The Quotes Basement
Sub-Level 6
'Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.'
'What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.'
"Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible?"
"I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'"
'We may weave real-fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmatic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Nothing original is created'
"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."
"Is life worth living? It is, so you take the risk of getting up in the morning and going through the day's work."
'A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.'
'The difference between finding the right word, as opposed to accepting the almost right word is the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display'
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
"I am told that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it."
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty ... but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
American: Traditionally, America has always been two and a half months in front of Australia.
Lady Astor was giving a costume ball and Winston Churchill asked her what disguise she would recommend for him. She replied, "Why don't you come sober, Mr. Prime Minister?"
"Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around."
'I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.'
"I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men's bones."
'The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.'
"The chat program is in public domain. This is not the GNU public license. If it breaks then you get to keep both pieces."
Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
'It is difficult to live in the present, rediculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.'
It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.
No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
'Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning...except its own'
'I have known of no man of genius who had not to pay, in some afliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.'
"With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half."
"I tell ya, I was an ugly kid. I was so ugly that my dad kept the kid's picture that came with the wallet he bought."
"Hi! I'm Larry. This is my brother Bob, and this is my other brother Jimbo. We thought you might like to know the names of your assailants."
Theorem: a cat has nine tails.
'You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool mum.'
'New Hampshire law forbids you to tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.'
On the subject of C program indentation:
Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one in which you are least interested and say nothing about the other.
'A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer.'
He's the kind of guy, that, well, if you were ever in a jam he'd be there... with two slices of bread and some chunky peanut butter.
'Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?'
'The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.'
compuberty, n:
"There are only two things in this world that I am sure of, death and taxes, and we just might do something about death one of these days."
Dorothy: But how can you talk without a brain?
handshaking protocol, n:
"It is enough to make one sympathize with a tyrant for the determination of his courtiers to deceive him for their own personal ends..."
"The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public."
"When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.'
Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
"He did decide, though, that with more time and a great deal of mental effort, he could probably turn the activity into an acceptable perversion."
"I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than 10 minutes listening to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't."
'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.'
"It says he made us all to be just like him. So if we're dumb, then god is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."
"I remember Ulysses well... Left one day for the post office to mail a letter, met a blonde named Circe on the streetcar, and didn't come back for 20 years."
"Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here."
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."
'The proof that IBM didn't invent the car is that it has a steering wheel and an accelerator instead of spurs and ropes, to be compatible with a horse.'
"Feel free to contact me (flames about my english and the useless of this driver will be redirected to /dev/null, oh no, it's full...)."
"There is no doubt that my lawyer is honest. For example, when he filed his income tax return last year, he declared half of his salary as 'unearned income.'"
'If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.'
"The government has just completed work on a missile that turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle; nicknamed 'Civil Servant', it won't work and they can't fire it."
'An ancient proverb summed it up: when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.'
"When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."
'There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.'
Fifth Law of Applied Terror:
double-blind experiment, n:
Catching his children with their hands in the new, still wet, patio,the father spanked them. His wife asked, "Don't you love your children?"
"How would I know if I believe in love at first sight?" the sexy social climber said to her roommate. "I mean, I've never seen a Porsche full of money before."
The Seventh Commandments for Technicians:
Katz' Law:
"As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed."
"I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell ... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ."
"Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed."
"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself amoung women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.
"The technique is wonderful. I didn't dream it would be so good. But I would never let my children come close to the thing."
"When I open a window to art some students look down to see how far they will fall while other look out to see how far they can leap."
Next Sub-Level? Right Here
'It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the reveling cosmos'
-Hyperion
- Rebecca West (This Real Night, Viking 85, quoted in Time 25 Mar)
- Norman Cousins
-Alexander Eliot (NY Post 28 Nov)
-Andy Warhol (1985 statement)
-Hyperion
-Elsa Maxwell (How to Do It Little, Brown)
-Walter Persegati (NY Times 9 Jul)
-John Keats
-Hyperion
- Will Durant (recalled on his death 7 Nov)
-J R R Tolkien (acknowledging critics who said his writing was difficult to understand, NY Times 3 Mar)
Aussie: Yes, but every day you're 12 hours behind, and that makes me happy.
--On writing his own music, ib Bruce Springsteen
-Charles F Kettering (quoted by T A Boyd Professional Amateur Dutton)
-Liam O'Flaherty (recalled on his death 7 Sep)
- James Branch Cabell (quoted on Who Said That? BBC TV 19 Sep)
-Copyright notice for the chat program
-National Lampoon, ("Deteriorata")
-Margot Fonteyn
-Jim Bishop
-Wernher von Braun (on the meaning of space travel, Time 10 Feb)
-Paul Gallico (NY Times 14 Jan)
-Archibald MacLeish ("In Praise of Dissent" NY Times 16 Dec)
-Leonard Bernstein (The Joy of Music, Simon & Schuster )
-Sir Max Beerbohm
-Otto von Bismark
-Rodney Dangerfield
Proof: No cat has eight tails. A cat has one tail more than no cat.
Therefore, a cat has nine tails.
-Captain Penny's Law
"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
-Blair P. Houghton
-Weed's Axiom
-Donald Knuth
The uncomfortable period of emotional and hormonal changes a computer experiences when the operating system is upgraded and a sun4 is put online sharing files.
-shades
Scarecrow: Well, I don't know... but some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.
-The Wizard of Oz
A process employed by hostile hardware devices to initate a terse but civil dialogue, which, in turn, is characterized by occasional misunderstanding, sulking, and name-calling.
-Russell Baker and Charles Peters
-Sir George Jessel
-Otto Von Bismarck
A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem to the earlier joke.
-Mick Farren ("When Gravity Fails")
-Dr. Greg Wettstein (Roger Maris Cancer Center)
-Oscar Wilde ("The Critic as Artist")
-Frank Zappa
"You admit that?"
"To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor"
-Spock and McCoy ("A Piece of the Action", stardate unknown)
-Rod Serling
-Jac Goudsmit
-Michael Beck (describing the PC-speaker sound device)
-Michael Lara
-Joseph C. Goulden
-Terry Pratchett ("The Light Fantastic")
-Brendan Behan
-Robert Benchley
If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.
Corollary:
If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.
An experiment in which the chief researcher believes he is fooling both the subject and the lab assistant. Often accompanied by a strong belief in the tooth fairy.
"In the abstract, yes, but not in the concrete."
Work thou not on energized equipment, for if thou dost, thy fellow workers will surely buy beers for thy widow and console her in other ways.
Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-Abba Eban
-Linus Torvalds (announcing kernel 1.3.3 on the linux-kernel mailing list.)
-W. Somerset Maugham ('The Summing Up')
-Arthur Miller
-Sir Thomas Browne (Urn Burial)
-Vladimir Zworkin (developer of television)