A man without God is like a fish without a skateboard. ~ Dear Lord, observe this bended knee This visage meek and humble, And hear this confidential plea Voiced in reverent mumble: Give me Shylock, give me Fagin But O God spare me Ronald Reagan! -- Ansel Adams ~ If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. ~ The United States Army; 194 years of proud service, unhampered by progress. ~ A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. -- Franklin Roosevelt ~ God must love assholes -- She made so many of them. ~ A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun. ~ Ronald Reagan -- America's favorite placebo ~ Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first. ~ Support the right of unborn males to bear arms! -- A public service announcement from Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic Church, and the National Rifle Association ~ Motto of the Electrical Engineer: Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis: it stays up as long as you don't fuck with it. ~ What can you use used tampons for? Tea bags for vampires. ~ Good day for water sports. Take a bath with a friend. ~ Jesus was killed by a Moral Majority. ~ Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion. -- Robert Burton ~ So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. -- Bertrand Russell ~ "Even the AI hated [my book]?" "The AI _loved_ it. That's when we knew for sure that _people_ were going to hate it." -- Dan Simmons, _Hyperion_ ~ "There is nothing wrong with the software that rm won't cure." -- Arnie Romo ~ "The voters have spoken, the bastards..." ~ Remember, even if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat. ~ "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing." -- Gamel Nasser ~ John Birch Society -- that pathetic manifestation of organized apoplexy. -- Edward P. Morgan ~ Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. -- S. Johnson ~ If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door. -- Paul Beatty ~ Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender. -- W. C. Fields ~ Think big. Pollute the Mississippi. ~ Hindsight is an exact science. ~ Boston, n.: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition. ~ There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. ~ Never be led astray onto the path of virtue. ~ The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it. -- Glaser and Way ~ The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- Tom Lehrer ~ Cigarette, n.: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in between. ~ "If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd everytime, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side." -- Orson Scott Card ~ Jesus don't walk on water anymore; his feet leak. -- Edward Abbey ~ A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. -- Mark Twain ~ "I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top." -- English Professor, Ohio University ~ There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" ~ "Life's little ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast, and frying pans without fires are often far between." ~ The Jewel of Judgement, Dworkin's text editor. And people complain about having to learn vi! ~ The Jewel of Judgement, Dworkin's text editor. And you thought Emacs had a lot of options. ~ The Jewel of Judgement, Dworkin's operating system. And people complain about Unix having weird command names! ~ Ask not what your country can do for you Ask what you can do for you And how your country can stop preventing you from doing that. -- Marko Tervio ~ Zero Defects, n.: The result of shutting down a production line. ~ No Risk Lifestyle, n.: Death ~ You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers. -- Steven Feiner ~ "If you're a real good kid, I'll give you a piggy-back ride on a buzz-saw." -- W. C. Fields ~ Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you? FIRST you rape, THEN you pillage!! ~ Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare. ~ Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis. ~ It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for being right. ~ Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. ~ "I think that I finally realized that my campaign had become evil when the players began to evaluate a human life in terms of just how much interior decorating it could fuel through magical sacrifice!" -- Kromm ~ Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been attempted before. ~ Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead. -- Mark Twain ~ /earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can. ~ He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered. ~ The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey. -- Andy Warhol ~ Windows Error 004 -- Operator Fell Asleep While Waiting ~ Come, let us retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment. ~ We are Microsoft... OS/2 is irrelevant. UNIX is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated. ~ PMS, the short period of time when women act like men do all the time. ~ Stalin, like Peter the Great, may be remembered for his lavishness in the expenditure of human life. ~ Drive an environmentalist crazy. Tell him that the greenhouse gasses are escaping through the hole in the ozone layer. ~ Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. Popular Mechanics, March 1949 ~ The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. -- Alexis de Tocqueville ~ God wanted to have a holiday, so He asked St. Peter for suggestions on where to go. "Why not go to Jupiter?" asked St. Peter. "No, too much gravity, too much stomping around," said God. "Well, how about Mercury?" "No, it's too hot there." "Okay," said St. Peter, "What about Earth?" "No," said God, "They're such horrible gossips. When I was there 2000 years ago, I had an affair with a Jewish woman, and they're still talking about it." ~ Conservative, n.: One who admires radicals centuries after they're dead. -- Leo C. Rosten ~ Repent! and worship the Great Green Arkleseizure! Repent of your unbelief so that when the Great White Handkerchief comes you will not be wiped up with the rest of the snot! ~ The wraith drinks a potion of gain level. The wraith seems more experienced! -- nethack ~ Fertility is hereditary. If your parents didn't have children, neither will you. ~ "What if they made the whole thing up? Four guys, two thousand years ago, over wine..." ~ Life's little ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast, and frying pans without fires are often far between. (Words from a hopeless romantic with a cynic's armor) ~ Random Executions will continue until Morale Improves. ~ Most legislators are so dumb that they couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel. ~ Q: How many right-to-lifers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to say that light started when the screwing began. ~ Q: How many supply-siders does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. The darkness will cause the light bulb to change by itself. ~ God isn't dead, He's just trying to avoid the draft. ~ A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. -- Alfred E. Wiggam ~ Nothing is better than Sex. Masturbation is better than nothing. Therefore, Masturbation is better than Sex. ~ In the beginning was the DEMO Project. And the Project was without form. And darkness was upon the staff members thereof. So they spake unto their Division Head, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks." And the Division Head spake unto his Department Head, saying, "It is a crock of excrement and none may abide the odor thereof." Now, the Department Head spake unto his Directorate Head, saying, "It is a container of excrement, and is very strong, such that none may abide before it." And it came to pass that the Directorate Head spake unto the Assistant Technical Director, saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide by its strength." And the assistant Technical Director spake thus unto the Technical Director, saying, "It containeth that which aids growth and it is very strong." And, Lo, the Technical Director spake then unto the Captain, saying, "The powerful new Project will help promote the growth of the Laboratories." And the Captain looked down upon the Project, and He saw that it was Good! ~ Haggis, n.: Haggis is a kind of stuff black pudding eaten by the Scots and considered by them to be not only a delicacy but fit for human consumption. The minced heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, calf or other animal's inner organs are mixed with oatmeal, sealed and boiled in maw in the sheep's intestinal stomach-bag and ... Excuse me a minute ... ~ Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids and taxes. ~ Democrats eat the fish they catch. Republicans hang them on the wall. ~ Republican boys date Democratic girls. They plan to marry Republican girls, but feel they're entitled to a little fun first. ~ Democrats make up plans and then do something else. Republicans follow the plans their grandfathers made. ~ Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in the USA. The remainder is thrown out. ~ Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats. -- The Official Rules, as compiled by Paul Dickson ~ Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination -- Graffito in a women's restroom ~ The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. ~ better !pout !cry better watchout lpr why santa claus town cat /etc/passwd >list ncheck list ncheck list cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist cat list | grep nice >giftlist santa claus town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | egrep 'bad|good' for (goodness sake) { be good } ~ LEO (July 23 - Aug 22) Your determination and sense of humor will come to the fore. Your ability to laugh at adversity will be a blessing because you've got a day coming you wouldn't believe. As a matter of fact, if you can laugh at what happens to you today, you've got a sick sense of humor. ~ Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head. ~ A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope. "That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow man". As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well, he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing." ~ Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. ~ Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere. ~ Drive defensively. Buy a tank. ~ The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. ~ Mickey Mouse! Sieg Heil! Mickey Mouse! Sieg Heil! Mickey Mouse! Sieg Heil! ~ "We are all individuals. We are all individuals. We are all individuals..." ~ At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. -- The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985 ~ "LA is like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth." -- Douglas Adams ~ A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy." Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too". ~ "Actually, I've always been rather fond of Lucifer. He was, after all, the brightest of all the angels before his fall." -- Rhydon of Eastmarch, _High_Deryni_ ~ Monday, n.: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" ~ "Sharing is to taxation as sex is to rape." -- Jan Wasilewski ~ Three Accounts for the Super-users in the sky, Seven for the Operators in their halls of fame, Nine for Ordinary Users doomed to crie, One for the Illegal Cracker with his evil game In the Domains of Internet where the data lie. One Account to rule them all, One Account to watch them, One Account to make them all and in the network bind them In the Domains of Internet where the data lie. ~ It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles. ~ Good news is just life's way of keeping you off balance. ~ "To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." -- Woody Allen ~ For years a secret shame destroyed my peace -- I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece. But now I think a thought that brings me hope: Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope. -- Justin Richardson. ~ CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh.. ~ To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car. -- Frank Zindler ~ "The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide. " ~ Real hackers cat > a.out ~ Pretend to spank me -- I'm a pseudo-masochist! ~ Pascal Users: To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed. ~ "If you think about it, somewhere there's a Logrus master with Amelia Earhart, a whole squadron of P-51's, and a mile-high pile of socks and keys." ~ "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." "The busy bee has no time for sorrow." "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." -- Blake, "Proverbs of Hell" from "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" ~ "Now is the time for all good men to come to." -- Walt Kelly ~ Chicken Soup, n.: An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin, cocaine, interferon, and TLC. The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" ~ ... The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune of "Camptown Races". Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" ~ Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams ~ "Hey! Who took the cork off my lunch??!" -- W. C. Fields ~ Children aren't happy without something to ignore, And that's what parents were created for. -- Ogden Nash ~ If Helen Keller is alone in a forest and falls, does she make a sound? ~ Additional: Our biggest enemy is going space crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes. --Holly Red Dwarf II, Queeg ~ when i die, i'd like to go peacefully. in my sleep. like my grandfather. not screaming, like the passengers in his car... ~ "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased." -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" ~ Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies: As a USENET discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. ~ Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb? A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank", and 20% of the definitions are of the form "A ...... consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks". ~ Nine megs for the secretaries fair, Seven megs for the hackers scarce, Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs, Three megs for system source; One disk to rule them all, One disk to bind them, One disk to hold the files And in the darkness grind'em. ~ Thinking of Maud you forget everything else. -- hack v1.0.3 Who was that Maud person anyway? -- nethack v3.1.0 ~ As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible. -- Blake, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" ~ "Good food, good meat, good god - let's eat!" (Prayer by Homer Simpson) ~ The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't. HBT; The Gospel According to Fred, 3:1 -- Principia Discordia ~ There is serenity in Chaos. Seek ye the Eye of the Hurricane. -- Principia Discordia ~ "What's big, noisy and has an IQ of 8?" "Operation Rescue." ~ We wish you a Hare Krishna, We wish you a Hare Krishna, We wish you a Hare Krishna And a Sun Myung Moon! -- Maxwell Smart ~ "Why did the tachyon cross the road?" "Because it was on the other side." -- random ~ Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all. ~ Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. ~ A cult is a religion with no political power. -- Tom Wolfe ~ Ignorance of your profession is best concealed by solemnity and silence, which pass for profound knowledge upon the generality of mankind. -- "Advice to Officers of the British Army", 1783 ~ "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." ~ All forms of earth threatening evil are doomed as soon as the scientist in charge says the words "Resonant Frequency." ~ Conquering Russia is a steppe by steppe process. ~ Capital Punishment: when the government taxes you to get capital, in order to go into business in competition with you, and then taxes the profits on your business in order to cover its losses. ~ bitch - a cool babe who refuses to change her name "A man will call a woman 'bitch' when he can't control her, when she won't do his bidding, when she's not compliant to his needs. I like this in a word." -- Cynthia Heimel ~ Conservative: If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. Liberal: That's not quite right. If guns are outlawed only the govt will have guns. Libertarian: What's the difference? ~ Engineering is the implementation of science; politics is the implementation of faith. -- Zetetic Commentaries ~ There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators. --Steven Wright ~ His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, `You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.' (Terry Pratchett) ~ (After watching the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey) Isaac Asimov : "HAL's breaking First Law! He's breaking First Law!" Carl Sagan : "So, strike them with lightning, Isaac." ~ Emacs is a good operating system, but I prefer Unix. ~ Man:TheMissingLinkBetweenApes&HigherIntelligence ~ America's drugs of choice. Lawyer James Ostrowski writes: It is well known that tobacco causes cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. While the effects of heavy alcohol consumption are not as well known, they include anemia, fatty liver, hepatitis, cirrhosis, pancreatitis, gastritis, ulcer, hypoglycemia, congestive heart failure, ataxia, brain damage, blurred vision, dementia, cranial nerve palsy, circulatory collapse, and hemorrhages. (1989) ~ "The main difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman can probably drive and knows when he's lying." -Peter da Silva ~ Quite true. The way I usually put this, when talking to fundamentalists, is to say that there's good news and bad news. The good news is that there _is_ a God; the bad news is that it's Cthulhu. ~ "Either what you've said is so vague that it's meaningless or I disagree with you completely." -- Tom Maddox ~ If you meet the Buddha in the Net, put his address in your Kill file. (Twist on the Zen brain-teaser,"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him") ~ Oh Subhuti, you have heard that the Tathagata has an address in the Net; that he posts news, or sends mail, or reads mail and news; but in truth, he has no fixed address in the Net, nor does he post or read mail or news; thus is he _called_ Tathagata." -- Diamondoid Sutra, XIII ~ When meeting a Zen master on the road, Greet him with neither words nor silence. Put his lights out, and you will be called One who truly understands Zen. ~ Too long for haiku: | Truly marvelous the proof | Of Fermat's Theorem. | (author unknown) ~ Overheard description of Flora: "She's sort of a cosmic-powered prom queen." ~ Put that cheddar cheese down now! --Pandora _The Amazing Rocket Butt_ ~ "O Great Goddess, to you I do pray, that I may with Karen no longer stay." -- Rocket-Butt ~ "The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch." ~ Nothing is faster than the speed of light ... To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on. ~ I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. -- Ogden Nash ~ President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax. ~ Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car. ~ First Law of Socio-Genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary. ~ Year, n.: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" ~ I trusted him like a brother -- which is to say, not at all. ~ And don't ever post pretending to be me again, or I'll leave dead birds in your underwear drawer! -- Pandora _Pandora and the Phoenix_ ~ Hey, I'm only two years old. Besides, you try typing with paws instead of fingers. This world is so homocentric. -- Pandora _Pandora and the Phoenix_ ~ The Creation of the Universe was made possible by a grant from Texas Instruments. -- Credits, "The Creation of the Universe" (A PBS scientific documentary) ~ Q: Catonis admodum scitum est, qui mirare se aiebat quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem vidisset. (What astonishes me, is that when two diviners meet, they can keep from laughint at one another.) ~ Q: Primus in orbe Deus fecit timor. It was fear that introduced gods into the world. ~ Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government. -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad ~ " In some of the poorer areas of the world it is sadly true that sex is the only luxury available to the ordinary man. Whether the ordinary woman also considers it a luxury is open to question." ~ "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- B. Russell ~ "If you ever have a free moment, you might consider checking out the travel brochures for the town in which you live. You might be amazed. You might not want to live there anymore." -Douglas Coupland ~ "God help us both." -"We Lylmik will help you as best we can. You will have to coerce God yourself." ~ The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. ~ Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. ~ "No chance for hanky-panky. We'll have to play it straight. At least I will." -"Then the advantage is still to the ungodly. Tomorrow, then." ~ "I suppose you'll be a candidate for the Skin-tank yourself now, eh?" -"I will be last, as is fitting." "Oh. Well, of course." ~ "It was no sin, only a failure. 'And even if my troop fell thence vanquished, yet to have attempted a lofty enterprise is still a trophy.'" -"Forty-two years in Holy Orders, you hear all the sins in the Lexicon. But angelism! Now there's a genuine rarey." ~ Language and its absurd conjunctions; Constellations and crustaceans rhyme. ~ The skeptic didn't know if he was alive or dead. But Death knew. ~ Redemption, n: Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it. ~ "How could they tell?" (Dorothy Parker upon hearing that President Coolidge had died) ~ "Because I have too many children." -- Operation Rescue member, on being asked why he was behind over $22,000 in child support payments to his eight kids ~ "I wish I could drink like a lady I can take one or two at the most. Three and I'm under the table -- Four and I'm under the host!" ~ A day without a pun is a day without sunshine; there is gloom for improvement. ~ The German method is to go to the principle of things, to select the wrong principle, and to build on that. ~ In some of the poorer areas of the world it is sadly true that sex is the only luxury available to the ordinary man. Whether the ordinary woman also considers it a luxury is open to question. ~ "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- B. Russell ~ "When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment ... it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands" -- Margaret Hilda Thatcher, on the Falklands Conflict. ~ alt.sci.sociology is supporting some good conversations these days. Nothing has yet been tied down to particular societies composed of specific human individuals, but it's promising. ~ To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time. ~ "In some of the poorer areas of the world it is sadly true that sex is the only luxury available to the ordinary man. Whether the ordinary woman also considers it a luxury is open to question." ~ "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- B. Russell ~ "And I'm not all that decent and honorable. I'm merely well-bred, which I hope is a tolerable substitute." -- Anne Rice, _Ramses the Damned_ ~ "Food is much cheaper in Hong Kong than in Japan-- primarily because Hong Kong has almost no farmers." -- World Bank report, on the political clout of farmers ~ "With that in mind It spread the tale that It transubstantiates into bread, to be consumed by man, so that man will feel less objection to the truth that It consumes man, like bread." -- R.A. MacAvoy _Damiano_, Lucifer, on the Beginning ~ But 'twas beyond a mortal's share/To wander solitary there: Two paradises 'twere in one,/To live in Paradise alone. -- Marvell, "The Garden" ~ "And what about you? At least my flaw is grand, while yours is merely pathetic." -- Marc Remillard -- Julian May, _The Adversary_ ~ "We Little Folk are only a simple barbarian nation, though, and all this high technology of yours is a radical pill to swallow." -"Our idea of wild innovation is using domestic animals for transport." --"And captured Milieu weaponry for...self-defense." -- Julian May, _The Adversary_ ~ "If I were not a man of peace I'd coerce the three of you to quivering jellyfish and get to the bottom of this." -- Julian May, _The Adversary_ ~ "It was no sin, only a failure. 'And even if my troop fell thence vanquished, yet to have attempted a lofty enterprise is still a trophy.'" -"Forty-two years in Holy Orders, you hear all the sins in the Lexicon. But angelism! Now there's a genuine rarey." -- Julian May, _The Adversary_ ~ "Chinese? _Chinese?_ Can't the flaming idiots recognize a flight of UFOs when they see one?" -- Julian May, _Intervention_ ~ Language and its absurd conjunctions; Constellations and crustaceans rhyme. ~ Redemption, n: Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ ~ "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." ~ Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. Harry S Truman ~ All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- E. Rutherford ~ Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" ~ A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain ~ Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. -- Winston Churchill ~ "Ah...the smell of napalm, the smoke of flames..." alt.1d ~ A city is a large community where people are lonesome together ~ Accordion, n.: A bagpipe with pleats. ~ Time flies like an arrow Fruit flies like a banana ~ BASIC, n.: A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company. ~ Finagle's Creed: Science is true. Don't be misled by facts. ~ Economics, n.: Economics is the study of the value and meaning of J. K. Galbraith ... -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" ~ A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems. ~ All intellectual improvement arises from leisure. -- Samuel Johnson ~ The Congress consists of 535 people, mostly men, mostly white, mostly lawyers, and mostly out when you need them. ~ A Swiss Army knife as big as you would have lots of things, Elef, but that doesn't mean I'd want to chop wood with it or anything. --Brad _EMACS 19_ ~ I have less! I have less! --Karen _Karen and the Snakes_ ~ .. postmodernity, once the plaything of smarty-pants French guys, in truth belongs to the engagingly stupid. -Newsweek ~ He was the sort of guy who cross-referenced and indexed his Post-It notes. ~ "Archy is hazardous to children and other living things" - My "Left" side Nuke it (government) till it glows and shoot it in the dark - My "Right" side ~ Can you get the doctor to have sex with you? -- Elef, discussing an "editor" with "gratuitous" features. ~ Me: It's so big, it doesn't do anything right! Walker: I think it does psychoanalyze pinhead ok. ~ C Code. C Code run. Run, Code, RUN! ~ "Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution." ~ What if Schrodinger's Cat wore a gas mask? ~ "I love you, you love me, pedobestiality." ~ "I hate you, you hate me, let's hang Barney from a tree." ~ If I throw a cat out of a window, is it kitty litter? ~ "Superior beings should not kill, but then superior beings should not have to live with vermin anyway." -- Gus Pratt (from Dr. Caligari) ~ I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal." -- Richard Feynman ~ I love you, you love me, With a little fricasee And some mustard and ketchup smeared all over you, Can't I have you for lunch too? ~ Death to the Pederastsaurus! ~ America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless. ~ "If you ever have a free moment, you might consider checking out the travel brochures for the town in which you live. You might be amazed. You might not want to live there anymore." -Douglas Coupland ~ "Can the free market guarantee quality education? No. Can it guarantee quality automobiles? No. It just produces them." ~ (in reply to a question about standards for private schools) "The FDA has killed millions in the name of standards." ~ I Hate You, You Hate Me We're a dysfunctional family With a knicknack, Daddy whacks Mommy in the face, This is really a sad place. ~ IRC is not 'more than a toy'. It's LESS than ... a belch on a windy day. IRC is a little ant exploring the inside of a microwave oven for all five seconds of its short, happy, exploding life." -- Kibo ~ "Before englightenment, Zen is a sacred philosophy. After enlightenment, Zen is an inside joke." --- Mark's not-so-ancient Zen proverb ~ These are not thoughts I express to anyone, of course, save now, when I believe myself to be dying. The world is unsafe for a man who utters such heresies. I see little evidence that Reason is triumphant or that it ever shall be triumphant. But if I have Faith, it is in the faint hope that mankind will save itself, that Lucifer did not, after all, lie. -Ulrich von Bek, _The War Hound and the World's Pain_ ~ Thank goodness MTV has shifted its two most controversial characters to a later time slot. That means viewers will no longer have to make an agonizing choice at 7pm between "Beavis and Butt-head" and the second half of "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." -Howard Rosenberg ~ "Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least." -Random, in _NPiA_ ~ Halloween and Thanksgiving have been cancelled in Arkansas this year. Seems the witch left and took the turkey with her. ~ Piety, n: Reverence for the Supreme Being, based on His supposed resemblance to man. ~ Pedestrian, n: The variable (and audible) part of the roadway for an automobile. ~ "The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologist's is the only language that was dead at birth." ~ "Asia, California and the psychological sciences do not have an impressive record at making people feel good. In Asia nobody has felt good for centuries." ~ "One of the CIA's few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world's most fully headlined secret agency." ~ "Do you know why Mr. Mayhew walked out? It was because his socialist, egalitarian principles had been outraged. There was one poor lion who hadn't got a Christian." -- Winston Churchill ~ "Improvised be damned! I thought of it this morning in my bath and I wish now I hadn't wasted it on this little crowd." -- Winston Churchill ~ Eloquent and lucid in living English, Winston was a scholastic failure because of his disdain for two languages which would be almost useless to him. ~ Happiness, n.: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. ~ Although its rudimentary ego could neither receive nor transmit thought, it knew that it was a fontema, that it must roll and roll and roll, endlessly, that by virtue of determined rolling its species would continue and would increase. -- _First Lensman_ ~ "Pushing against one, as she was buying something at a stall, or pulling her hair when she wasn't looking, or smacking her bottom, was not for me. Too many Victorian novels had given me romantic notions about falling in love, and I wanted something better than this." ~ "Ah hates crickets...He is as invisible as God but with a MUCH louder voice." -- JMS ~ "Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM." -- Larry Niven on his Roentgen Standard. ~ "You don't think he's smart enough to be in kindergarten? When I cash my Social Security he counts the money perfect and he knows the ABC's and a lot of Hebrew songs...what does he do wrong?" -"He doesn't cut straight." "Who cares, if he's not gonna be a tailor?" -- Grandfather and pre-school teacher, _Roommates_ ~ "You know, I've gone to a lot of psychics, and they've told me a lot of different things, but not one of them has ever told me 'You are an undercover policewoman here to arrest me.'" -- New York City undercover policewoman ~ Antisocial arrogance is only for those of us who deserve it. -- me ~ "Imagine reading something in 1980 that either begins or ends - "And then the Berlin wall came down, the Soviet Empire crumbled and the cold war ended, peace was declared between Israel and the PLO and then between the IRA and the Orangemen" (fingers crossed) It sounds like someone winding up all the threads ready for..." ~ 75 years for 70,000 light years means that Voyager can reach Alpha Centauri from Earth in a day and a half. Where was Kirk going, again? ~ The Voyager theme is excellently suited for a documentary on photosynthesis. Or grass growth. ~ "What do you want?" -- Sinclair in the Grey Synapse Chamber, "And the Sky Full of Stars" ~ "Perhaps there was some small wisdom in letting your species survive." -"We like to think so." -- Alit Neroon and Commander Sinclair, "Legacies" ~ "...or the Star Riders will be destroyed." -- Satai Delenn, "Legacies" ~ "The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat." -- Albert Einstein ~ "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force! Like fire, it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master." George Washington ~ "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." - Daniel Webster ~ Remember -- we're only simulating logic. ~ Amber -- lots of value for little money. And it even has typos, just like other currently popular games. On the other hand, it also has a working index, so maybe that's why it's not a big seller. ~ "Send a policeman and have it arrested." -- Bismarck, when asked what he would do if the British Army landed. ~ "Life's incessant ceremonies leap everlasting, humans spring eternal on hope's breast, and frying pans without fires are often far between." -- Roger Zelazny, _Sign of the Unicorn_, Corwin ~ "It is a proud and lonely thing to be a prince of Amber, incapable of trust. I wasn't real fond of it just then, but there I was." -- Roger Zelazny, one of the Amber books, Corwin ~ "Dragonlords fight for honor, Iorich nobles fight for justice, Jhereg nobles fight for money, and Dzurlords fight for fun." -- Steven Brust, a Vlad Taltos book ~ "And honesty means never having to say 'Please don't flush me down the toilet.'" -- Scott Adams, "Dilbert", Bob the dinosaur ~ "(Dr. Chandra) had long since broken off communications with the dwindling body of philosophers who argued that computers could not really feel emotions, but only pretended to do so. ["If you can prove to me that *you're* not pretending to be annoyed," he had once retorted scornfully to one such critic,"I'll take you seriously." At that point, his opponent had put on a most convincing imitation of anger.]" -- Arthur C. Clarke, _2010_ ~ ...people with a moebius strip of a mind... ~ Paranoia is what the lazy call wisdom. ~ "Does it occur to you, the fallibility of CIT thinking? Flux-thinking. You have prophetic dreams, remember? You can dream about a man drinking a glass of milk. A week later you can see Yanni drinking tea at lunch and if seeing him do that has a high shock-value, you'll super the dream-state right over him, you'll swear you dreamed about him doing that, exactly at that table, and even psychprobe can't sort it out after that." -- C.J. Cherryh, _Cyteen_, Grant ALX ~ "I AM THAT I AM"; "A is A". Is Yahweh the first Objectivist? ~ "The problem with Danny was that he felt the entire human race was so peculiar that no single peculiarity, unless it was harmful, made any more impression on him than any other. He knew, mostly from painful experience, that other people had different reactions, and he could make you feel like a creep or a bigot in ten seconds." -- Pamela Dean,_Tam Lin_ ~ And even priests were coming to spend some time in it, because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one--according to itself--the only one any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together. -- Terry Pratchett, _Small Gods_ ~ "I've stood in sunlight on one side of the street watching the rain fill rushing gutters on the other. When the forecasters say there's a 30% chance of rain in Tucson, it generally means that 30% of the city will get rained on." ~ "In my view, meaning-carrying objects won't submit to being shunted about (it's demeaning.)" -- Douglas Hofstadter ~ "It's perfectly accurate, the accuracy only possessable by subjunctive syllogisms." -- DRS ~ The fun with white chocolate macadamia nut cookies is telling which white fatty substance is which. I can't. ~ "The U.S. and Britain have now had universal government schooling for at least five or six generations. If it has done a good job of educating students it should now be unnecessary, and if it has done a bad job perhaps we should try something else." -- DDFR ~ "The concept of a right to life makes sense as my right to have other people not kill me. It does not make sense as a blank check against the rest of the human race for anything that extends my life." -- DDFR ~ "The problem with post-modernism is that you like it more if you're innumerate or illiterate; both is best." -- Graydon ~ Jeane L. Dixon, world renowned psychic, died Saturday (1/25) at age 79. There was almost universal sadness and lament throughout the world of celebrity psychics. Contacted at her home, Dionne Warwick's spokeswoman said that "[Miss] Warwick is beside herself -- none of us expected this to happen." ~ "I was out by the White House the other afternoon, saw a large group of religious fundies protesting, and they were chanting something about 'no more cyborgs'. I wanted to ask them what they were talking about (pacemakers?) but the Secret Service guy begged me not to start anything, so I didn't." -- Kathryn Aegis ~ "Second, medieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions." -- DDFR ~ "What are viruses for? To make us better and stronger through triumphing over adversity? (Like the 'benefits' of Auschwitz as was suggested by a professor of theology with whom I shared a debating platform on British television.) To kill enough of us to prevent the overpopulation of the world? (An especial boon in countries where effective contraception has been prohibited by theological authority.)" -- Richard Dawkins, _Climbing Mount Improbable_ ~ "Consider the decision of whether to clean up my office. The cost is several hours, perhaps days, of time and effort spent now. The benefit is not spending an extra five minutes every time I want to find anything. Cleaning up my office is a capital investment, made now in exchange for a future return. Pretty clearly, it is worth making. If I want to convince people that I am rational, I had better keep the door closed." -- DDFR, _Hidden Order_ ~ "The analysis of strategic behavior is an extraordinarily difficult problem. John von Neumann, arguably one of the smartest men of this century, created a whole new branch of mathematics in the process of failing to solve it." -- DDFR, _Hidden Order_ ~ "The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before." - F. Scott Fitzgerald ~ "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." -- Richard Dawkins ~ "For instance, suppose we apply this to nuclear weapon explosions over inhabited cities. The Copernican principle says that we don't have a privileged position within the interval of such usage - odds are, most of them have already happened. And the odds that there are thousands and thousands to come? Just astronomical. So don't worry, be happy - no nuclear wars can ever happen, probably." -- Tommy the Terrorist ~ "Reminds me of a humorous sf story I read a few years back where an amoeboid alien escaped punishment this way (it was guilty of selling pornographic pictures to earthly biologists who used them to illustrate mitosis in their textbooks). Both the resulting individuals claimed innocence, and pointed out that they were underage." ~ "However, one should also point out that lab mice are _very_ _very_ stupid, and are incaple of survival outside of the laboratory environment where their biggest day to day problem is rediscovering that today the food is on the left side of the cage." ~ "Emily Postnews, Lower Beyond version: 'It's important to include an appropriately trimmed excerpt from the message you're replying to, because the author may not have posted it yet...'" -- Wim Lewis ~ "It is a famous observation, first remarked by Thucydides, that the pahlanx in motion tended to slip to its right, as each man moved closer to the protection of his neighbour's shield. In contact with each other, two opposed phalanxes might be seen to wheel gradually about an invisible axis under the collective force of this invididual urge to self-protection." -- John Keegan, _A History of Warfare_ ~ "According to Alex Comfort, the Smith Papyrus, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, purported to have a recipe for correcting aging. Upon translation, it turns out to be a heavy metal hair dye. Five thousand years later we don't know much more." ~ "I think it's amazing that 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult thought they would beam up to space ships if they killed themselves. Any reasonable person knows that in reality they will be reincarnated as animals. You might not agree with my belief in reincarnation, but a lot of people do, so it's not a cult. There's certainly no evidence that larger groups of people have ever believed anything stupid. So once the number of believers exceeds a certain level, say 40, you have to think there's something to it. Unlike those "cultists" I wasn't brainwashed into my beliefs. I simply had a huge painful void in my life that I filled with the first thing that came along. You have to respect that. I'm not as gullible as those poor saps. That's probably because I was born in June, which makes me a Gemini. We're naturally skeptical." -- Scott Adams ~ "Bill Gates: the man who avoided changing the light bulb by defining darkness as the standard." ~ On Y2K: "Many COBOL programmers have tended to mix data and control information, usually to save space in databases. In particular, for example, the 'year' field would be a date if numerically larger than say 20, and a command or EOF flag if from 0 to 19. So, rollover will potentially cause great excitement for some database users, much more than wrong dates." ~ On TWA 800 "Also, if judged by past behavior, the US Navy does not lie about shooting down airliners. When the Vincennes downed the Airbus, the Navy admitted they did it, held an investigation, axed the skipper, and the US government ultimately made reparations to the families. I think we should give the navy the benefit of the doubt if they say they didn't do it." ~ "Doesn't anyone remember one of the biggest problems the Super Conducting Super Collider project ran into during construction in Texas? It wasn't politics... It was the Mecca of fire ants in all the extremely high-voltage conduits, junctions, transformers, and other high-strength field areas. The ants would eat the insulating compounds off and sit there basking in the emf high they apparently got. Occasionally, an ant would offer itself as sacrifice, prompting some Damn Big Breakers to blow..." -- RISKS ~ Another enemy decoy, built in occupied Holland, led to a tale that has been told and retold ever since by veteran Allied pilots. The German "airfield", constructed with meticulous care, was made almost entirely of wood. There were wooden hangars, oil tanks, gun emplacements, trucks, and aircraft. The day finally came when the decoy was finished, down to the last wooden plank. And early the following morning, a lone RAF plane crossed the Channel, came in low, circled the field once, and dropped a large wooden bomb. ~ On emulating hormones and long-range neurotransmitters: "If your job is delivering packages and all the packages are very small and your boss doesn't care who you give them to as long as it's on the correct continent and you have until the next ice age to get the work done, then you don't have a very difficult profession. I see no reason why simulating that anachronism would present the slightest difficulty." -- John K. Clark ~ "The really ironic issue of late has been supercomputer exports. We now have the spectacle of William Reinsch saying that export restrictions on supercomputer *hardware* are unworkable because the technology is available all around the world. This is the very same Commerce official who still says with a straight face that export controls on encryption *software* are workable and desirable." ~ "[Re: extinction of species, and the desperate need to blame someone] > There are 3,500 species of ant. Today. To the best of our knowledge. How many were there before the great Hexapodia Race Wars three thousand years ago, when the Better Red Than Dead Alliance destroyed the Polka-Dot League, slaughtering thousands of billions of thinking, feelering individuals in an act of genocide unmatched since the K-T event when the Brontosaurus' attempt at a space program using their largest-ever catapult went horribly wrong?" ~ "I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light-years radius, and by a factor of about a million... but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions." -- _State of the Art_ ~ He played as the Culture. He'd habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful. ~ "I didn't know we could do all this." "Obviously not. Good grief, man, the Culture's been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you've mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn't mean you've lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; overdesign. You know the Culture's philosophy." -- _Player of Games_ ~ Banks on von Neumann machines: "It would be perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build copies of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously, where is the fun in that?" ~ "Anyway, I would not be a woman in this society." -- "A Gift from the Culture" ~ The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront's problem with the Culture was simply that the older civlization stopped it doing the things it wanted to do. The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch: that the Affront existed at all and the Culture couldn't in all conscience do anything about it. -- _Excession_ ~ It was generally regarded as significant -- within the Culture if nowhere else -- that one of the few aspects of their own genetic inheritance with which the Affront had deemed it desirable to meddle had been in the matter of making the act of sex a somewhat less pleasurable and considerably more painful act for their females than their basic genetic legacy required. -- _Excession_ ~ "What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome, burn it." -- "The State Of The Art" ~ "I suppose the key point to remember in dealing with Florida landscaping is that at one point it was all a swamp and now that people have brought in actual dirt (like most species now present in Florida, soil is not native) it would rather be a jungle and is very adamant about becoming one in short order." -- Seth B. Noble ~ STEERING COMMITTEE REGRETFULLY MET WITHOUT YOU YESTERDAY STOP WE PASSED MOTION OFFICIALLY WISHING YOU COMPLETE SPEEDY RECOVERY STOP VOTE WAS SIX TO THREE STOP ~ Patron: "I am looking for a globe of the earth. Ref: "We have a table-top model over here." Patron: "No, that's not good enough. Don't you have a life size?" Ref (after a short pause): "Yes, but it's in use right now!" ~ " >and not just yelling "Fire" falsely in crowded theater. That cliche originally came from the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), he used it in one of his decisions that upheld the conviction of a man imprisoned for saying America should not be in the First World War. Years later Holmes said it was the worst decision he made in his entire legal career and he cringed whenever he heard somebody quoting his famous saying." ~ "The BBC is like a sausage machine: whatever you put in one end, you get Dr. Who out the other". -- Neil Gaiman ~ "There are few philosophical positions I can imagine that seem worse than dogmatic mushymindedness." -- Eric Watt Forste ~ "You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education." ~ "In the long term, productivity (i.e. output per hour of work) increases at about 2 percent per annum, meaning that each 35 years we could cut the work week by half while producing as much as we were at the beginning." ~ Glossofacilia: A tendency to use very large words to explain very small phenomena. Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather than simplify and is the natural instinct of reactionaries to an age of change. -- Jim Taylor ~ Herd crimes: Crimes that, once committed, are repeated communally, by everyone in the herd. Shoplifting is a herd crime of young teenagers; smoking marijuana was the herd crime of the counterculture of the late '60s and early '70s; padding expense accounts is the herd crime of junior executives. -- Jim Taylor ~ ": Not poverty alone. Cultural pressure too. The strong : advantage of schooling has to be perceived. I would think that pretty much everyone everywhere has a fairly good grasp of the value of education. It is most developed countries where the penalties of screwing up are so low that some people couldn't give a damn." -- Joseph Askew ~ "Political interference in a market is like nailing jello to a wall: You have to use more and more nails to the point of where it isn't jello any more, just a bed of nails with interesting colored filling." ~ "When I was younger they caught an escaped sheep up near the Mount Bold Dam. It had been lose for about three years. They could tell because of its wool. Modern domesticated sheep have lost the simple ability to shed their wool." ~ "> On the other hand the gradual collapse of dams and wiers would help > native species around here. The main introduced fish, the European carp, > isn't eaten by anyone much. Horrible fish. Anglers usually their noses up at > them. They will take an unbaited hook. Well, they put up almost as good a fight as, well, an inanimate object of the same size and weight as the fish in question..." ~ "The Camden Aquarium, in defense of sharks, has a placard stating that the most lethal wild animal in the US is deer. (Their mode of attack is to stand in your headlights, and then launch their dead or crippled bodies through the windscreen into your lap)." ~ "There is also the view which asserts that what you defend, you own, and that the US policy of permitting local government to its conquered possessions is Extremely Clever." -- Graydon, about Japan and S. Korea ~ "The moral of the story? If you are driving, and obstructed by a buzzard, DON'T get out and try to shoo him away, he's liable to toss the contents of his stomach on you. If he insists on being suicidal, then just let him be roadkill himself." ~ "*snort* I'm waiting for the day when people realise that mainstream is a subset of SF without the speculation.." -- Emmet O'Brien ~ "You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere, if only out of curiosity." --Colin L. Powell ~ 'A vegetarian approached me one day while I was eating, asking me (no doubt with the intention to sow guilt and preach a bit) "How can you eat *carrion*?". Unfortunately for him, I responded by happily explaining that it is quite natural for humans to eat carrion; after all, our evolutionary past suggests that we were opportunistic omnivores, eating meat whenever we could get it. Our teeth seem to be well adapted to chewing meat made tender by a slight rot, something we later replaced with cooking.' -- Anders Sandberg ~ "My usual description of the Culture for Banks newbies is: They don't optimize people for tremendous strength or tremendous intelligence, because that's what machines are for. They optimize people for what people are for: sex, drugs, and parties." -- Andrew Plotkin ~ "It strikes me that many people think of taking a spaceship to Mars as being something like sailing to America on the _Mayflower_ (or the _Santa Maria_ or whatever), whereas I see it like taking an 18-month voyage in a nuclear submarine and emergining in Antarctica during winter." -- Erich Schneider ~ 'I had in mind a different meaning of "discount rate". How much you value a dollar today vs. a dollar in a year depends on how much you'd value a dollar a year from now if you were alive, and what the chances are you'll be alive. The issue that you might die can be factored out via proper use of annuities, so that you are broke if you die.' ~ "I looked at the list for Sri Lanka recently too. Never before have I seen so many 'united liberation fronts' in such a small country." -- Erich Schneider ~ "The Hindenburg crash had 62 survivors and 35 fatalities. Of the 35 deaths, 27 resulting from jumping from the airship. Many of the remaining 8 deaths resulted from burns and injuries due to the ensuing diesel fuel fire." -- Dan Egnor~ ~ "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." -- Voltaire ~ "Unfortunately, a good many ST fans feel they must denigrate B5, and some of us feel irresistably drawn to nonsense whenever we see it, in order that we may refute it. Many of us would be quite willing to put up silently with (even watch, for old time's sake) current ST, but the semiliterate buffoons who occasionally innundate cyberspace with "B5 SUX TREK RULZ" postings keep tempting us, over and over again, into slapping them upside the head, in the vain hope that, since schooling has obviously failed them, a little pain might succeed." -- John W. Kennedy ~ "I worry about the human race." "Especially when no one shows up at the starting line." -- Over the Hedge ~ "I am the very master of the multipurpose metaphor; I put them into speeches which I always feel the better for. The speed of my delivery is totally vehicular; I'm burning with a passion about nothing in particular. I'm well acquainted too with matters technological; I'm able to explain myself in phrases tautological. My language is poetical and full of hidden promises . . . It's like the raging torrent of a thousand Dylan Thomases". -- Alistair Beaton ~ "Oh look, you forgot to carry the seven. There, that's better." ~ "Oops, mistake. You got so angry you distracted yourself from distracting yourself, and I slipped in the back door." ~ It takes a child to raze a village. ~ Russell Baker, 1987: "We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we commercialize art, we cherish success and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. The kids know that if we really valued learning, we would pay our teachers what we pay our lawyers and stockbrokers. If we valued art, we would not measure it by its capacity to produce profits. If we regarded literature as important, we would remove it from the celebrity sweepstakes and spend a little money on our libraries." ~ "The point that I'm constantly making is that people don't understand the difference between being solemn and being serious. There is a kind of Teutonic mind which you find not just in Germany and Switzerland, but also in America, which thinks that you have to be solemn if you are being serious. But in fact solemnity is, I think, in many ways the enemy of the kind of process of learning that comes from being open because solemnity is allied with pompousness." -- John Cleese, British actor. ~ "Any idiot can face a crisis: It is this day to day living that wears you out." -- Chekhov. ~ "Neither charm nor patience nor endurance has ever wrested power from those who hold it." -- Frederick Douglass. ~ 59. Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon... {on Usenet group alt.fan.pratchett} ~ If I had to summarize the Enlightenment in 25 words or less, I would say that it promoted reason above religion, denied the divine right of kings (and by extension the rest of the nobility), and held that individual conscience was to be prized above official doctrine. -- Paul J. Ste Marie ~ But practically the whole of English after Chaucer is reversions adopted in an attempt to sound pretentious. :) -- Jonathan Amery ~ "The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totali- tarian government whether Nazi or Communist." -- W. Churchill, Nov 21, 1943 ~ "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll ~ At Goertzel's recent AGI conference, I said: "The only thing I know of more difficult than building a Friendly AI is creating a child." And someone inevitably said: "Creating a child is easy, anyone can do it." And I said: "That is like putting quarters into a Coke machine, and saying, 'Look, I made a Coke!'" -- Eliezer Yudkowsky ~