"I can see that you have a lot to unlearn." -"If you are talking about my vulgar instinct for survival, forget it." -- Roger Zelazny, _The Courts of Chaos_, Corwin ~ It occurred to him suddenly that he wasn't very good at bitterness or regret, that he didn't have the stamina for them, and if he was to recapture his dignity he had better shape up fast. -- Anne Rice,_Queen of the Damned_, Marius ~ "Umm. Systems analysts rarely call their parents from across the country in response to mysterious problems. Still more rarely do they disappear. It is not part of the technical mentality to disappear." -- R.A. MacAvoy, _Tea with the Black Dragon_, Oolong ~ There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ ~ Pray, v: To ask that the laws of the universe be anulled in behalf of one confessedly unworthy. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ ~ The residence of high dignitary of the Christian Church is called a palace; that of the Founder of his religion was known as a field or wayside. There is progress. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ ~ Perhaps you are thinking: "But a tank costs several million dollars, not including floor mats. I don't have that kind of money." Don't be silly. You're a consumer, right? You have credit cards, right? Perhaps you are thinking: "Yes, but how am I going to pay the credit-card company?" Don't be silly. You have a tank, right? -- Dave Barry ~ Holy Wood!...was that special sort of beautiful area which is only beautiful if you can leave after briefly admiring its beauty and go somewhere else where there are hot tubs and cold drinks. Actually staying there for any length of time is a penance. -- _Moving Pictures_ ~ "Bastards or not, the U.S.A. would at least give my children passports." -- Freeman Dyson, _Disturbing the Universe_ ~ "Undoubtedly there is meanness in all the arts which ladies condescend to employ for captivation..." Miss Bingley was not so satisfied with this reply as to continue the subject. -- Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_, Mr. Darcy ~ "How unfortunate that you should have a reasonable answer, and that I should be so reasonable as to accept it!" -- Jane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_, Elizabeth ~ Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton beginning to talk to him. -- Jane Austen, _Emma_ ~ "Corruption is elected officials trading votes for their own advantage. Democracy is when the masses do the same thing." -- _Cyteen_ ~ "She wondered if one's time at college might be better served with friends like Thomas than with lovers like Nick." -- _Tam Lin_ ~ It was a poem about daffodils. Apparently the poet had liked them very much. Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in Susan's very definite and precise opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so. She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it. -- Terry Pratchett, _Soul Music_ ~ "(But) I've spent a lot of my life working in New Guinea (on bird evolution) among technologically primitive people. The average New Guinean is smarter, more alert, more interested and more engaged than the average white American." -- Jared Diamond, _Guns Germs and Steel_ ~ "If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the Earth in a week." -- E.O. Wilson, _Journey to the Ants_ ~ "To this day, no one has settled the controversy over whether Christ's body is literally present in the bread and wine of the Communion. This is unfortunate, since many people were executed for their divergent opinions on this issue. It would be nice to know which ones got burned by mistake." -- Frank Sulloway, _Born to Rebel_ ~ "Babies are rational. So are cats. If you insist on reading the newspaper when you should be petting your cat, the cat solves the problem by lying down on the paper. I don't know if that tactic is the product of calculation or trial and error -- but it works." -- David D. Friedman, _Hidden Order_ ~ "Aldous Huxley said that an intellectual was a person who had discovered something more interesting than sex. A civilised man, it might be said, is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat." -- John Keegan, _A History of Warfare_ ~ On the RoboRoach: 'My favorite quote about this, "They are not very nice insects. They are a little bit smelly, and there's something about the way they move their antennae. But they look nicer when you put a little circuit on their backs and remove their wings."' -- Sean Morgan ~ "After all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more." -- Hacker's Dictionary ~ "No, life is not fair. Not intrinsically. It's something we can try to make it, though. A goal we can aim for. You can choose to do so, or not. We have. I'm sorry you find us so repulsive for that." -- _Player of Games_ ~ "Have you heard of Sublimers before?" "Oh, yes. You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don't you?" "Oh, no! What we believe in takes one completely _away_ from such bodily concerns..." -- _Excession_ ~ "I'm inspired by the MIR situation, in a back-door sort of way... It demonstrates that space can be inhabited by a duct-tape culture (Apollo 13 was a disaster - Mir kludgery is SOP)." -- Clark Brooks ~ "If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy." -- Kurt Vonnegut ~ "First I will discuss the environment of the solar atmosphere. This is well-established science. Then I will discuss how one might keep an object immersed in that atmosphere cold enough to remain solid. This is an application of well-established engineering thermodynamics. Finally, I will describe the heliopter as a whole. This is an exercise in wild-ass system engineering." -- Carl Feynman ~ "so many stupid people, so few comets" -- Hara Ra ~ "> Milton? As in Milton Keynes? John Milton. Economist. Author of "Paradise Lost", epic poem about deflation." -- Jo Walton ~ "So how come we haven't seen real corporate warfare, then? or at least assasinations 'n' (more) corporate espionage?" You generally want to avoid getting local prosecutors involved. They actually put people in jail, on occasion. ~ "Look at 'em," said Granny Weatherwax. "All in black, again." "Well, we wear black too," said Nanny Ogg the reasonable. "Only 'cos it's respectable and serviceable. Not because it's romantic." ~ "Above all, it [the market] is a game which serves to elicit from each player the highest worthwhile contribution to the common pool from which each will win an uncertain share." ~ "Legislation intended to alter the general rules of just conduct is a comparatively new phenomenon in history and has justly been described as 'among all inventions of man the one wrought with the gravest consequences, more far-reaching even than that of fire and gunpowder'." ~ "A legislature is now not a body that makes laws; a law is whatever is resolved by a legislature." ~ "It is a curious consequence of giving the representative assembly unlimited power that it has largely ceased to be the chief determining agent in shaping the law proper, but has left this task more and more to the bureaucracy." ~ "The practices by which the great commerical centres had become rich were shown to enable the individual to do much more good and to serve much greater needs than if he let himself be guided by the observed needs and capacities of his neighbors." ~ "Since this judge-made law arises out of the settlement of disputes, it relates solely to the relations of acting persons towards one another and does not control an individual's actions which do not affect others. It defines the protected domains of each person with which others are prohibited from interfering. The aim is to prevent conflicts between people who do not act under central direction but on their own initiative, pursuing their own ends on the basis of their own ends. These rules must thus apply in circumstances which nobody can forsee and must therefore be designed to cover an uncertain number of future instances." ~ "He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing." -- Dorothy Parker ~ "And it is on that word, 'hummy', my dears, that Tonstant Weader Fwowed up." -- Dorothy Parker, on _The House at Pooh Corner_ ~ "Economists like myself tend to resist stupidity explanations like this, because just about any modeling approach can explain just about any behavior if you put stupidity in the right place." -- Robin Hanson ~ "Our spider has finished weaving her web. Think before you speak, my friends. Fools are her lawful prey." ~ "Kkkt. Adaptive." ~ "So high, so low, so many things to know." ~ "Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it." - Susan E. Cohen ~ "He's just pissed off because his Turing test came back negative." ~ "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but *some of them are on opposite sides.*" -- Patrician Vetinari in Pratchett's /Guards! Guards!/ ~ "My country right or wrong. When right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right." ~ 'Igors were avid to learn new things. But there were limits. Igors did not believe in "Forbidden Knowledge" and "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" but obviously there were some things a man was not meant to know, such as what it felt like to have every single particle of your body sucked into a little hole...' Thief of Time, pg 131 ~ One great analogy of the problem of getting the government involved is the government workers view of problem solving: If I teach a man to fish, I have a job for a day. If I give a man a fish, I have a job for life. -- Richard MacDonald, bujold list ~ It has caused me to evolve a rule of thumb "everyone is more interesting than they first appear". -- Mark Atwood ~ "If nothing we do means anything, the only thing that means anything is what we do." -- Joss Whedon (Angel) ~ "I beseech you, Sirs, in the bowels of Christ to consider that you may be wrong!" -- Oliver Cromwell, to Parliament ~ ObDilbert: (To a class of young children.) "The goal of every engineer is to retire without being blamed for a major catastrophe." ~ He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy ~