Buy a rifle, encrypt your data and wait for the revolution!

 

Important Disclaimer:

    The opinions expressed in this document are not
    necessarily those of the author. At least one of
    them belongs to Oscar Wilde, though he allows the
    author to borrow it from time to time. Others may
    belong to the small hairy man who lives in the
    moldy shoebox at the bottom of his garden, and who
    probably uses his vast technical knowledge and
    uncontrolled access to the author's telephone
    cable to tap into his Internet account and post
    all manner of weird things without his knowledge
    or consent, or at least that would explain a lot
    of things.  (Shamelessly borrowed from Daniel Frankham)

 
There exists in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with  freedom. - Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-1859)  

 

America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
--Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

 

Those who believe the common good should reign supreme over individual rights, are not alone:

The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community.....but must be for the good of all. Therefore we demand ....an end to the power of the financial interests.....profit sharing in big business....." -- Excerpts from the Political Program of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany (Nazis). Adopted in Munich Feb 24, 1920.

 
There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.  Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
-- anonymous in Fortune

 
The world of anti-trust is reminiscent of Alice's Wonderland....It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge's verdict - After the fact. -- Alan Greenspan

 
"...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'."
-- Salman Rushdie

 

Four items dedicated to our kids, on our move to America:
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson

 
For centuries the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those (mystics) who preached that the good is self sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those (socialists) who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to you to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
--John Galt in Atlas Shrugged            (Note: One slight correction: Aristotle did say it first!)

 
To live, Man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life:
- Reason
- Purpose
- Self-esteem
Reason, as his only tool of knowledge.
Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve.
Self esteem as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
-- John Galt

 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, arguably the only true genius ever to occupy the White House, in the Declaration of Independence.

 

Kids, you are now in the only country in world that holds your right to freedom and the pursuit of your own happiness as one of the core values on which its constitution is based. Carpe Diem!

 

For Living on this Earth:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
-- Ayn Rand

 

Collectivism and Altruism:

Heaven and earth are not humane.
They regard all things as straw dogs.
-- The Tao Te Ching

 
The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality -- with the code of self-sacrifice -- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: Fascism, Nazism, Communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.
--Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

 
Rosetta Robinson, 59, who was born in Clarksdale, left for the Midwest and came home more than 20 years ago from Detroit to take care of her aging parents. She said now, as she waited for a school bus to take her to the field, she chops cotton because "I don't like what welfare does to a person."  "You know why some people have all those babies?" she asked. "To get the welfare money so they can take care of men. Some of those kids don't get anything to eat. They go naked while their mamas are taking care of men too lazy to work. It ain't right."

 
A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane

 
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
-- Mark Twain

 
Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.
--Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

 
Man--every man--is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose  of his life.
-- Ayn Rand Institute of Advanced Objectivism.

 
Racism will be with us as long as collectivism is with us. We will not cure racism short of finding a way to eliminate the collectivist view of human identity. However, we can more easily eliminate governmental racism. This can only be accomplished if government respects the rights and potential dignity of each individual and stops acting as the ward healer collecting the spoils for special interest groups.
--Richard E. Ralston, Ayn Rand Institute of Advanced Objectivism

 

For Anél:
 Man is the source of every achievement, of everything high, noble and great on earth. Man, not men. Man, not society. Man, not the collective. Man's EGO is the source, the dynamo, the prime mover - THE FOUNTAINHEAD.
--Ayn Rand

 

The Value of Competition:
The true value of competiton lies not in the winning, but in the fact that it makes you better.
-- Ben Hogan (One of the greatest golfers that ever lived.)


For Jolette:
Winning is not everything. There is also losing. That is why winning is so important.
-- Hagar the Horrible

 

Reason and Objectivism:
For Reyco:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why I
I wonder why I wonder!
-- Richard P. Feynman

 
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
-- Richard P. Feynman

 
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
-- Leonardo da Vinci

 
....This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are -- and that the task of man's consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.
-- Ayn Rand Institute of Advanced Objectivism.

 
Man is not rational - merely capable of it.
-- Jonathan Swift (In other words: You have to decide that you want to think.)

 
Man is a rational being. Reason, as man's only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival.
But the exercise of reason depends on each individual's choice.
-- Ayn Rand Institute of Advanced Objectivism.

 
Objectivism offers a radical alternative to the ideas which dominate today's culture and universities: mysticism, altruism, and collectivism — and their results, such as nihilism, environmentalism, "multiculturalism," and statism. Objectivism challenges 2,000 years of thought — and provides the basis for a new Renaissance.
-- Ayn Rand Institute of Advanced Objectivism.

 
Common sense is just another name for prejudices we grow up with.
-- Stephen Hawking

 
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended for us to forego their use.
-- Galileo Galilei

 
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-- Albert Einstein

 
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
-- Albert Einstein

 
You see, but you do not observe.
-- Sherlock Holmes

 
To think is to see.
-- Honore de Balzac

 
When people are free to do what they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer

 
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything, and to doubt everything. Both ways save thinking.
-- Alfred Korzybski

 
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein

 
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
-- John Locke

 
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-- Phillip K. Dick, 1928-1982

 
Tiger gotta hunt. Bird gotta fly. Man gotta sit and wonder why, why, why.
Tiger gotta sleep. Bird gotta land. Man gotta tell himself he understands.
-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 
I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.
-- Pooh

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

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

 
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
-- H. H. Williams

 
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks

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

 

Environmentalism:
In one of the earliest expressions of ecological concern, Walt Kelley's cartoon character, Pogo, sadly informed his companions, "We have met the enemy, and they are us." Thereby betraying the true character of environmentalism: that it regards humanity as the enemy and is therefore rooted in evil.

 
Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.
-- Ronald Reagan

 

Stock Market Trading:
"When life looks like Easy Street, there's danger at your door."
-- The Grateful Dead

 
"Act without doing; work without effort.
Think of the small as large and the few as many.
Confront the difficult while it is still easy;
Accomplish the great tasks by a series of small acts."
-- The Tao Te Ching

 
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
-- Thomas Carlyle

 
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

 
A billion here, a couple of billion there --- first thing you know it adds up to be real money.
-- Everett McKinley Dirksen

 

Vision:
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

 

Courage and Cowardice:
Silence is the wisdom of fools.
-- Unknown

 
Failure is not an option - It is a rare privilege reserved for the few among us who have the guts to try.
-- Unknown

 
Trying to be a hero,
winding up a zero;
can scar a man forever
right down to your soul.
-- Larry Gatling

 
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total oblivion. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me and turn my inner eye to follow its path. When the fear is gone, only I will remain.
--The Litany Against Fear (Frank Herbert, -Dune-, 1965)

 
Greatness courts failure.
--Tin Cup

 
"It matters not how one plays the game, but where you place the blame."
-- Jack Doherty, my old Scottish golf buddy, whenever somebody blames a bad shot on any factor other than himself.

 
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their time.
--Voltaire

 
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
-- Publilius Syrus

 
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.
-- Charles McCabe

 

Love, Marriage and Relationships:
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.
-- Don Quinn

 
I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.
-- Art Leo

 
Anyone who hates dogs and kids can't be All Bad.
-- W. C. Fields

 
Sex is not the answer. It is the question. "Yes!" is the answer.
-- Unknown

 
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
-- H. L. Mencken

 
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
-- Don Vonada (Apologies for quoting him out of context!)

 
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it.
-- Peggy Joyce

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

 

Politics, Politicians, Governments and the Wars they start:
Do those that lie here know why did they die?
And did they believe when they answered the call...
Did they really believe that this war would end war?
For the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain,
the killing and dying was all done in vain.
For young Willy McBride, it all happened again
and again and again and again and again.
-- From "The Green Fields of France"

 

Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle.
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
-- The Tao Te Ching

 
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 Eisenhower

 
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

 
Bumper sticker in Columbia, SC:   I love my country - But the Government scares me.

 
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
-- George McGovern

 

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
-- Ronald Reagan

 

In America, any boy may become president and I suppose that's just one of the risks he takes.
-- Adlai Stevenson

 
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

 
I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.
-- Will Rogers

 
Eisenhower was very nice,  Nixon was his only vice.
-- C. Degen

 
Corruption is not the #1 priority of the Police Commissioner. His job is to enforce the law and fight crime.
-- P.B.A. President E. J. Kiernan

 
For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say "Canada". Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.
-- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to the U.S.

 
Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
-- Johnny Hart

 
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of the pox !"
"That, my Lord, depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress"
-- John Wilkes to The Earl of Sandwich, British Parliament, November 1763

 
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman

 
Langenhoven: "Mr. Speaker, half the members of this house are asses!"
Speaker: "The member will retract that last remark or be expelled from the chamber."
Langenhoven: "OK Mr. Speaker, half the members of this house are NOT asses!"
-- C.J.Langenhoven in the South African parliament, circa 1930.

 
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
-- O'Henry

 
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

 
We didn't send you to Washington to make intelligent decisions. We sent you to represent us.
-- Kent York, Baptist minister to US Rep. Bill Sarpalius.

 
And, of course, the word "politics" is derived from "POLY", meaning many, and "TICS", meaning small, blood sucking insects.
--- Chris Clayton

 
The people - that great beast!
-- Alexander Hamilton

 
Guidelines for Bureaucrats:
(1) When in charge ponder.
(2) When in trouble delegate.
(3) When in doubt mumble.
-- James Boren

 
There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
-- Mark Twain

 
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
-- Senator Soaper

 
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
-- H. L. Mencken

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

 
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
-- Will Rodgers

 
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-- Ronald Reagan, Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987

 

Leadership and Management:
Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
-- Charles G. Dawes

 
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
--Shakespeare

 
There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.
--Victor Hugo

 
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month.
-- Wernher von Braun

 
The question, "Who ought to be boss?" is like asking "Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?" Obviously the man who can sing tenor.
-- Henry Ford

 
It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
-- James H. Boren

 
Leadership is action, not position.
-- Donald McGannon

 

Dedicated to Africa:
My greatest supporters were Muhammar Gadaffi and Fidel Castro.
-- Nelson Mandela

 
He who asks questions cannot avoid the answers.
-- Saying in the Cameroon

 
I don't know why everyone thinks that The Last Action Hero was such a flop. We were Number One in Zaire
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

 
In America the customer is King, but in Japan the customer is God.
--Dr. Edward Deming
And in South Africa the customer is a damned nuisance.
--Neels Henning

 
There are many things worth living for.
There are a few things worth dying for.
There are no things worth killing for.
--Unknown

 
...You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love - nothing but food and fear.
-- From Ayn Rand's HUAC testimony, speaking about the Soviet Union, but equally applicable to Africa, where twice as many people are starving under brutal dictatorships and mock democracies today.

 
In the forest the gorilla sleeps where he wants to sleep.
-- Saying from Africa

 
Thank God I am an American.
-- Keith Richburg in: Out of America - A Black Man Confronts Africa.

 

Dedicated to all Scientists:
From a long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.
-- R. P. Feynman, Lectures on Physics.

 
Stoning non conformists is part of science. Stoning conformists is
also part of science. Only those theories that can stand up to a
merciless barrage of stones deserve consideration. It is the
creationist habit of throwing marshmallows that we find annoying.
-- Dr. Pepper.

 
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of
the smaller prime numbers.

2:  The Odd Prime --
It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED.

3:  The True Prime --
Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true."

31:  The Arbitrary Prime --
Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime
in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91
received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the
next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none
at all. Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are
derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but
true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
--Unknown

 
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
-- Kronecker

 
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking.
-- Jerome Lettvin

 
For a good Prime, call:
29819592777931214269172453467810429868925511217482600306406141434158089
-- Zachary Kessin

 
Time is that great gift of nature which keeps everything from happening at once.
--Unknown

 
A black hole is where God divides by zero.
--Unknown

 
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

 
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
-- N. Bohr

 
The previous one from Niels Bohr fits some journalists of the NY Times like a glove:
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920 
(Didn't the same illustrious publication nominate Adolf Hitler as Man of the Year a decade and a half later??)

 
See how system into system runs -
What other planets circle other suns.
-- Alexander Pope

 
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ...
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

 
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

 
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end of the blackboard.
-- Prof. Steiner

 
For I do not believe that the stars are spread over a spherical surface at equal distances from one center; I suppose their distances from us to vary so much that some are 2 or 3 times as remote as others.
-- Galileo (Who said that we see so much further than scientists like Galileo, because we stand on their shoulders?)

 
I don't understand you, Sir,
I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
-- Samuel Johnson

 
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
-- Goethe

 
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he  is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bath and not make messes in the house.
-- Robert Heinlein, Lazarus Long: "Time Enough for Love"

 
Whence are we, and why are we? Of what scene the actors or spectators?
--Percy Byshe Shelly

 
A crank is a man with a new idea - until it catches on.
-- Mark Twain

 
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-- Phillip K. Dick, 1928-1982

 
To know all things is not permitted.
-- Horatius

 
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
-- Tennessee Williams

 
The stomach is the only part of a man that can fully satisfied. The yearning of a man's brain for new knowledge and experience and for more pleasant surroundings never can be fully met. It is an appetite that cannot be appeased.
-- Thomas Edison

 
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.
--Leon Lederman

 

Insult:
A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
-- Mark Twain

 
He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.
-- John Mason Brown, drama critic

 
Comment on Boy George : " Just what England needs, another queen who can't dress."
--Joan Rivers

 
In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.
-- Winston Churchill, of Montgomery

 
MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.
-- Winston Churchill

 
Don't be humble, you're not that great.
-- Golda Meir

 
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
-- Mark Twain

 
I'm in Pittsburgh. Why am I here?
-- Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate

 
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
-- Oscar Wilde

 
Calvin Coolidge looks as if he had been weaned on a pickle.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

 
Ah, Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence!
-- TimeBandits

 

Humor:
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
-- Winston Churchill

 
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss.
-- Robert Heinlein, Lazarus Long: "Time Enough for Love"

 
How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?
-- Elliot

 
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work.
-- Gallagher

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

 
Hey! Who took the cork off my lunch??!
-- W. C. Fields

 
Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.
-- Ogden Nash

 
Grub first, then ethics.
-- Bertolt Brecht

 
Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
-- La Rouchefoucauld

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

 
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
-- La Rouchefoucauld

 
If man evolved from the ape, how come there are still apes around? Some of them were given choices.
-- from Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C."

 
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks.
-- Lew Col

 
A witty saying proves nothing.
-- Voltaire

 
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time - I think I've forgotten this before.
-- Stephen Wright

 
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

 
Quite literally, a man's memory is what he forgets with.
-- Odell Shepard

 
This world is a comedy to those that think, and a tragedy to those that feel.
-- Horace Walpole

 

Religion:
To those lucid and courageous minds who gave you the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Falwell, Robertson and the God-inspired rule of the Righteous. To those intrepid souls who fight with unflagging zeal to remove from libraries dangerous books they have not read and from theatres those spiritually toxic films they have not seen, believing that thought is a controlled substance and secular thinking hazardous to mental health.
--Parke Godwin, in the dedication of "The Snake Oil Wars"

 
America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies.
-- James Fenimore Cooper

 
God is Dead
-- Nietzsche

 
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies wil not understand this book either.
-- Kurt Vonnegut,  Cat's Cradle

 
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
-- Pablo Picasso

 
God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
-- Alfred Jarry

 
God may be subtle, but He isn't plain mean.
-- Albert Einstein

 
Faith is a decision, not a conclusion.
-- Joseph Fletcher

 
Kill them all, God will recognize his own.
--Amalric Arnaud, during the seige of Be'ziers (1209 AD), addressing soldiers who asked him how to tell the difference between the heretics and the orthodox Catholics.

 
There is a thing, formless yet complete.
Before heaven and earth it existed.
Without sound, without substance,
it stands alone and unchanging.
It is all-pervading and unfailing.
One may think of it as the mother of all beneath Heaven.
We do not know its name, but we call it Tao.
Deep and still, it seems to have existed forever.
-- Tao Te Ching

 
Towards no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences in belief.
-- James Russel Lowell

 
We dance round a ring and suppose,
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
--Robert Frost

 
An ethical man is a Christian holding four aces.
-- Mark Twain

 
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- H.G.Wells

 
We must be greater than God, for we must undo his injustice.
-- Jules Renard

 
I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating the world.
-- C. S. Lewis

 
Gotta serve somebody.
-- Bob Dylan

 
Men create gods in their own image.
-- Xenophanes

 
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside as a result of biological and psychological necessities.
-- Sigmund Freud

 
It is possible to pay another man's debts on his behalf, but it is not possible to make a guilty man innocent by suffering in his place.
-- Carl Lofmark

 
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
-- Cardinal Bellarmine 1615, during the trial of Galileo

 
Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
-- Mark Twain

 
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
-- Peter de Vries

 
Faith means not wanting to know the truth.
-- Nietzsche

 

Dedicated to all Man-Haters:
... A socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
-- Pat Robertson on feminism

 
Another instance of woman trying to do a man's job.
-- Referring to lesbianism -- Anonymous caller on a radio talk show.

 

Death and dying:
We are all travellers in this world. From birth till death, we travel between the eternities.
-- Robert Duvall in Broken Trail.

 
Alas, I am dying beyond my means.
-- Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed

 
I hope you died well,
and I hope you died clean...
-- From "The Green Fields of France"

 
Death smiles at all of us. All a man can do, is to smile back.
-- Marcus Aurelius

 
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
-- John Barrymore's dying words

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

 
Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
-- George Saunders' dying words

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

 
In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead.
-- Egyptian Book of the Dead

 
Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
-- R. Geis

 
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
-- Winston Churchill

 
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
-- Swinburne

 

Stupidity:
Famous last words:
    1. Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
    2. Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
    3. What happens if you touch these two wires tog---
    4. We won't need reservations.
    5. It's always sunny there this time of the year.
    6. Don't worry, it's not loaded.
    7. They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
    8. Don't worry, I can handle it.
    9. You and what army?
    10. If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a cop.

 
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
-- Elbert Hubbard

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

 
For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
-- R. Clopton

 

Odds and Ends:
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams

 
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
-- Harry Warner of Warner Brothers, 1925

 
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
-- Derek Bok, president of Harvard

 
Never underestimate the power of the dork side of the force.
-- Unknown

 
Don't say yes until I finish talking.
-- Darryl F. Zanuck

 
Immortality --- a fate worse than death.
-- Edgar A. Shoaff

 
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
-- Charles Schultz

 
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
-- Carl Zwanzig

 
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

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

 
I drink to make other people interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan

 
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
-- Oscar Wilde

 
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
-- Mae West

 
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal

 
I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I have never made one.
-- James Gordon Bennett

 
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
-- Pete Seeger

 
I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
-- Bill Hoest

 
Do not try to solve all life's problems at once --- learn to dread each day as it comes.
-- Donald Kaul

 
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"

 
"Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization."
-- Jon Bentley

 
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
--Martin H. Fischer

 
The present is not a free gift. You finance it with the future.
-- Unknown

 
Trust is like virginity. You lose it once and that's it.
-- Unknown

 
Anger gets us into trouble. Pride keeps us there.
-- Unknown

 
"I have the terrible feeling that, because I have a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater,
you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai."
--Orson Welles, "Someone to Love."

 
Men came together in cities in order to live: they remain together in order to live the good life.
-- Aristotle

 
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."
--- Robert Orben

 
Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.
-- Miguel de Cervantes

 
Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emporer of Siberia" or "Director of Corporate Planning".
-- The Official MBA Handbook on business cards

 
No, I don't think smoking should be illegal. Smokers are already getting the death penalty!
-- from Stev0's "rant of the week" on smoking

 
"As I grow older and older,
And totter toward the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom."
-- Dorothy Parker

 
Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
-- Earl Wilson

 
It is the business of little minds to shrink.
-- Carl Sandburg

 
When a man knows not what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
-- Seneca

 
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
-- Paul Valery

 
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation, but not the power of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw

 
Committee -- a group of men who keeps minutes but wastes hours.
-- Milton Berle

 
A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
-- Unknown

 
Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
-- Ambrose Bierce

 
Karl Marx would have been right proud of this one:
A Sept 13 1987 Boston Globe story indicated polls show almost half of Americans think the phrase 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' comes from the US Constitution. (source: Chomsky's Necessary Illusions)

 
For any twentieth-century American who'd been paying attention at all, the phrase 'criminal justice system' should have been warning enough." 
-- L. Neil Smith

 

Dedicated to all Programmers:
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary numbers and those who don't."
-- Unknown (If this makes no sense to you - Don't worry. It merely means that you belong to the second kind of people.)

 
"True. When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb."
-- Steve Haflich

 
"I view the landslide of C use in education as something of a calamity."
-- N. Wirth, 1993 (What else would you expect from the creator of Pascal?)

 
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein

 
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
-- Dick Brandon

 
"Why can't life be menu driven or at least have an 'undo' feature?"
-- David M. DeFelice

 
Well, both speed and reproducibility are important in a compiler, just like sexuality and reliability are both important in a spouse. The speed of a compiler and the sexuality in a spouse get you interested, but the reproducibility and reliability are what convince you to keep them.
-- Henry Baker

 
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
-- Richard W. Hamming

 
Don't get suckered in by the comments --- they can be terribly misleading.  Debug only code.
-- Dave Storer

 
The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."
-- "Politically Correct UNIX System VI Release notes"

 
Fortunately, the second-to-last bug has just been fixed.
-- Ray Simard

 
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis

 
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov

 

Scotty:     "Captain, we din' can reference it!"
Kirk:     "Analysis, Mr. Spock?"
Spock:     "Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table."
Kirk:     "Then it's of external origin?"
Spock:     "Affirmative."
Kirk:     "Mr. Sulu, go to pass two."
Sulu:     "Aye aye, sir, going to pass two."
                        -- anonymous

Which is, of course, exactly how it works.

 
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
-- John von Neumann

 
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
-- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"

 
A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensible answers calculated with micro metric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.
-- IEEE Grid newsmagazine

 
"As far as I know we never had an undetected error"
--Unknown

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

 
C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung 
-- .sig of Thomas Funke

 
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, President of  DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977
    (Have you seen any DEC PC lately??)

 
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
-- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985

 
The 9th Commandment for C Programmers (Annotated; Henry Spencer)states thus:
IX Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first
six characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome
and the years of its necessity stretch before thee
seemingly without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and
go mad on that fateful day when thou desirest to make
thy program run on an old system.
Though some hasty zealots cry "not
so; the Millenium is come, and this
saying is obsolete and no longer
need be supported", verily there
be many, many ancient systems in
the world, and it is the decree of
the dreaded god Murphy that thy
next employment just might be on
one. While thou sleepest, he plot-
teth against thee. Awake and take care.
It is, note carefully, not neces-
sary that thy identifiers be lim-
ited to a length of six characters.
The only requirement that the holy
words place upon thee is uniqueness
within the first six. This often
is not so hard as the belittlers claimeth.

 
If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.
- Henry Spencer

 
"[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy."
-- Joseph Campbell

 
"Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover"
C.A.R.Hoare "Hints on Programming Language Design" 1973

 
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
-- Robert Firth

 
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
-- Donald Knuth

 
C programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the computer, Lisp programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the programmer.
-- Stroustroup

 
A 16-head Cray C90 with some reasonable amount of disk costs $40M
For $40M, you could buy 4000 workstations and have enough left over to
buy a really cool switch with which to hook them together.......
So what would you rather have pulling your wagon, 16 oxen or 4000 chickens
with a frictionless harness?
--Larry Meadows

 
"What's taking so long? It's only typing!"
-- A marketing manager posing as a software manager

 
"Another of Fortran's breakthroughs was the GOTO statement, which was a uniquely simple and understandable means of structuring and modularizing programs."
-- From the May/June'94 IEEE Institute, an article about John Backus receiving the Draper Prize for having developed Fortran.

 
"First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
-- George Carrette