Amiga Tools 5/Amiga Tools 5.iso/tools/developer-tools/assembler-tools/proasm/examples/fortune/fortune.txt

Text File | 1996-04-25 | 12.3 KB | 296 lines

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We're here to give you a computer, not a religion.
- attributed to Bob Pariseau, at the introduction of the Amiga

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...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is
the practice of truth.
- George Jacob Holyoake

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"If you'll excuse me a minute, I'm going to have a cup of coffee."
- broadcast from Apollo 11's LEM, "Eagle", to Johnson Space Center, Houston
  July 20, 1969, 7:27 P.M.

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The meek are contesting the will.

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I'm sick of being trodden on!  The Elder Gods say they can make me a man!
All it costs is my soul!  I'll do it, cuz NOW I'M MAD!!!
- Necronomicomics #1, Jack Herman & Jeff Dee

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"I'm a mean green mother from outer space"
 -- Audrey II, The Little Shop of Horrors

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Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer.
It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who
watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide
people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and
cruelty for that.  On the other hand, I respect and envy the people
who get inspiration from their religions.
- Benjamin Spock

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged
demo.
- Andy Finkel, computer guy

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Being schizophrenic is better than living alone.

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NOWPRINT. NOWPRINT. Clemclone, back to the shadows again.
- The Firesign Theater

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Yes, many primitive people still believe this myth...But in today's
technical vastness of the future, we can guess that surely things were much
different.
- The Firesign Theater

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...this is an awesome sight.  The entire rebel resistance buried under six
million hardbound copies of "The Naked Lunch."
- The Firesign Theater

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We want to create puppets that pull their own strings.
- Ann Marion

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I know engineers.  They love to change things.
- Dr. McCoy

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On our campus the UNIX system has proved to be not only an effective
software tool, but an agent of technical and social change within the
University.
- John Lions (U. of Toronto (?))

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Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack

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"You know why there are so few sophisticated computer terrorists in the
United States?  Because your hackers have so much mobility into the
establishment.  Here, there is no such mobility.  If you have the slightest
bit of intellectual integrity you cannot support the government....  That's
why the best computer minds belong to the opposition."
- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity

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"Every Solidarity center had piles and piles of paper .... everyone was
eating paper and a policeman was at the door.  Now all you have to do is
bend a disk."
- an anonymous member of the outlawed Polish trade union, Solidarity,
commenting on the benefits of using computers in support of their movement

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Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society.
- Mark Twain

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The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.
- Ed Bluestone

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You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.
- Al Capone

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The fountain code has been tightened slightly so you can no longer dip
objects into a fountain or drink from one while you are floating in mid-air
due to levitation.

Teleporting to hell via a teleportation trap will no longer occur if the
character does not have fire resistance.

- README file from the NetHack game

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I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and
tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this
country with being sick and tired.  I'm certainly not.  But I'm
sick and tired of being told that I am.
- Monty Python

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"There is no statute of limitations on stupidity."
-- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.

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There is a time in the tides of men,
Which, taken at its flood, leads on to success.
On the other hand, don't count on it.
- T. K. Lawson

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...we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent
observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
into doubt.
- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer,
  Vol XII No. 2

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This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks -- to have
a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no
wires, no controls.
- Michael Swanwick, "Vacuum Flowers"

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Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our
pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs
and tears.  ...  It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious,
inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us
sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness
and acts that are contrary to habit...
- Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.C.), The Sacred Disease

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Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural
function are no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the brain
now and then and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise.
Actually, of course, this is a working assumption only....It is quite
conceivable that someday the assumption will have to be rejected.  But it is
important also to see that we have not reached that day yet:  the working
assumption is a necessary one and there is no real evidence opposed to it.
Our failure to solve a problem so far does not make it insoluble.  One
cannot logically be a determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in
psychology.
- D. O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior:  A Neuropsychological Theory, 1949

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Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous incarnations or
from a "universal mind" (the repository of all past wisdom and creativity)
not only are implausible but also unfairly demean the stunning achievements
of individual human brains.
- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi
  Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171

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...  Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part
of the person making the claim, not the critic.  It is not the
responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is
it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that
crystals or colored lights never healed anyone.  The skeptic's role is to
point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidcence
and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping
with the accepted body of scientific evidence.  ...
- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215

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"Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist."
- Jean Icbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie

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Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.  There are many examples of
outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but
they prevailed with irrefutable data.  More often, egregious findings that
contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts.  I have
argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness,"
and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of
neuroscience.  Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid
handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena
than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves
offer more plausible alternatives.
- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness: Implications for Psi
   Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171

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It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because
he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
- Voltaire

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I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that
decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to
medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us --
a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole
normal evolution of society.
- Andrew D. White, author, first president of Cornell University, 1896

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The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be....  The
natural disposition is always to believe.  It is acquired wisdom and
experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it
enough.
- Adam Smith

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I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of
tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for:  If
they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go
crude.  I'm a very technical boy.  So I decided to get as crude as possible.
These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even
aspire to crudeness.
- Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson

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However, on religious issures there can be little or no compromise.
There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious
beliefs.  There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than
Jese Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being.
But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf
should be used sparingly.  The religious factions that are growing
throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom.
They are trying to force government leaders into following their position
100 percent.  If you disagree with these religious groups on a
particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of
money or votes or both.  I'm frankly sick and tired of the political
preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be
a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D."  Just who do
they think they are?  And from where do they presume to claim the
right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?  And I am even more angry as
a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who
thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll
call in the Senate.  I am warning them today:  I will fight them every
step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all
Americans in the name of "conservatism."
- Senator Barry Goldwater, from the Congressional Record, September 16, 1981

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"I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell's ass."
- Senator Barry Goldwater, when asked what he thought of Jerry Falwell's
suggestion that all good Christians should be against Sandra Day O'Connor's
nomination to the Supreme Court

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...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers.  No matter how assured we
may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful
inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions.  This is true in religion
as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the
naive.  As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we
might be advised to leave them to heaven.  They will not, unfortunately, do
us the same courtesy.  They attack us and each other, and whatever their
protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear
that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword.  My own belief in
God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge.  My respect
for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most
virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth.  But even well-educated Christians are
frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus
because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record.  Such
ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized
Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it.  Some Christians, alas, resort to
formal lying to obscure such reality.
- Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of
  Conviction", edited by Philip Berman

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Whoa!  My whiffle balls!  My frisbees!  My wire rackets!
I've hit the jackpot!
-- Bart climbs to the roof, ``Bart vs. Thanksgiving''

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