The Quotes Basement
Sub-Level 8
"To the best of my knowledge there has been no child in space. I would like to learn about being weightless, and I'd like to get away from my mother's cooking."
'There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.'
'There are things I cannot do
'Everything contains, inside it, elements of its opposite. Good and bad, negative and positive, black and white - wherever you find the one, you will nesessaryarily find the other. Thus it is easier than you might think to transform one into the other.'
"[The] most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves ... is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital."
"You do what you have to do in life, when you form a philosophy that you can't talk yourself out of."..."People who decide they came to earth to work, who make work their personal philosophy, are kept very busy."
"Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain."
"Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays ... are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation."
'There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
'A girl and a boy bump into each other -- surely an accident.
'Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.'
'"We're running out of adjectives to describe our situation. We
had crisis, then we went into chaos, and now what do we call this?" said
Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga, who holds a doctorate from Yale.'
'What if dreams came true;
'If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you ... It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.'
'The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music. It is not a vessel into which the composer distills their soul drop by drop, but a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal.'
"I think it's fantastic that they could get a little kid's remote control car on Mars. And did you know that it can go up and look at rocks? I would have loved to watch it on TV but I had THE COMMON COLD. . .WHICH THEY HAVEN'T CURED YET!"
'The two party system ... is a triumph of the dialectic. It showed that two could be one and one could be two and had probably been fabricated by Hegel for the American market on a subcontract from General Dynamics.'
'Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said "My master is out." Nasrudin replied, "Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it."'
"Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character."
"One may be able to quibble about the quality of a single experiment, or about the veracity of a given experimenter, but, taking all the supportive experiments together, the weight of evidence is so strong as readily to merit a wise man's reflection."
'All of us should treasure his Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks:
'In a surprise raid last night, federal agents ransacked a house in search of a rebel computer hacker. However, they were unable to complete the arrest because the warrant was made out in the name of Don Provan, while the only person in the house was named don provan. Proving, once again, that Unix is superior to Tops10.'
'The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus:
'A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt. As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true", asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick.'
'The terminal is very neat and clean, the attendants all very attractive, the pilots very capable. The fleet of Learjets the carrier operates is immense. Your jet takes off without a hitch, pushing above the clouds, and at 20,000 feet it explodes without warning.'
"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjution with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonder child."
'The fountain code has been tightened slightly so you can no longer dip objects into a fountain or drink from one while you are floating in mid-air due to levitation.'
"I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.
Scott's First Law:
'...He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.'
'Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket"--which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention;" but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and--WATCH THAT BASKET."'
'George Bernard Shaw once sent two tickets to the opening night of one of his plays to Winston Churchill with the following note:
'In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.'
'When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade ...'
"I am convinced that the manufacturers of carpet odor removing powder have included encapsulated time released cat urine in their products. This technology must be what prevented its distribution during my mom's reign. My carpet smells like piss, and I don't have a cat. Better go by some more."
'In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence'.
Nasrudin walked into a shop one day, and the owner came forward to serve him. Nasrudin said, "First things first. Did you see me walk into your shop?"
"Acting is not very hard. The most important things are to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. And if I have to laugh, well, I think of my sex life."
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 1
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
"There was a writer in 'Life' magazine ... who claimed that rabbits have no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms. If they recalled every close shave they had in the course of just an hour life would become insupportable."
"Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike. If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine -- open or closed. In this respect, software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound."
Now, it we had this sort of thing:
Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
'You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World.'
"I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin."
The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system.
'Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. These economic downturns are very difficult to predict, but sophisticated econometric modeling houses like Data Resources and Chase Econometrics have successfully predicted 14 of the last 3 recessions.'
"Someone whom you reject today, will reject you tomorrow. But by then, if you've planned it right, you'll be sipping drinks with fancy little umbrellas on the sides of the glass while sitting on a gorgeous, undiscovered beach in the middle of summer. Then you wont feel so bad."
'History has much to say on following the proper procedures. From a history of the Mexican revolution:
"You can't expect a mother to be with a small child all the time," Margaret Mead once remarked, with her usual good sense, but in 1978 she shocked feminists by snapping that women don't really have children to put them in day care twelve hours a day, either.
'Es giebt eine Reihe iealischer Begeben heiten, die der Wirklichkeit parallel lauft. Selten fallen sie zusammen. Menschen und Zufalle modificiren gewohnlich die idealische Begebenheit, so dass sie unvollkommen erscheint, und ifre Folgen gleichfalls unvollkommen sind. Soo bei der Reformation; statt des Protestantismus kam das Lutherthum hevor.'*
'And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, not unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.'
"The ways of God in nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame in any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritius."
Next Sub-Level? Right Here
'The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.'
- Will Durant (People 8 Dec)
-Jonathan Adashek (age 12, letter to President Ronald Reagan, Life Oct)
-Charles Anthony Richard Hoare
I cannot watch while people suffer
I cannot sit when something must be done
I cannot judge those who are different
There are things I cannot do
Run
Hide
Ignore
There are things I cannot do
But there are certainly things I will do.'
-StarWars promo
-Computopia
-George Steiner (Publishers Weekly 24 May)
-Constantine Karamanlis, Prime Minister of Greece
-Bill Wilson, cofounder, Alcoholics Anonymous (As Bill Sees It , AA World Services)
- Winston Churchill (on work and pleasure, quoted by John Mason Brown "The Art of Keeping the Mind Refueled" Vogue 1 May)
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.'
-Universe
- John Berger (Pig Earth Pantheon 80, quoted by John Leonard NY Times 26 Aug)
A girl and a boy bump and her handkerchief drops -- surely another accident.
But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid -- *_ _ _ _ that _ _ _ had _ _ to _ _ _ _ mean _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ something*.'
-S. Morganstern, ("The Silent Gondoliers")
- Wernher von Braun , (NY Times 29)
-The Washington Post, February, 1988
(The New Yorker's comment:
At Harvard they'd call it a noun.)
And you could be who you wanted to be
You could do what you wanted to do
And you could help who you wanted to help
What if dreams came true;
And the world opened up
And you were never, ever afraid
What if dreams came true
But dreams do come true
Don't they?'
-StarWars promo
- Maxwell Anderson (quoted in NY Herald Tribune 7 Mar)
-Pierre Boulez (Réalités Aug )
-Anthony Morgan
-I.F. Stone
-Jonathan Swift
-Professor William Tiller (parapsychologist, Standford University, commenting on psi research)
"Just lie down on the floor and keep calm."'
-Robert Wilson ("John Dillinger Died for You")
Retribution:
I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.
Anticipation:
I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.
Diplomacy:
I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.'
-Windows Airlines
-Dr. Albert Hoffman (the discoverer of LSD)
'Teleporting to hell via a teleportation trap will no longer occur if the character does not have fire resistance.'
-README file from the NetHack game
"What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: 'Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America,' or 'Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.'"
-Dave Barry ("An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar")
No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right.
Scott's Second Law:
When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been wrong in the first place.
Corollary:
After the correction has been found in error, it will be impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation.
-Umberto Eco ("The Name of the Rose")
-Mark Twain ("Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar")
"Bring a friend, if you have one."
Churchill wrote back, returning the two tickets and excused himself as he had a previous engagement. He also attached the following:
"Please send me two tickets for the next night, if there is one."'
- Robertson Davies (a Canadian novelist on the generic Canadian novel.)
-Stanislaw Lem ("Cyberiad")
-Dr. Laurence J. Peter ("The Peter Principle")
"Of course."
"Have you ever seen me before?"
"Never."
"Then how do you know it was me?"
-Glenda Jackson
proof by example:
The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof.
proof by intimidation:
'Trivial'.
proof by vigorous handwaving:
Works well in a classroom or seminar setting.
-Charles Babbage
-Kurt Vonnegut
-Fred Brooks, Jr.
yield -a for yield to all traffic
yield -t for yield to trucks
yield -f for yield to people walking (yield foot)
yield -d t* for yield on days starting with t
...you'd have a lot of dead people at intersections, and traffic jams you wouldn't believe...
-Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of commands.
A: Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a Pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb-assassin to break the bulb in the first place.
-Dave Barry ("How to Dress for Real Success")
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
-- Matthew 5:37
"Hidalgo was later defeated at Guadalajara. The rebel army was captured on its way through the mountains. All were courtmartialed and shot, except Hidalgo, because he was a priest. He was handed over to the bishop of Durango who excommunicated him and returned him to the army where he was then executed."'
-Caroline Bird ("The Two Paycheck Marriage")
-Novalis (Moral Ansicten)
-Joseph Glanvill
-Joseph Glanvill