John Gay:
"Man may escape from rope and gun;
Who takes a woman must be undone."
The Economist magazine:
"Chaos theory - an explanation in search of a problem."
Joanne Harris in "Gentlemen and Players":
"Reminds me of the old joke about the pensioner convicted of murder.
'Thirty years, your Honor,' he protests. 'It's too much! I'll never manage it!'
And the judge says: 'Well, just do as many as you can...'"
Epitaph for a baby born at midnight who survived only two minutes:
"Seeing I was here for such a short time,
it was hardly worth coming at all."
William Butler Yeats, 'Adam's Curse':
"It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring."
The Federal Highway Administration, which will still forgive you:
"Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status."
Mary Elizabeth Williams, in the Salon article "How not to make love like a porn star":
"You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? 'Baffling'."
J. Maarten Troost reports a warning sign on a house on Vanuatu:
"NEVER MIND THE DOGS -
BEWARE OF OWNER!"
W C Fields, playing Cuthbert J Twillie in 'My Little Chickadee':
"Cousin Zeb: Is this a game of chance?
Cuthbert J Twillie: Not the way I play it, no."
William Dunham:
"Euler published 228 papers after he died,
making the deceased Euler
one of history's most prolific mathematicians."
Ambrose Bierce:
"A Conservative is one who is enamored of existing evils,
as distinguished from the Liberal,
who wishes to replace them with others."
Alan Newell:
"Fluids are a lot easier to drink than they are to understand."
Warren Buffett:
"You don't know who's swimming naked til the tide goes out."
Samuel Butler:
"Although God cannot alter the past, historians can."
Needlepoint slogan on a pillow in an historic Savananh mansion:
"A dirty mind is a perpetual feast."
Groucho Marx makes a thoughtful farewell to his host:
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
The warning at the beginning of the thiller "Fermat's Room", in which the victims must solve math puzzles or be crushed to death:
"Do you understand what prime numbers are? Because if you don't you should just leave now."
Goro Shimura, of the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture:
"Taniyama was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction, and so eventually, he got right answers, and I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes."
An agitated project manager:
"This project is too important to be held up by projects that are more important!"
Douglas Adams, in "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
"Arthur Dent: It's at times like this I wish I had listened to my mother.
Ford Prefect: Why? What did she say?
Arthur Dent: I don't know. I never listened."
William Blake:
"Those who restrain passion do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
The front desk clerk at a Third World hotel:
"The reason there are bugs in the bed is that they're too scared to get down on the floor."
Jud Northbark:
"People wouldn't mind rush hour nearly so much if it didn't occur just when everyone's trying to get back home."
A A Milne, "The House at Pooh Corner":
"The more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn't there."
Mark Twain:
"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
Sheriff Percy Egglefield, of Essex County, New York, laying out the law to a new inmate of his jail:
"I am going to let you out for the afternoon to walk around the town. But you have to be back by six. If you're not, I'm locking the doors, and I won't let you back in."
Grace Olive Wiley, short-time snake curator at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo:
"I do not feel I was guilty of carelessness.
I just forgot, simply forgot,
to close the door to the cobra's cage after I cleaned it."
Big Boy Matson, in Max Evans's "The Hi Lo Country":
"I'd knock that boy's brains out if I knew where to hit him."
Addison Frey, mathematics professor at Alfred University, explaining the "n!" notation for the factorial:
"Now the exclamation mark doesn't mean we're really excited about that letter n."
Richard Feynman:
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit. We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
Randall Jarrell, poet, and former occupant of what he considered the most poetically titled job in the Air Force - Celestial Navigation Tower Operator:
"The people who live in a Golden Age go around complaining how yellow everything looks."
Blaise Pascal:
"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it."
Virginia Woolf:
"I do not believe that gifts,
whether of mind or character,
can be weighed like butter and sugar,
not even at Cambridge."
Homer Hickam, 'Rocket Boys':
"I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night.
And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added."
A proverb from Transurania:
"A closed mouth gathers no feet."
The last will and testament of Rabelais:
"I owe much, I have nothing, the rest I leave to the poor."
Paracelsus:
"The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world."
Oscar Wilde, in 'The Importance of Being Earnest':
"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit;
touch it and the bloom is gone."
Bishop Berkeley refuses to accept Newton's concept of the derivative:
"Whatever therefore is got by such exponents and proportions is to be ascribed to fluxions: which must therefore be previously understood. And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?"
Critic Louis Leroy, reviewing Claude Monet in Le Charivari:
"It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do before."
Oscar Mandel, in 'Chi Po and the Sorcerer':
"Bu Fu: No, no! You have merely painted what is! Anybody can paint what is. The real secret is to paint what isn't!
Chi Po: But what is there that isn't?"
Galileo, 'Dialogue on Two New Sciences' (1638):
"So far as I see,
we can only infer that the totality of all numbers is infinite,
that the number of squares is infinite,
and that the number of their roots is infinite;
neither is the number of squares less than the totality of all numbers,
nor the latter greater than the former;
and finally, the attributes 'equal', 'greater' and 'less'
are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite, quanitities."
Aristotle in 'Physics':
"But my argument does not anyhow rob mathematicians of their study,
although it denies the existence of the infinite
in the sense of actual existence
as something increased to such an extent that it cannot be gone through;
for, as it is, they do not need the infinite or use it,
but only require that the finite straight line
shall be as long as they please.
Hence it will make no difference to them for the purpose of proofs."
Carl Friedrich Gauss:
"I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed,
which in mathematics is never permissible.
Infinity is merely a figure of speech, the real meaning being
a limit which certain ratios approach indefinitely near,
while others are permitted to increase without restriction."
Carl Friedrich Gauss:
"You know that I write slowly.
This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until
I have said as much as possible in a few words,
and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length."
CP Snow, in "The Sleep of Reason":
"It'll soon be over now", he said, "unless Clive Bosanquet makes an even longer speech than usual. Clive is a good chap, but he will insist on not leaving any stone unturned. And if in any doubt, he thinks it better to turn them back again."
Bill Bryson, in "The Lost Continent":
"By and large, a ride on a long-distance bus in America
combines most of the shortcomings of prison life
with those of an ocean-crossing on a troopship."
Pete Dexter, in "Paris Trout":
"He seemed confident," she said.
He smiled in spite of himself.
"Young lawyers are always confident. It's a failure of our law schools."
Henri Poincare:
"Geometry is the art of reasoning well with badly made figures."
The Duke of Wellington:
"An extraordinary affair.
I gave them their orders
and they wanted to stay and discuss them."
An old Transuranian proverb:
"In front of every silver lining there's a cloud."
Caitlin Macy, in 'The Fundamentals of Play':
"We had the only kind of money that was respectable these days -
the kind that was all gone."
Brendan Behan:
"I never came across a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse."
The philanderer's motto:
"If you're not in bed by midnight, you'd better go home."
Karl Kraus:
"The trouble with Germans is not that they fire artillery shells,
but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant."
Stephen Park, Keith Miller, Communications of the ACM, 1988:
SEED = 65539 * SEED"It is difficult to find two lines of code which violate more software engineering principles;
IF (SEED .LT. 0) SEED = (SEED + 2147483647) + 1
the intent is obscure and the result is non-portable."
Letter from Napoleon to Josephine:
"Home in three days. Don't wash."
Charles James Fox, satirizing the critics of the spendthrift George IV:
"I am conscious of my faults,
but I hope I atone for them
by my marked disapprobation of such faults in others."
Hydrodynamicist Horace Lamb, addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science:
"I am an old man now,
and when I die and go to heaven
there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment.
One is quantum electrodynamics,
and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids.
...And about the former I am rather optimistic."
The chamberlain of the ill-favored Queen Charlotte, wife of George III:
"I do think the bloom of her ugliness is going off."
Clausewitz:
"What genius does must be the best of all rules."
Napoleon on the French Council of State:
"There were good workmen among them.
The trouble was that they all wanted to be architects."
Napoleon:
"A constitution should be short, and obscure."
Paul Valery:
"A poem is never finished, merely abandoned."
Boris Kolenkhov, in "You Can't Take it With You!":
"I feel so good, life is running around inside of me like a squirrel!"
Immanuel Kant:
"Aus so krummem Holz als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist,
kann nichts ganz gerade gezimmert werden! -
(From such crooked wood as men are made,
nothing quite straight can be built!)"
A saying:
"If the rich could hire the poor to die for them,
the poor could make a good living."
Freeman Dyson, quoting Enrico Fermi in "A meeting with Enrico Fermi", Nature, Volume 427, page 297, 2004:
"I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say,
'with four parameters I can fit an elephant
and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'"
Bernard Baruch:
"I made my money by selling too soon."
Advice from John Boy's father when he was thinking of buying a horse:
"Son, never buy something that eats while you sleep."
Jud Northbark:
"Every computer program is correct up until the moment it is written."
Otto Frisch, in "What Little I Remember":
"An expert is someone who has made all possible mistakes."
Otto Frisch, in "What Little I Remember":
"Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked."
Otto Frisch, in "What Little I Remember":
"A really good scientist is one who knows how to draw correct conclusions from incorrect assumptions."
A "Polish saying":
"Sleep faster! We need the pillows."
Jonathan Swift:
"A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle."
Saki (H H Munro):
"A little inaccuracy saves tons of explanation."
H L Mencken:
"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas."
Shakespeare, in "Cymbeline", Act IV, Scene 2:
"Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers, come to dust."
Douglas Adams, in "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
"Humans are not proud of their ape ancestors,
and rarely invite them round to dinner."
Thomas Edison, who believed that experimental inquiry was far more valuable than theory:
"I can always hire some mathematicians,
but they can't hire me!"
John Cleese, announcing that his firm must fire one of its two pantomime horses, a decision to be made by a death match:
"Now you may think that this is very harsh behavior,
but let me tell you that our management consultants actually queried
the necessity for us to employ a pantomime horse at all!"
An acquaintance of the 19th century American Clarence King:
"The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original."
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
"Most people go to their graves with their music still inside them."
A proverb:
"To travel fast, go alone;
to travel far, go together."
Ring Lardner, in "The Young Immigrants":
"'Shut up!', he explained."
Miles Moses, on being asked by his grandfather if anyone could tell him the difference between average and mean:
"Most of the people in this house are average,
but my sister is just plain mean!"
Nigel Dennis, in "Cards of Identity":
"She cried until her grief had been eased, after which, like any bereaved person, she half-shelved the dead and half-opened his bank account."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"The light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern,
which shines only on the waves behind."
Corky St Clair, in "Waiting for Guffman":
"I hate you and your ass face!"
Monty Python:
"All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat;
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid; -
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!"
Samuel Beckett:
"Fail again. Fail better."
Zsa Zsa Gabor:
"How many husbands have I had? You mean, besides my own?"
Charles Grodin, recalling just one of the many insults and putdowns he received in his career:
"When Charles Grodin enters a room, it is as though someone just left."
Robert Frost:
"Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length."
Draagekreik Neros, fearful trembler:
"Life must be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards."
Samuel Johnson, having explained himself and being told 'But I don't understand!':
"Sir, I have given you an argument.
I am not also obliged to provide you with an understanding."
Author Steven Millhauser, asked to give a brief biography:
"[1943-]"
Heather Wolfe, in the movie "Starting Out in the Evening":
"Dating younger men is like chewing gum:
ten minutes of flavor followed by bland repetition."
Samuel Johnson, of his frequent dinner host Henry Thrale:
"His conversation does not show the minute hand,
but he strikes the hour very correctly."
A university department chair, in Alison Lurie's "Truth or Consequences":
"You take the job because you have ideas about how things could be better, and then you spend most of your time keeping them from getting worse."
The movie "Music from Another Room":
"Nina: My name is Nina. I was named after a character in 'The Seagull'.
Jesus: Really? My name is Jesus. I was named after a bandleader in Panama City."
English dramatist Nathaniel Lee, who was confined for five years in Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, better known as "Bedlam":
"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me!"
Benjamin Disraeli, on being asked to explain the difference between misfortune and catastrophe:
"If Mr Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune;
if anyone pulled him out, that would be a catastrophe."
John Cusack, playing Rob Gordon, in "High Fidelity":
"Well I've been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."
A child actor in the original "Lord of the Flies" film, asked why, between takes, he was catching lizards and tossing them into a fan:
"To see how many pieces they are cut up into."
Jud Northbark, in "Elementary Penguins":
"Cruelty is the ideal children's game:
no equipment is needed,
the rules are simple to learn,
and you can play even if your opponent doesn't want to."
Delmore Schwartz:
"Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn."
J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England":
"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."
Jane Hamilton, in "Disobedience":
"Living with a high school teacher is probably not that different from living with a coal miner. They are down the shaft, they are cleaning up from being down the shaft, or they are preparing to return to the shaft."
The winner of the Olympic ping pong competition:
"Winning the world title was easy.
The hard part was making the Chinese team!"
Sherman Stonor, Baron Camoys, explaining with his usual delicacy why a relative had suddenly abandoned his studies at a seminary:
"I believe he was jumping a little too low at the leapfrog."
Samuel Johnson:
"There is no point in settling the precedence between a louse and a flea."
Woodrow Wilson:
"In Washington, some men grow. Others merely swell."
Laurence Urdang, in his preface to The New York Times Everyday Reader's Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words:
"This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefuehl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages."
Russell Banks's character Hannah Musgrove, in 'The Darling':
"My mother was a closed circuit. All her poles and the pronouns that represented them were reversed. Of strangers, she would say, 'She hasn't met me yet'."
S. M. de Gyurky, in a letter to 'The Futurist' magazine, makes artificial intelligence practical:
"An autonomous system would take about 10 years to build. Human reason alone, using Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the software functional requirements document, would entail about 8 million lines of commented code. The systems architect would have to be conversant in Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hegel and have many years of experience in building sofware systems of 1 million lines of commented code."
Dean Acheson,
Alan Bennet,
Winston Churchill,
Historian H.A.L. Fisher,
Henry Ford,
William Randolph Hearst,
Douglas Hector in "The History Boys" by Alan Bennett,
Elbert Hubbard,
Robert Sherrill,
Arnold Toynbee,
Mark Twain,
Voltaire:
"History is just one damn thing after another."
Edna St Vincent Millay:
"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It's one damn thing over and over."
Headline in the Washington Post, after Hilary Clinton's response to Barak Obama's declaration that he'd won the nomination:
"IN DEFEAT, CLINTON GRACIOUSLY PRETENDS TO WIN"
Dana Stevens:
"Angelina Jolie is the closest thing we have to a real superhero. She's everywhere at once, never ages, travels the world crusading for right, and can easily be pictured crouching atop the Chrysler building."
John Archibald Wheeler, physicist who coined the phrase "black hole":
"Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
Space is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening to me."
Woody Allen:
"Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
Frederick Brooks,
in 'The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering':
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Terence Witt explains Null Physics:
"Null Physics is derived from the concept that our entire universe is the internal structure of nothingness. In other words, physical reality is an intricate, four-dimensional geometric equation that adds to zero because it exists within zero."
A proverb:
"A drowning man reaches for a snake."
Representative Charles Rangel, explaining the limits of his unbounded support for Hillary CLinton:
"We pledged to support her to the end. Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is."
Ludwig Prandtl, congratulated on his first use of English to present a paper at a conference:
"Ja, ja, I am shpeak the technical English, but I have great difficulty when I try to make intercourse."
Lewis Carroll, 'Alice in Wonderland':
"At last the Dodo said, 'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'"
Stephanus of Byzantium, geographer under Justinian I:
"Mythology is what never was, and always is."
Carl Friedrich Gauss:
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one."
Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part 1:
"Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"
Scott Brown, reviewing "Alone in the Dark", a movie, based on a video game, by Uwe Boll, the world's worst director:
"Far be it from me to dismiss a man's effort in a single sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value."
A banker in an avuncular mood.
"The most expensive thing you'll ever buy is money."
Moliere:
"We die only once, and for such a long time."
The sucker's warning:
"If you can't spot the fool when a deal's being made, then everyone else can."
The first call, 2 January 1994, to Michael Wolff's NetGuide hotline, (motto: No question too dumb):
"Hello! Is this the Internet?"
Gordon Liddy, a veritable font of quotations, some original, was asked if it hurt when he would demonstrate his toughness by holding his hand over a candle flame:
"Of course it hurts. The secret is not to mind that it hurts."
The cinematic TE Lawrence (of Arabia, that is), extinguished a candle with his fingers, prompting his friend to try it as well, only to discover that it really hurts:
"What's the trick?"
"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts!"
Jacques Lacan:
"Love is giving something you don't possess to someone who doesn't exist."
Yibiao Pan:
"I decide what's obvious, not my students."
Melissa Bank:
"When someone asks me to eat shit, I don't nibble."
Melissa Bank:
"The good thing about being nowhere in your career is you can do it anywhere."
Bob Dylan:
"It took me a long time to get young."
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Conservative candidate for mayor of London (he won), after denying he was having an affair, and then being forced to admit it:
"My friends, I have discovered there are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for further disasters."
The highlight of "Gilgamesh", which suddenly switched to Latin for some reason, and so was imprinted perfectly in my mind for 40 years:
"Sex dies et septem noctes Enkidu coibat cum meretrice."
Patricia Pearson, author of "A Brief History of Anxiety":
"Anxiety is fear in search of a cause."
The slogan of computer manufacturers, the title of a Spice Girls song, the title of the autobiography of extravagant architect Morris Lapidus, among many other occurrences:
"Too much is never enough."
Reporter and commentator Alex Dreier:
"A diplomat is someone who thinks twice before saying nothing."
Will Blythe, a self-described insane fan of the North Carolina basketball team, and hence a despiser of the rival Duke team:
"To hate like this is to be happy forever."
Sign under a trophy trout:
"I got here because I couldn't keep my mouth shut!"
Napoleon:
"When the enemy is engaged in destroying himself, don't interfere!"
A Cramputational Scientist:
"Parallel processing allows an instructor to compute an inaccurate estimate for pi before the students have lost interest in the topic."
A West Virginian:
"You have to understand that West Virginia is such a tightly-knit, ingrown state that everything becomes political. And everything political becomes personal."
Woody Allen:
"There's an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of them says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible!' and the other one says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life."
Secrets of the Millionaires:
"Say yes before your brain has time to say no!"
Willie Nelson:
"The second mouse gets the cheese."
Theodor von Karman:
"What's the point of Esperanto?
There's already an international language.
It's called bad English."
Vice President Dick Cheney opens up to an interviewer:
Q: "Can you briefly describe what kind of qualities you are looking for in a new CIA director?"
A: "Probably not."
George Orwell, in "1984" in 1948:
"Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you, and you sold me."
Jud Northbark:
"I hesitate to say that any mathematician suffers from social pathology when in fact so many of them seem to thrive on it."
Ben Hogan:
"Golf is a game of luck. The more I practice, the luckier I get!"
Jud Northbark:
"No matter how long or hard I spin,
Less gold goes out than straw comes in!"
Computer scientist Alan Kay:
"The Apple Macintosh is the first personal computer good enough to criticize."
Controversial heart surgeon Denton Cooley, under cross examination:
Lawyer: "Do you consider yourself the best heart surgeon in the world?"
Cooley: "Yes."
Lawyer: "Don't you think that's being rather immodest?"
Cooley: "Perhaps, but remember, I'm under oath."
David Lodge, 'Changing Places':
"He runs the Department very much in the spirit of Dunkirk, as a strategic withdrawal against overwhelming odds."
Haven Kimmel, 'A Girl Named Zippy':
"Mooreland, Indiana, is a long way to go
not to be anywhere when you get there."
From the documentary 'Because the Bible Tells Me So':
"A fifth grader's idea of God is OK - if you're a fifth grader."
A saying:
"The shortest distance between two lines is under construction."
Jack Nicholson:
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch."
Jane Austen, 'Persuasion':
"It was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely."
The San Jose Logfile:
"KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION TRAPS 37 DATA MINERS!"
A meteorological proverb:
"Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get."
An updated meteorological proverb:
"Climate is what you affect; weather is what gets you."
Penelope Keith:
"Shyness is just egotism out of its depth."
Saint Augustine,
Pearl Buck,
Winston Churchill,
Marcus Tullius Cicero,
Albert Einstein,
Pliny T. Elder,
TS Eliot,
Malcolm Forbes,
Benjamin Franklin,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Ernest Hemingway,
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Thomas Jefferson,
Doctor Samuel Johnson,
Abraham Lincoln,
Jud Northbark,
Blaise Pascal,
Ezra Pound,
Marcel Proust,
Robert Sayre,
Madame de Sevigne,
Madame de Stael,
Henry David Thoreau,
Mark Twain,
Voltaire,
EB White,
Oscar Wilde:
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
William Blake:
"A truth that is told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent."
Hal Abelson:
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
Gore Vidal:
"Idries Shah's books were a good deal harder to read than to write."
Kernighan's Law:
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
The prime minister, ending a meeting with a group of unemployed men, as 'reported' by David Frost on 'That Was The Week That Was':
"Well, I have to get back to work now, even if you don't."
Marshall McLuhan:
"I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt."
Abraham Lincoln:
"If I were really two-faced, do you imagine this is the face I would wear?"
Last transmission from a Navy pilot:
"I'm lost, but I'm making record time."
Diane Johnson, in 'Le Mariage':
"Self pity has the merit that it is apt to be sincere."
A student, when confronted with evidence that her term paper contained plagiarized sentences and paragraphs (New Scientist, 10 February 2007):
"No, I didn't do that.
It was the person who wrote the paper for me."
Philosopher and brain theorist Pat Churchland after a bad faculty meeting:
"Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home."
Bleeding Gums Murphy:
"Blues ain't about making yourself feel better; it's about making other people feel worse."
Winner of Corecomm's Worst Technical Communication Sample of the Month, submitted by Susan Gallagher from a manual she was rewriting:
"Type the field name Name in the Field Name field."
Ed Koch:
"Rudy Giuliani is absolutely not a racist.
He's nasty to EVERYBODY."
Jud Northbark:
"If you believe in infinity, you also believe a string can have just one end."
Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward, after being pressed at a party for information about the Union Army's next moves:
"Madame, if I did not know, I would tell you."
From Oakley Doake's play "The Crumpled Gusset":
Miranda: "They say the sirens were half woman, half monster."
Edgardo: "And what was the other half?"
Paul John Gascoigne, renowned English football player:
"I never predict anything, and I never will."
Homer Simpson:
"Alaska, where you can't be too fat or too drunk!"
Camilla Caimano, after receiving yet another change of address from me:
"I'll have to start writing your new addresses in pencil!"
Dorothy, in Oz:
"People come and go so quickly here!"
What a Russian yells when facing danger:
"Dvum smertiam nye by vat, I odnoi nye mino vat!"
(Two deaths cannot happen to a person, and one death can't be avoided!)
Barbara Amiel, consort of Conrad Black, perfectly expressing her frame of mind upon being criticized for her extravagant lifestyle:
"I suppose its the process of being singled out that is often more frightening than the thing itself. A Holocaust survivor once explained to me that when Jews were being rounded up it was awful, but you were not alone."
Joan Anderman, writing for the Boston Globe, defending Al Gore's 'Live Earth' event of 7 July 2007:
"Shame on the naysayers! I saw a drunk middle-aged man toss his beer bottle in a recycling bin for the first time. Multiply that by two billion. That's a measurable outcome."
Woody Allen:
"Unrequited love is the only kind that lasts."
From the Book of Proverbs:
"A boy chases a girl until she catches him."
Roger Myers, Jr, Producer of 'The Itchy and Scratchy Show', on 'The Simpsons':
"You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?"
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, whose Red Army shot 158,000 men for desertion during World War II:
"In the Red Army, it takes a very brave man to be a coward."
Dwight Schrute, of 'The Office':
"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most."
Jack Valenti:
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Jud 'Mossy' Northbark:
"In our minds, our programs are always working. We really can't help believing in them utterly. Thus we test and debug until reality has been adjusted to match our incorrigible fantasies."
Jud 'Mossy' Northbark:
"If a computer code has not been tested, it is absolutely certain to be wrong. If it is not known how to test it, then the code should never have been written."
Carolyn See, in the novel "Making History":
"Live your whole life as if it were deductible!"
Patti Novak, Buffalo matchmaker, on meeting her client, a 346 pound former Mr Nude Universe who was recently kicked out of a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant:
"You've made a choice between doughnuts and sex."
Paulie Walnuts:
"I lost two friends this year. You can take 2007 and give it back to the Indians."
PG Wodehouse:
"He was so crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase."
Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the UN, replacing John Notlob, that is, Bolton:
"I have discovered from your comments that the best thing I have done was to choose my predecessor."
Steve Martin:
"Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything."
Norman Maclean, in "Young Men and Fire":
"I was told in a somewhat dreamlike way that the two mathematicians were at a conference, in Ogden, Utah, as I remember, and the man who told me sounded as if he were off somewhere too. I was to discover later that being away at a conference is a basic characteristic of mathematicians wherever you find them."
Sherlock Holmes:
"There comes a time when, for every addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones!"
Golda Meir:
"Don't be so humble - you're not that great!"
Jonathan Katz, physicist at Washington University at St Louis:
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a PhD in physics than by drugs."
Garrison Keillor:
"A good newspaper is never quite good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever."
Wess Roberts, in "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun":
"Being a leader of the Huns is often a lonely job."
Dave Barry:
"I've been known to email people who were literally standing next to me, which I know sounds crazy, because at that distance I could easily call them with my cellphone."
A saying:
"It's better to be at the table than on the menu."
Miikka Ryokas, 22 year old computer science student in Turku, Finland:
"As the popular joke goes, the problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work."
PG Wodehouse, in "A Damsel in Distress":
"What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts."
Bill Layton, after a basketball game with his students:
"The older I get, the better I used to be."
A proverb:
"If you're plotting revenge, remember to take two shovels."
Tony Soprano:
"You can't put the shit back in the donkey."
Peter Medawar, reviewing Teilhard de Chardin's book 'The Phenomenon of Man':
"Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."
Margery Sharp, in "The Sun in Scorpio":
"Did I say paradigm? I must be drunk," said the M.O. "I'm always drunk when I say paradigm."
Frank Pakenham, Lord Longford, a former advocate for Myra Hyndley:
"Only dead fish swim with the stream."
Wells Tower, while attending a convention of young conservatives:
"What makes Newt Gingrich's face so attractive is the shape of the skull, which is concave in the center, so that its features are perfectly displayed in a sort of naturally occurring candy dish of head bone."
Bill Gifford, while recreating the adventures of an early explorer by sailing the Pacific in a small ship, quoting an observation from the ship's first officer:
"Some of you will get seasick," he admitted, "But as you're hanging over the rail, remember that you're providing entertainment for the rest of us."
George Will:
"Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings."
Charlie LeDuff, writing about the area near Oklahoma City:
"The landscape is so flat and barren you could probably watch your dog run away all day long."
Ralph Smith:
"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up."
Deborah Wiener, an interior designer who said she hides terrycloth slippers in each bathroom of the house she shares with her husband and two sons.
"My fourth design mantra is never, ever go barefoot in a man's bathroom."
An old proverb:
"If the captain doesn't know where he wants to go, there is no wind that will take him there."
Woody Allen:
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."
Wanda Sykes:
"NASA is like welfare for bright people. They're so smart they're useless."
Jimmy Rabbitte, in the movie version of The Commitments:
"We would be working class, if there was any work."
George Box, professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin:
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
Idi Amin Dada:
"I don't like human flesh. It's too salty for me."
The blessing that visitors and correspondents gave to James Murray, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. (As it turns out, the last word in the dictionary was actually zyxt, and Murray died around the time that he was working on the word turn-down):
"May you live to see Zymotic!"
James Murray, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explaining why he had fired yet another of the seemingly well-qualified assistants to his work:
"He is an utter numb-skull, a most lack-a-daisical, graspless fellow, born to stare at existence."
Parvati, a female boxer and competitor on the version of Survivor which divided 20 people into four teams by race:
"So they're dividing us into different ethnic groups - is that kosher?"
Mark Twain:
"The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that if they continue we shall soon know nothing at all about it."
If you've just been stopped for your drunken driving, demanded to know if the arresting cop is a Jew, told the attending policewoman "What are you looking at, sugar tits?", declared that you own Malibu, and then confided that the Jews have started all the wars in history, you might want to say "I am sorry", or at least say "I am sorry," or at least ask your publicist to say "I am sorry". But, being Mel Gibson, even on the second try, his publicist could only get the first two words right:
"I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display."
From the memoir "The Sound of No Hands Clapping", by the hapless Toby Young:
"Toby Young is a balding bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a punctured beach-ball, the charm of a glove-puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane. And I speak as a friend."
Peter Carey, author of "Oscar and Lucinda" and "The True History of the Kelly Gang," in "My Life as a Fake":
"He was as happy as a dog with two tails."
Laconia is an ancient region of Greece, whose chief city is Sparta. The people of this region, known as Lacedemoneans, were as closed-mouthed and terse as the proverbial Mainers of today. Their behavior inspired the English word laconic, from the original Greek word "Laconizein". During the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians sent a blustery threat:
"If we come to your city, we will raze it to the ground!"to which the Lacedemonians economically responded:
"If."Thanks to Vasileios Basios for correcting the previous version of this discussion!
The supposed motto of Embrey, Indiana, childhood home of Harmony Faith Lane and Harry Lockhart of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang":
"When in doubt, cut up a pig."
Tony Soprano muses to his therapist:
"You know my feelings. Every day is a gift. It's just, does it always have to be a pair of socks?"
His grandfather's appraisal of comedian Ron White:
"That boy's got a lot of quit in him!"
Charles Hoare, inventor of the QuickSort algorithm, in his 1990 ACM Turing Award Lecture:
"I conclude that 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 way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
An anonymous student evaluator, as reported by AJ Meir:
"This instructor makes it difficult for the average student to get an A!"
John Haedrich, a nursing home director, paid for a DNA test, whose results suggested he shared a genetic signature commonly found among Jews. He then asserted an automatic right to Israeli citizenship from a Los Angeles rabbi, who replied:
"DNA, schmee-NA!"
Warren Hastings, the first governor general of British India, on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors involving the brutal taxation of the population. (He was acquitted.):
"My God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand amazed at my own moderation!"
The father of the bride, in "Imagine Me and You":
"How long have I been married? Thirty years. If I'd killed her straightaway I would be out again by now."
Tim Flannery, in "The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth":
"We must remember that if we act now, it lies within our power to save two species for every one that is currently doomed."
Clayton Webster, after being nutritionally deprived for several hours:
"I'm so hungry I could eat the ass out of a horse."
The company motto when Walt Disney first started hiring starving cartoonists:
"If you don't show up for work on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday."
Catalin Trenchea, making a fine point:
"It's not that I dislike him. I don't like him."
Wallace Shawn, who recalls as a child putting on puppet shows with his brother on such topics as Patrice Lumumba, on being asked the names of celebrities who might have seen these shows:
"I'm not going to be a namedropper. I'm very resistant to what Chairman Mao calls the cult of personality."
Jud Northbark, after accidentally reading one too many ninny articles about watches found on the beach, intelligent design, Gaeia principles, and universes that wouldn't exist if we weren't there to see them:
"Ah yes, the anthropic principle, the inevitable conclusion that astronomy is the study of astronomers."
Larry Shepp, professor of statistics at Rutgers, on being informed that a mathematicial discovery he made had actually been discovered by an earlier mathematician:
"Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered!"
Jud Northbark, after one week of constructing documentation for all the routines in a mathematical function package:
"The God of mathematical software has an inordinate fondness for Bessel functions."
David Clark, discussing how the worst disasters can be caused by the slow incremental growth of seemingly insignificant problems, in particular how the early disregard of security issues has corrupted the Internet:
"The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants."
Michael Kinsley, in an online article in Slate about Larry David titled "America's Jane Austen":
"Nineteenth-century English village life will always loom large in the world's imagination, like Greenland in a Mercator projection map."
Hugo Dyson, a member of the Inklings literary group, as fellow member JRR Tolkien was reading from "The Lord of the Rings":
"Oh no, not another fucking elf!"
David Edelstein's suggested promo for a movie version of Moby Dick:
"Sometimes you get the whale. And sometimes the whale gets you."
Oscar Wilde:
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."
Dan Rather:
"Well, we've said it many times - if a frog had sidepockets, he'd carry a gun."
Dan Rather:
"Frankly, we don't know whether to run, to watch, or to bark at the moon."
Nehemiah, of MTV's "The Real World":
"I don't fail anything - except for math, twice."
Alan Greenspan, at his 1988 confirmation hearings:
"I guess I should warn you if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said."
Jud Northbark:
"A bureaucracy is born by asserting a monopoly on a particular activity; it flourishes by failing to accomplish it."
A wise old proverb:
"It's no use having a dog and barking too."
At an exhibition of Whistler's paintings, a critical woman is supposed to have stopped in front of one of Whistler's more abstract paintings, and remarked:
"Well, Mr Whistler, I certainly don't see things as you do!"to which Whistler replied:
"No, ma'am, but don't you wish you could?"
Leslie Orgel's Second Rule:
"Evolution is cleverer than you."
John Cruickshank, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, describing F David Rader, the president of the publishing company, and associate of Conrad Black:
"He wasn't averse to quality journalism; he just thought it should go on somewhere else."
Willem Dafoe, playing a drug dealer in "Light Sleeper":
"My philosophy is, if you've got nothing to say, then don't say it."
Richard Hamming, a pioneer numerical analyst:
"Just as there are wavelengths that people cannot see, and sounds that people cannot hear, computers may have thoughts that people cannot think."
Conan the Barbarian, (impersonated by Arnold Schwarzenegger), in answer to the question "What is best in life?" (and paraphrasing a remark by Genghis Khan!):
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women."
Genghis Khan:
"The greatest thing in life is:
- to crush your enemies,
- to see them fall in the dust,
- to take their horses and cattle,
- to hear the lamentation of their women, and
- to sleep upon the bellies of their daughters."
Epitaph:
"Here lies the body of W W,
Who never again will trouble you, trouble you."
Brewster Bragsheer:
"Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid."
Homer Simpson, while parading around with a sign announcing the coming of the apocalypse:
"In a world gone mad, only a lunatic is truly insane!"
Wolfgang Pauli dropped this acidic writeoff about a colleague:
"So young, and already so unknown!"
("So jung, und schon unbekannt!")
A member of J Robert Oppenheimer's PhD defense committee:
"I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions!"
Charles Babbage:
"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."
Ari Fischer, press secretary for George Bush II:
"How can you ask a followup question when I didn't answer your first question?"
Unattributed:
"Why be difficult, when, with a little effort, you can be impossible?"
Brewster Bragscheer
"Job: a life support system for a web page."
Charles Babbage, who invented both the computer and the belief that as long as you were right it didn't matter who you irritated:
"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."
An aspiring film student, asked of a Dutch filmmaker at a festival:
"What's it like to make a foreign movie?"
An exchange on "Futurama" between Frye, pizza delivery boy from the 20th century, and Leela, the one-eyed alien:
Frye [hesitantly]: "I'm having one of those, uh, things... like a headache with pictures".
Leela: "You mean an idea?"
Political gadfly Christopher Hitchens noted:
"George Bush's eyes are so closely set that he could get by with a monocle."
Florida governor Jeb Bush, after Hurricane Charley:
"You can't plan for the unforeseen. God doesn't follow the linear directions of computer models."
My Chinese cookie fortune for 8 July 2004:
"Live life not expecting, then even the small tings you will be grateful for!"
Mark Rasch, who prosecuted Clifford Stoll's Hannover Hackers, commenting on the poor security practices and weak passwords that enabled a series of breakins at national laboratories:
"The silicon is fine. It's the carbon we have to deal with."
French model Nouni Cisse, explaining why she didn't know anything about the Israeli security barrier until the day she was posed there, beneath Arabic graffiti she also couldn't read that says "I am a donkey!":
"They showed me a newspaper, but I can't read it, because it is in Israelian."
Boris Spassky, on the dissolution of his first marriage:
"We had become like bishops of opposite color."
Anton Chekhov:
"Any idiot can handle a crisis. But it's the day-to-day living that wears you down!"
Anthony Heath and Yogengra Yadav:
"The Indian National Congress Party is like a pillow: it reflects the shape of the last person who sat on it."
From a letter to Scientific American by Ray Kurzweil:
"According to my models, we are doubling the paradigm shift rate approximately every decade."
From a television commercial:
"The new Oral B toothbrush has amazing 3D action!"
From Madame Secretary by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:
- Call Senator Helms;
- Call King Hussein;
- Call Foreign Minister Moussa;
- Make other congressional calls;
- Prepare for China meeting;
- Buy nonfat yogurt.
A venerable Russian adage:
"If you see a Bulgarian on the street, beat him. He will know why."
Asked of a waitress at a truck stop just over the Virginia state line:
"I don't know if I'll like grits - can I have just one?"to which she replied,
"Honey, grits only come in groups."
Arnold Schwarzenegger, tossing his helmet into the ring for the California governorship:
"It's the most difficult decision I've ever made in my entire life, except for the one in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax."
Elvis Mitchell, film critic for the New York Times:
"The movie 'Legally Blonde' puts the 'b' in 'subtle'".
Robin Williams, in a comedy performance (and thus, probably 80 other times) said:
"Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party."
Mark Twain, in a quote that seems to have cut itself loose from any exact formulation or textual attribution, supposedly said, more or less:
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
William Least Heat Moon, in "Blue Highways":
"Indiana 66 is a road so crooked it could run for the legislature."
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Goon, who would patent the fart and not even let you have a free trial:
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
Woody Allen:
"Eternity is very long, especially towards the end."
John Malkovich's T-shirt:
"The thing about doing something terrible is you hardly ever remember it."
Ben Ratliff, reviewing a performance by White Stripes:
"You can contradict yourself successfully if you do it with conviction."
Woody Allen, in Hollywood Ending:
She: "But he's made several commercially successful American movies."
He: "That's all you need to know about him. He's the white line in the middle of the highway."
Cardinal Jaime Sin, asked to comment on the ruinous population explosion of the Philippines:
"The more, the merrier!"
John Boyd, fighter pilot and military strategist:
"There are only so many ulcers in the world, and it's your job to see that other people get them."
Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, commenting on a sweeps week surge in Michael Jackson coverage:
"Michael Jackson is the ultimate traffic accident. People can't take their eyes off him!"
Jeffrey Dahmer, anthropophage, recorded on video at his grandmother's house in 1990:
"I've been surviving mostly on McDonald's food, but like I said, that gets expensive. I have to start eating at home more."
Sophie Harris, in the New York Times Book Review of 05 January 2003:
"Will Self has a fatal weakness for daffy polysyllables, alliteration and puns. The effect is occasionally that of a man leaning carelessly on a nail gun."
Judith Stern and Robert Lettieri, in the manual "QuickTime 5 for Macintosh and Windows", trying to take your breath away:
"Unlike most pieces of software, QuickTime isn't an application, but an enabling technology."
My can of Campbell's Pork and Beans, in which the "Pork" ingredient has always been infinitesmal, has apparently accomplished the impossible, unless they're just using smaller beans:
"Now with more beans!"
Cullen Murphy, managing editor of The Atlantic, (which makes it a bit easier to get yourself published) writing in an article about limbo:
"...purgatory was merely an unpleasantness for transients, the afterlife's O'Hare."
Roman Jackiw, Professor of Physics at MIT, defending the French Bogdanov twins's embattled thesis relating infinite temperature and imaginary time to a theory of conditions before the Big Bang:
"I would be very careful before calling something nonsense if I didn't understand it yet."
Richard Kunkel, Dean of the College of Education at Florida State University, speaking for the ages at a ceremony for National Mediation Week:
"It's about resolution, stupid!"
Me, because it has to be possible:
"I can't even lose correctly! First I was in the wrong place but the right time, then in the right place but the wrong time. So I was that close...to what, exactly? Sheesh!"
Michael Dibdin, in the comic murder-romance Dirty Tricks:
"Though I refused to age, the students and other teachers grew younger year by year."
Raymond Syufy, chief executive of Century Theaters, commenting on an unsavory executive compensation scheme at AMC:
"Was one back scratching the other?"
Joshua Milrad, codirector of the video "Spring Break Uncensored", commenting on a pair of awesomely artificial breasts:
"You could calculate pi with those things."
Me, about to leave the bathroom, but then turning around after a sudden worry:
"I think I forget to hit RETURN."
Clifford Truesdell, in a review of a paper (Mathematical Reviews, Volume 12, page 561):
"This paper gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error, however, is not new."
Charles De Gaulle:
"The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."
Carrie Ameen, a cancer survivor, or an actor playing one, in a gushy television ad for "America's pharmaceutical companies", inventing a new grammatical tense, the past-forward-contrapositive:
"Ten years ago I might not be sitting here today."
Lee Dreyfus, a former governor of Wisconsin:
"Madison, Wisconsin, is fifty-two square miles surrounded by reality."
Winston Churchill, on Clement Atlee, whom he preceded and succeeded in the office of prime minister:
"A modest man, who has much to be modest about!"
George W Bush:
"It makes no sense to replace someone who's on the Appropriations Committee with someone who is not!"
The motto on a pillow on Alice Longworth Roosevelt's couch:
"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me!"
Michelle Kwan's skating costume's subliminal message, according to the New Yorker, as quoted in an article in the New York Times:
"I am going to make my First Communion, and I intend to yodel."
An uncredited constructor of the local television guide:
"Tonight we have the great Ring trilogy: Rocky I, Rocky II, and Rocky III."
HL Mencken:
"SELF RESPECT: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."
Doctor Samuel 'Dictionary' Johnson:
"Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he is caught young."
The best line from the movie version of "The Fellowship of the Ring":
"No one tosses a dwarf!"
Todd Robbins, a New York magician who sometimes does his own blockhead act, quoted in the New York Times obituary for Melvin Burkhart, "the Human Blockhead", 18 November 2001:
"Anyone who has ever hammered a nail into his nose owes a large debt to Melvin Burkhart."
Me, on a bad day:
"Reading fussy modern programs with declarations like object object object or Line line LINE , I miss the days when using variable names like IP1 or XMAX would get you called verbose and eccentric."
EF Benson, in "Queen Lucia":
"With regard to religion, finally, it may be briefly said that she believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia..."
Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly, in A Guide to Latex2E, with their humor parameter set to zero:
"In the original version of Latex, there are several English words such as Figure and Bibliography included explicitly in certain commands. This in fact violates the rules of good programming which forbid doing anything explicitly."
Macbeth (as reported by Shakespeare):
"Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?"
Crusty Australian art critic and unreliable driver Robert Hughes:
"It's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but then the unlived life is not worth examining."
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who headed IBM's shift from traditional big-iron computer to systems using arrays of processors, on the fact that hardware advances have far outpaced software:
"All those Porsches and nowhere to drive."
A protest sign displayed during the Florida presidential recount:
"'Manual Count' Means Manipulation!"
Maurice Wilkes, after the first attempts to write programs for the EDSAC computer:
"I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
Governor Earl Long:
"I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics."
Referring to the gaudy, grandiose, ostentatious buildings that Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has splattered around Seattle, a critic remarked:
"We'll look back on this as the era when money was too cheap to meter."
A Montenegrin, interviewed in connection with an article about Montenegro's efforts to separate from Serbia:
"Of course we are better than those damn Serbs. Our alphabet has four more letters!"
Alan Perlis, first recipient of the Turing award, first chair of the CMU Computer Science Department, and author of "Epigrams on Programming":
Epigram #63: "When we write programs that learn, it turns out that we do and they don't."
In a book about Great Britain's tortuous tango with European integration, a picture of Prime Minister John Major is dryly captioned:
"My hesitation is final."
Paul Halmos:
"Mathematics isn't in a hurry. Efficiency is meaningless. Understanding is what counts. So is the computer important to mathematics? My answer is no. It is important, but not to mathematics."
David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, commenting after the latest collapse of a peace plan in Northern Ireland:
"Northern Ireland is the only place I know where someone will drive 100 miles out of his way just to receive an insult."
Computational neuroscientist Greg Hood, after refusing to eat a suspiciously shiny sweet with a metallic glazing that Anjana Kar had brought back from India, going to his car, retrieving his digital volt/ohmmeter, and performing diagnostics:
"Never eat a cookie with a resistance of less than 1 ohm."
Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, who presented a computer-aided proof of the Four Color Theorem:
"When proofs are long and highly computational, it may be argued that even when hand checking is possible, the probability of human error is considerably higher than that of machine error."
The chef at G's, (or is it Charlie's?) in Oakland, Pittsburgh:
"With enough cayenne pepper, anybody can make a hot sauce, just like anybody can punch you in the face. But with my hot sauce, you're going to ask me to punch you in the face again."
Cynthia Van Ness, of Buffalo, New York, in a letter appearing in the May-June 1998 issue of The Utne Reader:
"Why do carnivores always bring up Hitler when they talk about vegetarians? What are the moral implications of their rhetorical dependence on someone they profess to despise?"
Eugene Wigner, asked to confirm an anecdote about him, in which he got into a fight with a taxi driver over a tip, and then told him "Oh, go to hell, please!", responded:
"Of course the story is true. But you must understand: That driver was very impolite!"
On a T-shirt:
"If a man speaks in a forest, and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"
An anonymous senior official of the National Security Agency:
"The NSA is a self-licking ice cream cone."
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