Misc. quotes


vi is to EMACS as masturbation is to making love: effective
and always available but probably not your first choice.

the law of inanimate reproduction:
"If you take something apart and put it back together again
enough times, you will eventually have enough parts left over
to build a second one."

The company doesn't tell me what to say, and I don't tell them
where to stick it.

"God built a compelling sex drive into every creature, no
matter what style of fucking it practiced.  He made sex
irresistibly pleasurable, wildly joyous, free from fears. He
made it innocent merriment.
...
Needless to say, fucking was an immediate smash hit. Everyone
agreed, from aardvarks to zebras.  All the jolly animals --
lions and lambs, rhinoceroses and gazelles, skylarks and
lobsters, even insects, though most of them fuck only once in
a lifetime -- fucked along innocently and merrily for hundreds
of millions of years. Maybe they were dumb animals, but they
knew a good thing when they had one."
   --- Alan Sherman, "The Rape of the A*P*E*" 

If you believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.

To see is not to perceive,
to perceive is to not live,
to live is not to die,
not to die...is not life.

"The trust and respect of a child is an honor to be earned, not demanded."

"I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape"
 - Desmond Morris, "The Naked Ape"

I doubt, therefore I might be.

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.

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

"A radioactive cat has eighteen half-lives."

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with
substance.
                -- Sam Brown, "The Washington Post", January 26, 1977

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last
you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his
Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
                -- Mark Twain
                   "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

I can't imagine how you could argue that GUIs in general are "superior"
to CLIs. If you want to describe a complex operation to someone, do you
point and wave, gesturing in the air, or do you use *words*? 
-- dave@cca.org (Dave Fischer) in alt.religion.computers

"I am ... a woman ... and ... technically a parasitic uterine growth"
-- Sean Doran the Younger [allegedly]

If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.

The world is coming to an end ... SAVE YOUR BUFFERS!!!
 
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

If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire.

Opinions are like assholes -- everyone's got one, but nobody wants to
look at the other guy's.
                -- Hal Hickman

The years of peak mental activity are undoubtedly between the ages of
four and eighteen.  At four we know all the questions, at eighteen all
the answers.

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward,
then we are a sorry lot indeed."
-- Albert Einstein

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.
                -- Mark Twain

You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you
can with just a kind word.
                -- Bumper Sticker

"You can't have everything.  Where would you put it?"
                -- Steven Wright

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
                -- Booker T. Washington


Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip
around the Sun.

pepke@scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke) in alt.atheism.moderated:
As for love, in the human realm, real worship in the context of love is a
warning sign that there's some seriously dysfunctional behavior going on.

Even paranoids have enemies
               -- anonymous

"he who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who 
dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming 
he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to 
interpret a dream.  And someday there will be a great awakening when we 
know that this is all a great dream.  Yet the stupid believe they are 
awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this 
man ruler, that one herdsman--how dense! Confucius and you are both 
dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.  Words 
like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle..."

improperly reprinted from Burton Watson's translation of Chuang-tzu.

                     LAO CHEN:  DOUBT THE THING

  1.  The Way that     3.  If you think      5.  Ordinary folk
      can be mapped        "I know well",        go to pieces
      is not the           Little Truth          over the
      0REZIAN Way;         Do you know;          Gateful Dread
      The Noise that       If you think          And cling
      can be heard         "I know not",         miserably to
      is not the           Truly nothing         malformulated
      0REZIAN Noise;       Do you know;          dharmas;
      For Way is the       The Psyckle of        The E.`.0.`. says
      Toss of the          Doubtful Faith        "Fall apartheid!"
      Sauce; and           cuts no faith,        and "No noise is
      Noise is the         no doubt,             ease!"
      Bind of the          no wobble.        6.  The 0ne who
      Mind.            4.  Ordinary folk         penetrates this
  2.  The Way is           are ensnared by       ink and fiber
      vast and empty       the Coils of          sits at both
      like 0REZ:           the DiamondBack       ends of the
      It is ZER0;          and krender           Projection of the
      It is not ZER0;      themselves in         Mysterious Presence
      It both is and       its Intifaqqa;        simultaneously
      Is not ZER0;         The Extra0rdinary     producing and
      It neither is        0ne dances a          enjoying a
      Nor is not ZER0;     Tangle in the         Wonderful Show.
      To struggle to       Restless Calm.
      grasp it is
      Poseidon's
      Chaotic Dilemma.

When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I don't deal drugs.
When they took the six amendment, I was quiet because I'm innocent.  When they
took the second amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.  Now they've
taken the first amendment and I can't say anything at all.

"I do not have a body, I am a body." 
  -- unknown

"What do drugs, religion, and cosmetics have in common? They all cost too
much, do little that is useful, and usually make things worse than they
were to begin with."

'No lawyers.  Prosecuters will be violated.'.
  -- fehr@ninja.aes.mb.doe.ca (John Fehr)

"When people stop believing in God, the problem is not that thereafter they believe in
nothing, it is that thereafter they will believe in anything." 
  --  G.K. Chesterton (?)

When any action is regulated by law, the incentive for individual conscience to
govern is diminished, unless the law coincides with almost universally held
moral standards." --Greenleaf's Principle

"If you understand, things are such as they are;
If you don't understand, things are such as they are."
    -- another Zen Koan

Seen on a license plate frame in Sunnyvale, CA:
        "my other car is a cdr"

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more
glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do.  To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts.
                -- Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Live"

Rhode's Law:
        When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly,
empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred,
induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always
for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage,
material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or
none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed,
proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably,
universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it
becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.


There are two types of people in this world, good and bad.  The good
sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
                -- Woody Allen

This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of
the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many
solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were
largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper,
which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of
paper that were unhappy.
                -- Douglas Adams


"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
(By leitner@inf.fu-berlin.de, Felix von Leitner)

``I think it would be a good idea.'' -- Mahatma Ghandi, when asked what he
                                        thought of Western civilization

Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire
telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull his tail in New
York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there.  The only difference is that there is no cat."

Idiot, n.:
        A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant
biology.

"All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific."
-- Jane Wagner

Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a
hole in his head.

Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way
before it is understood.

It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for
being right.

Why are many scientists using lawyers for medical
experiments instead of rats?

        a)  There are more lawyers than rats.
        b)  The scientist's don't become as
            emotionally attached to them.
        c)  There are some things that even rats
            won't do for money.


"We should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."
---- Albert Einstein

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away".
                -- Philip K. Dick

"Ah, you know the type.  They like to blame it all on the Jews or the
Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact
that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately
unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep
up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
                -- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is a big difference

"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

"Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin."
-- Michael O'Donohugh

I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in
twenty minutes.  It's about Russia.
                -- Woody Allen

A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no
responsibility at the other.

If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a
conclusion.
                -- William Baumol

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum --
"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding
bureaucracy.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
                -- Thomas Edison

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.  It is never any
use to oneself.
                -- Oscar Wilde

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

Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers.
                -- Pablo Picasso

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
                -- Thomas Edison

"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."
                -- Woody Allen

I am pleased to see that we have differences.  May we together become
greater than the sum of both of us.
                -- Surak of Vulcan, "The Savage Curtain", stardate 5906.4

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

Support your local Search and Rescue unit -- get lost.

                AMAZING BUT TRUE ...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.

...but I think that God's got a sick sense of humour and
   when I die I expect to find him laughing.

Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules:
        The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of
the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.

Q:  How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A:  Three.  One to report it as an inspired government program to bring
    light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government
    plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a pulitzer
    prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb
    assassin to break the bulb in the first place.

Q:  How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A:  Two.  One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub
    with brightly colored machine tools.

Q:  How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:  None.  The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays out
    of the way.

Q:  How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A:  One.  He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem
    to an earlier joke.

Q: How many zen students does it take to change a light bulb? 
A: Two: one to change the light bulb and one to not change the light bulb. 

Q: How many zen masters does it take to change a light bulb? 
A: Tree in the golden forest. 

Q: How many Communists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:          One, but it takes him about 30 years to realize that the old
            one has burnt out.

Q: How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:               Four. One to do the job and three to listen to him brag
                 about the screwing part.

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:               It's sexual harassment to even SUGGEST jokingly on the
                 net that a woman SCREW in anything. This posting will be
                 banned by the FCC.


Q: How many medflies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A:           None: they do it in the fruit.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)

I have never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to
any question.
                -- Spock, "This Side of Paradise", stardate 3417.3

Sex is like air.  It's only a big deal if you can't get any.

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four.  Unless
there are three other people."
                -- Orson Welles

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.

If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to
get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving
the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting
that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.  The
college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious
and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to
rally their jaded spirits.  I would have the studies elective.
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure
interest in knowledge.  The wise instructor accomplishes this by
opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for
himself.  The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for
boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am.
It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get."

I'm really concerned about my wife since we moved to California. She's
 gotten kind of kinky. She likes to tie me up and then go out with someone
 else.
                 -- Tom Dreesen

Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and
 through the nose of the gentleman.  -- Herbert Spencer

Since GOD spelled backwards is DOG, is my poodle Satan?

I'm very insecure--I get depressed when I find out the people I hate don't
 like me. I'm kind of paranoid too. I often think the car in front of me is
 following me the long way around.
                 -- Dennis Miller

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a
 conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to
 the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
  -- Bill Vaughan

A gentleman can disagree without being disagreeable.

"Removing illusions, none by none."

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

"Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas."

Kryten:  Pub: ah, yes, a meeting place where people attempt to reach
         advanced states of mental incompetence by the repeated consumption
         of fermented vegetable drinks.
   -- Red Dwarf - 'Timeslides'

Johnny says to his mom: I want to be a drummer when I grow up!
Mom: But Johnny, you can't do both. 

It's so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the
Devil when he is the only explanation of it.

The world isn't worse.  It's just that the news coverage is so much better.

More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.  One
path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total
extinction.  Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
                -- Woody Allen

Answering machine madness - befuddle the caller:
 This is Anthony.  Leave me a message at the beep.  (beep)
 Whoops, I bet you couldn't hear that.  Lemme try again.  (Beep)
 Nuts, once more with feeling...

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
                 One to change and one not to change is fake Zen. The
                 true Zen answer is Four. One to change the bulb.

If you do not strive with others, you will be free from blame-Lao Tzu

Learning builds daily accumulation, but the prictice of Tao builds daily
simplification.  Simplify and simplify, until all contamination from
relative, contridictory thinking is eliminated.  Then one does nothing,
yet nothing is left undone.  One who wins the world does so by not
meddling with it.  One who meddles with the world loses it.
 -- Lao-Tzu
 -- Tao te Ching

What happens to your fist when you open your hand?   -- Zen Buddhism

Joshu is my favorite Zen Master. It is said that a monk once asked him, 
To be holy - what is it like?
      Joshu replied, To dump a mountain of shit on a clean plain. 
                                                         -- Disk Sutphen

It's a Tao thing, there is nothing _to_ understand.
 
It's a Zen thing, trying to understand won't help.

Can I buy you a drink, or do you just want the money?
   a pick up line


FIDDLE, n.  An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a
horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.


    To Rome said Nero:  "If to smoke you turn
    I shall not cease to fiddle while you burn."
    To Nero Rome replied:  "Pray do your worst,
    'Tis my excuse that you were fiddling first."
                                                            Orm Pludge
 -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

      Thousands of engineers can design bridges.....,but the great
     engineer is the man who can tell whether the bridge.....should
be built at all.
             EUGENE C. GRACE

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just
 as dumb as the next guy.
  -- Richard Feynman

When cigarettes are outlawed, only outlaws will cough.


Scientists Discover New Element:  `Administratium`:

     The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by
University physicists here in Lund.  The element, tentatively named
Administratium (Ad), has no protons or electrons, which means that it has
an atomic number 0 and falls outside the natural patterns exhibited by
other elements. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistants to the
neutron, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistants to the vice neutrons.  This
gives it an atomic mass of 312.  The 312 particles are held together by a
force involving the continuous exchange of meson-like particles, called
"memos". Because it has no protons or electrons, Administratium is inert.
Nonetheless, it can be detected chemically, in that it seems to impede
every reaction in which it is present.  According to one of the
discoverers, even a small amount of Administratium made one reaction which
normally lasts less than a second take more than four days.
Administratium has a half-life of approximately three years.  It does not
actually decay.  Instead, it undergoes a reorganization in which a vice
neutron, assistants to the vice neutron and certain assistants to the
neutron exchange places.  Some studies have indicated that its mass
actually increases after each reorganization, although this is yet to be
explained.  Another phenomenon which has been observed, as expected from
the mechanics of minute particles, is that the more one tries to pin down
the positions of vice neutrons within the structure of administratium, the
more uncertain those positions become.  Within a short time after the
discovery was announced, the existence of the element was confirmed in
laboratories around the world.
		-- jinx@thecentre.com (send "Jinx me!" to subscribe)

The only way to combat criminals is by not voting for them.
                 -- Dayton Allen

Some folks find it necessary to use psychics to contact the spirit world.
 Experience tells me that your ordinary bartender can do just as well, at
 half the cost, and twice as quickly.

For most of history, baby-having was in the hands (so to speak) of women.
 Many fine people were born under this system. Things changed in the 1970s.
 The birth rate dropped sharply. Women started going to college and driving
 bulldozers and carrying briefcases and using words like "debenture." They
 didn't have time to have babies ... Then young professional couples began
 to realize that their lives were missing something: a sense of stability,
 of companionship, of responsibility for another life. So they got Labrador
 retrievers. A little later they started having babies again, mainly because
 of the tax advantages.
                 -- Dave Barry

   I quite agree with you, said the Duchess; and the moral of
that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put
more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.'
          -- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

Don't knock the weather, nine-tenths fo the people couldn't
start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
    -- John Ruskin


You know it's Monday when you wake up and it's Tuesday.
                -- Garfield

        "If electricity comes from electrons, does that mean
         that morality comes from morons?"

Seen on the back of a Jeep CJ7.  Text was upside-down...

If you can read this
please turn me over.


The most egotistical person we've ever heard of is the one who remarked
that he had only been wrong once in his life and that was when he
thought he was wrong but wasn't.
 

the purpose of life is a life of purpose

When you don't want to do something, a meeting is indispensible as the most
 efficient tool to accomplish your goal.

        Now she speaks rapidly.  "Do you know *why* you want to program?"
        He shakes his head.  He hasn't the faintest idea.
        "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly.  
"The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman.  "You take a program, 
born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution.  You nurture the 
program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever 
stronger.  Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, 
a keystroke changed there."  She sweeps her arm in a wide arc.  "And other
times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very 
*essence*, then beginning anew.  But always building, creating, filling the 
program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances.  Watching 
the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can 
stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect.  This is the programmer's finest
hour!"  Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. 
"This ... this is your canvas! your clay!  Go forth and create a masterwork!"

----

"Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the worlds problems?"
(Dad is completely confused and finds no answer.)
"I think grown-ups just ACT like they know what they are doing." -- Calvin (Watterson)