Be thee warned: these are also unconfirmed!
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
-- Collette
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
-- Helen Keller
Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
-- Amelia Earhart
Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going
to show.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
-- Emily Dickinson
Some things ... arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms
and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
-- Gail Goodwin
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
-- Anna Freud
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable
uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words,
we are the hero of our own story.
-- Mary McCarthy
I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting
there, with divine patience -- and laughter.
-- Susan M. Watkins
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites.
Moderation is for monks.
-- Lazarus Long
To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy--and
dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
-- Lazarus Long
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn
old falsehoods.
-- Lazarus Long
Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't
bet, you can't win.
-- Lazarus Long
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why.
Then do it.
-- Lazarus Long
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.
-- Lazarus Long
If man is to vanish from the earth, let him vanish in the moment of creation,
when he is creating something new, opening a path to the tomorrow he may
never see. It is man's nature to reach out to grasp for the tangible on
the way to the intangible.
-- Louis L'Amour
Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.
-- Louis L'Amour
The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the
hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures
I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer
because of the memories of this I was enduring.
-- Louis L'Amour
In these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift ...
How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time,
I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants.
Before this voyage, I always had what I needed--food, shelter, clothing
and companionship--yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn't get
everything I wanted, when people didn't meet my expectations, when a goal
was thwarted, or when I couldn't acquire some material goody. My plight
has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value
each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst or
loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out
of the raft, I see God's face in the smooth waves, His grace in the
dorado's swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from
the sky. I see that all of creation is made in His image. Yet despite
His constant company, I need more. I need more than food and drink. I
need to feel the company of other human spirits. I need to find more than
a moment of tranquility, faith and love. A ship. Yes, I still need a
ship.
-- Steven Callahan
day 27 of 76 days lost at sea
The more fundamental the truth, the more politically incorrect is the
expression thereof.
-- G. Gordon Liddy
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come
nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
-- Han Suyin
One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains
to be done.
-- Marie Curie
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei
Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.
-- Richard Bach
He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and
heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope
of ever behaving "normally."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man
contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
pi seconds is a nanocentury
-- Tom Duff
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place
the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,
the connection of events.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a great deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
-- Lewis Carroll
"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They
seem more afraid of life than death." -- James F. Byrnes
"There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's
brain death, and there's being off the network." -- Guy Almes
Music is like making love. There is a certain charm to good-naturedness and
technical mastery is impressive; but what we all want is passionate virtuosity.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow--
truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot."
-- Neil Gaiman
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." -- Maugham
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live
near him.
-- J. R. R. Tolkein
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
INDIAN PROVERB
Trust in God, but tie your camel first.
-- Mohammed
Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
ANONYMOUS
The most costly of follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation.
-- H. L. Mencken
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting
for us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on
this earth.
-- Ayn Rand
It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity, and fanaticism when they come
separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out,
if only to preserve one's sanity.
-- Adam Dalgliesh
Rule of the Great:
When people you admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
"To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a
certain low passion for middle-class respectability."
-- Oscar Wilde
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as
far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-A. Einstein
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-Winston Churchill
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, thought
Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
-- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
"...The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,
that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves,
that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a
forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for
the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis
Q: Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time
he will pick himself up and continue on.
A: Winston Churchill
Q: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged
to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.
A: Mark Twain
"Sigismundo was backing up, automatically, into the forest of white serenity,
looking for something, *anything*, that might serve as a weapon, and at the
same time he was thinking that it was not fatigue that wore you down
eventually, and not even fear, but just outrage: the sense that the universe
had no *right* to be so pitiless and intractable. You surpass yourself in
courage and willpower, you do what you think you cannot do, and then do more,
and in the back of your mind is the thought always, *Now* I have done enough,
*now* no more will be asked of me. And the universe quietly demonstrates that
it does not give a rat's arse."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles
"There is no knowledge that is not power." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it." -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge
is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." -- Albert Einstein
"Adversity is the first path to Truth." -- Lord Byron
"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always."
-- Albert Schweitzer
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
"Never pray for justice, because you might get some." -- Margaret Atwood
The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often
visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is
rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem
lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope).
- John Bear
- Computer Wimp
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which
came before, but I think very few can be considered to have
achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders
of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget
that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to
that which they destroy.
- Peter Greenaway
You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the
running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later
when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.
- Jonathan Carroll
- Outside the Dog Museum
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is
hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays
itself.
- Johann Sebastian Bach
"This world is a comedy for those who think but a tragedy for those who
feel."
-- Horace Walpole
"....I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
-- Thomas Edison
"Well, I mean, YES idealism, YES the dignity of pure research, YES the pursuit
of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin
to suspect that if there's any REAL truth, it's that the entire multi-
dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch
of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another 10
million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money
and running, then I for one could do with the exercise."
-- One of the white mice in the Hitchhikers' Guide
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
-- Isaac Asimov
Our faith comes in moments ... yet there is a depth in those brief moments
which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from
bad judgment." --Rita Mae Brown
"Comedy is tragedy plus time." --Carol Burnett
Chance favors only the prepared mind.
LOUIS PASTEUR
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
HENRI BERGSON
We separate past and future and find that time is an amalgam
of both. We separate good and evil and find that mind is an
amalgam of both. To understand, we must grasp the whole.
-- Isaac Asimov
The moving finger writes; and having writ
Moves on: not all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
-- The Rubaiyat
We should always be in a state of receptivity to an omnipresent
gift rather than yearning for the attainment of a distant goal.
-- Jean Houston
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the
heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
-- author unknown
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all
subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
-- Justice William O. Douglas
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think.
I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out.
But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last.
I can pretend that lives last longer than moments.
Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade.
Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient,
fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold
and dust. But I can pretend.
-- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #48: Journey's End
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of
a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but
to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are
torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by
the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
- Albert Camus
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant--
What then?
-- Stephen Crane
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
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally
sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We are taught to feel shame
for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our
feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during
our days and our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that
trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.
It is important to realize that you cannot win unless your
opponent makes a mistake; there is no possibility of creating a
win solely out of your own genius.
-- Ken Wheyld
Only in one's dreams can one be truly free.
Twas always thus, and always thus will be.
-- Keating
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Old time is still a-flying,
and this same flower that smiles today,
tomorrow will be dying."
-- Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
-- Albert Einstein
Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth's and harmony's behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.
-- Emerson, "Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing"
Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of travelling.
-- M.L. Runbeck
Contentment: The smother of invention.
-- Ethel Mumford
In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not
always an easy sacrifice.
-- Richard Bach, Illusions
"I believe... that the richness of life is not measured by its length but
by its breadth, its height, and its depth."
-- Richard M. Nixon
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving,
and that's your own self.
-- Aldous Huxley
There is a fountain of youth: It is your mind, your talents, the creativity
you bring in your life and the lives of people you love.
-- Sophia Loren
Judge not thy friend until thou standest in his place.
-- Rabbi Hillel
I don't want the cheese, I just want to get out of the trap.
-- Spanish Proverb
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of
nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
-- Tallulah Bankhead
It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known
in heaven.
-- Nicholas Caussin
Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
-- C. D. Jackson
If not now, when?
-- Rabbi Hillel, "Pirke Avot"
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
Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.
-- Daniele Vare
With equal pace, impartial fate,
Knocks at the palace and the cottage gate.
-- Horace
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you
something else is the greatest accomplishment.
-- Emerson
America is a country where they have freedom of speech but
everyone says the same thing.
-- Tocqueville
Friendship is neither transitive nor inherited.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup, "The C++ Programming Language"
There is material enough in a single flower
for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.
JOHN RUSKIN
This is the true nature of home - it is the place of Peace; the shelter,
not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.
JOHN RUSKIN
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
-- Sir William Schwenck Gilbert
Vi Veri Veneversum Vivus Vici. Ave Atque Vale.
(Talent is a flame, genius a fire.)
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
-- John F. Kennedy
Inexperienced players often have confused notions about sacrificial
combinations. Such moves are brilliant if they are the strongest available,
but they are anything but brilliant if they are objectively inferior moves.
The master, if he is a true artist, will seek perfection rather than fireworks
whose chief object is to lead his opponent astray.
-- Jose Raoul Capablanca
Chess has always struck me as the most fanatical,
sanguinary, and time-consuming of games, not healthful
enough for a sport or productive enough for social or
artistic significance. It is sequestered and sterile,
the antithesis of a humanistic pursuit.
-- John Simon
...for chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel
the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.
-- Herbert Russel Wakefield
Even if we could teach a machine to play chess merely as well as a- to use
Norbert Wiener's simile- majority of the human race (no offense meant),
we would be furnishing definite proof that a machine can solve problems of
sufficient complexity to defy the reasoning ability of millions of people
throughout their lives.
-- Edward Lasker, The Adventure of Chess
Les pawns sont l'ame du jeu.
The pawns are the soul of the game
-- Danican Philidor (1726-95)
In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions,
with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken
(a not unusual error) for what is profound.
-- E.A. Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue
I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That
piece cannot be moved.
-- Kierkegaard
Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. Byron
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe;
the rules of the games are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on
the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair,
just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks
a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
-- T.H. Huxley
"Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God
had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity."
--Voltaire
quoted in _Dad's Own Cookbook_
"From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a
life." --Arthur Ashe
to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and
day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which
any human being can fight, and never stop fighting
e.e. cummings
"The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late."
-- Daniel Defoe
"Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just
want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to
say has more lasting value."
-- Robert Maynard Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance")
"Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not
succeed."
Mark Twain
"No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions."
Charles Steinmetz
"For forms of government, let fools contest... what e're's best administered,
is best."
Alexander Pope
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
Albert Einstein
"Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.
For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to
hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great
wrongs, and they will be powerless to vex your mind."
Leonardo da Vinci
"One who looks for a friend without faults will have none."
Hasidic Saying
"If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the
other direction."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, _The Way to Freedom_
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that
matters, in the end."
Ursula K. LeGuin
"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers
"People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something,
and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?'"
Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can."
Danny Kaye
"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."
Neils Bohr
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
William Shakespeare
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity."
George S. Patton
"Those who do not plan for the future will have to live through it anyway."
Len Fisher
"We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves
cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative
spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... We are not going to
be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless
we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common."
Buckminster Fuller
"We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it is
creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us."
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo astronaut
"Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds."
George Eliot
"The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom--they are the pillars of
society."
Henrik Ibsen
He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, will never
be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
-- Tryon Edwards
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or
convictions.
-- Dag Hammarskjold
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
-- Joseph Joubert
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that you will make you break
your word or lose your self-respect.
-- Marcus Antonius
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment; Mastering
others requires force; Mastering the self needs strength.
-- Tao te Ching
When your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
-- Jiminy Cricket
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though
checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither
enjoy nor suffer too much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat.
-- Teddy Roosevelt.
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If
you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one,
not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;
avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless,
airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become
unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
To love is to be vulnerable.
-- C.S. Lewis
"I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of
principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't."
-- Mark Twain
"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity."
-- H.G. Wells ("The Time Machine")
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about
what's really going to be scared.
--P.J. Plauger, Computer Language, Programming on Purpose, p.29, March 1983
Calvin: People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't
realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world
Hobbes: Isn't your pants' zipper supposed to be in the front?
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start
closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive
like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume
and at least a pint of ether.
-- H.S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore
I am not omniscient, but much is known to me.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem
strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A man that all the world hates,
There must be something about him.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Who thinks little of himself, is often more than he thinks.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We really only know, when we don't know; with knowledge, doubt
increases.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude
towards the public.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had
acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.
-- Victor Frankl
There are two roads of abandoning resolutely one's present life in order
to make the life of one's dreams come true, and renouncing the dream in
order to throw oneself wholeheartedly into one's present situation.
-- Paul Tournier
Of course I shall go astray often...for who does not make mistakes?...
but I cannot go far wrong for I have seen the truth.
-- Dostoevsky
God knows, when I go to the theater I don't want to emerge from it as
exactly the same person. I want to be made to think about something,
I want to be changed in some way - at least be forced to reconsider my
perceptions. Because life is very short. Why waste your time?
-- Edward Albee
We stand already, here and now, in the reflection of the things which
are to come; we are perplexed, but not hopeless; smitten by God, but
nevertheless, in this crisis, under His healing power.
-- Karl Barth
Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not
your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the
indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk
safely on the earth.
-- Edward Yashinsky
The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all
temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is the mark of an
abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.
-- Edmund Burke
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all
kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of
political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.
-- Karl Popper
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-- Winston Churchill
Be sure to keep busy, so the devil may always find you occupied.
-- Flavius Vegetius Renatus
It is your business, when the wall next door catches fire.
-- Horace
Don't learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade.
-- Anonymous
Life is eating us up. We all shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it
will be all one a hundred years hence.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before you borrow money from a friend, decide which you need more.
-- Anonymous
The secret of contentment is the realization that life is a gift, not a right.
-- Anonymous
The best way to knock the chip off your neighborUs shoulder is to pat him
on the back.
-- Anonymous
"The perfection of a history consists in being dislikable to all
sects." -- Pierre Bayle (French critic?)
"History is something that never happened told by someone who wasn't there."
-- Gomez de la Serna, _Greguerias_
Finding a good man is as easy as nailing jello to a tree.
-- A hallmark greeting card message
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature
makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is
enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or
most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better
than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not
think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the
cat by getting to the grave first.
-- G. K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_
The layout of the text that has come to be regarded as conventional
is that which perpetuates the illusion that scientific research is
conducted by the inductive process.
-- P.B. Medawar, "Advice to a Young Scientist"
The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know.
-- Harry S Truman
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because
there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it,
those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship,
for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a
healthy love for him.
-- Michael Montaigne
Do not become archivists of facts. Try to pentrate to the secret of their
occurance, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
-- Ivan Pavlov
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more
difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing in the tempting place.
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure
and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-- Zelda Fitzgerald
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- Herbert G. Wells
"The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'"
-- Alice Walker
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.
-- Anatole France
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.
--Robert Browning
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
Be sure you're right; then, go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett
Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.
-- Emily Dickenson, #1768
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
-- Wallace Stevens, Adagia, In Opus Posthumus
Television is the first truly democratic culture -- the first culture
available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want.
The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes, "New York Times," 1969
One reason we can hardly bear to remain silent is that it makes us feel so
helpless. We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and
control others. If we are silent who will take control? God will take
control; but we will never let Him take control until we trust Him. Silence
is intimately related to trust.
-- Richard J. Foster
You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the
way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace.
Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and
unwinnable.
-- Jesse Jackson
Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be
anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
-- Matthew 6:34
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love
harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all
humankind.
-- Richard Dehmel
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them, I will use my time."
-- Jack London
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life,
but only a fool trusts either of them.
P.J. O'ROURKE
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence
is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?), "THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY"
Government investigations have always contributed more to our amusement
than they have to our knowledge.
WILL ROGERS
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented
systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of
Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one
are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
THOMAS PAINE
Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
HARRY S TRUMAN
We want individual freedoms. We want the government to stay out of our lives
*except* that we want the government to prohibit acts of wickedness.
RANDALL TERRY, FOUNDER OF "OPERATION RESCUE"
A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth,
no property, and vulgar employments.
ARISTOTLE
The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human
hands, will ever be liable to abuse.
JAMES MADISON
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain
occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826)
But the chess they [God and the Devil] play is not the little ingenious game
that originated in India; it is on an altogether different scale. The Ruler of
the Universe creates the board, the pieces, and the rules; he makes all the
moves; he may make as many moves as he likes whenever he likes; his antagonist,
however, is permitted to introduce a slight inexplicable inaccuracy into each
move, which necessitates further moves in correction. The Creatos determines
and conceals the aim of the game, and it is never clear whether the purpose of
the adversary is to defeat him or assist him in his unfathomable project.
Apparently the adversary cannot win, but also he cannot lose so long as he can
keep the game going. But he is concerned, it would seem, in preventing the
development of any reasoned scheme of the game.
-- H.G.Wells, The Undying Fire
Inexperienced players often have confused notions about sacrificial
combinations. Such moves are brilliant if they are the strongest available,
but they are anything but brilliant if they are objectively inferior moves.
The master, if he is a true artist, will seek perfection rather than fireworks
whose chief object is to lead his opponent astray.
-- Jose Raoul Capablanca
Chess has always struck me as the most fanatical,
sanguinary, and time-consuming of games, not healthful
enough for a sport or productive enough for social or
artistic significance. It is sequestered and sterile,
the antithesis of a humanistic pursuit.
-- John Simon
...for chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel
the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.
-- Herbert Russel Wakefield
Even if we could teach a machine to play chess merely as well as a- to use
Norbert Wiener's simile- majority of the human race (no offense meant),
we would be furnishing definite proof that a machine can solve problems of
sufficient complexity to defy the reasoning ability of millions of people
throughout their lives.
-- Edward Lasker, The Adventure of Chess
Les pawns sont l'ame du jeu.
The pawns are the soul of the game
-- Danican Philidor (1726-95)
In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions,
with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken
(a not unusual error) for what is profound.
-- E.A. Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue
I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That
piece cannot be moved.
-- Kierkegaard
Life's too short for chess.
-- H.J. Byron
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe;
the rules of the games are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on
the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair,
just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks
a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
-- T.H. Huxley
Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way.
-- Isaac Goldberg
I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I speak the
truth, and they never believe me.
-- Conte Camillo Benso di Cavour
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but
never remembers her age.
-- Robert Frost
The greatest danger to human beings is their
consciousness of the trivialities of their aims.
-- Gerald Brennen
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"
Treat the other man's faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His
mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine.
-- Henry S. Haskins
If it is to be, it is up to me.
-- unknown
There is no use discussing what could be done if we were other beings
than what we are.
-- Werner Heisenberg
I shall leave you as you left me...as you left her. Marooned for all
eternity in the center of a dead planet. Buried alive! Buried alive!
-- Khan (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another --
it's one damn thing over and over.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright --
And this was very odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
He that has no fools, knaves nor beggers in his family
was begot by a flash of lightning.
-- Thomas Fuller
The threat is often stronger than the execution.
-- Nimzowitsch
It's not enough to have a lot of respect for bishops in the abstract --
you've gotta watch out for them!
-- Shelby Lyman, chesscaster (NY Times)
... when you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains,
however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign Of Four
No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent,
a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as
well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
-- John Donne, Meditation XVII
As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought
for the other fellow. He could be plotting something.
-- Hagar the Horrible
"Elephants and hippopotamus have grown clumsy as well as big, and the elk is of
necessity less graceful than the gazelle."
-- D'Arcy Thompson.
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst
state, an intolerable one." -- Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_, chap. 1.
Quote: They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty,
which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth
stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.
Author: Alexander Cockburn
Reference: The Nation, Feb. 4, 1991
Keywords: exact, war, truth
Quote: There never was a good war or a bad peace.
Author: Benjamin Franklin
Reference: Letter to Josiah Quincy, 11 Sept. 1773
Keywords: exact, war, peace
Quote: I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young
men to die in.
Author: George McGovern
Keywords: inexact, war, men
Quote: Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Author: Groucho Marx
Keywords: inexact, military, intelligence
Quote: Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
Author: Groucho Marx
Keywords: inexact, military, music
Quote: Ich betrachte auch einen sigreichen Krieg an sich immer als ein
\bel, das die Staatskunst den Vvlkern zu ersparen bem|ht sein
muss.
(I regard even a victorious war as an evil, that politics must
strive to spare the people from.)
Author: Otto von Bismarck
Keywords: exact, war, vicory
Quote: This is a picture of the British High Command at the beginning
of World War I. These aren't evil men -- some of them aren't
even stupid.
Author: G. Dyer
Reference: WAR
Keywords: exact, war
Quote: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is
spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of
life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Reference: April 16, 1953
Keywords: exact, war, weapons
Quote: In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their
sons.
Author: Herodotus
Keywords: inexact, war
Quote: Before a war military science seems a real science, like
astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Author: Rebecca West
Keywords: inexact, war, military, science
Quote: I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one
who has seen its brutality, its futility, its _stupidity_.
Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Keywords: inexact, war, soldiers
Quote: It is regrettable for the education of the young that war
stories are always told by those who survived.
Author: Louis Scutenaire
Keywords: inexact, war, education
War does not determine who is right -- only who is left.
-- Bertrand Russell
Renegade academician. They're a dangerous breed when they go feral.
-James P. Blaylock in "Lord Kelvin's Machine"
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your
acquaintances will know you in a thousand years
-- Richard Bach, Illusions
Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet
again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those
who are friends.
-- Richard Bach, Illusions
A friend is a present you give yourself.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
One who looks for a friend without faults will have none.
-- Hasidic Saying
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
-- Samuel Paterson
Who ceases to be a friend, never was one.
-- Anonymous
A friend you have to buy won't be worth what you pay for him.
-- G. D. Prentice
Friends are like melons; shall I tell you why? To find one good you must
one hundred try.
-- Claude Mermet
Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
-- Woodrow Wilson
Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
-- T. S. Eliot
Before you borrow money from a friend, decide which you need more.
-- Anonymous
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because
there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it,
those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship,
for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a
healthy love for him.
-- Michael Montaigne
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
-- Joseph Conrad
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should
have the guts to betray my country.
-- E. M. Forster
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell -- you see,
I have friends in both places.
-- Mark Twain
Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his
friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people.
Take a cool, appraising glance at his pals.
-- Cynthia Heimel
Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there
must be a beverage.
- Woody Allen
Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong
about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly
taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-- (Hungarian proverb)
[In the context of quantum mechanics] "Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein
"Fishing gives you a sense of where you fit in the sceme of things - Your
place in the universe...I, mean, here I am,one small guy with a fishing pole
on this vast beach and out there in the blue expanse of ocean are these
hundreds of millions of fish...laughing at me."
-- Shoe
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
-- Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
-- Virgil
"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics,
died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died
similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."
-- David L. Goodstein, _States of Matter_ (1975).
"He who saves one life saves the world."
- Talmudic saying
Anywhere is walking distance, if you've got the time.
-- Steven Wright
If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.
-- Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland"
Laziness is nothing more that the habit of resting before you get tired.
-- Jules Renard
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
-- Neils Bohr
Never speak more clearly than you think.
-- Jeremy Bernstein
It's good to hope; it's the waiting that spoils it.
-- Yiddish proverb
The bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362
admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean, that God doesn't
love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision.
-- Lynn Lavner
All that you see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.
-- Edgar Allen Poe
"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly
possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of
thought, a rivalry of aim."
-- Henry Brook Adams
As the man with the wooden leg said "It's a matter of a-pinion"
-- A. Stewart in his song " Dr. Finlay"
"Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters."
-- Samuel Johnson
"Take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then
say it with the utmost levity."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"_Don't stop the plough to kill a mouse._ Do not hinder important
business for the discussion of a trifle."
-- C. H. Spurgeon
"Never underestimate the power of a simple courtesy. Your courtesy may
not be returned or remembered, but discourtesy will."
-- Princess Jackson SMith
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_
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but _minds_ alive on the shelves.
-- Gilbert Highet
If we make peaceful revolution impossible,
we make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy
"Some mornings it's not worth chewing through the leather straps."
-Emo Phillips
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you
smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work
and then they get elected and prove it.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
I've never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
-- Calvin Coolidge
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to
learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for
their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams, _Last Chance to See_
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce
our errors of youth for those of age.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a
mistake when you make it again.
-- F. P. Jones
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the
wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat
that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a
hot stove- lid again - and that is well; but she will also she
will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-- Mark Twain
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not
the same river and he's not the same man." -- Heraclitas
"An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip
of the cutting shears." -- John Fowles
"So manifold are our interests in life that it is not
uncommon that, on a single occassion, the foundations
of a happiness which does not yet exist are laid down
simultaneously with the aggravations of a grief from
which we are still suffering." -- Marcel Proust
"For a man cannot change, that is to say, become another
person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self
which he has ceased to be." -- Marcel Proust
"I know I'm going to get old and be one of those crazy
women who sits on balconies and spits on people and screams,
'Get a haircut!' I know this, and I don't really fear it.
I'd just like to move toward it with as much grace and
dignity as possible." -- Carrie Fisher, "Postcards..."
Before you put on a frown . . . make absolutely sure there are no smiles
available.
-- Jim Beggs
Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in
eternity.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
Each man's task is his life preserver.
-- George B. Emerson
Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
-- Benjamin Franklin
The more we do, the more we can do.
-- William Hazlitt
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
-- Helen Keller
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making
exciting discoveries.
-- A. A. Milne
When by judgement one means knowing how something comes to be
what it is, the judgement must appear as re-constructing the
identical universe of the difference. Then every model
includes the measure of its own difference. No state of
equilibrium is empowered to remain identical, or to compel the
individual to alter (and integrate with it). The identical is
equal to itself, since it is different.
--Franco Spisani (1975)
If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.
JIMMY BUFFET
It is better to laugh about your problems than to cry about them.
OLD JEWISH PROVERB
Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.
VICTOR HUGO
He who Laughs, Lasts.
ANONYMOUS
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
Once you get people laughing, they're listening and you can tell them
almost anything.
HERB GARDNER
They all laughed at Albert Einstein. They all laughed at Columbus.
Unfortunately, they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown.
WILLIAM H. JEFFERYS
The person who knows how to laugh at himself will never cease to be amused.
SHIRLEY MAC LAINE
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
VICTOR BORGE
If you can't laugh at yourself,
then you can bet that everyone else is doing so.
ED JOHNSTON
If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.
MARTIN LUTHER
Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.
ARNOLD GLASOW
One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers,
the power of shared laughter.
FRANCOISE SAGAN
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge
is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)
I make myself laugh at everything, in case I should have to weep.
PIERRE-AUGUSTIN DE BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-1799)
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of
comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical
comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a
safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is
part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be
excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of
humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity
from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
ERIC IDLE
"Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the
lesson." -- Vernon Law
"Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
--Franklin P. Jones
"There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and
this is not learning from experience." -- Laurence J. Peter
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the
examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had
such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the
final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific
problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
-- Albert Einstein
One night after Ellie's death, Rowan had stood alone in the wide living
room beneath the high-beamed ceiling, talking aloud to herself, laughing even,
thinking there is no one, no one to know, no one to hear. The glass walls were
dark and indistinct with reflected carpet, furniture. She couldn't see the
tide that lapped ceaselessly at the pilings. The fire was dying out. The
eternal chill of the coastal night was moving slowly through the rooms. She
had learnt a painful lesson, she thought -- that as they die, the ones we love,
we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny
little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And
there is nothing left but the endless flow.
-- Anne Rice, "The Witching Hour"
In Germany they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I
didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Trade
Unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I
was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no one
was left to speak up.
--Pastor Martin Neinmoeller
You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never
the one with whom you have wept.
-- Kahlil Gibran
Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep,
too grave to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
-- Kahlil Gibran
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for
others to laugh at him.
-- Thomas Szasz, _The Second Sin_
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it
were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
-- H. L. Mencken
I live in my own place
have never copied nobody even half,
and at any master who lacks the grace
to laugh at himself -- I laugh.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, inscribed over the door to his home
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep
-- George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Lord Byron, _Don Juan_
But if you had restraint, common sense, and creativity, why would
you be in college at all?
--Roger Simon, _Chicago Tribune_ column
If the only tool you have is a hammmer every problem begins to
look like a nail.
-- Mark Twain
"The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable,
is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be
distrusted."
--T. De Quincey, "On the Knocking at the Gate in _Macbeth_"
"Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give the signal."
- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules.
The fate of all mankind, I see, is in the hands of fools.
--King Crimson
Even in the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin
-- k.d.lang, _Constant Craving"
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
Phillip K. Dick
How do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an
immense worlds of delight clos'd by your senses five?
-- William Blake
Do not be pessimistic and focus only on negativity. Take
things as they are without emotional exaggeration.
-- Hua Ching Ni
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
-W. C. Fields
The Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted
all the alternatives.
--Winston Churchill
The greatest of evils, indeed perhaps all evils, are compounded of accident,
ignorance, ego, and of virtue taken to excess.
-- Jon K. Hart, after Forest Church
For the love of love, how many changes can take place in a person before
it all becomes meaningless and there is nothing left but a sort of
numbness? Is that where I am now? No. Just the opposite; it is more
like pins and needles of the soul.
-- Jack Agyar, from Steven Brust's "Agyar"
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened
and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to
an absolute geometry that even stones -- maybe only the stones --
understood.
-- Annie Dillard, _An American Childhood_
"The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards."
--Alexander Jablokov, "The Place of No Shadows"
"Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog,
the scenery never changes."
- Lewis Grizzard
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side
with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-- Brian K. Reid
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself
now and then finding a smoother pebble off a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before
me."
-- Isaac Newton
Life can only be understood backward,
but it must be lived forward.
-- Kierkegaard
"Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool
from any side" Yiddish proverb
"Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right,
make us easy to live with." Rev. Peter Marshall
"No one beneath you can offend you. No one your equal would."
Jan L. Wells
"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
--Confusius
"Give every man thy ear but few thy voice."
--William Shakespeare
"He who is not busy being born is busy dying."
--Bob Dylan
"You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money."
P.J. O'Rouke
"Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them."
--Andrew V. Mason
"Never date a man whose belt buckle is bigger than his head."
--"Grace under fire" ABC-TV (Casey Werner Co)
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
-- Roy Batty, in Blade Runner
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Peace with Germany will be impossible as long as
the Jews persist in failing to shoot Hitler."
--Neville Chamberlain
Evil often triumphs, but never conquers.
-- Joseph Roux
A good laugh is sunshine in a house.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray
Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
-- Woodrow Wilson
Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact
and communion with others, however humble.
-- Washington Irving
Friendship should be more than biting time can sever.
-- T. S. Eliot
Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
-- Richard Hooker
Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is
wholly rough.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
He who foresees calamities, suffers them twice over.
-- Beilby Porteus
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
-- George Eliot
Half the failures in life arise from pulling in oneUs horse as he is
leaping.
-- Julius Hare
True dignity is never gained by place, and never lost when honors are
withdrawn.
-- Phillip Massinger
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have
nothing whatsoever to do with it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone
Distinction of Merit."
-- William Blake
"Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all
matter? So the Body of me, to all I meet, or know." --Walt Whitman
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of
thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If
only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." -- A. Einstein
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh -- Voltaire
In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of
imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.
-- H.L.Mencken: _A Popular Virtue_
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- H.L.Mencken: _Chrestomathy_
Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one
young woman and another.
-- G.B.Shaw: "Major Barbara"
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's
to keep unmarried as long as he can.
-- G.B.Shaw: "Man and Superman"
Every woman should marry--and no man.
-- B. Disraeli: _Lothair_
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
-- H.L.Mencken
I married beneath me. All women do.
-- Lady Nancy Astor
It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and
persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and
unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for
years or even generations.
-- Khalil Gibran
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!
-- Thomas Carlyle
History... is little more than the register of the crimes, follies,
and misfortunes of mankind.
-- Edward Gibbon
It is not the neutrals or the lukewarms who make history.
-- Adolf Hitler
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
-- Virginia Woolf
The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses
a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.
-- Scott Adams
Why do people park in driveways and drive on parkways?
-- Larry Anderson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the long run, we are all dead.
-- John Maynard Keynes
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.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
-- Plato
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations,
whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring
effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found
the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an
entire year.
-- Albert Einstein
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says,
does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are
maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest
possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are
heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are
pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to
heels with official rubber-stamps.
- H.L. Mencken
'Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?'" -Emily Bronte
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-Voltaire
Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of
course, living in a state of sin.
-John Von Neumann
Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit.
-David McCord
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good,
you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
-Howard Aiken
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
-Arthur C. Clarke
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
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 vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces
it with.
-Tennessee Williams
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare
Our computer has never had an undetected error.
-Weisert
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
The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular
employment of violence.
-Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but hurled with great force.
-Dorothy Parker
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable.
-John F. Kennedy
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 past imperfect, the
present insufficient, and the future absolutely perfect.
-Amrom Katz
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce. -J. Edgar Hoover
Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
In the beginning, I was made. I didn't ask to be made. But if it brought
some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way
through life's mournful jungle then so be it.
-Marvin, in _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, by Douglas Adams
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
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
-Confucius
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is
not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
-Will Durant
Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness
of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule.
-David Guaspari
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-George Saunders' last words
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
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its
fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be
popular.
-Oscar Wilde
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-George Bernard Shaw
By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy.
If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-Socrates
Never fight an inanimate object.
-P. J. O'Rourke
If at first you don't succeed, you may be at your level of incompetence
already.
-Lawrence J. Peter
There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.
-Ken Venturi
A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
-William Wordsworth, of Newton
The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other
solution.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"L'Homme pense; donc je suis," dit l'Univers.
-Paul Valery
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off
by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh,"
I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after
you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time
memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen
minutes. -Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
-Tom Robbins
To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
navigation!- Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor, I should have
known more about it.
-Henry David Thoreau
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
What I spent, is gone; what I kept, I lost; but what I gave away will be mine
forever.
-Ethel Percy Andrus
What's the matter, you poor dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, make yourself scabs?
-Shakespeare, Coriolanus
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-Hungarian Proverb
If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes.
-Robert Redford
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with
great force.
-Dorothy Parker
Wagner's music is better then it sounds.
-Mark Twain
The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
-Mell Lazarus
The last Christian died on the cross.
-Nietzsche
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-James Russell Lowel
To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take
him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.
-Karl Kraus
I believe that every human has a finite number of heart-beats. I don't intend
to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
-Neil Armstrong
We were taken to a fast-food cafe where our order was fed into a computer.
Our hamburgers, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been
boiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially
flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents.
-Jean-Michel Chapereau
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a
woman in the audience stood up and said, "Yes, but is it the God of the
Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
-Quentin Crisp
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel
underneath.
-Oscar Levant
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit
fly, and still have room for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.
-Fred Allen
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me
as a citizen and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world.
Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and
Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
-Albert Einstein
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
-Germaine Greer
Television- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.
-Ernie Kovacs
I doubt if the vigilance of the law is equal to making money stick with
over-credulous people.
-Justice Jackson, 1944
Complete possession is proved only by giving.
All you are unable to give possesses you.
-Andre Gide
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from
comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did
not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments in the
future.
-Andre Gide
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard
to sleep after.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are
composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
-Mark Russel
You are obviously suffering from delusions of adequacy.
-Alexis Carrington
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
-Emily Dickinson
When you don't have any money, the problem is food.
When you have money, it's sex.
When you have both, it's health.
If everything is simply jake,
then you're frightened of death.
-J. P. Donleavy
Birds never sing in caves.
-Henry David Thoreau
As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that
you understand what I'm doing or why you're paying me so much money. What's
important is that you continue to do so.
-Hunter S. Thompson's Samoan Attorney
You white people are so strange. We think it is very primitive for a
child to have only two parents.
-Australian Aboriginal Elder
Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong
as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer
than any flame.
[Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB)]
...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has
been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
-Fred Brooks, Jr.
...Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that
as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most
notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand
years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported
evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a
difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice
is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is
making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that
you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not
terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also.
But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the
evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
-Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned
in school. -- A. Einstein
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
-- Albert Einstein.
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
- Samuel L. Clemens
A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is
no longer indispensible.
- Admiral Byrd
The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance.
- Shelley
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
- Cowper
"Great wits are sure to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
-- Dryden, _Absalom and Achitopel_
"The major cause of accidents remains hunter error, Johnson says. And it's
hard to teach people not to be stupid."
-- The Capitol Times (a paper in Wisconsin)
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents." -- Nathaniel Borenstein
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells
"You know, there have been an incredible number of natural disasters this
year, but when you put it into the Big Picture, I don't think it's the end
of the world... because the Cubs didn't win the Pennant." -- A. Whitney Brown
"When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster."
--Lao Tse, _Tao Te Ching: 72_
"The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have
taken place." -- Claude T. Bissell
"Everything has a boolean value, if you stand far enough away from it."
-- Galena Alyson Canada
Language is a virus from outer space. - William Seward Burroughs (b.1914)
All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to
nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may
give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they
will never give the inner meaning of the original.
- Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941)
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr. or Sr.?)
Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
- Leo Calvin Rosten (b.1908)
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak
it to? - Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938)
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is
not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
- Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
- Robert Burton (1577-1640)
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were
taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things
themselves. - John Locke (1632-1704)
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of
party, faction, and division of society.
- John Adams (1735-1826)
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the
pedigrees of nations. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no
laconism can reach it: 'tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great
deal in a little room. - Jeremy Collier (1650-1726)
It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) (65-8 BC)
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are
slippery and thought is viscous. - Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
"The Education of Henry Adams", 1907
No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But
this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced.
-- Bertrand Russell
When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty
years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter
gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have
never been in any accidentI or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen
but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck
and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that
threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
-- Capt. E. J. Smith, of the RMS Titanic, in 1907.
"Be a man!" said I. "You are scared out of your wits! What good is
religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and
floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God
had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent."
-- H. G. Wells
"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
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
The eyes have one language everywhere.
GEORGE HERBERT
The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
MARCELLINUS AMMIANUS
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
LILY TOMLIN
Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective
as a rightly timed pause.
MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914?), "THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY"
Even if you do learn to speak correct English,
whom are you going to speak it to?
CLARENCE DARROW
"A degree, ... is a first step down a ruinous highway.
You don't want to waste it so you go on to graduate work
and doctoral research. You end up a thorough-going
ignoramus on everything in the world except for one
subdivisional sliver of nothing."
-- Isaac Asimov, _The Dead Past_
It's not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's
thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate from her 1981 novel "The Shooting Party"
"Most people would like to be delivered from temptation but would like it to
keep in touch."
-- Robert Orben
"In a mad world only the mad are sane." -- Akira Kurosawa
Language exists to conceal true thought. -- Tallyrand
When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Goethe
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks
anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring
this uniformity up to the highest possible point. -- H.L. Mencken
It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no
schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by
having schools without education. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Einstein
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
-- Chinese proverb
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-- M. L. King, Jr.
The best way to get rid of temptation is to give into it. --Oscar Wilde (?)
"Education is a private matter between the person and the
world of knoweledge and experience, and has little to do
with school or college." - Lillian Smith
"Books are the curse of the human race." --Benjamin Disraeli
"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the
time, with my eyes hanging out." --Dylan Thomas
An ordinary man can...surround himself with two thousand books...and
thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is
possible to be happy. --Augustine Birrell
I am part of all I have read. --John Kieran
Show me the books he loves and I shall know
The man far better than through mortal friends.
--S. Weir Mitchell
The things i want to know are in books; my best freind is the man who'll
get me a book I ain't read. --Abraham Lincoln
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food
and clothes. --Desiderius Erasmus
Quote: A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.
Author: Franz Kafka
Quote: The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over
the man that can`t read them.
Author: Mark Twain
History teaches that men behave wisely once they have
exhausted all alternatives.
-Abba Eban
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
-Mark Twain
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists
elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact
us.
-Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes)
Examinations are formidable, even to the best prepared, as the
greatest fool can ask more than the wisest man can answer.
-Chales Caleb Colton
"Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then
suddenly he turns on you with a miniature maching gun."
- from a cartoon by Matt Groening
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips
over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." --Matt Groening
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence." -- H.L. Mencken
"Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain emties.~
--Jules Renard
"Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows
out the candle and blows up the bonfire." -- La Rochefoucauld
"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the
shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity, I call
their lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to
the emotional life what constancy is to the intellect - simply a confession
of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for
property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were
not afraid that others might pick them up." -- Ocsar Wilde
"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."
-- Charlie Brown
"Never judge someone by who he's in love with; judge him by his friends.
People fall in love with the most appalling people. Take a cool, appraising
glance at his pals." -- Cynthia Heimel
"Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and VERY important." --Lisa Hoffmann
"Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last
romance." -- Ocsar Wilde
"The fickleness of the woman I love is only equaled by the infernal
constancy of the women who love me." -- George Bernard Shaw
"Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight
girdle, a higher tax bracket, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia."
-- Judith Viorst
"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down
your house, you can never tell." -- Joan Crawford
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
--Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin -- it's the
triumphant twang of a bedspring.
-- S.J. Perelman
Change is what makes the world go 'round, not love. Love only
keeps it populated.
-- Charles H. Brower
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to
seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no
one will believe it.
-- Bertrand Russell
USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every
four people make up 75% of the population.
-- Dave Letterman
But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture
a little past them into the impossible.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself
are the will to power - and nothing else!
-- Nietzsche
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as
great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things
as possible.
-- Sean O'Casey, "The Plough and The Stars"
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to
enslave a philosohpy.
-- William Ralph Inge
Without a doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth.
For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears.
Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
-- Lord Samuel, "Romanes Lecture", 1947
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason
it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
-- Charles Mingus
A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
-- William Wordsworth
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-George Bernard Shaw
A study of the science of technology defines what is possible; a
study of the economics of technology establishes which of the
possibilities is practical and useful.
-Montgomery Phister
All science is concerned with the relationship of cause and effect.
Each scientific discovery increases man's ability to predict the
consequences of his actions and thus his ability to control future events.
-Laurence J. Peter
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-E. Rutherford
And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline,
can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion
to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal
or political motive.
-Sir Henry Hallett Dalt
Art is I; science is we.
-Claude Bernard
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science
can never regress.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
But I have seen the science I worshiped and the airplane I loved
destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
-Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.
By the time a social science theory is formulated in such a way that
it can be tested, changing circumstances have already made it obsolete.
-Professor Charles P. Issawi
HE: Let's end it all, bequeathin' our brains to science.
SHE: What?!? Science got enough trouble with their OWN brains.
-Walt Kelley
He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess
them, needs religion.
-Goethe
I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above
the natural sciences.
-Thomas Mann
I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a
very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom
everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or
at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade,
and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach
much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense
of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor
popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.
-Carl Sagan
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And
in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the
additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
-Carl Sagan
If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
-Lazarus Long
If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible
and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind
of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the
good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community
ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the
media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper
in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly
astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational
system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that
may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the
human future.
-Carl Sagan
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a
really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would
actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them
again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should,
because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it
happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that
happened in politics or religion.
-Carl Sagan
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not
to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-Sir William Osler
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shorte-
ned
itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period
the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles
long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only
a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling invest-
ment
of fact.
-Mark Twain
It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively
proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand
only from those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to
replace the religious catechism by something else, even it it be a scientific
one.
-Sigmund Freud
Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.
-Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)
Mustgo:
Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so
long it has become a science project.
-Sniglets, Rich Hall & Friends
Parkinson's Finding on Journals: The progress of science varies inversely
with the number of journals published.
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science
made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection
of facts is not necessarily science.
-Henri Poincaire
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over. Every major
advance in the technological competence of man has enforced revolutionary
changes in the economic and political structure of society.
-Barry Commoner
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
-Lazarus Long
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.
The goal of nature is to build better mice.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but That's funny ...
-Isaac Asimov
The social problems raised by science must be faced and solved by
the humanities.
-Harold Dodd
The stature of a science is commonly measured by the degree to which
it makes use of mathematics.
-S. S. Stevens
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited
to open the way to the next better one.
-Konrad Lorenz
You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding
decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left
over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart.
-F. Allen
I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate
the human race.
-- Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom
you must account.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Do not let people put you down. Believe in yourself and stand for yourself
and trust yourself.
-- Jacob Neusner
You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better
than you think you can.
-- Jimmy Carter
It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say
the opposite.
-- Sam Levenson
Your mind must control, but you must have heart ... Give your feeling free.
-- Vladimir Horowitz
Know thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
-- Alexander Pope
Seek not the things that are too hard for thee, neither search the things
that are beyond thy strength.
-- Apocrypha
"Serious men are inevitably shallow, just as virtuous women are always dull.
One must be a bit of a scoundrel to know the depths of oneself."
-- Sigismundo Celine, Nature's God (by Robert Anton Wilson)
"There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your
age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed
as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
--Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking-Glass_
I believe that once when asked his religion, Disraeli replied:
"Great men are all of the same religion"
Questioner: "And what religion is that?"
Disraeli: "Great men never say."
"Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where
their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes
its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach
farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from
adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and
character." -- Henry David Thoreau
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I
live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly
used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. Life is no 'brief
candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a
moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on
to future generations."
--George Bernard Shaw
"Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not
relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you."
--Stewart E. White
"Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out."
--Satchel Paige
"Do every act of your life as if it were your last."
--Marcus Aurelius
"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."
--Voltaire
"Even if you're on the right track, if you stand still you'll get run over by
the next train."
--Will Rogers
"It always surprises me that some things are so surprising that they even
surprise people that nothing surprises any more."
--Erik Dasque
"Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph
of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
--James Joyce
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night"
--Edgar Allen Poe
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to
diminishing returns."
--J.M. Clark
"Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the
least."
--Earl of Chesterfield
"The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth."
"Every thought is a seed. If you plant 'Crab' apples don't count on
harvesting 'Golden Delicious'."
"As for disappointing them, I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to
disappoint myself."
--Oliver Goldsmith
"Cut off the human race from the knowledge and comprehension of its history,
and its government will just turn into a monkey cage. We need the guidance
of history. All our yesterdays, it is true, have only lighted fools the
way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and
the list of the fools."
-- Stephen Leacock
Broad, wholesome, charitable views ... can not be acquired by vegetating in
one's little corner of the earth.
-- Mark Twain, _Innocents Abroad_
"...Dreaming is a philogenetically older mode of thought..." - C.G. Jung
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live sturdily and Spartan-
like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and
shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest
terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and
genuine meaness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's
blood and probably themselves will not be realized.
Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering
that a noble and logical diagram once recorded will never
die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing
asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember
that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that
would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your
beacon, beauty.
-BURNHAM
"It is not good for all your wishes to be fulfilled; through
sickness you recognize the value of health; through evil,
the value of good; through hunger, satisfaction; through
exertion, the value of rest."
-HERACLITUS
Just remember, once youUre over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
-- Charles Schultz
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
-- Samuel Paterson
No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating
one peanut.
-- Channing Pollack
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was
once eccentric.
-- Bertrand Russell
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly
what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
-- Virginia Woolf
Who ceases to be a friend, never was one.
-- Anonymous
He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.
-- Napolean Bonaparte
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of
scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture
of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin
or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
-- Bertrand Russell
"Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men
to be thought half as good. Luckily this in not
difficult."
-Charlotte Whitton
If there is anything better than to be loved it is loving.
-Anonymous
The way to love is to realize that it might be lost.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
-John Donne
To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
-Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz
Love gives itself; it is not bought.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is better to have loved an lost, than not to have loved at all.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
-Benjamin Franklin
Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.
-H.L. Mencken
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-H.L. Mencken
There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand copies.
-Francois De La Rochefoucauld
I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
-Henry Ward Beecher
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A kiss: A peculiar proposition. Of no use to one, yet absolute bliss to two.
The small boy gets it for nothing, the young man has to lie for it, and the
old man has to buy it. The baby's right, the lover's privelege, and the
hypocrite's mask. To a young girl, faith; to a married woman, hope; and to
an old maid, charity.
-V.P.I. Skipper
The economic and technological triumphs of the last few years have not
solved as many problems as we thought they would, and, in fact, have brought
us new problems we did not forsee.
-Henry Ford II
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
-John Dewey
Whatever else scientists do, the most significant thing they do is to try
to find out things that are not known.
-Dennis Flanagan
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the
greater view?
-Victor Hugo
The Wright brother's flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
-Charles F. Kettering
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
-Sir Issac Newton
Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important
questions), few of us spend time wondering why nature is the way it is; where
the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here...or whether there are
ultimate limits to what humans can know...But much of science has been driven
by such inquire. An increasing number of adults are willing to ask
questions of this sort, and occasionally they get some astonishing answers.
-Carl Sagan, Introduction to _A Brief History of Time_ by Stephen W. Hawking
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your
heart's desire. The other is to get it.
-- BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman, IV
The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They
gave him love and he invented marriage.
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from
the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution
wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
-- Ralph Emerson
There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon
as I learn what it is I'll get married again.
-- Clint Eastwood
Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
-- Agnes Allen
We may not return the affection of those who like us, but
we always respect their good judgement.
"Wedlock--the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of
the chaise lounge."
--Mrs. Patrick Campbell quoted in "Jennie" vo. 2, 1914.
"Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for
isolation of spirit."
--Ellen Glasgow, "Barren Ground" 1925 (not terribly romantic, that)
"Bernard placed one arm tightly round her. When will you marry me Ethel he
uttered you must be my wife it has come to that I love you so intensely
that if you say no I shall perforce dash my body to the brink of yon muddy
river he panted wildly. O don't do that implored Ethel breathing rather
hard."
--Daisy Ashford (age 9) "The Young Visitors" 1919 [lack of quotation not my
choice] [that was lack of punctuation]
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to
please everyone." -- Bill Cosby
"If you achieve success, you will get applause. Enjoy it -- but never quite
believe it." -- Robert Montgomery
"Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:
If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero."
-- David Ellis
"Success and failure are equally disastrous." -- Tennessee Williams
"In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success
because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its
efforts. Namely, the physical universe." -- Ken Jenkins
"A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by
its author." -- S. C. Johnson
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard P. Feynman
"If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average." -- Bill Cosby
"If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure."
-- Then-Vice President Dan Quayle
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and
the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to
find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a
healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know
even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to
have succeeded." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a
happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth."
-- O.G. Sutton
"It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to
succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible." -- Arthur Machen
When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine
ourselves.
-- Confucious
Only the educated are free.
-- Epictetus
The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
-- Edward Gibbon
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
-- Victor Hugo
The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A friend you have to buy won't be worth what you pay for him.
-- G. D. Prentice
To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
-- George Bernard Shaw
"I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come
out of all this tumbling around."
-- poet Louise Brogan, on her affair with poet
Theodore Roethke
"I knew words were like chains, they held me back...
the act of description taints the description."
-- John Fowles (from "The Magus")
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are.
If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
-- Oscar Wilde
"All our life is crushed by the weight of words:
the weight of the dead."
-- Luigi Pirandello
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely
a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the
reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps
never have seen in himself."
-- Marcel Proust
"It takes a lot of time being a genius -- you have to sit
around so much doing nothing."
-- Gertrude Stein
"Art isn't political because of a label, a theory, or a
rejected grant application; art is political because it
has the power to change lives."
-- Peter Zeisler
"We risk the greatest loss when we allow our questions to
be made smaller."
-- Stephen Dietz (in an article debunking
the oft-used advice "you should only write
what you know about")
Quote: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between
betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should
have the guts to betray my country.
Author: E. M. Forster
Reference: Two Cheers for Democracy
Quote: Rien n'est si dangereux qu'un ignorant ami; Mieux vaudrait un
sage ennemi.
(Nothing is as dangerous as an ignorant friend; better a wise
enemy.)
Author: Jean de la Fontaine
Quote: ... the most important thing in the programming language is the
name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have
recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a
suitable language.
Author: D. E. Knuth, 1967
Quote: She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong
by wrong.
Author: Mae West
"Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men.
Death will come, always out of season. It is the command of the Great
Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and what
cannot be prevented should not be grieved for.... Misfortunes do not
flourish particularly in our lives -- they grow everywhere."
Big Elk
Omaha Chief
"God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. One
must take it. The only choice is how." -- Henry Ward Beecher
"The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter."
-- Mandie Ellingson
"Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are
those which never come." -- Amy Lowell
"The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without
trials." -- Chinese Proverb
"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for." --
unknown
"The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step." -- Chinese Proverb
"No wise man ever wished to be younger." -- Jonathan Swift
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." -- Thoreau
There will come a time when you will dicscover a thing called
loneliness. But remember life's cruellest irony: The time you feel most
lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
--Douglas Coupland
We pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.
Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style.
A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace
failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of
us will ever be free.
--Tom Robbins
If you come to me with your fists doubled, I think
I can promise you that mine will double as fast
as yours; but if you come to me and say, "Let us
sit down and take counsel together and, if we differ
from one another, just understand what the points at
issue are", we will presently find that we are not so
far apart at all, that the points on which we differ
are few and the points on which we agree are many.
-Woodrow Wilson
Once the realization is accepted that even between
the closest human beings infinite distances continue
to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow
up, if they succeed in loving the distance between
them which makes it possible for each to see each
other whole against the sky.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
in LETTERS
Every worthwhile has a fence around it, but there
is always a gate and a key.
-Henry Frederick
"`You were hurt,' Kumiko said, looking down at the scar.
Sally looked down. `Yeah.'
`Why didn't you have it removed?'
`Sometimes it's good to remember.'
`Being hurt?'
`Being stupid.'" -- Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson
As a child, I understood how to give; I have forgotten that grace since
I became civilized. I lived the natural life, whereas I now live the
artificial. Any pretty pebble was valuable to me then, every growing tree
an object of reverence.
Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa)
Santee Sioux
"The sun, the moon and the stars that make the wind blow,
it took me twenty years to understand.
But lost to me is how the lives of friends go.
Like autumn leaves, in Oklahoma wind."
-- Vince Bell, "The Sun, Moon and Stars"
"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we
leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we
can enter another." -- Anatole France
I should have known you'd bid me farewell
There's a lesson to be learned from this, and I learned it very well
Now I know you're not the only starfish in the sea
If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me
And I think it's gonna be all right
Yeah, the worst is over now
The morning Sun is shining like a red rubber ball.
-- Cyrkle, _Red Rubber Ball_
"Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have
not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of
our today." --Friedrich Nietzsche, _Human, All Too Human_
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
-- Richard Whately
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-- Francis Bacon
You will never *find* time for anything. If you want time you must make
it.
-- Charles Buxton
Education is a progressive discovery of ignorance.
-- Will Durant
Energy and persistence conquer all thing.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Adventure is not outside a man, it is within.
-- David Grayson
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill ... Great works are
performed, not by strength, but perseverence.
-- Samuel Johnson
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do,
Nothing else.
-- Andre Malraux
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you
really stop to look fear in the face.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may
be very kind.
-- Edmund Spenser
When the gods choose to punish us, they merely answer our prayers.
-- Oscar Wilde
Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
Love not what you are, but what you may become.
-- Miguel de Cervantes
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
-- Albert Einstein
Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts?
Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness? Or is it the exalting
separation from the turmoils of life, that veiling of the world in
which for the soul nothing there remains but souls? It is therefore
that the letters in which the loved name stands written in our spirit
appears like phosphorous writing by night, in fire, while by day,
in their cloudy traces, they but smoke?
-Richter
Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke.
-Claude McDonald
It is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge ...
and another to take the path that leads to it.
-- St. Augustine
With the first link of chain forged
First speech senteced
First thought forbidden
First freedom denied
Chains us all inevitably.
-- from Star Trek
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science."
-- Albert Einstein
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
-- Albert Einstein
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming
feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love
you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some
won't like you at all." - from _Venus Envy_, by Rita Mae Brown
A ... mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
-- Oliver Wendel Holmes
What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge,
and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.
-- Marina Horner
What publishers are looking for these days isn't radical feminism.
It's corporate feminism -- a brand of feminism designed to sell books
and magazines, three-piece suits, airline tickets, Scotch, cigarettes
and, most important, corporate America's message, which runs: "Yes,
women were discriminated against in the past, but that unfortunate
mistake has been remedied; now every woman can attain wealth, prestige
and power by dint of individual rather than collective effort.
-- Susan Gordon
"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay