ha-ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!"
- --D. Duck
- \"Consequences, shmonsequences! So long as I'm rich!"
- -- Daffy Duck
- \"Mine! Mine! It's all mine!"
- -- D. Duck
- \ Politicians
-
- "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves,
- only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that
- there may be something to them we are missing."
- -- Gamel Abdel Nasser
- \"Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters."
- -- Ross Presser
- \ All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in
- the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find
- that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are
- dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes,
- to make it possible.
- T. E. Lawrence
- _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_
- \Always do what you are afraid to do.
- Emerson
- \"It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more
- true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are
- usually attracted by other things than power. When they
- do act, they think of it as service, which has limits.
- The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insa-
- tiable, implacable."
- David Brin
- _The Postman_
- \H. L. Mencken: "The American public knows what it wants,
- and deserves to get it good and hard."
- \"Hankerin' for trouble, eh? Well I would like--"
- [aside] "I would like? I would like a trip to Europe!"
- "--I would like..."
- --Daffy Duck, "Dripalong Daffy"
- \"Go on! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers
- and gunpowder and cordite!"
- --Daffy Duck, "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!"
- \"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is
- water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries
- and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than
- rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know."
- --Groucho Marx, "Animal Crackers"
- \"Go! And never darken my towels again!"
- --Groucho Marx, "Duck Soup".
- \"Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me.
- I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty."
- --Groucho Marx, "Monkey Business"
- \"The shortest distance between two points is through Hell."
- --Brian Clark
- \There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory,
- decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.
- -Timothy Leary
- \"I'm a great housekeeper. I get divorced. I keep the house".
- -- Zsa Zsa Gabor
- \ James Bond: What do you expect me to talk?
- A.Goldfinger: No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
-
- Goldfinger
- \"Well, now, hold onta yer horses, there, Frazier. I mean, as a
- psychiatrist, isn't it your job to, uh, `seek and uphold the truth'?"
- "Oh, get real, Cliff."
- --- Cheers
- \A witty saying proves nothing.
- --- Voltaire
- \"J. D. Salinger... John Knowles... even James Kirkwood and that
- guy Don Bredes... they've destroyed being an adolescent,Garraty.
- If you're a sixteen-year-old boy, you can't discuss the pains of
- adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off
- sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon."
- Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
- \Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
- \Lunatic Asylum: The place where optimism most flourishes.
- \Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.
- \The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
- \Hartley's First Law:
- You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
- on his back, you've got something.
- \Cole's Law:
- Thinly sliced cabbage.
- \A conservative is one who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
- \Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change.
- \Frisbeetarianism: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the
- on roof and gets stuck.
- \The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
- stupidity of your action.
- \Bacchus: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for
- getting drunk.
- \Winston Churchill: "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats
- look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
- \Harry Bender:
- "Imagine the appeals,
- Dissents and remandments,
- If lawyers had written
- The Ten Commandments"
- \James Thurber: "I think that maybe if women and children
- were in charge we would get somewhere."
- \Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C.": "If man evolved from the
- ape, how come there are still apes around? Some of them were
- given choices."
- \Bill Watterson, cartoonist: "Sometimes I think the surest
- sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe
- is that none of it has tried to contact us."
- \Unidentified Scientist: "After two years of trying,
- scientists at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center have
- managed to get a chimpanzee pregnant." Which proves that no
- task is repugnant to a true scientist.
- \Irv Kupcinet: "What can you say about a society that says
- God is dead and Elvis is alive?"
- \A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
- -- Ben Franklin
- \A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity
- in his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and
- exceptional ability in that particular field."
- \A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"
- "However," replied the Universe,
- "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
- -- Stephen Crane
- \Be self-reliant and your success is assured.
- \For economists, the real world is often a special case.
- \Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if
- one went to Harvard).
- -- Edgar R. Fiedler
- \A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted
- \An ounce of vanity can ruin a ton of merit.
- \Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
- -- Samuel Goldwyn
- \A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
- \The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
- -- Sean O'Casey
- \A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe
- in God.
-