And I Quote:

"Yelena bonner was Sakharov's wife. She came to America when he was in internal exile. We had a little dinner up at HBO. From the HBO dining room you can see the Empire State Building. I asked this stupid question - This is your first trip to America. What do you like most about America? Is it the Empire State Building? Is it democracy? She said - The washing machines are fabulous!"
Michael Fuchs.
"Gravity is a scam! Don't fall for it!."
The Newton Refutin' Teuton.
"Two excuses are worse than none."
Jud Northbark.
"Aloft! What rock through yonder window breaks?"
The Glazier's Alarm.
"From happiness to unhappiness is just a short step; from unhappiness to happiness is a long journey."
A Kakanian proverb.
"He probably doesn't even know he's dead."
Frances Hughes, on the delirious violent end of Beatles gofer Mal Evans.
"The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought."
Rudi Dornbusch.
"When you worship power, compassion and mercy look like sins."
Benjamin Cremer.
"FRIEND: Someone who will help you hide the body."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"The sculptor Lysippus used commonly to say that whereas his predecessors had made men as they really were, he made them as they appeared to be."
Pliny the Elder, in 'Natural History'.
"No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding."
Richard Russo, in 'Straight Man'.
"The logical end to defensive warfare is surrender."
Napoleon.
"INTELLECTUAL: Someone who knows absolutely everything, but nothing else."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"MEMORY: The only reason teenage children are allowed to survive."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth."
Shakespeare, 'Richard the Second'.
"Stephen Smale was nearly always locally wrong, but globally right."
A mathematical colleague.
"Let's get it typed up. Then we'll have something to alter."
Niels Bohr, preparing to attack his latest idea.
"Two wrongs don't make a right... but three lefts do."
Silyas Dogwood, 'Not That You Asked'.
"EXPERIENCE: The license to repeat your mistakes, with ever greater confidence."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Go back where you came from!"
Idaho state senator and idiot Dan Foreman at a public forum, shouting down Trish Carter-Goodheart, a Native American candidate for office.
"You are what your record says you are."
Coach Bill Parcells.
"DERMATOLOGY: The ideal medical career - because the patient never dies, and never gets better."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"The decor looked like a landfill had sneezed."
Eve Fairbanks, 'The Inheritors'.
"Ah Robbie, ye asked them for bread and they hae gi'en ye a stane."
The mother of poet Robert Burns, who died impoverished and alone, commments on a statue raised in his memory.
"INTELLECTUAL: A person who has found something more interesting than sex."
Aldous Huxley, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."
Mario Cuomo.
"Charles Evans Hughes is a bearded iceberg."
Teddy Roosevelt, commenting on the frosty demeanor of the man who was twice governor of New York, Supreme Court justice, and candidate for president in 1916.
"The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all costs."
Baron Edward Henry Carson, British Attorney General, refusing to bemoan the staggering casualties of the World War.
"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves."
Virginia Woolf, 'To the Lighthouse'.
"He has glaring faults and they certainly have glared at us this term."
Stephen Fry's report card.
"I leaned back and thought of England and tried to give myself over to Blowers's soothing cadences, the richness of his vowels, the rarefied pronunciation - the spoken equivalent of calligraphy."
Sarah Lyall, in 'The Anglo Files', on soccer announcer Henry Blofeld, (nicknamed 'Blowers')
"Queen: And where have you been wounded, soldier?
Soldier: I'm afraid I can't say. I did not study Latin."
The soldier with a buttock wound.
"Avoid cliches like the plaque!"
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, 'Grammar Between You and I'.
"He despised those rules which had been long in practice, to keep his ship and men out of danger, which had been held in former times a point of great ability and circumspection, as if the principal art of a ship had been to be sure to come home safe again."
Clarendon's words in praise of the furiously aggressive Admiral Robert Blake, who established Britain's naval supremacy under Oliver Cromwell.
"Thanks to De Lellis and Szekelyhidi, we now realize that even less is known about Euler's equation than we thought. And what we thought we knew wasn't much to begin with."
Cedric Villani, 'Birth of a Theorem'.
"I was a tomboy. I only played with boys and with boy toys. My favorite toy was a leather gun belt that had a strap to fasten the holster tightly to my leg. When they gave me a doll, I shot it in the head and that was the end of that."
Aunt Arlene.
"All photographs are accurate, None of them is the truth."
Richard Avedon.
"What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask."
Joan Didion, 'Play It As It Lays'.
"AIRPLANE: two million metal parts flying in close formation."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Everyone who is born hold dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer only to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."
Susan Sontag.
"I have had my results for a long time, but I do not yet know how to arrive at them."
Gauss, who always knew he was right, but just not necessarily why.
"If you are told:
a truncated pyramid of 6 for vertical height of 4 on the base by 2 on the top.
You are to square this 4, result 16.
You are to double 4, result 8.
You are to square 2, result 4.
You are to add the 16, 8, 4, result 28.
You are to take a third of 6, result 2.
You are to take 28 twice, result 56.
See, it is 56. You will find it right."
The Rhind Papyrus, 'Directions for Obtaining the Knowledge of All Dark Things', 1700BC.
"Why is a raven like a writing desk?"
The Mad Hatter, in 'Alice in Wonderland', posing a riddle that even Martin Gardner couldn't explicate.
"Holden (Android detector): Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Leon (the android): My mother? Let me tell you about my mother! (BLAM!)"
The question that ends the interrogation and the interrogator in 'Blade Runner'.
"What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?"
The task given to the computer Deep Thought, which after thousands of years returned the answer '42'.
"What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
The third question to King Arthur, from the Bridgekeeper at the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
"Why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air?"
Uh Clem, in 'I think we're all Bozos on this bus', trying to confuse Doctor Memory, a talking computer.
"Once you've given your pig an enema, there's no turning back."
E B White.
"Wit is the eloquence of indifference."
William Hazlitt.
"It's just a question of mind over matter. I don't mind, and you don't matter."
Albany Georgia police chief Laurie Pritchett, vowing to Charles Sherrod that he would defeat his anti-segregationist efforts.
"They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat!"
A sardonic motto for the Purim meal.
"I divide my officers into four classes: the man who is clever and industrious is suited to high staff appointments; use can be made of the man who is stupid and lazy; the man who is clever and lazy is fitted for the highest command - he has the nerve to deal with all situations; but the man who is stupid and industrious is a danger, and must be dismissed immediately."
Colonel-General Baron Karl von Hammerstein-Equord.
"Renter: My apartment door is jammed and I can't get out!
Landlord: I can send someone right away. Will you be at home?"
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Talk Me Down'.
"Where do Unitarians come from? Well, it's like this. There's a fork in the road to the Pearly Gates. One sign says 'This way to Heaven' and the other says 'This way to discussions about Heaven'."
Silyas Dogwood.
"If you've got a Hungarian friend, you don't need an enemy."
Saul Bellow, 'The Adventures of Augie March'.
"A happy man has no past, an unhappy man has nothing else."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"A hamadryad is a wood nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that."
An aside by the Greek god Hermes, hovering invisibly in the background of John Banville's 'Infinities'.
"Lord Randolph Churchill was the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral."
Archibald Primrose, Earl of Roseberry, on Churchill's disintegration into alcoholism following the unexpected acceptance of his threat to resign from the cabinet.
"Zaphod Beeblebrox is just this guy, you know."
The personal psychiatrist of Zaphod Beeblebrox, dismissing acclaim and hoopla over the former president of the Universe, inventor of the Galactic Gargleblaster, and best bang since the big one.
"We hear and apprehend only what we already half-know."
Henry David Thoreau.
"Those who believe in evolution make truth claims; yet the very existence of truth depends upon the Biblical concept that truth exists."
Julie Von Vett and Bruce Malone, 'Inspired Evidence: Only One Reality'.
"The greenest mile is the one not driven."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The population of this country is educationally divided by the letter h into three classes: the confident, the anxious, the indifferent."
Ernest Weekley, 'The Romance of Words'.
"Sir Hiram Maxim has prevented more men from dying of old age than any other man who ever lived."
Lord Salisbury, in a curious compliment to the effectiveness of Maxim's machine gun.
"Pain is inevitable;
Suffering is up to you."
Silyas Dogwood.
"The fussy urinator who tries to use the flap-door built into his briefs always ends up going on a fishing expedition."
Brewster Bragsheer, .A Strange Deep-Sea Catch'.
"Mike: 'A double negative is logically a positive, but illogically, it is often understood as the reverse, another negative. However, a double positive is never understood as a negative.'
Ike: 'Yeah, yeah!"
Negativity at the logical positivist convention.
"There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world, but no ruined stones."
Hugh MacDiarmid, 'On a Raised Beach'.
"It looks older than ever before!"
A Swedish archaeologist, enthusing at the reopening ceremony for a restored Bronze Age cairn.
"Floating point numbers are like piles of sand; every time you move one, you lose a little sand, and pick up a little dirt."
Brian Kernighan, Philip Plauger, 'The Elements of Programming Style'.
"Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a dinner table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring suddenly about the state of a man's soul."
Oscar Wilde, 'Aristotle at Afternoon Tea'.
"Patrick McHenry uses the Shawshank Redemption metaphor. Andy Dufresne has to crawl three miles through a pipe full of human shit to go and reach freedom. And Patrick's like, Well, you can crawl slowly, or you can crawl quickly. Just make a decision!"
An unnamed banking lobbyist, on North Carolina representative Patrick McHenry's frustration with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
"I've tried him drunk and I've tried him sober and there's nothing there!"
King Charles II on the 'amiable vacuity' of his nephew-in-law, the Danish Prince George.
"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."
Kate Moss.
"Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are."
John D Cook.
"Mike: 'For two dollars, will you do me a great favor?'
Ike: 'You got two dollars?'
Mike: 'Not with me. It's in my other pants.'
Ike: 'You got other pants?'"
A bar-room dialogue.
"LOST: One cufflink. Will buy or sell."
Waiting at the corner of Hope and Cynicism.
"Two's company, three's a crowd, as your parents often say."
Perpetual Disappointments Diary.
"Briton: 'We could come over and beat the daylights out of America any day.'
American: 'What, again?'"
Maurice Barrymore gracefully wins an argument.
"I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow."
Flannery O'Connor.
"Your mental illness was just like your middle name. I knew you had one, I just didn't know what it was."
A friend of Taylor Tomlinson, after being told she was bipolar.
"Prince George was well trained in the work of easing the burden of his own greatness for those who were for the moment inflicted with it."
Anthony Trollope, 'The Way We Live Now'.
"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there."
Paul Theroux, in 'Dark Star Safari'.
"I really don't mind playing the fool as long as I can make it clear that I too can hear the jingle of the bells upon my hat."
Jacqueline Novak.
"William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.'"
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy.
"ANTICIPATORY PLAGIARISM: occurs when someone steals your original idea, and publishes it a hundred years before you were born."
Robert Merton, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you think!"
Wolfgang Pauli.
"It's odd, but in the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics."
Richard Feynman, after having been introduced as `also a bongo player'.
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."
Thomas Paine, author of 'Common Sense'.
"Karl Radek, overhearing a comrade exclaim 'Thank God!', insisted that he should instead have said 'Thank Stalin!'. 'Thanks for setting me straight', said the comrade, 'but what will we say after comrade Stalin dies?'. And Radek replied 'Then we must say Thank God!'"
Silyas Dogwood, 'Behind the Door there is Another'.
"Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library containing thirty thousand books, and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'How many of these books have you read?', and the others who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones."
Nassim Taleb, 'The Black Swan'.
"A journalist had described it as a place where it was not a matter of the haves and have nots, but of the haves and the have yachts."
Susan McKay, 'Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People'.
"Whatever You Say, Say Nothing"
Seamus Heaney, a poem title.
"The study of language seems to attract pedants in whom correction becomes the lowest form of learning."
Paul Collins, 'The Book of William'.
"High school tells us one man, one vote; politics shows us a billion dollars, a billion votes."
Jud Northbark.
"Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible."
Stig Dageman, 'German Autumn'.
"I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?"
Max Bialystock, in 'The Producers'.
"You can never guarantee that a proof is correct; the best one can say 'I have not discovered any mistakes.'"
Edsgar Dijkstra, 'Programming Considered as a Human Activity'.
"When using a piece of software, if you make the exact same error twice, that's actually the software's fault. You are not that good!"
Detelina's Second Law of Programming.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
Mark Twain.
"TRUE GENTLEMAN: A fellow who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn't."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"As a Monkey that climbs a Tree, the higher he goes the more he shows his Arse."
Benjamin Franklin, on ambitious social climbers.
"It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true; the importance of truth is that it adds to interest."
Alfred North Whitehead.
"She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had nothing to worry about, and wouldn't have, as long as she continued to worry all the time."
Richard Russo, 'The Risk Pool'.
"The world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."
Ernest Hemingway.
"He was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you."
William Dean Howells, of his friend Mark Twain.
"You wouldn't give only the dull ones to Almighty God."
Gerald Manley Hopkins, poet, after Katharine Tynan asked him why he had decided to become a Catholic priest.
"It's really very easy to be a writer; all you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."
Walter 'Red' Smith, sportwriter.
"Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure."
Jane Austen.
"My father knew just what he wanted to do when the war was over. 'He'll get tired of it', my mother said confidently. She tried to keep up with him, but she couldn't, because nobody had been shooting at her for the last three years and when she woke up in the morning, it wasn't with a sense of surprise."
Richard Russo, 'The Risk Pool'.
"She died gracefully, as though she had studied how to do it."
Antonia Fraser, in 'The Weaker Vessel', of the 17th century courtesan Jane Myddelton.
"At every wedding he attended, he wanted to be the groom, at every funeral the corpse."
Silyas Dogwood, describing a compulsive attention seeker.
"Whether it's a heart attack, a computer crash, or identity theft, never have your crisis late on a Friday afternoon."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'I can only help you in alphabetical order'.
"Always my soul hungered for less than it had."
T E Lawrence.
"THE LAFFER CURVE: A concept so simple you can explain it to a congressman in six minutes, who can then go around the country repeating it to constituents for six months."
Hal Varian, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"SAINT: Someone who is married to a martyr."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit."
Francis Bacon.
"I really hope I break even tonight. I need the money!"
Going broke on the installment plan in Las Vegas.
"Spurious claims are also so common in the field that physicists joke about USOs - unidentified superconducting objects."
Wired magazine, reporting on the online hysteria over a purported superconducting material called LK-99.
"Qui me amat, amat et canem meum
(Love me, love my dog)."
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).
"Language is the only homeland."
Czeslaw Milosz.
"Don't you get it? Feeding a black hole just makes it hungrier!"
Astrophysicist Modine Gunch, denouncing a NASA plan to deflect an approaching black hole by pushing Mars into its path.
"Mudyard Stripling, who is willing, for the right price, to amaze any business conference with one of his endless series of pretentious 'Just-Not-So' stories."
Jud Northbark, on a omnipresent prowler of the lecture circuit.
"Don't part with your illusions; when they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
Mark Twain, sounding suspiciously like Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Benjamin Franklin, Anne Frank, and other frequent contributors to calendars.
"All those brains - and no intelligence!"
Brewster Bragsheer, contemplating a paradox.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
George Orwell, '1984'.
"You cannot have an Adolf Hitler without a Neville Chamberlain."
Peter Maas, commenting on the civil war in Yugoslavia.
"Every sentence in a story nine centuries old should include the word `perhaps'."
David Howarth, '1066: The Year of the Conquest'.
"EXOBIOLOGY: That great subject without a subject matter."
Stephen Jay Gould, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Those who cannot forget the past are condemned to misinterpret it."
Peter Maas, commenting on the civil war in Yugoslavia.
"Charles de Gaulle's codename was 'ramrod'; he had the rigidity of a poker, but none of its occasional warmth."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law."
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"Don't worry, my uncle used to say, everything will turn out bad."
Elia Kazan.
"One of the finest minds of the fourteenth century."
Jay Cooke Allen, epitomimizing 'Colonel' Robert McCormick, longtime reactionary owner and ideologue of the Chicago Tribune.
"Every life is a dead end."
Silyas Dogwood.
"Art is limitation: the essence of every picture is the frame."
G K Chesterton.
"I gave up trying to read your Fortran code because it's all capitalized, so I feel like you're constantly screaming at me."
A sensitive programmer.
"He is a man with a great future behind him."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
Francis Bacon.
"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
Heidegger.
"Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painted 3,000 canvases, 10,000 of which have been sold in America."
Rene Huyghe, former chief curator of the Louvre.
"Waiter: 'Your baby is simply adorable!'
Mother: 'Oh, but just wait til you see his photograph!'"
Overheard at the Dunwich Diner.
"The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg."
Emile Zola.
"Some mornings it's just not worth it to chew through the leather straps."
Emo Phillips.
"Most of the time, we are sleeping. But we can wake up."
George Saunders.
"If I can't have too much, I don't want any."
Harry Eugene Crews, tattooed provocateur and Southern writer.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Robert Coveyou.
"One can only eat three times a day. And in between are the gaps."
Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christie's 'Mrs McGinty's Dead'.
"Dear Advice Columnist: I recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?"
Bill Knott.
"At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves."
George Orwell.
"EDUCATION: casting fake pearls before real swine."
H L Mencken, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"All a school education can do, in any case, is put a man in the position to begin educating himself."
John Wain, 'Samuel Johnson: A Biography'.
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting experience, like a long bout of some painful illness."
George Orwell.
"We all came out of Gogol's overcoat."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the debt all Russian authors owe to Nikolai Gogol.
"Is long-form journalism dying? A five-minute read"
Article headline at The Hill, 04 December 2020.
"At sign, A, B, C, D, ..."
The zero-based alphabet song.
"It is faster to make a four-inch mirror and then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."
Bill McKeenan, Thompson's law of telescopes.
"The best model of a cat ... is a cat."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"A new scientific truth begins as heresy and ends as superstition."
Thomas Huxley.
"Sophistication is either your first language, or you always have an accent in it."
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 'Fleishman is in Trouble'.
"Tradition is the conservation of the fire, not the adoration of the ashes."
Gustav Mahler.
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
Archilochus.
"A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand."
Virginia Woolf.
"One can find women who have never had a love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one."
Francois de La Rochefoucauld.
"I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your critique in front of me. Soon it will be behind me."
Max Reger, German composer, responding to a critic.
"Now that mathematicians have addressed the theory of relativity, I no longer understand it myself."
Albert Einstein.
"In the hedge fund business, when you're down 30 percent or 40 percent your clients will withdraw all their money and you'll be shut down in no time. However, when you're down 90 percent, as the Hermitage Fund was in 1999, most clients say to themselves, What the hell. Might as well hold on and ride it out to see if it recovers."
Bill Browder, 'Red Notice'.
"The Greeks recall a story about two men walking through a dark forest when they encountered a stranger. Realizing that they had actually met the great god Pan, who was famous for granting wishes, they both knelt down in supplication. Pan was in a good mood, and said that the first man to speak would have his wish granted; but the second man would get twice the same. The greedy man naturally hesitated, and began to drool a little; the envious man immediately said 'Take one of my eyes!'."
Jud Northbark, 'The Hideous Hideout'.
"What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it."
Margot Asquith, wife of the British Prime Minister.
"Closed on account of death. Not Sam."
A handwritten storefront sign that answers one question and raises another.
"In February 1984, at the age of seventy-one, after a long illness and without regaining consciousness, Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko became the leader of the Soviet Union."
Irina Ratushinskaya, 'Grey is the Color of Hope'.
"It's a typical scientist's question, to be read as 'How can we simplify this problem so that we can answer it?'"
Len Fisher, 'How to Dunk a Doughnut'.
"Oersted's discovery electrified the scientific world."
An inadvertent, obscure, but very silly joke in L Pearce Williams's 'The Origins of Field Theory'.
"If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever get polished?"
Rumi.
"My birth was the first of my misfortunes."
Jean Jacques Rousseau, getting his autobiography off to a rip-roaring start.
"Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth."
Pablo Picasso.
"The best defense against logic is ignorance."
Silyas Dogwood.
"Asking whether nature or nurture is most important is like asking whether width or height is the most important factor in computing the area of a rectangle."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"The defeated are those who accept defeat."
Charles De Gaulle, leaving France for exile in England, after witnessing the capitulation of the French government.
"Put all your eggs in one basket ... and then watch that basket!"
Mark Twain, contradicting a proverb.
"At either end of the socioeconomic spectrum, there lies a leisure class."
Eric Beck.
"It's sort of like having fun, only different."
Howard Donner, a volunteer doctor at an emergency medical station halfway up a mountain, shivering, with nausea and a blinding headache, asked why he does it.
"A committee is an animal with four hind legs."
A Kakanian proverb.
"All the knots come to the comb."
A Kakanian proverb.
"There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing. There is only one reason for doing something."
Anne Smiley, in John LeCarre's 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'.
"The optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The pessimist knows that we do."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!"
The vital message that will stop Gort from destroying the Earth, from 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'.
"Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?"
Shakespeare, Sonnet 146.
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
Oscar Wilde.
"Our danger is that we win all the battles except the last one."
General Halder, warning Hitler against his relentless drive to continue and expand the war.
"To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
Ursula LeGuin.
"The art of being a policeman is to disregard what is unnecessary to see."
Napoleon, chiding Minister of Police Fouche, for reporting Joseph Bonaparte's secretive visits to a mistress.
"The greatest misfortune that can befall an invalid is to be extremely rich and in a position to consult many doctors."
Baron Dubois, cautioning Joseph Bonaparte's ever-sickly wife.
"Saint-Just had come to Paris as the author of an interminable poem, 'Organt', usually described (but only with the greatest generosity) as pornographic."
Simon Schama, 'Citizens'.
"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison."
Evelyn Waugh, 'Decline and Fall'.
"A snake bit Freron; the snake died."
Voltaire, sarcastically dismissing Elie Catherine Freron, who led the French `Counter-Enlightenment'.
"Lunch in Paris, dinner in Saint Petersburg."
Kaiser Wilhelm II predicts the course of the first World War.
"We go to war on a highway, and return on a narrow path."
A Kakanian proverb.
"ABIBLIOPHOBIA: the constant dread of running out of books to read."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy, demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism."
Edward Abbey, 'Desert Solitaire'.
"Rather than hunt for his supper, the owl seems to be calling his supper to come to him."
Edward Abbey, 'Desert Solitaire'.
"Scientists, like hangmen, are socially disadvantaged by their profession."
Len Fisher, 'How to Dunk a Doughnut'.
"So much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet."
Lionel Shriver, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'."
George W Bush to Tony Blair.
"Every game is unique, and this one is no different!"
A sports commentator.
"If the watch requires a watchmaker, then the watchmaker requires a watchmakermaker."
Jud Northbark, 'Don't Get Me Started!'.
"When you take a dislike to a person, imagination does the rest."
C P Snow, 'Strangers and Brothers'.
"The mind is what the brain does."
Stephen Kosslyn, psychologist.
"We are told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us!"
Shirley Hazzard, 'The Great Fire'.
"Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems."
Paul Erdos, commenting on the failure to solve Collatz's 3n+1 problem.
"Another damned thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"
The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with the second volume of 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'.
"Fear knows where you are hiding."
Jud Northbark, 'Footsteps Faint and Fatal'.
"They never tell you that what we surprise ourselves with may be disappointment."
Alexander Maksik, 'You Deserve Nothing'.
"If a blind man threatens to stone you, you know he must be standing on a stone."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Crash Davis: 'Man that ball got outta here in a hurry. I mean anything travels that far oughta have a damn stewardess on it, don't you think?'"
The movie 'Bull Durham'.
"I mean: how shall I explain? I - it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again."
Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'.
"No one believes a computer code except for the one who coded it. Everyone believes an experiment except the one who performed it."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?"
Vladimir Nabokov, 'Pnin'.
"Centuries of centuries, but only in the present do things happen!"
Jorge Luis Borges.
"For people married to mathematicians, the competitor is mathematics."
Pam Freyd.
"The shops opposite were a High Street palindrome: Korean grocery, courier service, letting agents, courier service, Korean grocery."
Mick Herron, 'Slow Horses'.
"Trapper: 'How can you stand the cold in so little clothing?'
Indian: 'Your face is not covered. Is it cold?'
Trapper: 'No, it stays warm.'
Indian: 'Indian is all face.'"
Jim Motavalli, 'Naked in the Woods'.
"There are days when it takes all you've got just to keep up with the losers."
Robert Orben.
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."
Dan Stanford.
"Everything is OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end."
Silyas Dogwood.
"Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"Fellow traveler: 'This is your star line. Notice it is connected. You are very emotional. That is your life line. You will live to be about eighty or eighty five.'
Paul: 'Tell me more.'
Fellow traveler: 'I cannot, I am only on chapter five.'"
Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
"Because none of the Datong locomotive factory is automated, it is indestructible. If a bomb dropped on it today, it could be back to work tomorrow."
Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
"To ask the proper question is half of knowing."
Roger Bacon.
"The Japanese are so coarse that they don't know what to call things except by their real names."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Eclectic Infinities'.
"Eat when you're hungry, love while you're young."
Silyas Dogwood.
"Spring makes even a cabbage become beautiful."
Silyas Dogwood.
"General Winfield Scott's incompetence as a presidential candidate is suggested by the fact that he did not publish a volume of his speeches; instead, his opponent, Franklin Pierce did."
William Johnson, 'Lincoln's First Crisis'.
"The past is a contraction of what has passed."
Philip Hoare, 'The Whale'.
"Honor, not Honors."
Richard Burton, explorer and adventurer, stating his motto.
"South Carolina is too small for a republic, and too large for an insane asylum."
James Louis Pettigru, attorney, upon hearing that his home state of South Carolina had voted to secede from the Union.
"I think if I do twenty experiments, I'll fail nineteen times. After I've done ten, I think good, I've failed halfway to success."
Lulu Chen, a researcher in Gary Lynch's neuroscience laboratory.
"Russia is not a great power, it's essentially a gas station with nuclear weapons."
Colin Clarke, political scientist.
"If Joe Biden keeps shipping illegal immigrants into our states, we're all going to have to learn Spanish. My message to Biden: no way, Jose!"
Lindy Blanchard, craven Republican candidate for governor of Alabama.
"The man who does not know where he is going goes furthest."
Oliver Cromwell.
"When he is alone in a room, there is nobody there."
John Maynard Keynes, on British Prime Minister Lloyd George.
"Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking."
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"DON'T LOOK, GRANDMA!: the reflexive mental prayer of an adolescent being drawn inexorably from innocence to adulthood."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I used to think the worst thing in life was ending up all alone. It isn't. The worst thing in life is ending up with people that make you feel all alone."
Robin Williams, in 'World's Greatest Dad'.
"An alcoholic is someone who violates their standards faster than they can lower them."
Robin Williams.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a chicken, being possessed of a good fortune and presented with a suitable road, must be desirous of crossing."
Silyas Dogwood.
"BANKER: a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the moment it rains."
Mark Twain, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in the collapse of the South Sea Trading Company.
"It is earlier than we think!"
Vannevar Bush.
"Put all your eggs in one basket - and keep your eye on that basket!"
Mark Twain contradicts a famous proverb.
"The two men saw much of each other, conversing almost entirely in pauses."
Samuel Behrman, in 'Duveen', describing the relationship between Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and President Calvin Coolidge.
"The best teacher tells you where to look, but not what to see."
Silyas Dogwood.
"The joke was that when Harvey Weinstein auditioned lawyers, he pulled a signed contract out of the filing cabine and said, 'OK, if you're so good, tell me how I can get out of this!'"
Peter Biskind, 'Down and Dirty Pictures'.
"MORTON'S FORK: the rule of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor for Henry VII, as to who must pay taxes to him: those who live extravagantly clearly have money to squander; those who live frugally clearly have money saved."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."
Janet Malcolm.
"Miss Anders, I didn't recognize you with your clothes on."
James Bond, in 'The Man with the Golden Gun'.
"If I had my life to live over again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner."
Tallulah Bankhead.
"Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss."
Byron.
"In vain does one knock at the gates of poetry with a sane mind."
Plato.
"Science explains everything, but understands nothing."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Buried with Inferior Minds'.
"Rules are vestal virgins; unless they are violated, there can be no issue."
Johann Georg Hamann.
"I am like a mountain stream: I run fast and bright but not very deep."
Voltaire.
"What, for the most part, mean we by Genius, but the Power of accomplishing great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end?"
Edward Young, 'Conjectures on Original Composition', 1759.
"We are simultaneously hostile to communism and sympathetic to nationalism and when the two become closely associated, we become frustrated, angry, precipitate, and inconstant. Or, to make the point by simple metaphor, loving corn and hating lima beans, we simply cannot make up our minds about succotash."
William Fulbright, 'The Arrogance of Power'.
"Wars in Europe rarely start on a Wednesday."
Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's envoy to the EU, on Wednesday, 16 February 2022, following predictions of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine... which ended up occurring on Tuesday.
"People think that 'complex' is an advanced state of 'complicated'. It's not. A car key is simple. A car is complicated. A car in traffic is complex."
Zoran Perkov, quoted in Michael Lewis's 'Flash Boys'.
"With the exception of instructional video and maybe pornography, I can't think of much film that's explicitly marketed as something to be watched while you're otherwise occupied."
Jack Hamilton, 'In Defense of the Insufferable Music Fan', Atlantic, November 2021.
"Money belongs in your hand, but not your heart."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Paradigm Sleeps Tonight'.
"You are a little corpse carrying around a soul."
Marcus Aurelius, quoting his teacher Epictetus.
"The actors barely missed playing badly enough to make it amusing."
Theodore Herzl, reviewing 'The Taming of the Shrew' as performed in London by John Drew's troupe.
"If you want a gift that will be used and seen every day, send them a refrigerator magnet."
Silyas Dogwood, 'Are You There, Moriarty?'.
"The great Scrabble champion Nigel Richards, we learn, was once asked, after winning a tournament, if he'd like to say a few words. 'I don’t know any,' he said."
Steven Poole, the Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2022.
"The thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult that it hasn't yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now."
Savas Dimopoulos, particle physicist.
"In the movies, a woman can throw her new-born child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it, while shooting into the windows of a day-care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message."
David Sedaris, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'.
"A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection."
David Sedaris, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'.
"A bull does not become king by entering the palace; - The palace becomes a barn."
A Kakanian proverb.
"'Shit' is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit."
David Sedaris, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'.
"I bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being 'Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse'."
David Sedaris, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'.
"Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them."
Anita Harris, geologist, quoted by John McPhee, 'In Suspect Terrain'.
"No amount of candlepower can illuminate a black hole."
Andrew O'Hehir.
"THICK THICK THICKTH: the number of the lisping beast."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"OUTARDS: those bodily structures which are separated from the innards by the skinnards."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Scoutmaster: Now let's go over how to remove a foreign object from the eye.
Clueless Scout: You mean...like something from France?"
Jud Northbark, 'How Can They Say This Stuff?'.
"Lad: Daddy, what's that light that's blinking on the dashboard?
Dad: It tells which way I'm going to turn.
Lad: But how does it know that?"
Jud Northbark, 'Behind Every Mystery, Another Mystery'.
"Lowering my expectations has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams!"
Jud Northbark, 'Please Leave a Message, We're All at the Beach'.
"Fusion research is governed by the law of conservation of difficulty: as soon as one problem is solved, another arises of equal difficulty."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Slowly I Turned'.
"Chance, too, which seems to rush along with slack reins, is bridled and governed by law."
Boethius, 'The Consolation of Philosophy', Book V.
"A week before he was assassinated, Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland.
A week before he was assassinated, Kennedy was...well, you get the idea."
Silyas Dogwood, 'It's Hard to Say'.
"The beggar may sing before the thief."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Roy: Hey, Herb, how's life?
Herb: Taking forever!"
Woody Harrelson, playing 'Roy', greets a wino, in the movie 'Kingpin'.
"Build a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a night;
Set a man on fire, and you keep him warm the rest of his life."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Keep Away from Small Children'.
"My hovercraft is full of eels."
John Cleese, playing a Hungarian trying to buy cigarettes in a shop, and quoting from a faulty Hungarian-to-English phrasebook, in Monty Python's 'Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook' sketch.
"So on the form is a box that asks if you have homosexual tendencies, and I checked it, so they sent me to a psychiatrist, and he said I see you checked the box, do you think you would have trouble in the army and I said, well there's all those men."
David Geffen recalls why he was not drafted.
"Everyone knows Ezra Pound's funny name, but no one can quote him."
Paul Theroux, 'The London Embassy'.
"A crack in the rim of a tea cup leads to the land of the dead."
W H Auden.
"At some point you just need to leave the theater so the next crowd can see the movie."
Richard Ford, on death.
"Faustus: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Mephistophilis: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."
Christopher Marlowe, 'The tragicall history of Doctor Faustus'.
"Incognito, ergo non sum."
Secret motto of the NSA (No Such Agency).
"Oh honey, no one ever paid to see under the top."
Producer Joel Schumacher, after a cast member complained the Minnie Driver's performance in 'Phantom of the Opera' was 'over the top'.
"The spleen really is the creative organ."
Baudelaire, playing on the idea that the spleen is the source of anger.
"What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us; in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible."
Fernando Pessoa.
"Without the concept of happiness, existence would be much more bearable."
Flaubert.
"Data! data! data! he cried impatiently, I can't make bricks without clay."
Sherlock Holmes in 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches', by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
"I'm just praying for a miracle. I know they never happen, but if one did, wouldn't that be a miracle!"
The faith of an unbeliever.
"Literature is news that stays news."
Ezra Pound.
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves."
Gamal Abdel Nassar, to CIA operative Miles Copeland.
"FAREWELL THINKERS AND IDENTITY SEEKERS."
The heading of a one page protest note by T. Coon, scattered around the Abbey School in Canon City, Colorado, at the opening of Fall semester 1965, which got him expelled. The closing of the note didn't help his case: 'Written with the help of Camel Cigarettes and Jim Beam whiskey'. It also made me wonder, for a while, what a 'Farewell thinker' could be.
"There are a great many historical novels that ought to be written; the difficulty is finding someone to write them."
Anthony Burgess, 'The Novel Now'.
"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes."
A basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh.
"He knows so little, and knows it fluently."
Ellen Glasgow, author of 'Phases of an Inferior Planet'.
"He is always willing to lend a helping hand to the ones above him."
F Scott Fitzgerald, on Ernest Hemingway.
"Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write."
A E Housman.
"Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest."
Tobias Wolff, 'This Boy's Life'.
"Pray let me add a word of congratulation on the completion of your wonderful volume, to those of which I am sure you will have received from every side. I have laid it down in the full enjoyment of a feeling that one rarely experiences after boyish days, of having been initiated into an entirely new province of knowledge, which, nevertheless, connects itself with other things in a thousand ways. I hear you are engaged on a second edition. There is a trivial error on page 68, about rhinoceroses."
Francis Galton congratulates his cousin Charles Darwin, but can't resist picking a nit.
"They are like a pair of scissors who go snip and snip and snip without doing each other any harm, but God help the poor devil who gets between them."
Lord George Paget, describing the bitter rivalry between Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, on the eve of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
"The magic words are Squeamish Ossifrage."
A sentence encoded using the RSA encryption scheme, published as a challenge in an article by Martin Gardner in 1977, and decoded in 1994.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
Noam Chomsky, in 'Syntactic Structures', posing a sentence that presumably had never been composed before, but which neverless could be understood.
"The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed."
A sentence generated by Racter, an early artificial intelligence program, which became the title of a book full of Racter's ditherings.
"No bed for Beatle John!"
A newspaper headline after John Lennon, maintaining a bedside vigil for Yoko Ono, was forced to give up his bed at Queen Charlotte hospital for a patient. He later wrote a song with this title.
"Just as a carpenter, I suppose, seeing a piece of rough timber, feels an inclination to plane it and square it and put it into shape, so a writer is not really content to leave any experience in the amorphous haphazard condition in which life presents it."
Evelyn Waugh, 'Ninety-Two Days'.
"Perhaps it is a good thing to preserve one's ignorance for old age."
Evelyn Waugh, 'Ninety-Two Days'.
"For excellence, the presence of others is required."
Hannah Arendt.
"He could start an argument in an empty room."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan."
Norman Podhoretz, 'Making It'.
"We talk about the violence of the river. We never talk about the violence of the banks that allow it to flow."
Bertolt Brecht.
"The wrong way to debug is to stare at your broken code. The right way to debug is to hide your code, write it again, and compare."
Jud Northbark, 'Close Your Eyes And See!'.
"Love at last sight."
Walter Benjamin, commenting on Baudelaire's poem 'To a Passerby'.
"'Brighton Rock' I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgment."
Graham Greene, 'Ways of Escape'.
"One had a sense of unfairness, as when a serious incident occurred during the blitz on London in one's own civil defense area, and then the raids just went on instead of ending there. God, one felt, should allot each man one problem at a time."
Graham Greene, 'Ways of Escape'.
"There is a bit of the schoolmaster in an Intelligence officer: he imbibes information at second hand and passes it on too often as gospel truth."
Graham Greene, 'Ways of Escape'.
"My dear boy, it is not easy to lose a good woman. If one must marry, it is better to marry a bad woman."
Graham Greene, quoting Alexander Korda, in 'Ways of Escape'.
"Driving in Pittsburgh, you are always lost. Sometimes, you can actually see the other road you should be on. The people on that road are lost too."
Semitrailer Colander, 'The Rhyme of the Beechwood Boulevard Mariner'.
"Why won't I use software created by university professors? Because an academic researcher, by definition, keeps playing with his software until he breaks it so badly he can no longer fix it. Then he loses interest, and that's the 'final' version you will retrieve from his web site."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Bits from the Bucket'.
"One lane widens to three lanes, but as you come to the T-intersection the rightmost lane is for left turns..."
Semitrailer Colander, 'The Rhyme of the Beechwood Boulevard Mariner'.
"Exits, exits, everywhere and not a one to take!."
Semitrailer Colander, 'The Rhyme of the Beechwood Boulevard Mariner'.
"Never drive onto a road when you know it intersects itself."
Semitrailer Colander, 'The Rhyme of the Beechwood Boulevard Mariner'.
"Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went."
Edward Fitzgerald, 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam'.
"To be honest around a central lie is like building a house with the foundation unlevel."
Winston Graham.
"The man who is suddenly successful loses friends and gains acquaintances."
Winston Graham.
"It's crackers to give a rozzer the dropsy in snide!"
MAD Magazine, quoting Margery Allingham's detective character Magersfontein Lugg.
"Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers."
Howard L Chace, the 'MURAL' from 'Ladle Rat Rotten Hut'.
"Memory is a telescope pointed at time."
Marcel Proust.
"Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it to the stop you want, and then you get off."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey.
"To end the siren shortage, the OCD let a contract to Bell Telephone Laboratories to design a standard model. The result was christened the Victory Siren and could be operated by an ordinary automobile engine which powered compressed air through whirling metal blades. Touted by its designers as the loudest sound in the world, its blast was said to be able to break the eardrums of a man standing 100 feet away, and the Army considered using it as a weapon for a time."
Robert Lingeman, 'Don't You Know There's a War on?'
"Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you, and you sold me."
George Orwell, '1984'.
"A Russian is like an onion. The more you peel him, the more you cry."
A Kakanian proverb.
"We worked, but we were not paid!"
The makers of a mosaic in the Roman baths at the temple of Garni, Armenia append an angry subtitle to their work.
"I respect his independence. However, I hope that independently he will conclude that my views are the ones that should be followed."
Richard Nixon, putting an invisible shock collar on the new Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns.
"When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win."
Nancy Isenberg, 'White Trash'.
"Student: 'Will this be on the test?'
Instructor: 'It will be now!'"
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, in 'The beginner's guide to teaching zombies'.
"When vice prevails, and impious men hold sway, the post of honor is a private station."
Joseph Addison, in the play 'Cato'.
"Never accept a government job that doesn't come with an inbox."
Henry Kissinger, hak@secretary.state.gov.
"What's with all these underscores?"
An exasperated Virginia Tech faculty member attending a computer workshop, who apparently thought that CamelCase was the proper way to name variables.
"Many had argued that the government included such a broad and diverse and experienced array of senior officials as to guarantee wise and peaceful policies. But one could rather say that their only real differences were over which country they wished to obliterate; After long and exhausting debates, it turned out that any country would do."
Silyas Dogwood, 'War Without End, Amen'.
"Even if I always say no that doesn't mean I don't want to be asked."
Logan Burkardt.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
George Orwell.
"Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy except force. It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men."
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting."
Tom Wolfe, 'The Painted Word'.
"What you did was impulsive, capricious, and melodramatic. But it was also wrong."
Moira Rose, a character on Schitt's Creek.
"Poetry makes nothing happen."
W H Auden.
"I wish that I was as sure of any one thing, as Tom Macaulay is sure of everything."
Lord Melbourne, British Prime Minister, referring to historian Thomas Macaulay.
"Over time, a child discovers imperfections in its model of the world. The teacher was looking away, I shoved Tom, he went 'oof!', I put on my innocent face, the teacher turned around, and barked 'Detention! Both of you!' and I realized 'Oh, this is much more complicated than I thought!'"
Jud Northbark, 'Unpictured Title'.
"Falling leaves return to their roots."
A Kakanian proverb.
"One doesn't speak of rope in the house of a hanged man."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'Same Bed, Different Dreams'.
"IMAGINATION: the power to disemprison the soul of fact."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Guys like you are in what we call the reality-based community. That's people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove, speaking to Ron Suskind.
"Journalism is the only occupation where at all times you know less than anyone else in the room."
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
"She had been brought up in almost nun-like seclusion by the strictest of governesses, had never been left alone with any man save her father, and, to ensure that she should not be contaminated by even a hint of the mysteries of sex, had only been allowed female pets."
Desmond Seward, describing Marie-Antoinette, in 'Napoleon's Family'.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
General James Mattis, who apparently didn't appreciate his nickname of 'Mad Dog'.
"An empty cab pulled up to the House of Commons, and Clement Atlee got out."
Winston Churchill, (a false quotation).
"Genius is more work than just being a genius."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Who Can Help Me Shift This Paradigm?'.
"The good mathematicians see analogies between theorems, or theories. The very best see analogies between analogies."
Stefan Banach, or someone just like him.
"After the first three minutes, nothing of any interest would happen in the history of the universe."
Steven Weinberg, Nobel physicist, after describing the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang until it cooled enough to allow the formation of atomic nuclei.
"Sir, please tell the prime minister even hurry takes time."
The harried commander of a refugee camp for East Bengalis, after a visit and brutal interrogation by Indira Gandhi.
"The only way I can lose is if I am caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy!"
Edwin Edwards, four time governor of Louisiana.
"The admiral certainly knows how to swim!"
Eduouard Herriot, president of the French Chamber of Deputies, after Admiral Jean Darlan abruptly switched his allegiance to the capitulationists.
"The enemy is in front of us, behind us, to the left of us, and to the right of us. They won't escape this time!"
Chesty Puller, Marine Colonel during the Korean War.
"Go forth, my son, and see with what folly the affairs of men are governed."
Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish chancellor [1583-1654], sending his son off on a tour of Europe.
"It would win for us a proud and popular title. We would become the first aggressors for peace."
Francis Matthews, US Navy Secretary, points out the public relations advantages of a preventive nuclear attack on Russia.
"Tattoos are how stupid people let you know."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Thunder in the Pipeline'.
"Truth just is, but error must have reasons."
Stephen Jay Gould, in 'Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms'.
"Toys and games are precursors to serious ideas."
Charles Eames, chair designer.
"And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile! It has never been spread out, yet, the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Lewis Carroll, in 'Sylvie and Bruno Concluded'.
"As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper, to assure himself that what it said was true."
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
"I gave him an unlimited budget, and he overspent it."
Jack Kent Cook, after hiring George Allen to coach the Washington Redskins fooball team.
"How many Italian prisoners have we taken? Oh, several acres, I would think."
A subaltern of Lieutentant Colonel John Combe, of the 11th Hussars, after the battle of of Benghazi.
"There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory."
Gian-Carlo Rota.
"An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field."
Gian-Carlo Rota.
"Any philosopher who uses the word 'and' too often cannot be a good philosopher."
Hegel.
"Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?"
Sir Boyle Roche, master of the Irish Bull.
"The cup of Ireland's misery has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet half full."
Sir Boyle Roche, Irish baronet, [1736-1807].
"God made the whole world out of nothing. And sometimes the nothingness shows through."
Paul Valery.
"The world is a prison, in which solitary confinement is preferable."
Karl Kraus.
"Weak men have doubts before a decision, strong men afterwards."
Karl Kraus, editor of the critical newspaper 'Die Fackel' (the Torch).
"Love makes one little room an everywhere."
John Donne, in 'The Good-Morrow'.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
George Carlin.
"Arguing with a fool proves there are two."
Doris Smith.
"The Germanic peoples would be less universally unpopular if they could rid themselves of their cherished illusion that anyone except themselves wants or likes efficiency."
Carlile Macartney, historian, in 'The Hapsburg Empire: 1790-1918'.
"The only question now is which corpse gets the most flowers."
Chauncey DePew, Senator, after Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican party to run against President Taft, opening the way for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
"The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature."
Dorothy Parker.
"The most difficult instrument to play well is the second fiddle."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'The Muse Abused'.
"Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love."
Noel Coward.
"When there are two men left in the bar at closing time, and one them coldcocks the other, it is not equivalent to 150 million Americans getting simultaneously punched in the face."
Jordan Ellenberg, in 'How Not To Be Wrong', on misleading statistics that try to convert a foreign disaster toll to an American equivalent.
"TRIVIAL: If I have to show you how to do this, you're in the wrong class."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"You can explain it to a Congressman in six minutes, and they can talk about it for six months."
Hal Varian, economist, on the craze for the Laffer curve, which suggested that reducing taxes could increase tax revenue.
"Make me something unique, Ivan the Terrible said to his architects, and they made him St Basil's, and he asked if they could make him another. Yes, they said, and Ivan had their eyes put out, because he didn't want anyone else to have one."
Reggie Nadelson, in 'Comrade Rockstar'.
"Old Cowboys Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)."
A song by Dean Reed, the Colorado cowboy who became a Russian rock star.
"We are all dreaming the same dream."
Schopenhauer.
"The best place to avoid a job is at work."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"A man who marries again doesn't deserve to lose his first wife."
Silyas Dogwood.
"But I did exactly what you told us to do."
A 'C' student, disputing and yet validating his grade.
"Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back in again."
Eugene Debs, American labor leader.
"It is forgivable to be defeated; it is not forgivable to be surprised."
Frederick the Great.
"Sam McClure had three hundred ideas a minute, but only John Philips knew which one was not crazy."
The editorial dynamics at McClure's Magazine.
"DEAD CAT BOUNCE: because they don't."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Was Lady Berners a baroness in her own right? Yes, and everything else in her own wrong."
Hugh Berners, father of Gerald Lord Berners, 'the last eccentric'.
"Americans, however, frequently seek to place themselves on the right side of history - as if an earthquake has a direction."
Michael Doran, in 'Ike's Gamble'.
"History will be kind to me - for I shall write it."
Winston Churchill.
"Distrust first impulses - they are nearly always good."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.
"I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay."
Winston Churchill, 80 year old prime minister and stroke survivor, after losing an argument with John Foster Dulles.
"There can be no center in infinity."
Lucretius.
"We live in a country with an unpredictable past."
Ivan Ivanovich, Russian thinker.
"It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics."
Bruce Schneier.
"The Balkans produces more history than it can consume."
Winston Churchill.
"If something is free, you're not the customer; you're the product."
Bruce Schneier.
"This place is not fit to wash a rat in."
Nora Joyce, commenting on James Joyce's apartment.
"To keep our rowing shell from tipping over, we tried everything, including parting our hair in the middle."
Homer Kirby, member of the 1908 University of Washington rowing crew.
"The Latin Quarter of Paris gots its name in medieval times, because university students coming from all over Europe spoke Latin rather than French as their lingua franca."
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, in 'Opus Popus'.
"Chess is a constant struggle between my desire not to lose and my desire not to think."
Jan Gustafsson, chess grandmaster.
"The purpose of sexual intercourse is to get it over with as slow as possible."
William Matthews.
"His musical taste was so exquisite that he knew a bad note before it was played."
Brewster Bragsheer.
"I think he's only right behind her so as to push her off a cliff."
Alan Duncan, on Boris Johnson's show of support for Prime Minister Theresa May.
"English life is a long, slow toothache."
Lawrence Durrell.
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it."
Mark Twain.
"Be wrong as fast as you can."
Ed Catmull, a founder of Pixar.
"When I don't see eye to eye with somebody, I just take the time to explain it better, so they understand the way it should be."
Steve Jobs, asked by Ed Catmull how things get resolved when people disagree with him, better explains it so he understands.
"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best."
Somerset Maugham.
"In America, only the successful writer is important;
In France, every writer is important;
In England, no writer is important;
In Australia, you have to explain what a writer is."
Jeffrey Cottrell.
"Even the greatest work of literature is just the dictionary out of order."
Jean Cocteau, aka aaCceeJnotu.
"Mediocre men must have a mediocre idea of what constitutes greatness."
Tolstoy, but what would he know?
"Don't pay any attention to the critics - don't even ignore them."
Samuel Goldwyn.
"Biography, as the philosopher said, has added a new horror to death."
Margaret Drabble.
"Rigid, the skeleton of habit upholds the human frame."
Virginia Woolf, in 'Mrs Dalloway'.
"You stop finding bugs when you stop looking."
The Old Programmer's Almanac, revised edition.
"Memory is not an instrument for remembering the past, but its theater."
Walter Benjamin.
"Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time."
Basquiat.
"The railroads were like bad art; they were not accidents."
Richard White, in 'Railroaded'.
"Chase is a good man, but his theology is unsound. He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity."
Benjamin Wade, on the ambitious and vain Salmon Portland Chase, who hoped to replace Lincoln.
"In Book 7 of the Republic, Plato has Socrates say that mathematicians are people who dream that they are awake."
Alec Wilkinson, 'The New Yorker', 02 March 2021.
"Some smartarse Pommy sports journalist once wrote that boxer Joe Bugner looked like a Greek statue, but had fewer moves."
Mark 'Chopper' Read.
"Upside down each one's the same in a different way, but upside down they're all the same in the same way."
A riddle from the Devil's Picture Book.
"I would have divorced you, but you were never home long enough to discuss it."
An astronomer's wife.
"Actually, yes, you are correct. If we would ask for help on the Internet, I am certain that someone would send us the true solution to this mystery. We would also receive every other explanation to this mystery, probable, improbable, or impossible. And that would put us back to where we were at the beginning of this case. Actually, miles and miles back before that.
Bruce Finster, police detective, responding to the suggestion that he appeal for help to 'Internet sleuths'.
"Practically speaking, you can't be overworked, just over-assigned."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Just a Word Before I Go'.
"Priest: You are about to die. Do you renounce Satan?
Oscar Wilde: I hardly think this is the time to be making enemies."
Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed.
"Interviewer: What would it take to get a body like yours?
Bodybuilder: For you, three or four generations."
The Miles Angstrom Show.
"The more I practiced, the worse I realized I was."
John Oliver, describing his experience learning to play the viola for a high school orchestra.
"Vote for us, and you'll never have to vote again!"
The election slogan of the neo-Nazi party UNA, the Ukrainian National Assembly, reported by Anna Reid, 'Borderland: A journey through the history of Ukraine'.
"'Ukraine is not dead yet' is the less than inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem."
Anna Reid, in 'Borderland: A journey through the history of Ukraine'.
"The great Arthur Eddington gave a lecture about his alleged derivation of the fine structure constant from fundamental theory. Goudsmit and Kramers were both in the audience. Goudsmit understood little but recognized it as far-fetched nonsense. After the discussion, Goudsmit went to his friend and mentor Kramers and asked him, 'do all physicists go off on crazy tangents when they grow old? I am afraid.' Kramers answered, 'No Sam, you don't have to be scared. A genius like Eddington may perhaps go nuts but a fellow like you just gets dumber and dumber.'"
Max Dresden.
"I feel so strongly about the wrongness of reading a lecture that my language may seem immoderate. The spoken word and the written word are quite different arts. I feel that to collect an audience and then read one's material is like inviting a friend to go for a walk and asking him not to mind if you go alongside him in your car."
Sir Lawrence Bragg.
"He is like the Euclidean point. He has position without magnitude."
Ernest Rutherford, describing a colleague at the University of Manchester.
"Some coders, when confronted with a problem, think, I know, I'll use regular expressions. But now they have two problems."
Jamie Zawinski, one of the designers of Netscape Navigator.
"Valerie probably thinks that writing a book is like riding a bicycle, something you never forget. I am here to ensure her that most emphatically it's not. More like having a baby: in the sense that you have to forget what hell it was at the time in order to contemplate doing it again."
Kathleen Conlon, in 'Unfinished Business'.
"It was late at night by the time we reached Daspalla. The town was deserted. There was no sign of the elephants. I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach.
'Jesus!' I shouted. 'I just can't believe this. We've lost them. They could be anywhere...'
'No sir', Mr Tripathy announced calmly, pointing to large mounds that decorated the road like loaves of bread. 'Now we follow shit.'"
Mark Shand, in 'Travels on my Elephant'.
"90% of lawyers give the other 10% a bad name."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'But First the Bill'.
"When Graham met him he was marching his force up and down the countryside, apparently looking for an enemy to run away from."
Leonard Cooper, in 'The Age of Wellington', describing the feckless behavior of the Spanish general La Pena during the Napoleonic wars.
"What can I say? I urinate in Morse code - dots and dashes."
Alan Arkin, in 'The Kaminsky Method'.
"Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait."
G K Chesterton.
"The pain of waiting for letters which don't come very much exceeds the pleasure of getting them when they do."
Penelope Fitzgerald, in 'The Beginning of Spring'.
"You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war."
Winston Churchill, after Neville Chamberlain agreed to Hitler's demand that Czechoslovakia be dismembered.
"This is what God would have built if he had had the money."
George Bernard Shaw, visiting William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle.
"Every artist works, like the Gobelins weavers, on the wrong side of the tapestry."
Edith Wharton.
"God's only excuse is that he does not exist."
Stendhal.
"From 1949 to 1991, when Bonn was the capital of the German Federal Republic, a standing joke among resident politicians and civil servants described the city as only half the size of Chicago's cemetery, but twice as dead."
Harvey Sachs, in 'The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824'.
"Before a dinner party, a composer sat down at the piano and played his latest piece for the guests. Later, at the table, his neighbor asked what the piece meant. The composer got up, went back to the piano and played it again."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Owl in the Flour Barrel'.
"An idle priest will baptize goats."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Driver: 'Today, I bet you wish you had a car!'
Motorcyclist: 'Nope! I only wish it wasn't raining.'"
A traffic light conversation on a rainy day.
"And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all."
Neutral Milk Hotel, 'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea'.
"The tragedy of the psychotic is that he lives in terror of a breakdown which has in fact already occurred."
Michelle de Kretser, in 'The Hamilton Case'.
"When I criticized Ribbentropp's qualifications to handle British problems, the Fuehrer pointed out to me that Ribbentropp knew Lord So and So and Minister So and So, to which I replied, Yes, but the difficulty is that they know Ribbentropp."
Hermann Goering, denigrating the choice of Joachim von Ribbentropp to be Nazi Germany's ambassador to Great Britain.
"A boy is youngest when he thinks himself a man."
Mary Renault, in 'The King Must Die'.
"Before stepping outside into the North Dakota winter, I used to fill my pockets with ice cubes to keep me warm."
Jud Northbark, in 'My Shoe, Your Face'.
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, suggesting that understanding only comes at the end.
"The end might not be in sight for theoretical physics, but it might be in sight for theoretical physicists."
Stephen Hawking, commenting on how the remaining secrets of the universe may be beyond comprehension.
"If there is technological progress without the modernization of political institutions, the result will be Genghis Khan with a telegraph."
Alexander Herzen, to Czar Alexander II.
"I left Hart's house having acquired in a single afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation."
Richard Rodgers, recalling his first meeting with Lorenz Hart.
"Oscar Hammerstein was a wonderful father to everyone except his children."
James Hammerstein.
"The tango is a sad thought, dancing."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The axe forgets, but not the tree."
A Kakanian proverb.
"There is no crueller tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colors of justice."
Montesquieu.
"The Revised Standard Version of the Bible was created by men who did not realize that they were atheists."
T S Eliot.
"Some bring joy wherever they go; some whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde.
"Failure isn't getting knocked down; it's not getting back up again."
Mary Pickford.
"The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all things else to support and agree with it."
Francis Bacon.
"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
Marshall McLuhan.
"I look like a departing pachyderm."
Charles Laughton.
"The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space."
Immanuel Kant.
"How come if you dial the wrong number, it's never busy?"
Silyas Dogwood.
"It isn't possible to direct a Charles Laughton film. The best you can hope is to act as referee."
Alfred Hitchcock, after filming 'Jamaica Inn'.
"An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him."
Joseph von Sternberg, film director, belittling his actors.
"If all the people who live together were actually in love, the earth would shine like the sun."
Jacques Prevert.
"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."
Jonathan Swift.
"The director of genius is the man who can provide the stability and the focus by which everyone can go fruitfully mad at once."
Simon Callow, in 'Charles Laughton'.
"He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man."
Anton Kuh, describing the poet Stefan George.
"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Yes, But I Didn't Really Enjoy It'.
"The tail had passed through and beyond the point of wagging the dog, and had become the dog."
A participant in Project Whirlwind, in which the development of a universal flight simulator, to be supported by a computer, gradually veered off into the exclusive development of the world's first real time digital computer.
"There is always one more fruit fly."
Jud Northbark, in 'Finite Elephants'.
"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo."
Jean Cocteau, or someone very like him.
"The United States is the first known case of a civilization developing through disintegration."
Clive James, in 'Cultural Amnesia'.
"Everyone's life looks to be in pieces when seen from the inside."
Albert Camus.
"Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes."
Albert Camus.
"Culture begins when you forget what book that came from."
Ezra Pound.
"History must offer us a progressive intelligibility."
Marc Bloch, historian and a founder of the Annales school of French social history.
"Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones."
Historian A J P Taylor on Napoleon.
"Lublin is a true Ultima Thule; it is inhabited by anthropods whose reaction time is so slow that you can speak with three of them at the same time. Before the first answers, you can listen to the second, and ask the third a question."
Ludwik Fleck, Polish immunologist.
"A gift is a contract with a missing page."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Opus Mopus'.
"This film has more asides than a dodecahedron."
Glen Weldon, reviewing the NetFlix series 'Enola Holmes'.
"A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over, and shoots the wounded."
Murray Kempton, journalist.
"The true genius in advertising is to sell you the problem and the solution."
George Orwell.
"HISTORY: the story of everything that needn't have been like that."
Clive James, in 'Cultural Amnesia', from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"He's trying to repair a broken window with a hammer."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Everyone thinks of changing the world; No one thinks of changing themself."
A Kakanian proverb.
"HATHOS: The peculiar pleasure felt in hating something."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are."
Harry Frankfurt, in 'On Bullshit'.
"Scully was appallingly gregarious - so outgoing she was practically incoming."
Karen Joy Fowler, in 'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves'.
"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease."
Voltaire.
"You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into."
Ben Goldacre, in 'Bad Science'.
"A memoir masquerading as a history of the cosmos."
George Bernard Shaw, critiquing Winston Churchill's 'The World Crisis'.
"The white Baptists fled further east to a new church so huge and sprawling it had been dubbed Six Flags Over Jesus."
Michael Lewis, in 'The Blind Side'.
"Halleck is a great emptiness surrounded by an education."
William Woodward, assessing Lincoln's Army Chief of Staff General Henry Halleck.
"OK, I have to admit you've got a point. It's a stupid one, but it's still a point."
Joe Hemmeter, scrupulously fair even to an idiot.
"I'm afraid that sometimes you just remind me of an angry old man yelling at a cloud."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'New Hope for the Dead'.
"You mustn't say that Stalin stifled Jewish culture. Stalin stifled all culture."
Mick Bennett, the assistant editor of the Daily Worker, defending Stalin against charges of anti-Semitism, as recalled by Alison Mcleod in 'The Death of Uncle Joe'.
"NORTHPAW: A Right-handed person."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"PENANTEMATE: The item just after the first one."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I'll admit he started out as a child prodigy, but he was still acting like a child long after he was no longer a prodigy."
Jud Northbark, in 'All Men are Bothers'.
"Lloyd George could never see a belt without wanting to hit below it."
Margaret Asquith.
"Don't talk to me when I'm interrupting!"
Michael Curtiz, director of 'Casablanca'.
"I respect directors who stubbornly follow their own path, even if the result is a Claude Lelouch film."
Uri Klein, reviewing Claude Lelouch's 'Un + Une', in Haaretz.
"Football is to physical culture as a bull fight is to agriculture."
Thorstein Veblen.
"If your phone doesn't ring, it's me."
Now playing on the Heartbreak Hotel jukebox.
"There are no weeds, and no worthless men. Only bad farmers."
Victor Hugo.
"Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn't I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?"
Samuel Pennypacker, Pennsyvania governor, rebuking a rowdy crowd.
"Well that's a relief. We noticed that you kind of dress up more than the other boys in the neighborhood and we thought you were pretending to be wealthy. We were afraid you might grow up to be a Republican."
Ray Hill's mother reacts to his informing her that he is gay.
"George Lucas told the greatest joke about two men walking into a bar in 1977. Now, twenty-two years later, it's time to find out how the bar got its zoning permits, and liquor license, and how they hired the busboy."
Dana Gould, on the devastating banality of 'The Phantom Menace'.
"Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current:
They change the sky, but not their soul, who cross the ocean."
Horace.
"It's amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must have been invented."
Amos Tversky.
"The problem with being a pessimist is that if the bad thing happens, you've lived it twice."
Amos Tversky.
"The nice thing about things that are urgent is that if you wait long enough, they aren't anymore."
Amos Tversky.
"You know, Murray, there is no one in this world as smart as you think you are."
Amos Tversky, after attending a lecture by Murray Gell-Mann.
"Private: I'm not going to wear a helmet. If a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it already.
Sergeant: What about the bullets addressed 'To whom it may concern'?"
Amos Tversky, sergeant in the Israeli army, convincing his private to wear a helmet.
"It was good for you. How was it for me?"
Two behavioralists, after having sex.
"If you meet a bear while crossing a rotten bridge, say 'Hi there, uncle!'"
A Turkish proverb.
"Your Excellency, Your Honour, Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences, Your Lord Bishops, Your Paternity, Your Reverends, Your Worship, Ladies and Gentlemen..."
The toastmaster at a dinner party at the British Government House in Jerusalem during the Mandate, carefully addressing the assemblage of high commissioners, chief rabbis, chief judges, mayors, and patriarchs.
"To a worm in a horseradish, the world is a horseradish."
A Yiddish proverb.
"When a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed."
Czeslaw Milosz.
"Jerusalem had no natural industries except holiness."
Simon Montefiore, in 'Jerusalem'.
"Madam, I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testaments."
Disraeli, upon by asked his religion by Queen Victoria.
"My schoolmaster, the Reverend Matthew Preston, kept the Sabbath by being in a bad temper."
Thomas Macaulay, author of 'The History of England'.
"All of them were born either before, during, or after the First World War."
Hope Whitmore, not quite making her point, in the documentary 'The Mitfords'.
"Even a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it."
John Keats.
"Every calendar page also contains the anniversaries of everything that has not yet happened."
Richard Powers, in 'The Gold Bug Variations'.
"By adding enough features, you can make any piece of software unusable."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Undoing'.
"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."
George Bernard Shaw.
"Court ruling: Lazarus must return life insurance payout."
News item: The Jerusalem Daily Scroll.
"Software is not gold, it is lettuce; it is a perishable good. If it is not in a place where it is getting improved over time, it will rot."
Brian Behlendorf.
"They could work very hard when they had to - at end of week, in harvest time - but Sunday was holy, Monday was holy, and Tuesday was often needed to recover from so much holiness."
David Landes, in 'Revolution in Time'.
"I've assumed the burden of sex for us all."
David Koresh.
"GENDER FLUID ILLEGALS MAY BE ENTERING THE COUNTRY 'TWICE'."
A caption on the ATN news broadcast, in the opening of the show 'Succcession'.
"Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons."
Vladimir Nabokov, in 'Lolita'.
"Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings."
Konrad Lorenz.
"Revenge. A man will enjoy that, even when Avarice has ceased to please."
Benjamin Disraeli, asked to name the passion whose pleasure is most lasting.
"The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still."
Thomas Macaulay.
"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."
Winston Churchill, as Sir Stafford Cripps walked by.
"Art doesn't render what is visible. Art makes visible."
Paul Klee.
"They say you can't do it, but sometimes that doesn't always work."
Casey Stengel.
"What was 'Cinderella' if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?"
Elif Batuman, in 'The Idiot'.
"I studied dramatics for seven years under General MacArthur."
Dwight Eisenhower, responding to a visitor who asked if he knew MacArthur.
"After a certain age, you will have fewer friends every year. But for me, it happened very early."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Inside Skinside'.
"Examples are better than descriptions."
William James.
"When she entered the room, dialogue ceased, and monologue inherited its assets, and continued business at the old stand."
Mark Twain, describing an encounter with the chatterbox Elinor Howells.
"One of the beauties of living in Cleveland is that any direction feels like progress."
Michael Cunningham, in 'A Home at the End of the World'.
"She is one of the happy martyrs of the world, hugging her grudges to her, and relishing every insult as a toothsome morsel."
Dora Jessie Saint, in 'Village School'.
"Promises, like pie crusts, are made to be broken."
Jonathan Swift.
"The British aristocracy does nothing, and does it very well."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Waiting for the Splash'.
"Werner Heisenberg is speeding down the autobahn when a police officer pulls him over.
'Do you know you were going exactly 200 kilometers per hour!', he shouts at him.
'Oh hell,' says Heisenberg, 'now I'm completely lost!'"
Jud Northbark, in 'The Future is Coming, But Where Will We Put It?'.
"Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid."
Kory Stamper, in 'Word by Word'.
"An imaginary illness is worse than the real thing, because it is incurable."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Enter Before Knocking'.
"This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J R Miller's 'Practical Gamekeeper'."
A mock review, in Field and Stream, of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
"Demographers are people who wanted to be accountants but lacked the personality for the job."
Brad Edmondson.
"It was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry."
James Watson, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA.
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."
Niels Bohr
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
Schopenhauer.
"If someone says you have ears like a donkey, just laugh. If another person says it, buy yourself a saddle."
A Kakanian proverb.
"After shaking hands with a Greek, count your fingers."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Nothing bothers you? You need a goat."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The tongue is soft, and you keep it; your teeth are hard, and they fall out."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Once you've been struck by an axe, it's almost a pleasure to be beaten with a club."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
Alfred North Whitehead, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of 'Principia Mathematica'.
"Where a man's eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica is, there shall his heart be also."
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who made his living as a travel writer, and once walked from Holland to Constantinople, presumably leaving his encyclopedia at home.
"I have written only one masterpiece. That is the Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music."
Maurice Ravel.
"Do you know the best thing about cleaning things? Everything always gets dirty again!"
Lynn, a character in the movie 'The Chambermaid'.
"Granted. Recommend Urinoco."
Frederick William, King of Prussia, approving the petition of the inhabitants of the town of Gumbinnen to change the name of their local river, the Pissa.
"Thank you for a lovely weekend. They tell me it rained."
Kay Redfield Jamison, getting a note from her lover.
"FINLANDIZATION: The art of bowing to the East, without mooning the West."
Kari Suomalainen, Finnish political cartoonist, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Friend: Guess who just died?
Him: Today, anyone will do!"
Carl Fuerstenberg, German banker [1850-1933].
"Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
Leibniz.
"Didn't Tom Petty say the waiting was the hardest part? I represented his wife in their divorce. I got her half of that song."
Nora Fanshaw, divorce lawyer, a character played by Laura Dern in the movie 'Marriage Story'.
"It is worse than a crime - it's a mistake."
Joseph Fouche, Napoleon's Minister of Police, criticizing the kidnapping and execution of the duc d'Enghien.
"All his life, it seemed to him, he had been addressing people who had already left the room."
Penelope Lively, in 'Judgment Day'.
"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'The Gnome Approaches'.
"Men are like zeros in arithmetic. Their value depends entirely on their position."
Napoleon.
"These last few days are among the happiest I've ever ignored."
Doug Kenney, cofounder of National Lampoon, who jumped off a cliff in Hawaii.
"The tragedy of life is not that men die, but that they cease to love."
Somerset Maugham.
"A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true."
Isaac Newton.
"Bad theater is like dentistry; you're compelled to stay in your chair."
From the movie 'Colette'.
"Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."
The Book of Daniel, Chapter 12, Verse 4.
"I will be brief. But not so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the world's shortest speech. He said 'I will be so brief I am already finished', and sat down."
Edward O Wilson.
"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air, and where it lands, painting a target."
Homer Adkins, American chemist.
"The purpose of models is not to fit the data, but to sharpen the questions."
Samuel Karlin, Stanford mathematician whose Karlin-Altschul statistics was a basis for the genetic sequence similarity software BLAST.
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."
William James.
"I mean, she's not not helpful, but she's not helpful."
Overheard at the barber shop; why English is not learnable from a book.
"I hardly see him at night since he took up sex."
Clara 'Mac' Kinsey, wife of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
"Professor Black: It's just as easy to teach Lebesgue integration as it is to teach Riemann integration.
Professor White: Perhaps, but it isn't just as easy to learn."
Overheard in the Mathematics department.
"Many things in life require an act of faith, such as eating a bologna sandwich."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Secret is in the Sauce'.
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Samuel Johnson.
"There is a magic moment, during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a microsecond, taking a little of it, and passing it on."
Kurt Vonnegut.
"We will never regard the Russian border as secure until there are Russian soldiers on both sides of it."
A Russian proverb.
"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."
Alexis de Tocqueville.
"You can't tell nobody what they don't know - not even that they don't know it."
Gertrude Stein.
"When you become famous, you don't change, everybody else does."
Kirk Douglas.
"Don't think there's a tangerine there. Just forget there isn't one."
In the Korean movie 'Burning', Hae-Mi explains the secret to pantomiming the peeling of a tangerine.
"Every time someone in the world lies, Dick Ebersol gets a royalty."
Elliot Wald, a comedy writer for Second City and Saturday Night Live.
"What if Jesus had gotten five-to-ten instead of a death sentence?"
Rosie Shuster, a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live.
"Mr President, if this works out, who knows where it will lead?"
Lorne Michaels, trying to loosen up Gerald Ford enough to give an enthusiastic 'Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!'.
"If we don't play God, who will?"
James Watson, in a starring role.
"I admit that Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev."
Czar Alexander II, refusing to dismiss the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, despite the fact that he had remarried before the mandatory seven year wait following a divorce.
"Linus Pauling proved that chemistry could be understood, instead of being memorized."
Max Perutz, molecular biologist, who investigated the structure of hemoglobin.
"If you lead a pig to shit, you won't need to make him eat."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Bristles from Brussels'.
"Unasked-for advice poisons the giver and the receiver."
Modine Gunch, in 'The Defunctive Declination'.
"If dieticians really want to get people to eat healthy, all they have to do is make apples taste like bacon."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Concave Conclave'.
"A gentleman need not know Latin, but then he must have forgotten it."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'The Golden Dustbin'.
"I dream of a world where every chicken can cross the road without having to give a reason."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Flustered Cluck'.
"The show doesn't go on because it's ready.
The show goes on because it's 11:30pm."
Lorne Michaels, producer of 'Saturday Night Live'.
"Student: Have you finished correcting our papers?
Professor: Correcting them? That would take a lifetime! I'm merely grading them."
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, in 'As I was Saying'.
"It's the same show, but now they all read how great it is, we get these big standing ovations every night, and it's the exact same show as before. The audience always reacts differently if they've been told it's good. A lot of actors have that experience."
'Joan Cohen', in Kenneth Lonergan's 'Margaret'.
"In Washington D.C., extreme paranoia is regarded as excessive complacency."
Henry Kissinger.
"Your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people's necessities."
George Bernard Shaw, in 'Man and Superman'.
"Insolence is the armor of the weak. It is a device to induce courage in the face of one's own panic."
Henry Kissinger.
"Whenever I see a fellow look as if he is thinking, I say that's a mutiny."
Captain Sir Thomas Troubridge.
"The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don't."
Stanley Kubrick.
"Chile is a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica."
Henry Kissinger, dismissing the importance of Chile.
"The amateur works until he can get it right. The professional works until he cannot go wrong."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'The Inkblot Code'.
"No kid learned to ride a bicycle by going to a seminar."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Hot Air Buffoon'.
"Graduate research students are where mediocre ideas go to die."
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University.
"Sure, go ahead to the bathroom. That will be the first time this afternoon that I'll know what you've got in your hand."
George S Kaufman, playwright, author of 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', giving his bridge partner permission for a bathroom break.
"Somebody was already using the pencil."
Dorothy Parker, explaining to the New Yorker editor Harold Ross why she wasn't working in the office.
"I don't know if Mr Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing his book is a great reader."
A review of Henry Kissinger's 'Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy'.
"As president of the university, I constantly had to deal with three demands: * sex for the undergraduates, * athletics for the alumni, * parking for the faculty."
Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.
"A politician promises a bridge even where there is no river."
Nikita Krushchev.
"He died, as his sly cousin Lord Ellenborough remarked, in the full vigour of his incapacity."
Caroline Alexander, in 'The Bounty', on the death of Fletcher Christian's determined defender Edward Christian.
"In Pakistan the standard unit of stated delay was half an hour; a delay of three hours meant not that day."
V S Naipaul, in 'Among the Believers'.
"I decided I'm not going to act anymore - to the extent that you can quit something you're not doing."
Dustin Hoffman, floundering on the edges of the New York theater world.
"One of the first sentences I learned in English was 'Please do not kiss me!'"
Mike Nichols, immigrant, comedian, actor, director of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'.
"Filming is postponed for three days. The giraffe stepped on his cock."
Herbert Ross, choreographer, recounting the troubled filming of 'Dr Dolittle'.
"You won't be graded on what you know, but on what you can explain."
Bill Layton, warning his students about cramming for the math prelim exam.
"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised."
Appsley Cherry-Gerard, survivor of Robert Scott's British Antarctic Expedition.
"John Bolton is a bureaucratic tapeworm. Try as you might, you can't expel him. He will live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering but never suffering himself."
Tucker Carlson, whose vileness is occasionally entertaining.
"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate, and end by producing a kind of friction."
Carl von Clausewitz, author of 'On War'.
"William Buckley, Jr, sat me down to chat about the museum. I laughed when he used the word 'jejune'. Buckley never spoke to me again."
Thomas Hoving, in 'Making the Mummies Dance'.
"If I hadn't know it was you, I wouldn't have known it was you."
Kif Kroker, in 'Mysteries of Earth-Speak for Martians'.
"The obstacle in the way becomes the way."
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and meditator.
"France's first mistake was to take him for an idiot.
Her second mistake was to take him for a genius."
Victor Hugo, on Napoleon III.
"Pompous dinner guest: I have done only one truly bad thing in my entire life.
Talleyrand: And when will it end?"
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, losing his patience.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."
Robert J Hanlon, stating Hanlon's Razor.
"The one noticeable mistake in this respect concerns the series makers’ apparent ignorance of the vast divisions between different socioeconomic classes in the Soviet Union: in the series, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a member of the Academy of Sciences, lives in nearly the same kind of squalor as a fireman in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In fact, Legasov would have lived in an entirely different kind of squalor than the fireman did."
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 04 June 2019.
"Each time there is an item of news disagreeable to the government, it should not be published until we are so sure it is true that there is no point in printing it because everyone already knows it."
Napoleon, explaining his freedom-of-the-press policy.
"The United States of America has thirty-two religions and only one dish, and that is inedible."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, recalling his visit to the US.
"Christine: What I’d really like is to be on Math Olympiad.
Teacher: But math isn’t something you’re terribly strong in.
Christine: That we know of yet."
Christine McPherson, a character in the movie 'Ladybird', defying conventional wisdom.
"I attest that any system which aims at taking freedom by open force to other peoples will only make that freedom hated, and prevent its triumph."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.
"If you want to be number one, you have to be odd."
Dr Seuss.
"Right or wrong, it is very pleasant to break something from time to time."
Fyodor Dostoevsky.
"The road up and the road down are one and the same."
Heracleitus.
"If you want to be happy, marry your second wife first."
Bill Layton's father.
"There's a wonderful Hollywood saying: Do you know the difference between a brown-noser and a shithead? Depth perception."
Jon Landis, maker of the movie 'Animal House'.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!"
President Merkin Muffley, in the film 'Dr Strangelove'.
"I’m suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two."
Neal Stephenson, in 'Anathem'.
"Never a man dies but another man is gratified."
A Kakanian proverb.
"A wolf must die in his own skin."
George Herbert, poet and priest in Shakespearean England.
"Thank God, they always shoot the the same leg!"
Henri Guerin, who lost a leg in the first World War, and then, during the 1944 uprising in Paris, was shot again, in the wooden leg.
"Maybe I'm afraid of dying, but not death itself. Death is like stupidity. It doesn't bother you, just the people around you."
Ricky Gervais.
"I have captured you by the short rabbits!"
The subtitle of a scene in a Hong Kong Kung Fu movie.
"When you walk a garden there is a case you have to return."
Paul Theroux, recalling a mystifying sign in Japan.
"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."
Dolly Parton.
"Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The Aga Khan is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English dukes take precedence."
The book of Heraldry.
"The majority of Americans are not Republicans. The majority of Americans are not Democrats. The majority of Americans are Americans."
Howard Schultz, hapless unwanted Starbucks presidential candidate.
"Let's not forget that the Roman Empire had central heating, but saw nothing amiss in feeding human beings to wild animals for the pleasure of the multitude."
Peter Heather, in 'The Fall of the Roman Empire'.
"India is larger than the world."
Jorge Luis Borges.
"He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting."
Queen Victoria, complaining of the formal speaking style of her prime minister Gladstone.
"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia."
H L Mencken, in 'Prejudices: First Series'.
"Manners are the shadows of virtue."
Sydney Smith.
"One is not born a woman. One becomes a woman."
Simone de Beauvoir.
"In math, wrong answers are bad, but wrong questions are worse."
Jordan Ellenberg, mathematician.
"We wash as far down as possible, then we wash as far up as possible, but we don't wash possible."
Jeannette Walls's homeless mother, describing her daily cleaning routine in public restrooms.
"In this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim)."
Herman Melville, in 'Moby Dick'.
"Call it a serpent instead of a snake, if you like, but either way, if it bites you, you will die."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Pillows of Hercules'.
"Not for a moment do I believe that she lies in bed at night and thinks, 'I was a swindler. I was a crook. I lied.' You know, I don’t know if she's lying, or if it's an unconscious, self-protective, reconstructed reality, but what is coming out of her mouth is not mapping onto the reality that you and I share."
Roger Parloff, duped by Theranos executive, fraudster and compulsive liar Elizabeth Holmes, doesn't want to believe there are bad people.
"I have come to abstain in person."
Frank Maguire, Northern Irish nationalist, whose positive vote on a motion to change the representation of the Northern Ireland counties would have prevented the British government from falling.
"The man with a little knowledge soon displays it."
A Kakanian proverb.
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."
Oscar Wilde.
"I can do anything, but I can't do everything."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'What He Said'.
"In Ireland, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as tragedy."
Tim Pat Colman, in 'The Troubles'.
"Feed the wolf, keep the sheep."
A Kakanian proverb.
"God gave us memories that we might have roses in December."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Ransom Note: First Draft'.
"A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist only knows what it will be when he has finished it."
W H Auden.
"COINCIDENCE: God's way of staying anonymous."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Sullivan: 'What do the people in Pittsburgh know?'
Producer: 'They know what they like.'
Sullivan: 'If they knew what they liked, they wouldn't live in Pittsburgh!'"
The Preston Sturges movie, 'Sullivan's Travels'.
"He was a man who had no enemies, and who was hated by all his friends."
Jud Northbark, in 'Who Paid for that Tombstone?'.
"Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet."
National Lampoon, in 'Deteriorata'.
"History is the only field of human study where we cannot begin at the beginning."
Jacob Burckhardt.
"German Businessman: 'As a token of our appreciation, a luxury Mercedes!'
Pavel Borodin: 'It would be dishonorable of me to take a bribe.'
German Businessman: 'But you must take it. I insist!'
Pavel Borodin: 'Well...you could always sell it to me.'
German Businessman: 'Just name the price!'
Pavel Borodin: 'Twenty kopecks...and I'll take two of them.'"
Pavel Borodin, Boris Yeltsin's 'fixer', showing how to handle a bribe.
"Never let a good crisis go to waste."
Rahm Emanuel.
"He strikes me as a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him doing it."
Bruce Lockhart, in February 1918, after an interview with Leon Trotsky.
"If you'd say to Stanley 'I'd give my right arm to work for you', he'd probably say 'Why are you lowballing me?'"
Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick's assistant.
"In August, the Prussian Chamber refused to grant an appropriation for more than two years of army service. The war minister demanded three years: the first two years, it was said, to teach the soldier to shoot the foreign enemy; the third, to shoot his mother and father."
Edmund Wilson, in 'To the Finland Station'.
"The most dangerous place in New York is between Rudy Giuliani and a microphone."
James Comey.
"It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God."
Mark Twain, in 'A Double Barrelled Detective Story'.
"Continuing existence or cessation of existence: these are the scenarios. Is it more empowering mentally to work towards an accommodation of the downsizings and negative outcomes of adversarial circumstance, or would it be a greater enhancement of the bottom line to move forward to a challenge of our current difficulties, and, by making a commitment to opposition, to effect their demise?"
Tom Burton, hamming it up, in 'Long Words Bother Me'.
"I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was. I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president."
Harry Truman, US president, explaining his dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur.
"The historian grows quite giddy as he tries to disentangle the complications of heredity consequent on the free and easy habits of the English aristocracy. The Harley family, children of the Countess of Oxford, were known as the Harleian Miscellany on account of the variety of fathers alleged to be responsible for their existence."
David Cecil, in 'Melbourne'.
"Some guy hit my fender, and I told him, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' but not in those words."
Woody Allen.
"A drunkard or a gambler may be weaned from his ways, but not a politician."
Anthony Trollope, in 'Phineas Redux'.
"Even though it's a pixellated blob still, it's a better pixellated blob."
Harold Weaver, commenting on images returned by the New Horizons space probe to the remote object known as 'Ultima Thule'.
"I was shocked to read more lies in the press about me today. They say I owe two million dollars. I don't! It's at least four million dollars. Do you know how successful you have to be to owe that kind of money?"
Milo Yiannopoulos, human troll doll, may he be ever more 'successful'.
"You could say that we're all hallucinating all the time, and when we agree about our hallucinations, that's what we call reality."
Anil Seth, neuroscientist.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin.
"Noam Chomsky: What are you working on these days?
Kurt Goedel: I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori."
Rebecca Goldstein, in 'Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel'.
"THE HUNGARIANS: A thousand years of victory in defeat."
Paul Lendvai.
"GERMAN HISTORY: A series of turning points where nothing turns."
A J P Taylor.
"Traffic Cop: Professor, I'm going to have to look in your trunk.
Schroedinger: Fine, there's nothing in there but my cat.
Traffic Cop: Ugh, this cat is dead!
Schroedinger: Well he is now!"
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Whole World is Watching'.
"Dogs look up to us.
Cats look down on us.
But pigs treat us as equals."
Winston Churchill, whose wife's pet name for him was 'pig'.
"Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man."
Thomas Hobbes.
"The scrotal lymphedema was a real ball and chain."
Dan, in 'The Man with the 80 Pound Groin'.
"Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!"
Dom Perignon, inventing champagne.
"To make a new start, the correct question is not: what can I get rid of, but rather: what must I keep."
Jud Northbark, in 'Hay From the Needlestack'.
"As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality. Woe to him who has nothing left to desire. We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 'Julie, or the New Heloise'.
"Politics is a stupid job done by smart people."
Nicholas Sarkozy, French President, as played by Denis Podalydes, in the movie 'The Conquest'.
"I've got a sock full of shit and I know how to use it."
Senator Joe McCarthy.
"'The bite of this snake rarely results in death,' the doctor said. 'Its venom is fatal in only three percent of cases.'
'I see ...' the mother said. 'Then if I had 100 daughters, I would only lose three of them. But I only have one daughter.'"
Max Frisch, in 'Homo Faber'.
"The greatest danger in times of crisis comes from the zeal of the inexperienced."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.
"In Malaysia, we have freedom of speech. We just don't have freedom after speech."
Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysian politician jailed for electoral success.
"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."
Edmund Burke.
"Just as fish living in a cave will lose their ability to see, programs not regularly executed lose their ability to run."
Jud Northbark, in 'I Told You I Was Sick'.
"Julius Philosyrius, except for his name, is anonymous."
Nicholas Saunders, stumbling in prose, in 'Alexander's Tomb'.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture."
Ray Mummert, pastor, in the middle of the 'Intelligent Design' controversy that bankrupted the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania.
"There are only two classes of mathematicians in Felix Klein's department: those who work on what Felix Klein wants, neglecting what they want, and those who refuse to work on what Felix Klein wants, doing what they want instead. Logically, Felix Klein cannot be a member of either group. Therefore, Felix Klein cannot be a mathematician."
An anonymous joker, on the Goettingen Mathematics Department under Felix Klein.
"Fortune doesn't change men - it exposes them."
Suzanne Necker, married to Louis XVI's finance minister, and survivor of the French Revolution (she moved to Switzerland at the right time).
"In user-indifferent software, the simplest tasks can turn out to be the most difficult. And because they are simple, no one has bothered to document or exemplify them. My most recent hour in hell was spent trying to draw a horizontal line within a gnuplot image, and then thrashing about on the Internet among broken, irrelevant, and misleading documentation and examples. I only figured it out when I ran across a note that I had posted myself, six years before."
Jud Northbark, in 'The As-Is World'.
"AGORA: a place set apart for people to go and cheat each other."
Cyrus, king of the Persians, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"When I travel in the provinces, I never ask which is the best hotel, but which is the newest, because in Turkey things tend to wear out so quickly."
Martin Flavin, in 'Red Poppies and White Marble'.
"In the Falkland Islands, mutton is known as '365' because it is served every day of the year."
The Cacophagist's Cookbook.
"Evelyn Waugh’s uncle wrote a travel book called 'Turkey Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow'. Waugh remarked that it could have been retitled 'Boxing Day'."
The Cacophagist's Cookbook.
"The art of public life lies in knowing when to stop, and then going a bit further."
Evelyn Waugh.
"A vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisances."
Paul Theroux, observant grouch.
"There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way."
Karl Kraus.
"Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse."
James Joyce.
"Mr Bain: Listen, that is most interesting. It is what we call the six o'clock beetle, because he always makes that noise at exactly six o'clock.
Waugh: But it's now a quarter past four.
Mr Bain: Yes, that is what is so interesting."
Evelyn Waugh, in 'Ninety Two Days'.
"Any old stick will do to beat the Church of Rome, and if it breaks, you've got two."
Father Ronald Knox.
"The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions."
Paul Samuelson, economist.
"The president is aware of what is going on. That's not to say that there is something going on."
Ron Ziegler, press secretary for Richard Nixon.
"The streets of Philadelphia are safe. It's only the people who make them unsafe."
Mayor Frank Rizzo.
"Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life."
Orrin Hatch, senator from Utah, who knew the sanctity of public opinion.
"The Archbishop is the shepherd of his flock, and the Archdeacon is the crook on his staff."
Silyas Dogwood.
"We have only one person to blame, and that's each other."
Barry Black, of the New York Rangers hockey team.
"To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the actor Edmund Kean.
"One pearl is better than a necklace of potatoes."
Etienne Decroux, mime, actor, and film star.
"How excellent a thing is sleep. It wraps around a man like a cloak."
Miguel Cervantes.
"The people are tired of Monsieur Clemenceau, and he will have to wait until he is dead to be a great man again."
Ernest Hemingway, reporting the attitude of the French public to their eighty-year-old president.
"It is not only the fault of the axe, but of the tree as well."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Whoever declares a child to be 'delicate' thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant."
Robertson Davies, in 'The Cunning Man'.
"SCHOOL: a jail with educational opportunities."
Robertson Davies, in 'The Cunning Man', from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Italy has a healthy appetite, but bad teeth!"
Bismarck, commenting on a failed Italian effort at grabbing territory.
"This is not your signature!"
The paradoxical blustering complaint made by a bureaucrat, because John Guiver always writes with block letters, rather than cursive.
"He who raises his sword against a prince must throw away the scabbard."
Jud Northbark.
"Shoot him, for now."
Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary, asked about what to do with a captured prisoner.
"Journalism is a great profession as long as you get out of it."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'An Exit Strategy for Life'.
"People who are afraid of loneliness should never marry."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Third Cross on the Right'.
"Probability and Statistics used to be married; then they got separated; then they got divorced; now they hardly see each other. This is crazy!"
David Williams, in 'Weighing the Odds: A Course in Probability and Statistics'.
"The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality."
George Eliot.
"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."
Mark Twain.
"Sarah Palin dismisses the fuss about teacher salaries, saying of one protesting teacher that her reward is in heaven. Unfortunately, her rent is due here on Earth."
Bill Maher, on 'Politically Incorrect'.
"I am pleased that history recognizes the first to invent something, but I am more concerned with the first person to make it work."
Grace Hopper, who developed the FLOW-MATIC language, a precursor to COBOL.
"The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear that they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so: it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the ear (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed: and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure."
Thomas de Quincey, in 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'.
"Tradition cannot be turned off at will; you have to let it drip for a bit."
Georgina Armour.
"IBM had created this process and it absolutely made sure that quality would be preserved. At one point, somebody kind of looked at the process to see, well, you know, what it's doing and what's the overhead built into it; what they found is that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box."
Rich Seidner, quoted by Stephen Segaller in 'Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet'.
"One day the whole world was going to look like Los Angeles, he decided, not a city, not the absence of a city, just ruined countryside, with houses squeezed between highways which never tired of whispering the lie that it was more interesting to go somewhere than to be here."
Edward St Aubyn, in 'On the Edge'.
"In those days, anyone interested in building steam engines in America was working in a vacuum."
Andrea Sutcliff, in 'Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention'.
"Being a Stranger, I was invited to sup at a Tavern. The Cook was too filthy an Object to be described, only another English Gentleman whispered to me and said, he believed, if the Fellow was to be thrown against the Wall, he would stick to it."
Edward Burt, describing a visit to Edinburgh in 1754.
"Of the three popes, John the Twenty-Third was the first victim; he fled, and was brought back a prisoner: the most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest."
Edward Gibbon, in 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'.
"If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."
Tom Wolfe, author of 'The Right Stuff' and 'Bonfire of the Vanities'.
"A stubby, prim-looking woman, asked by a player if he should split tens, might say, 'If you had a twenty-inch dick, would you cut it in half?'"
Frederick and Steven Barthelme, in 'Double Down'.
"The English Department was a place of twenty-year turf wars and otherwise endearing behavior, of people who pressed long-time graduate students to call them 'Santa' in the privacy of their office, but please, please, 'Doctor Claus' in the public halls."
Frederick and Steven Barthelme, in 'Double Down'.
"Cret asked, 'Where did you get this idea"' and Father replied, 'Oh, I got it out of my head, Mr Cret.' Telling this story, Father, to imitate his teacher, would then assume a cartoonish French accent and say, very slowly, 'Eez good zat it eez out'."
Frederick and Steven Barthelme, in 'Double Down'.
"My friends tell me that I have an intimacy issue - but I don't think they know me."
Garry Shandling, comedian of insecurity.
"Absence makes the heart go wander.'"
Modine Gunch, The Statesville Record and Landmark, 30 April 1969.
"Laura: 'You said you would marry me if pigs could fly, so there's hope!'
Lauro: 'Let me be precise; only if pigs can fly will I marry you.'"
Tractatus Logico-Eroticus.
"How will you spend eternity: Smoking or Non-Smoking?"
Sign outside Shibboleth Valley Church.
"NULLIPSISM: The belief that I am the only person in existence, and I'm nobody."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I just want to know how come we choose from just two people for president and fifty for Miss America."
Michael Collins, in 'The Resurrectionists'.
"Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works."
The Old Programmer's Almanac.
"Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
Stephen Hawking.
"There is nothing whatever between the Prince of Wales and Lily Langtry. Not even a sheet."
A British newspaper in the 1890's, shortly before being sued for libel.
"A mouse once tried to outwit a cat. It is believed that in the end the mouse did succeed in permeating the cat, but the cat is still living - and the mouse cannot be found."
H G Wells, mocking the Fabian Society's goal of 'permeating' all political parties with its socialistic ideals.
"He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head."
Margot Asquith on Lord Birkenhead.
"It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never put dots over her i's, to save ink."
Horace Walpole, in 'Letter to Horace Mann'.
"He was too intelligent to belong to the intelligentsia."
Piers Brendon, on Winston Churchill.
"I am always quite willing to be satisfied by the best."
Winston Churchill.
"I hear you boys have been putting your private parts where I wouldn't put this umbrella."
The Duke of Cambridge, admonishing student cadets at the military academy at Sandhurst after a scandal.
"The blind man fears no snake."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I don't care one bit about salary; but I discovered I care a great deal about salaries!"
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, realizing that all faculty salaries were public information.
"Every group of friends has room for one pushy person, even if it doesn't."
Brewster Bragsheer, 'All Men are Bothers'.
"Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
General George Patton, in the movie 'Patton'.
"Watt had watched people smile and thought he knew how it was done."
Samuel Beckett, in 'Watt'.
"You're 59, Peter? How is that possible? For ten years I've thought of you as 51."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Dead Man's Holiday'.
"For fields like linear algebra, we have developed a standard catalog of problems and solutions.
And there are some fields for which maybe we don't have a solution.
But for Artificial Intelligence, I would say we don't even have a problem."
Brewster Bragsheer, who does have a problem.
"I have often observed with singular pleasure that a fly, driven from a honey pot, will immediately, and with very good appetite, alight and finish his meal on an excrement."
Jonathan Swift.
"COCAINE: God's way of telling you that you have too much money."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Admiral Turner: I MAY BE CRAZY BUT IT LOOKS LIKE THE JAPS HAVE QUIT THE WAR, AT LEAST IN THIS SECTION.
Admiral Nimitz: DELETE ALL AFTER 'CRAZY'."
A telegraphic exchange during the initial invasion of Okinawa. Shortly afterwards, American troops discovered the Japanese deeply entrenched in tunnels, and a fantastically bloody campaign ensued.
"Yachting is a lot like standing in an ice cold shower while ripping up dollar bills."
Brewster Bragsheer, on the other side of yachting mania.
"One day, someone will find an unsigned William Golding novel, and it will be worth a fortune."
William Golding, after an exhausting public appearance and autograph session at the 1989 Toronto literary festival.
"An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."
Elbridge Gerry, warning that a standing army is like a standing penis.
"History is a common meadow in which everyone can make hay."
A Kakanian proverb.
"At last this odious man is dead. His departure causes his survivors joy, but is bound to distress the dead."
The bishop of Alexandria, in 444, delivering the eulogy for patriarch Cyrillus.
"However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead."
Richard Dawkins.
"DEDICATION: To my advisor, who didn't think this problem could be solved, didn't think this problem was worth solving, didn't think I was the person who could solve it, and didn't believe my solution when I completed it. His determined opposition has been my constant inspiration."
Roger Gradstud, burning his bridges in his PhD thesis.
"You have to understand, University of Hawaii professors are paid in sunshine."
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, explaining away his skimpy pay check.
"If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship's captain?"
A question on a test for fifth-graders in China, later explained away as not a mistake, but a challenge to critical thinking.
"There are books in which the footnotes or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books."
George Santayana.
"He was an experienced businessman and I was an inexperienced businessman. And when that combination gets together, it is often the case that the inexperienced businessman gets some experience."
Leonard Adleman, recalling his negotiation with Jack Kelly for a loan to save his RSA Security company.
"BACHELOR: A man who comes to work from a different direction every day."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Shoes Yes! Books No!"
Anti-intellectual slogan for a march organized by Juan Peron.
"As is well known in mathematics, any trick that you can use more than once is actually a method."
Paul Nahin, in 'Will You Be Alive Ten Years From Now?'.
"In Nebraska, you don't have to die to go to hell."
Don Hartwell, writing in his Dust Bowl diary.
"The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage."
Emperor Hirohito, not necessarily admitting the absence of any prospect of victory.
"After history has had a hundred years to macerate the faddish reputation of James Joyce, the last item to disappear will be his perfect sentence: 'When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold.'"
Silyas Dogwood, on the vagaries of fashion, in 'Gumming the Gristle'.
"My morning hasn't begun until I've had half an hour to sit in a comfortable chair and rearrange my phlegm."
An inveterate smoker.
"It's really true! Every time I speak, I'm prematurely quoting myself!"
Narcissus Mangold.
"'I'm, like, a smart person' is a sentence that disproves itself. It's like getting a back tattoo that says 'I Make Good Decisions.'"
Seth Myers, commenting on a tweet by a presidential twit.
"Battle is no more characteristic of war than copulation is of marriage."
Jud Northbark, in 'Smoke Them All Now!'.
"With what strife and pain we come into the world we know not, but tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it."
Thomas Browne, author of 'The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered'.
"When the drink's in, the wit's out."
A Kakanian proverb.
"His mind was like a lighthouse beacon; at times it illuminated things in a blinding clear light, and then it would turn away, leaving only unutterable darkness."
Lloyd George, at the 1916 memorial service for Lord Kitchener.
"There is no city in the world which has erected a statue to a critic."
Julian Barnes, British author of 'The Sense of an Ending'.
"In America, anyone can grow up to be president. That's just one of the risks we take."
Adlai Stevenson.
"There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer."
Graham Greene.
"Laws, like houses, lean on one another."
Edmund Burke, in 'Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland'.
"An event has happened, of which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to remain silent."
Edmund Burke, in 'On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings'.
"You don't have to explain what you never said."
Calvin Coolidge.
"No emotion can be so pure as the hatred you feel for a child."
Penelope Fitzgerald, in 'At Freddies'.
"The deepest thoughts of this so-called philosopher can be found preserved in needlepoint on pillows scattered throughout the land."
Jud Northbark, in 'A Gift of Millstones'.
"After the European Union imposed monthly salary caps on public employees, the Greek government added a thirteenth and then a fourteenth month to their calendar."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Autocannibals'.
"An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter."
Michael Lewis, in 'Boomerang'.
"Ireland has two kinds of weather: it's raining, or it's about to rain."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Trust, but Terrify'.
"Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet."
Franklin McKinney Hubbard, American cartoonist and journalist, [1868-1930].
"St Augustine asked where time came from.
He said it came out of the future, which didn't exist yet,
into the present that had no duration,
and went into the past that had ceased to exist."
Graham Greene, in 'The End of the Affair'.
"NOW ENTERING KLEIN BOTTLE, SOUTH DAKOTA."
Seen in the rear-view mirror, I think.
"Without promotion, something terrible happens - nothing!"
P T Barnum.
"He was said to be distinguished-looking: that's ugly with money."
Carrie Fisher, describing stepfather Harry Karl.
"The chairman appoints a committee because something doesn't need to be done, and it needs to be not done very carefully and over a long long time."
Jud Northbark, in 'Academia Nuts'.
"Fighting is to war what cash payment is to trade, for however rarely it may be necessary for it actually to occur, everything is directed towards it, and eventually it must take place all the same, and must be decisive."
Carl von Clausewitz, author of 'On War'.
"Complexity is not inherent in an object. To a butcher, for instance, a bicycle may be complex and a sheep's brain quite simple."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'A Deficit of Wonder'.
"The brain emits thoughts as the liver does bile."
Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, 17th-century French physiologist.
"This is a book about my involvement with two outrageous catastrophes - the Second World War, and my father."
Martin Moritz Thomsen, writer and Peace Corps volunteer, in 'My Two Wars'.
"Distressed Motorist: 'Can you please tell me how to get to Chicago?'
Farmer: 'Well, I certainly wouldn't start from here!'"
Silyas Dogwood, in 'A Can of Corn'.
"In Hollywood, everyone's favorite page in the trades is the obituaries."
Cassian Elwes, film producer.
"MIT Philosophy Professor: 'What do you think of us humanists?'
MIT Physics Professor: 'Think of you? We don't even bother to ignore you.'"
David Shiang, who claims to offer final answers to humankind's most enduring mysteries, in 'God Does Not Play Dice'.
"I didn't go to film school, I went to films!"
Quentin Tarantino.
"When I was in Mexico, I asked an Indian how old he was and he said: soon it will be sixty five years ago that I began to die."
Ivan Klima, in 'Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light'.
"If you locked Bingham up alone in a closet, he'd pick a fight with himself."
A description of pugnacious movie executive Ray Bingham.
"Dickie, you're so crooked, if you swallowed a nail, you'd shit a corkscrew."
Gerald Templer, British Field Marshal, who fought in both World Wars, to Louis Mountbatten.
"The prime minister is like the great banyan tree. Thousands shelter beneath it, but nothing grows."
Sadashiv Kanoji Patil, a former leader of the Congress party, describing Jawaharlal Nehru.
"Credit is suspicion asleep."
Gladstone.
"Quae sunt in luce tuemur e tenebris...
Things shine more brightly to one who is in the dark."
Lucretius, author of 'De Rerum Natura'.
"As a pedestrian approaches an intersection, the universe experiences an ever-growing urge to emit a car out of nowhere to obstruct the way."
Jud Northbark, in 'Getting Nowhere Fast'.
"As a car approaches an intersection, the universe experiences an ever-growing urge to emit a pedestrian out of nowhere to obstruct the way."
Jud Northbark, in 'Getting Nowhere Fast'.
"If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
Fudd's First Law of Opposition.
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
Ruth Rendell, in 'A Judgement in Stone'.
"Success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure."
Graham Greene, in 'A Sort of Life'.
"Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity."
Gustave Flaubert.
"I am the more astonished that so many thousands of grown men should be possessed again and again with a childish passion to look at galloping horses, and men standing upright in their chariots. If, indeed, they were attracted by the swiftness of the horses or the skill of the men, one could account for this enthusiasm. But in fact it is a bit of cloth they favor, a bit of cloth that captivates them. And if during the running the racers were to exchange colors, their partisans would change sides, and instantly forsake the very drivers and horses whom they were just before recognizing from afar, and clamorously saluting by name."
Pliny the Younger, in Letters 9.6, echoes Seinfeld's remark that sports fans are really just cheering for a particular set of clothes.
"When you write a research paper,
you are afraid that your result might already be known;
but when you write an expository paper,
you discover that nothing is known."
Gian-Carlo Rota, quoting one of his teachers.
"DEMOCRACY: the worship of jackals by jackasses."
H L Mencken, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Physicists: if a particle can exist, it does;
Programmers: if an error can occur, it has.
Philosophers: if we can be, we are."
Jud Northbark, in 'Now That I'm Nowhere, Where Can I Go Next?'
"As my landlord has noted: you may catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but a hand grenade catches them all."
A former tenant, twice threatened with eviction, harassed, lied to, disrespected, and cheated.
"Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood... but an ordinary chemist?"
Wolfgang Pauli, physicist, struggling with the illogic of the breakup of his marriage.
"INSOMNIA: the indigestion of the soul."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary.
'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.'
'Don't you think God knows the facts?' Bethe asked.
'Yes,' said Szilard, 'He knows the facts, but he does not know this version of the facts.'"
Hans Christian von Baeyer, author of 'QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics'.
"Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, US Supreme Court Justice, 1902-1932.
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
G K Chesterton, author of 'The Man Who Was Thursday'.
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
Benjamin Franklin.
"Those who cannot learn from history are compelled to repeat it in summer school."
Professor Gradgrind of Hardtack University, in 'Nocturnal Admissions'.
"The thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself."
Thomas Kineally, in 'Schindler's Ark'.
"Friends are God's apology for relations."
Hugh Kingsmill, English humorist and biographer.
"Other people publish to show how to do it, but Julian Schwinger publishes to show only he can do it."
Freeman Dyson, on mathematical physicist Julian Schwinger.
"He is a second Dirac, only this time human."
Eugene Wigner, summing up Richard Feynman.
"There are no two words more harmful in the English language than 'good job'."
Terence Fletcher, rabid band leader, a character in the movie 'Whiplash'.
"I could throw him three times out of four, but he would never stay throwed."
A childhood contemporary of Andrew Jackson remarks on his refusal to accept defeat.
"The cure for loneliness is solitude."
Marianne Moore, poet and writer of 'The Octopus', about Mount Rainier.
"A joke is the epitaph of an emotion."
Friedrich Nietzsche.
"History is something that never happened, written by someone who was never there."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Shut up, Arnold, or I'll direct this play the way you wrote it."
John Dexter, after playwright Arnold Wesker disputed his direction.
"He knew every mathematician's phone number, but I don't think he knew anyone's first name. I doubt if he would have recognized my first name even though I have worked with him for twenty years. The only person he called by his first name was Tom Trotter, whom he called Bill."
Peter Winkler, on Paul Erdos.
"Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."
William Butler Yeats.
"As Aristotle remarked, men do not become dictators to become warm."
C S Lewis, in 'Surprised by Joy'.
"I don't care about proofs. I want to know the truth."
Paul Dirac, after his assistant told him he had discovered the answer to their research problem, but could not prove it.
"Science has determined that the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. Therefore, common sense tells that the speed of dark must be even greater, since it has to get out of the way."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Sound of One Clap, Handing'.
"Fifty years ago, a classical education forced students to learn Greek and Latin, even though in most cases it was knowledge that would be completely useless to them. Nowadays, we just do calculus."
Professor Gradgrind, of Hardtack University.
"He's 52 now, but so fears old age that he prefers to think of himself as 11 centigrade."
The master of ceremonies, introducing Tom Lehrer at the Tomfoolery celebration.
"Where there's a bang, there's Yang."
Graduate students in experimental physics describe the hazards of allowing their equipment to get near the notoriously accident-prone C N Yang, co-discoverer of parity violation.
"After great effort and planning, the French Army is now fully prepared to win the previous war."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Time, and Other One-Way Streets'.
"The more the universe seems comprehensible,
the more it also seems pointless."
Steven Weinberg, physicist, in 'The First Three Minutes'.
"I am not a speed reader;
I am a speed understander."
Isaac Asimov, who wrote more than 500 books, even if he didn't have time to read them all.
"The wider the circle of knowledge,
the greater the circumference of ignorance."
A Kakanian proverb.
"But now we see through a dark, glassly."
The Reverend William Archibald Spooner.
"It's like words are your second language, sir."
Richard Splett, deputy assistant to the vice president, admiring the impromptu eloquence of vice presidential candidate Tom James, a character in the HBO series 'Veep'.
"Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, the army is free to move from point to point, and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating in the interior of our country, where supplies are accessible. Nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain."
The Confederate government bulletin after the fall of Richmond.
"Money doesn't matter; what's important is having it."
Contessa Marguerite Dumont, a character in the film 'Marguerite'.
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
Professor Irwin Corey, the World's Foremost Authority.
"The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level."
Wolfgang Pauli.
"Oppenheimer once said that Wolfgang Pauli was the only person he knew who was identical to his own caricature."
Jeremy Bernstein, in 'Physicists on Wall Street'.
"This looks like a bird, but no bird looks like this."
Jeremy Bernstein, in 'The Merely Personal', recalls a friend's self evaluation of his first amateur painting.
"Little things upset him. When Pluto was declared not a planet, he was just devastated."
Ken Jennings, Jeopardy champion, in 'Maphead'.
"We don't even wake up for less than $10,000 a day."
Linda Evangelista, supermodel.
"Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.
Richard Hamming.
"The increased legibility of his handwriting only serves to reveal the inadequacy of his ability to spell."
Nicholas Elliott's good news/bad news report card from Eton.
"The master points to the moon;
the disciple stares at the master's finger."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to see with other eyes."
Marcel Proust.
"Being a comedian has a lot in common with being a matador. The feedback is so instant you can't argue about it."
Camilla Cleese, actress, writer, and daughter of John Cleeese.
"The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes."
Sir Thomas Beecham.
"Henry James chews more than he has bitten off."
Mrs Henry Adams.
"Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind.
One said to the other, 'The flag is moving.'
The other replied, 'The wind is moving.'
Huineng overheard this.
He said, 'Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving.'"
Wumen Huikai, in 'The Gateless Barrier'.
"Science progresses one funeral at a time."
Max Planck, on the disadvantages of deference to the great and old.
"Our failures lay in our inability to appreciate the extreme obstinacy of Hitler. More than once we forecast that he would withdraw to shorter lines in Italy or Russia or the Balkans in order to economize on divisions. I still believe he would have done better if he had followed our advice!"
A member of Britain's Joint Intelligence Subcommittee, musing on the difficulty of predicting Hitler's actions.
"If one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet'."
Paul Krugman, as the Lemmings Party marches toward the sea.
"All I was sayin is that a horse is a different proposition from what a lot of people think. A lot of what people take for ignorance on the part of the horse is just confusion between the righthand horse and the lefthand horse. Like if you was to saddle a horse and all and then walk around to his off side and start to mount up. You know what's goin to happen.
Sure. All hell's goin to bust loose.
That's right. That particular horse aint even seen you yet."
Cormac McCarthy, in 'Cities of the Plain'.
"Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot!"
From 'Titanic, or Dash, Dot dot, Dash, Dot Dash, Dash Dot, Dot dot, Dash dot dash dot', one of the first operas to be written and performed entirely in Morse code.
"Kepler observed that the apparently irregular motions of the planets were a function of the form of the lens of the eye. This does not mean that we cannot study the planets, only that we must also study the eye."
A S Byatt, in 'Still Life'.
"Nowadays being anonymous is worse than being poor."
Rachel Barbra Berry, a character on the TV show 'Glee'.
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Charles Mackay, in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds'.
"Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and soon I was fully convinced that he understood it."
Chaim Weizmann, recovering from a transatlantic ship journey with Albert Einstein in 1921.
"How can I miss you when you won't go away?"
Dan Hicks, county music artist, titling a song.
"In this town, I'm the leper with the most fingers."
Jake Gittes, a character in the movie 'The Two Jakes'. played by Jack Nicholson.
"Never modify your office computer on a Friday afternoon."
The Old Programmer's Almanack.
"If the comments and the code disagree, both are probably wrong."
Norm Schryer, computer researcher at AT&T Bell Labs.
"Colleges aren't really in the education business. Colleges are in the credentialing business."
Josh Kaufman, business advisor.
"LIGHTLEAPYEAR: How far a photon travels from the beginning of January 1st, 2016 until the end of December 31, 2016."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"People think that facts help you see a theory, when in fact, it is only by having a theory that you are able to see facts."
Jud Northbark, in 'Quote, Ere a Demon Strand 'em!'.
"'Do you get many complaints about the service here?'
'Certainly not, there is no service!'"
Laurence Olivier, at the front desk of the Ukraine Hotel in Moscow.
"Hard work pays off in the long run...but procrastination pays off now."
Lukas Bystricky, still counting his winnings.
"On the other hand, in America, in the Republic, one must waste a whole day in paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the streets, and must become as stupid as they are, and over there, no opera."
Stendhal, aka Marie-Henrie Beyle, in 'The Charterhouse of Parma'.
"He who excuses himself accuses himself."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The first essential for a prime minister is to be a good butcher."
William Gladstone.
"It's when you don't know where you is goin that you gotta hurry!"
Bun Rabbit, in Walt Kelly's 'Potluck Pogo'.
"You were a pretty thing once. Not that looks are everything. You don't look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire."
John Osborne, in 'The Entertainer'.
"Make sure you buckle up tight. It's the difference between a closed and open casket."
Kerry St Pe, pilot, giving preflight instructions to passenger Mike Tidwell, in 'Bayou Farewell'.
"Every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it."
Laurence Sterne, in 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'.
"'No, you've got it exactly wrong', said McManus, 'the fundamental task of publishers is to decide what NOT to print.'"
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Proverbs and Converbs'.
"She wished God had left Adam and Eve plain, and not stuck the odd bits on to them."
Joyce Cary, in 'Herself Surprised'.
"Senator Foghorn: You're lying, and you know it!
Senator Leghorn: Well yes I am, but hear me out!"
Highlights from the filibuster.
"You must come again when you have less time."
Walter Sickert, painter, escorting a guest to the door.
"I am utterly exhausted. All last night a man was knocking at my door; finally at 6am I just got up and let him out."
Semolina Pilchard.
"Corpses can be found - it's the living who disappear."
A Kakanian proverb.
"There are only a few truly interesting things in this world, maybe sex, sports, feuds, accidents and death; the rest we leave to university professors."
Jud Northbark, after a particularly tedious faculty dinner.
"Socrates: Well, you know, you can't prove a negative.
Mocrates: Oh, yeah? And can you prove that?"
Battle of the Sophists.
"I feel if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."
Tom Lehrer, author of 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park'.
"The German nightmare is to stand in front of a counter; the German dream is to sit behind a counter."
Kurt Tucholsky, German satirist and writer.
"Although every week we had a different colloquium speaker, the abstract I was given to publicize was invariably two or three indigestible paragraphs of unappealing jargon, so that, in order to attract an audience, I was compelled to append a short catchy blurb like `Spider Silk Stronger Than Kevlar?' - it was sort of like English Subtitles for the Hard of Thinking."
Rembell Ofderbally.
"When you own a presentation device, everyone who has to give a presentation becomes your friend."
Burkardt's Corollary to Borggaard's Pickup-Truck Theorem.
"When you own a pickup truck, everyone who has to move becomes your friend."
Jeff Borggaard's Theorem.
"Artie: 'Larry's a good man, but he is a performer, and you should try to think of a performer as a small, helpless child.'
Jeannie: 'No, Artie - you know I have sex with him.'
Artie: 'I'm so sorry.'"
The Larry Sanders Show.
"Do you want:
* FAST CASH
* BALANCE INQUIRY
* UNDEFINED"
A haphazardly programmed Sun Trust ATM.
"They make a desert and call it peace."
Calgacus, Caledonian chieftain, criticizing the encroachments of the Roman empire, quoted by Tacitus.
"George: 'My whole life has been a complete waste of time!'
Jerry: 'And there's so much more to go!'"
Seinfeld.
"ANARCHY, or, to use a more neutral term, the passion for armed self-help."
Eric Hobsbawm, in 'The Age of Capital', Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States!"
Porfirio Diaz, president of Mexico.
"The right honorable Gentleman caught the Whigs bathing,
and walked away with their clothes.
He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal position,
and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments."
Benjamin Disraeli, of how Tory Leader Sir Robert Peel 'stole' the increased franchise, originally one of the Whig party's initiatives.
"He is a landmark, but not a beacon."
J Robert Oppenheimer, on Einstein's unproductive later years, spent denying quantum mechanics and pursuing a unified field theory.
"Contemporary physicists come in two varieties.
Type 1 physicists are bothered by EPR.
Type 2, the majority, are not.
But one has to distinguish two subvarieties.
Type 2a physicists explain why they are not bothered.
Their explanations tend to miss the point entirely,
or to contain physical assertions that can be shown to be false.
Type 2b are not bothered and refuse to explain why.
Their position is unassailable."
David Mermin, physicist, on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox.
"LOGO: a language with a great grammar, but not much literature."
Marvin Minsky, computer scientist, Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Try as I do, I can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis."
Muriel Spark, in 'A Far Cry From Kensington'.
"I will say that the one feature I like about men is that they can usually figure out how small appliances work."
Charles Baxter, in 'The Feast of Love'.
"None go so far as those who know not whither they are going."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The kind of mathematician who can't find their shoes except in a Sobolev space will not like this book at all."
John Boyd, reviewing Oliver Buehler's 'Waves and Mean Flow'.
"My goal every day is to try to keep 218 frogs in a wheelbarrow long enough to get something passed."
John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives.
"The Irish are a very fair people. They never speak well of one another."
Samuel Johnson.
"There is a tremendously strong perception that we bungled, bungled, bungled very badly. I think we were within the normal journalistic range of bungle."
Mary Mapes, explaining why the movie based on her discredited 60 Minutes II report on George Bush's military record is called 'Truth'.
"There were so many women, at various stages of his life, that we read not only of mistresses but of submistresses."
From a review of a biography of poet Ted Hughes.
"Memory is the only true real estate."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If you need a new idea, read an old book."
A Kakanian proverb.
"You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It's the stuff we can understand. It's cats that are complicated."
John Horton Conway, mathematician and inventor of the game of Life.
"Men love women; women love children; children love hamsters."
Joanna Trollope, in 'Second Honeymoon'.
"We investigated before the crime was committed, not after!"
Florian Tenbrock, former East German Stasi officer, expressing his exasperation with police work in the united Germany.
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Alberto Brandolini, enunciating the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.
"A real genius. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know anything about sports."
General Leslie Groves, on why he picked J Robert Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan project.
"This post was written by : if ( function_exists( 'coauthors_posts_links' ) ) { coauthors_posts_links(); } else { the_author_posts_link(); } who has written 296 posts on The Movie Blog."
An accident at themovieblog.com.
"All you need in the Army is a strong back and a weak mind."
William Langer's company commander, enlisting him for service in the first World War.
"The problem with socialism is that you always run out of other people's money."
Margaret Thatcher.
"Yet another cackle! Will there ever be an egg?"
James Chadwick, physicist, upon reading yet another paper on the emerging but murky field of quantum mechanics, 1926.
"They have brought me a bat!"
King Charles II, after meeting his future bride Catherine of Braganza, whose bizarre Portuguese dress included wings.
"There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time."
Susanna Clarke, in 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell'.
"Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible."
Samuel Johnson, after unwillingly listening to a violin piece and being told to appreciate it because it was difficult.
"He has the air of a man who has not so much achieved success, as become resigned to it."
Hilary Mantel, in 'Bring Up the Bodies'.
"The sun will shine on a dog's ass."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Even the bad man is given the Sabbath."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Barr: 'You know this means one of us will have to be president.'
Buchanan: 'Well that would have to be you, because I don't answer my mail."
Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, dividing the spoils, after being asked to take over Saint John's College in Annapolis.
"Having a PhD is no barrier to being hired at St John's, but it can't help."
Anonymous faculty member at St John's College, where every faculty member is expected to be able to teach every class.
"I love you with all the passion attendant thereto."
Mortimer Adler, waxing concupiscient.
"He is incapable of taking any initiative whatsoever, one of those people who could drown in a glass of water."
Irene Nemirovsky, in 'Suite Francaise'.
"For us, Zen means to empty our minds. For a Tahitian to have Zen, he would first have to fill it up."
Tony Horwitz, in 'Blue Latitudes'. "Tucson Arizona is where the summer comes for the winter and Hell comes for the summer."
H L Mencken.
"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
Edsgar Dijkstra.
"Donald Knuth loves to begin his papers with obscure quotations. On occasion, he has found a saying he likes so much that he has written a paper just so that he can preface it with that quotation."
An anonymous fan.
"I think she is often wrong, but most of the people I know think it is important to have her around because she's wrong in such a fruitful way."
John Maynard Smith, biologist, on Lynn Margulis.
"No speaker of any natural language would casually say 'I saw a cow, call it 'cow', which was doing cow things in a cowly way among other instances of cows,' and yet this repetitious moronic drivel is the standard pattern in the culture of computer programming."
Jud Northbark, in 'Pointers to Nothing'.
"It would often happen that he would return the next day after a protracted discussion and say, 'Well, I have consulted my pillow on that question, and after all, I believe I was wrong.'"
Judge Bullard, on Judge Martin of the Louisiana Supreme Court.
"To evaluate modern education, look at a student's handwriting. It will appall you. They don't teach handwriting anymore. They don't teach reading or mathematics either, but that's easier to hide."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Acid Bath'.
"You live, you die, your stuff goes out to the curb."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire."
Morris Kline, in 'Why the Professor Can't Teach'.
"Almost any competent administrators became CMG (known among recipients as standing for 'Call Me God'); governors of second-class crown colonies were advanced to KCMG ('Kindly Call Me God'); and governors of first-class colonies were promoted to GCMG ('God Calls Me God')."
David Canadine, in 'Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire'.
"Of course I go too far, but unless you go too far, how can you tell how far you can go?"
Robert Thomas, New York Times obituarist.
"If you only have five minutes to solve a problem, use three of them to determine the best approach."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie."
Clarence Barron, president of Dow Jones & company, and manager of the Wall Street Journal.
"Standing by my door, I heard the discharge of a gun, and in 4 or 5 seconds of time after the discharge, the small shot came rattling about me, one or two of which struck the house, which plainly demonstrates that the velocity of sound is much greater than that of a cannon-bullet."
Benjamin Banneker, upon being shot at.
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?"
Aaron Altman, a character in the movie 'Broadcast News', played by Albert Brooks.
"People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard it talked about."
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
"When I was a child, I could already draw as well as Raphael. But it has taken my whole life to learn to draw as well as a child."
Pablo Picasso.
"Success is a self-correcting phenomenon."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Recycled Gum'.
"I hope you will soon be playing well enough for me to beat you."
Vladimir Nabokov, hearing that his friend Edmund Wilson was taking up chess.
"First buy the horse, then buy the saddle."
Robert Carver, in 'The Accursed Mountain'.
"Two political prisoners were talking on their arrival at the notorious Burrel gaol. 'I got ten years, what did you get?' asked the first. 'I got fifteen' said the second. 'What for?' asked the first. 'Nothing,' replied the second. 'Listen,' riposted the first sharply, if we're going to be friends you're going to have to be honest with me. For fifteen years you must have done something - ten years is the sentence for nothing."
Robert Carver, in 'The Accursed Mountain'.
"The unsmiling girl at the reception desk spoke a few words of Greek, Italian, and English. In all of these she was equally unhelpful."
Robert Carver, in 'The Accursed Mountain'.
"How hard it is to win by attacking the reason when the heart is the fortress in question."
Anthony Trollope.
"Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins."
Edith Wharton.
"Nothing would help us to sell our canvases more than if they could gain acceptance as decorations for middle-class houses."
Vincent Van Gogh, foretelling the doom of his art.
"We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'."
Sir Arthur Eddington.
"Authorities expect the death toll to rise as fundamentalist activists and radical protesters clash with militant reactionaries."
The Gloom and Doom News Template.
"His mail is now delivered by gophers."
Silyas Dogwood, of a despised enemy who recently died.
"We support Tito the way a rope supports a hanged man."
Nikita Krushchev, responding to heckling from the Chinese delegation for deviating from Communist doctrine by supporting Tito.
"The rule of attack is 'never reinforce failure'."
Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, a character in Evelyn Waugh's 'Men at Arms'.
"Intelligentsias are born to be unhappy."
Arnold Toynbee.
"Madness is a language like any other, and thus it has a dictionary, a grammar, and a corresponding and evolving set of cliches whose meaning may be construed."
Dr Hans-Ephraim von Seidensticker, in 'The Unguarded Moment'.
"Women explore for eternity in the vast garden of sacrifice."
A refrigerator magnet poem, quoted by 'Celine' (Julie Delpy) in the movie 'Before Midnight'.
"If you can see Cil Point it means rain later; if not, rain now."
Kingsley Amis, in 'The Old Devils'.
"When American movie executives decided to make a film version of Alan Bennett's play 'The Madness of George III', they insisted on renaming it 'The Madness of King George', knowing that otherwise the American audience would assume they had missed the first two parts."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'A True Bill of Particulars'.
"Teachers embraced computers in the classroom because it allowed them to stop actually teaching; who can blame students for following their lead?"
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Compressing the Vacuum'.
"It's only after you have attempted to constuct a fool-proof system that you begin to appreciate the inexhaustible inventiveness of fools."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Ring in Poseidon's Bathtub'.
"Newton had a cat he loved so much that with his own hands he sawed a little opening at the bottom of the door to his office so that she could visit him freely. When the cat had kittens, Newton got out the saw again and cut another, smaller opening so that the kittens could visit him as well. You can't be a genius at everything."
Jud Northbark, in 'Sculptures in the Dust'.
"Like lava walls in Hawaii, the frontiers of a country mark the limits of the most recent eruption of hatred."
Jud Northbark, in 'As the Tick Swells'.
"Each of us knows from his own experiences that there is something beyond the evidence."
E M Forster.
"The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated."
Randy Powell, revealing Vortex Based Mathematics, the most profound re-discovery of all time.
"So far, so good."
A man, having jumped off a 100 story building, passing the second floor. "The spirit of community is not dead. When I saw that the sidewalk in front of our office was covered in mud and started cleaning it away with a board, many people stopped by to help. They helped by giving me phone numbers I could call so that someone else could come and do the work."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'The Buck Passed Me'.
"I stepped into fabulosity late in life."
Joanna Coles, editor of Cosmopolitan.
"The river cannot be stepped in twice by the same you."
Heraclitus Junior, in 'Battle of the Books, the Rematch'.
"To Citizeness Boilleau,
Rue Revolutionnaire, former Saint-Louis, at Paris,
this 4 Floreal.

My dear friend,

I beg you to do your utmost to bring a well-seasoned lettuce salad
or rather the materials for making one, we have bowls; but try to
make sure that it is fresh and in good condition. If you have no
money, try to get hold of some for this advance. As I am writing
to you by the small post, I don't want to send it to you, but I
shall get it to you later. Don't forget the oil and vinegar. If
you cannot get money to do this, take the trouble to come and see
me and I shall give you what you need to buy what is necessary.
We have salt, but bring a little pepper. Try to do this for us
today, if at all possible, I shall be very obliged to you, and
bring as much oil as you can. I shall be very obliged to you and
embrace you with all my heart.

Your husband Boilleau."
A prisoner, writing home during the Reign of Terror.
"When you talk to God, it's praying;
when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia."
Ruth Rendell, in 'Adam and Eve and Pinch Me'.
"And all the crows in all the trees
cry Banyan for the Banyanese!"
Michael Ondaatje, in 'The Cat's Table'.
"So I asked him, how can it be both an aphrodisiac and a laxative, and he said, well, it's all in the timing."
Michael Ondaatje, in 'The Cat's Table'.
"His nickname is 'Else' because if no one else is willing to handle a problem, then he has to."
Mike Schneier, explicating the nickname of a hapless departmental drudge.
"After dining with Gladstone, I believed he was the smartest person in England;
After dining with Disraeli, I believed I was the smartest person in England."
A woman who chanced to dine successively with both contestants for the premiership of Great Britain.
"Millions were spent on the library renovation, the staff got bright new offices, the students got chat rooms, TV's and coffee bars; meanwhile the books were all 'archived' or sent to the basement, and yet we kept all the librarians."
Jud Northbark, in 'Jesus Driving the Coffee Vendors from the Library'.
"Corporate mission statements prove that the emperor's new clothes fit every size."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Form Hungers for its Filling'.
"Every environmental slogan boils down to: ...We're destroying the world a little more slowly than before..."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Hell Money'.
"Visitor: 'In your institute, nobody takes anything seriously.'
Bohr: 'That is quite true, and even applies to what you just said.'"
A visitor, complaining to Niels Bohr after spending time at his atomic physics laboratory in Copenhagen.
"Talking with him was like playing tennis with a man who, whenever you knocked the ball over to his side, put it in his pocket."
An acquaintance of Alexander Fleming, who first described the mold that produces penicillin.
"The man in ecstasy, and the man drowning - both throw up their arms."
Franz Kafka.
"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
Somerset Maugham, in 'Cakes and Ale'.
"USER-FRIENDLY: Software I have written."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Dotting Your Ellipsis', from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"LOS ANGELES: three million people in search of a downtown."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"It does not surprise me that the devil is an Irishman, though I thought perhaps a bit taller."
From the movie 'A Field in England', by Ben Wheatley.
"I always keep a supply of stimulant handy, in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy."
W C Fields.
"When you starve with a tiger, the tiger starves last."
Walt Kelly, author of the 'Pogo' cartoon strip.
"Socrates is a man;
All men are mortal;
Therefore, all men are Socrates."
Woody Allen.
"Even donkey shit is shiny on the outside."
A Kakanian proverb.
"You see things that are and you say, 'Why?'... I dream things that never were, and you say, 'Stop making things up!'"
Judge Barnyard Slaw, in 'The Shredded Thumb'.
"1. "No, that cannot happen! 2. Well, it does not happen when I run the program! 3. Honestly, that wasn't supposed to happen; 4. So..., why did that actually happen? 5. Oh... 6. Wait a minute...how did my program ever work?"
The (first) Six Stages of Debugging.
"The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder."
Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, during the disastrous riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
"Dick Armey is a stupid person's idea of a smart person."
Ezra Klein.
"I love my wife so much I almost told her."
A Norwegian farmer, confessing to his best friend.
"Your mother has a smooth forehead."
The worst possible insult in the Klingon language, literally 'Hab SoSlI Quch'.
"The price of coffins is rising."
The Dowager Empress of China, suggesting to one of her officials that his immediate suicide would be politically useful to her.
"The calculator is a shamelessly inadequate crutch for the mathematical cripples produced by the current education system. If you don't believe this, ask a student to evaluate:
     1 + 1 / ( 2 + 1 / ( 3 + 1 / ( 4 + 1 / 5 ) ) )
The correct answer is 225/157 or about 1.4331, but they will spend far more time arguing with you that this expression has no meaning before effortlessly dashing off some ridiculously wrong answer which they neither believe nor doubt."
Jud Northbark, Time Magazine's Man of the Year, 2006.
"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.
'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
Ernest Hemingway, in 'The Sun Also Rises'.
"A true fan won't agree that anything about MATLAB is bad; he won't even agree that there are bad MATLAB programs. No, he will say, giving you a meaningful stare, there are just bad MATLAB programmers."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Dummy Argument'.
"In the folk tradition of C, programs are written 'upside down', with the most trivial parts coming first, so that the main program, which explains it all, comes as a belated surprise to the weary reader. C theologians praise this as 'bottom up' programming, whereas it is, in fact, a stone-cold case of a lazy avoidance of properly declaring procedures."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'They Should Have Stopped at B'.
"The really bad features of a programming language are unique. They are so awful that no other language copies them. Among such ghastly goofs we must include the question mark operator of C, which does nothing but abbreviate a simple logical operation into an obscure miasma of punctuation."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'They Should Have Stopped at B'.
"PRECYCLE: to use only one side of a sheet of paper; to discard clothes because they are no longer fashionable; to create waste products; to leave a trail of unused products; Sample sentence: 'If it weren't for us precyclers, the recyclers would have nothing to work with!'"
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"What can you expect from a pig but a grunt?"
Patrick Weston Joyce, in 'English as We Speak it in Ireland'.
"His skill is building large pediments for small statues."
Alistair Cooke, on public relations specialist Benjamin Sonnenberg.
"I don't want to see a Swiss watch in pieces. I want to hear it tick."
James Evershed Agate, English theater critic, rejecting the analytic approach to literary criticism.
"Cooke, you must learn to murder your darlings."
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, returning a florid essay to the Cambridge undergraduate Alistair Cooke.
"TROPE-A-DOPE: The use of the word 'trope' in any circumstance whatsoever, revealing that one has had an education just good enough to know a lot of extra words, but not when not to use them."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"PUBLIC PERFORMANCE OF THESE CAPTIONS WITHOUT PERMISSION IS FORBIDDEN!"
The real reason that the controversial 'Captions Courageous: The Public Performance' was shut down.
"TAURCEN: A creature formed from the head of a horse and the lower body of a man; the leftovers from a centaur; considered neither intelligent nor speedy, this armless creature generally starved to death, since attempts to graze resulted in an unrecoverable fall."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I've never seen anyone so ugly with just one head."
Malcolm Tucker, a character playing the Director of Communications, in the TV series 'The Thick of It'.
"He is the first prime minister to crawl at 250 miles per hour."
Dorothy Parker, after Neville Chamberlain's many airplane trips to Europe culminated in the shameful Munich agreement with Hitler.
"There's no time to go home. I'll pass myself coming back in."
Hugh Abbot, minister in charge of the Department of Social Affairs, in 'The Thick of It'.
"AMORSTICE: The voluntary, mutual, temporary cessation of a state of woo."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude."
Michael Lewis, in 'Liar's Poker'.
"To succeed at Salomon Brothers, you have to wake up every morning ready to bite the ass off a bear."
John Gutfreund, CEO of the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers.
"It's no use crying over all the fish in the sea."
A Kakanian proverb.
"There's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns."
Octavia Butler, author of the Patternist science fiction series.
"The covers of this book are too far apart."
Ambrose Bierce, author of 'The Devil's Dictionary', reviewing a book.
"He pisses more than he drinks."
Silyas Dogwood, of a boaster.
"No trees were harmed in the creation of this document."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Don't print this e-book!'.
"The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment."
Steve Eisman, financial analyst.
"You gaze at a photograph and see yourself frozen in time;
it gazes back and sees you crumbling into old age."
Bencherman Franken, in 'Murmurrings and Refractions'.
"I lay down at night a man and arose in the morning a bruise."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after a night sleeping on a Cambridge dormitory bed he described as like two sacks of potatoes tied together.
"Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first."
Julian Barnes, in 'The Sense of an Ending'.
"The free ride on ever-faster computer processors is over. It is time for lazy programmers to get smart or get out."
Upton Downs, in 'The Wizard of Up'.
"So what are the possibilities of working from home?"
Roger Gradstud, investigating the chances of a career in the Marine Corps.
"As well as being an outstanding patron, Rudolf built up a truly remarkable collection which has frequently been likened to his own personality in its immense richness and lack of purposeful direction."
Arthur MacGregor, a British writer who largely invented the hisory of museums, on Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II [1552-1612], compulsive collector of treasures, monstrosities and wonders.
"Can't spell? Then be apart of our group!"
American Paragraphic Association, ad campaign slogan.
"This may not be what George Washington looked like then, but this is what he looks like now."
A guide, standing before Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington at the Museum of Modern Art.
"In the case that the formula is neither provable nor disprovable, such a machine certainly does not behave in a very satisfactory manner, for it continues to work indefinitely without producing any result at all, but this cannot be regarded as very different from the reaction of the mathematicians."
Alan Turing.
"Escape from a Nazi death camp was made possible by contributions from viewers like you."
PBS, announcing what great things I have done.
"If it isn't broken, take it apart and fix it."
The engineer's motto.
"The circle of the English language has a well defined center but no discernible circumference."
James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
"Three may keep a secret if two are deaf."
Bencherman Franken, in 'Porridge is on My Neck'.
"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Blind Potatoes'.
"Our city's forestry plan is evidently the typical compromise: the forest is to be preserved forever, but the trees may go."
Upton Downs, in 'Down-Time'.
"Youth will pass; immaturity is forever."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'A Thousand Follies'.
"On the sun, it is noon, always and everywhere."
Marcel Marceau, in 'The Quotable Marcel Marceau'.
"Inter arma enim silent leges. [During war, the law is silent.]"
Cicero, in 'Pro Milone'.
"I spent four years having nothing but classified thoughts."
J Robert Oppenheimer, war-time director of Los Alamos Laboratory.
"The only medicine that can cure presidential ambition is embalming fluid."
Morris Udall.
"Rubber gloves don't keep you alive; fear does."
Denny McLean, master electrician, accident-free for 30 years but repeatedly cited by his boss for refusing to wear safety gloves on the job.
"You should always look for money where you lost it."
Morris Lipsett, announcing he will make a fresh start, in the demolition business, after having lost his life savings to bankruptcy, in the demolition business,
"Have I said something unexpectedly foolish?"
Alcibiades, Athenian statesman and turncoat, on receiving a thunderous ovation from the audience.
"They said our operating system was unusable. So how did we solve that problem? We wrote manuals, tons and tons of them - but no one read them. They said the manuals were unreadable. So how did we solve that problem? If no one can read the manuals, we obviously don't need them. And now we're the world's top manual-free operating system. Problem solved!"
Richard Member, director of the Easter Egg Gnostic App Driver (EEGAD).
"Your proposed password 'jfurkenbong$4209' failed the dictionary test."
Jud Northbark's computer screen, just before he shot it.
"If you stop asking when the job will be done, the answer is 'Never'."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Cleaner Vacuums'.
"Upon reports of computer security issues, have all users change their passwords. Then go back to bed."
Jud Northbark, in 'Now Playing in the Security State Theater'.
"The amount of work a committee can fail to do is proportional to the square of the size of the committee."
Brewster Bragsheer, acting second deputy vice-chair pro-tem of the ad hoc standing committee of the whole.
"So I guess God is unpacking him now."
Arthur Conan Doyle's daughter Mary, leaving a funeral after being told that Mr Jones was in a coffin because he was being sent to heaven.
"A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak as the case requires."
Francis Bacon, in 'Of Friendship'.
"My work consists of two parts: the one presented here, plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose committee refused to grade his unwritten work.
"If I walked across the Potomac river in front of a hundred witnesses, the headline in the Washington Post would be THE PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM."
Lyndon Johnson, the unsinkable.
"Don't try to shit higher than your asshole."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wasn't all that tall.
"Never slap a man in the face when he's chewing tobacco."
Francis J Underwood, congressman and president, a character in 'House of Cards'.
"It is said that Plato admitted no student ignorant of geometry. These days, we admit students entirely unable to master or even understand the notion of nested parentheses, suggesting that their own intellects operate at a correspondingly primitive level of simple, direct sentences: I eat food; hand scratches nose; car goes fast."
Jud Northbark, in 'Parentheses in Every Direction'.
"Set theory takes as its fundamental atom the empty set, a thing that contains nothing. You might think such an idea can go no further, but set theory creates a new, distinct thing, the set which contains the empty set, essentially a box full of a box full of nothing. You can see that nothing will stop a mind that thinks this way. Even God must tip his hat to such audacious creation ex nihilo."
Jud Northbark, in 'Parentheses in Every Direction'.
"Many people are puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced in such uniform lengths, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders in producing the perfect spaghetti."
BBC Panorama broadcast on the annual spaghetti harvest in Switzerland, 1 April 1957.
"Have YOU found Waldo?"
The motto of the Church of the Second Coming of Waldo.
"This mind intentionally blank."
Logo for a T-shirt at an unbearably boring engineering conference.
"Berkeley's views admit of no answer and produce no conviction."
David Hume, rebuffing the philosophic arguments of George Berkeley, who argued that the material world is an illusion we generate, and that the only reality is an ideal one in our minds.
"Negotiating with Michael Collins is like trying to write on water."
Lionel Curtis, while settling the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921.
"Let's say that as a general rule, I like to be able to follow a talk, but not to actually predict it!"
Mike Schneier, during the presentation of a paper at a math conference.
"A straight road is an offense unto God; then let it bend, yea, let it turn and cross itself. And if it nonetheless go straight, then let its length be not long, else that is presumption and arrogance. But if straight and long it must be, then let it not go so in both directions, for the life of ease and convenience is an abomination. Yet if it will be straight and long and bidirectional, then may it be cursed with many names, so that those who attempt to traverse it will be crushed by confusion and misery."
From 'The Secret Protocols of the Tallahassee Department of Roads'.
"Fathom it for me."
Piers Morgan, insufferable television excrescence, after asking what could expain the mysterious diversion and disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines plane, and receiving the answer that it was 'unfathomable'.
"If my devils are to leave me,
I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."
Rainer Maria Rilke.
"Compromise is a stalling between two fools."
Stephen Fry, one half of 'Fry and Laurie', and 'Jeeves and Wooster'.
"Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship."
Sydney Smith, eccentric editor of the Edinburgh Review, on meeting at dinner a woman of similar tastes.
"My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon."
Sydney Smith, English cleric, conveying the isolation of an assignment to the English countryside.
"Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam engine in trousers."
Sydney Smith.
"The thing about poverty is that it happens to the people who can least afford it."
Silyas Dogwood, in 'Crumbs from the Cracker Barrel'.
"A paradox is a red flag indicating a fundamental error in reasoning. When I was a a child, my father asked me which direction I would look in order to see the moon, and I said, up, of course. Then he asked me, if I was standing on the moon, which direction I would look to see the earth, and I said, down, of course, and he said: but then you would only see your shoes."
Jason Rosenhouse, approximately, in 'The Monty Hall Problem'.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
William Butler Yeats, (a misattribution of a statement of Plutarch).
"The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting."
Plutarch, in 'On Listening'.
"CHUTZPAH: When you shit on a stranger's doorstep, then knock on the door and ask for toilet paper."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"When it comes to love,
woman gives and forgives,
man gets and forgets."
A Kakanian proverb.
"When I was a minimal bud on the evolutionary bush, my happiness was maximally contingent on the false dichotomy of visiting an echt museum or, faute de mieux, equilibrating my punctuation at Yankee Stadium, that optimal hecatomb of Babe Ruth's career (see my book, 'Dynamic Stasis')."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Literary Sins of Gulden J Stevens'.
"The definition of inanity is repeating the same axiom over and over and expecting the same result."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'This Mind Intentionally Blank'.
"Dealing with Newt Gingrich is like hugging an eel."
Bill Clinton.
"The majority of people who clicked on this piece stopped reading it a few paragraphs ago."
Alex Pareene, journalist for Salon magazine, facing the reality of the Internet attention span.
"CLOSE PAREN"
Jan Wesley Shockley, lifelong proofreader for the Waycross Indiana News-Historian, epitaph.
"AGNOSTIC: One who imagines it possible that God has simply left the room for a moment."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"There is the attitude that says, 'As long as I keep riding on this train, it won't go to the wrong destination.'"
J Robert Oppenheimer, recalling his decision to remain on the General Advisory Commission after the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, vetoed their report denouncing the hydrogen bomb.
"I have plenty of friends to do something with; I have nobody to do nothing with."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Dog Returns to His Vomit'.
"When Pauli had gone looking for an assistant to join him in Zurich in the spring of 1933, it was almost an accident that he had chosen Weisskopf instead of Bethe.
'Who are you?' Pauli asked without ceremony after he had finished a calculation at the desk.
'I am Weisskopf, you asked me to be your assistant.'
'Yes,' said Pauli. 'First I wanted to take Bethe, but he works in solid-state theory, which I don't like, although I started it.'
When Weisskopf showed Pauli what he'd done with his first assignment after a week's work, Pauli looked at it with a growing expression of fathomless disgust and then said, 'I should have taken Bethe after all.'"
Thomas Powers, in 'Heisenberg's War'.
"When your ancestors were still living in trees, mine were already forging checks!"
Fritz Houtermans, physicist, defending his heritage.
"I have seen a physicist for the first time. He suffers as he thinks!"
Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, after meeting Niels Bohr.
"No, no, you are not thinking - you are just being logical!"
Niels Bohr, physicist, criticizing the argument of a speaker at a conference.
"Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing."
Joseph O'Neill, in 'Netherland'.
"The church is near, but the road is icy;
the pub is far, but I will walk carefully."
A Kakanian proverb, as quoted by Joseph Hemmeter.
"It is easier to write a new code than to understand an old one."
John von Neumann.
"Never turn down an offer that hasn't been made yet."
Max Gunzburger.
"Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors."
Preface to the RAND Corporation book 'A Million Random Digits, With 100,000 Normal Deviates'.
"If you have nothing to do, please do not do it here."
An anti-loitering sign in Bengal.
"He couldn't really tell very good people from less good people. I guess they all seemed so much slower."
Raoul Bott, speculating on why John von Neumann treated smart and stupid people equally.
"In all my years I have never seen such beautiful evening clothes: pray, who is the candidate's tailor?"
David Hilbert, questioning PhD candidate John von Neumann.
"RAINBOW: the symbol of hope, indicating that the rain is about to be driven away by the sun;
WOBNIAR: the symbol of despair, indicating that the sun is about to disappear behind a murderous downpour."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"ECNALUBMA: The mysterious wailing vehicle you have just crashed into head-on, which is now incapable of taking you to the MOOR YCNEGREME."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"BBC Radio's correspondent Peter Day has a rumbling baritone so rich and throaty that he must be pressing all the keys on the pipe organ at once. You could take any one of his broadcasts, slice it, butter it, and feed a nation for a week."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Holiday in the Dark'.
"But Madam, do I not also destroy my enemies by making them my friends?"
Abraham Lincoln, after being denounced as a half-hearted patriot by a woman who wanted him to drive the South into the ground.
"It is time to recognize that we have lost the battle against the indiscriminate use of the word 'literally'. But we only lost because we still believed that the word actually had meaning. It now has none, and is simply a sort of language extender. In fact, every sentence can be improved by inserting the word 'literally' in it, and the only remaining question we face is where and how often to do so."
Otto Tintenfleck, grammarian, speaking literally the last word on the war over the misuse of the word 'literally'.
"I find a change of nuisance to be a sort of vacation."
David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, asked how he could bear to face a miner's strike and an uprising in Ireland while prosecuting the first World War.
"Neugebauer always insisted that the length of the review was not intended to be directly proportional to the importance of the paper. Indeed, a bad paper needed to have a review sufficiently detailed so that nobody needed to look at the paper itself, whereas a really important paper needed only to be called to the world's attention."
Ralph Boas, on Otto Neugebauer's editorship of 'Mathematical Reviews'.
"This book fills a much-needed gap."
A much-needed book review.
"Remember that those who have two strings to their bow may shoot stronger, but they rarely shoot straight."
Queen Elizabeth I, chastising Mary Queen of Scots.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
John Maynard Keynes, English economist and defender of deficit spending
"Interviewer: 'Assuming the show gets picked up for more episodes, what topics are next?'
Moukarbel: 'Ceara Lynch is a humiliatrix in Portland. One service she provides is called 'ignored'. For a few dollars a minute, she'll ignore you. Sometimes, she'll turn that camera on so you can watch her ignore you."
Chris Moukarbel, director of a pilot for a proposed new HBO series called 'Sex/Now'.
"The intelligent man is able to overcome the difficulties that the wise man avoided in the first place."
Brewster Bragsheer, differentiating between wisdom and intelligence.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them."
Alfred North Whitehead.
"You haven't ignored the last of me!"
Zapp Brannigan, captain of the Democratic Order Of Planets spaceship 'Nimbus'.
"A Harvard Medical School study found, by examining social networks, that obese people are most likely to have obese friends, and that the weight of your friends is a predictor of your own weight. We conclude that the best way to lose weight is to drop all friends heavier than yourself."
Jud Northbark, in 'Banished from Zembla'.
"Time travel is possible; it is practical; in fact it is happening right now - but at a very tiny, but positive, rate."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Cross-eyed Cyclops'.
"Killing time is the worst of murders."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Nail Cries Out for a Hammer'.
"Fearing pain, hunger or illness is rational.
We have experienced these and come out the other side.
But fearing death - no."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Message Found in a Klein Bottle'.
"APPLAUSE: (noun), the echo of a platitude."
Ambrose Bierce, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Actually, killer robot warriors will save lives, by reducing the number of human soldiers on the battlefield."
The Devil's public relations agent.
"Our motto is: We're not happy until you're not happy."
The Lachrymaniacs blues band.
"Being on a university committee taught me two things. The first was about people: no one wants to do anything. The second was about committees: no one wants anything done."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Surfing the Maelstrom'.
"He couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner."
Johnny Carson, assessing Chevy Chase.
"He's luckier than a dog with two dicks."
Bill Clinton, dismissing the career of Barack Obama.
"Things are getting better so much faster now that soon progress will leave us all behind."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Fugitive Splinter'.
"Now it's possible for me to record every moment of my life, but when will I get time to watch it all?"
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Treadmill Marathon'.
"If you talk to gangsters long enough, you'll find out they're just as bad as respectable people."
Murray Kempton, newspaper man, and former copy boy for H L Mencken.
"Republicans get a vote before Saint Peter does."
The Wall Street Journal editorial, after Ohio governor John Kasich justified extending Medicaid by saying that Saint Peter would ask him if he had helped the poor, not if he had supported smaller government.
"There's no education in the second kick of a mule."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Women don't look for handsome men.
Women look for men who have had beautiful women."
Milan Kundera, in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'.
"To fail at one thing is to fail at everything."
A Kakanian proverb.
"How do you eat an elephant? One teaspoonful a day."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If a man wants to learn to ride a horse, he must first learn how to fall off it."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Politics is show business for ugly people."
Jud Northbark, in 'Tinsel in the Ice Cream'.
"How can I miss you if you won't go away?"
Dan Hicks, titling a country song.
"To avoid mistakes, avoid activity."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Who needs barbarians to destroy the library, when the librarians themselves will do the job so enthusiastically, and so thoroughly too!"
Jud Northbark, after the university library remodeled itself into a gaping study hall, chat room, and coffee house, with books and journals banished to a moldy basement on crank-shelves.
"So how did you get this job?"
Most bizarre question posed by a visitor at Mount Vernon to a slave, impersonated by a re-enactor.
"A wake-up call's mother is unfolding. At the other end is a bell, which is telling us we have built a house at the foot of a volcano. The volcano is spewing lava, which says move your house."
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, after the New Republic edited one of his columns down to its residual mixed metaphors and cliches.
"No matter how long you feed the wolf, his gaze returns to the forest."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Before you express surprise or anger at the miserable stage of user software, you should realize that to a software designer, it makes perfect sense to include in a drop-down menu the option 'SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE HEAD'. After all, he reasons, if there are any complaints, I can always add an 'UNDO' option."
Jud Northbark, in 'Computer Software: Threat or Menace?'.
"My second-grader is seriously considering a career in electrical engineering."
Excerpt from a grotesquely premature application for admission to MIT.
"If you blame the axe, you must also blame the tree."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Ian Betteridge, stating his Law of Headlines, and adding 'The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don't actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.'
"Opportunity is like a bald man with a beard:
easier to grab coming than going."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Trouble comes cheap, and leaves expensive."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
Mike Grace, first baseman for the Chicago Cubs.
"Their average age is dead."
Simon Lovell, cheering up his friend Alex Stone, who was expelled by the Society of American Magicians for revealing how certain tricks were performed.
"Another persistent petitioner was a professor in the English department at Louisiana State University who submitted at least a story a week for months, each one worse than the last. He wrote what I consider the single worst opening sentence in the history of English literature: 'Geez, she said, undulating toward the jukebox'."
William Murray, story editor for the New Yorker.
"Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy."
William Blake.
"If you pay peanuts, you'll only hire monkeys."
A Kakanian proverb.
"In the rich man's house, the only place to spit is in his face."
Diogenes.
"The first ten million years were the worst.
The second ten million years were the worst, too.
The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all.
After that, I went into a bit of a decline."
Marvin the paranoid android, expressing the tedium of parking cars while waiting to meet his time-traveling friends.
"A friend of mine recently moved out of her apartment, stayed away for six months, and moved back in again, a sort of real estate Grover Cleveland."
Anna North, journalist, editor, and novelist.
"When I was younger, I could remember anything,
whether it happened or not,
but I am getting old,
and soon I shall remember only the latter."
Mark Twain.
"Mork: The telephone is very simple. It's like a long dachshund that stretches from your house to mine. You pull the tail in your house, and it barks in my house.
Dork: OK, I guess I understand. But then how does radio work?
Mork: The same, only without the dachshund."
Explaining the mysteries of telecommunication.
"Knock knock!
Who's there?
George Zimmerman.
George Zimmerman who?
Congratulations, you're on the jury!"
Don West, defense attorney for George Zimmerman, begins his presentation by joking about the pre-trial publicity.
"Canibus: '99% of your fans wear high heels.'
LL Cool J: '99% of your fans don't exist.'"
Taunt and counter-taunt of two rap stars.
"Fluid dynamicists were divided into hydraulic engineers who observe what cannot be explained, and mathematicians, who explain things that cannot be observed."
Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, British physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner.
"Yonai's first appearance before the diet was a great success. It was reported that he said nothing, said it briefly, elegantly, and forcefully."
Lester Brooks, in 'Behind Japan's Surrender'.
"We were put here on earth to help others.
I'm not sure what the others were put here for."
W H Auden.
"Evolution is an epic recited by a stutterer."
Arthur Ko-Ko-Koestler.
"The blank canvas is afraid of me."
Vincent van Gogh.
"It seemed that his greatest asset was an instantaneous ability to hesitate."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Work Proclaims Its Maker'.
"I was still reeling from my first day as a resident in the Charity ward when a grizzled doctor, with breath reeking of onions, took me out to the smoking lounge and in what he must have thought a kindly manner declared that inside every patient was a dead man trying to get out, and that I was there merely to ensure a comfortable delivery."
Len Kirkson, in 'The Loathsome Threshhold'.
"Lanier is often described as 'visionary', a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills."
Jennifer Kahn, describing Internet opinionator Jaron Lanier.
"One doubts the intellectual consistency of the radical who denounces the Wall Street banker while idealizing the poor; after applying his remedy of universal wealth, he would presumably be impelled to hate everyone."
Jud Northbark, in 'Blows Against the Vampire'.
"Talents too many,
Not enough of any."
Jane Kendall Mason, choosing her own epitaph.
"BE REALISTIC: DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE!"
A demonstrator's sign during the Paris student uprising of 1968.
"Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it."
Alfred North Whitehead, renowned demonstrator that 1+1=2.
"The great book of Nature lies ever open before our eyes and the true philosophy is written in it.
But we cannot read it unless we have first learned the language and the characters in which it is written.
It is written in mathematical language, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures."
Galileo.
"Addicts who inject themselves in the groin are now using an antiseptic wipe before and after they inject. People are really taking care of themselves!"
A determinedly upbeat director of a Ukrainian needle exchange program for heroin users.
"It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones and never gotten credit for that."
Glenn Gould, eccentric pianist.
"When it comes to work, one boy is worth half a man, -
and two boys are worthless."
A South Dakota rancher, scraping the barrel for temporary helpers.
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful,
and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
George Orwell.
"I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected."
Wolfgang Pauli, 1930, queasy after giving birth to the neutrino.
"I just love sleeping. I could do it for days in a row. For me, waking up is like having to hit the pause button in the middle of a really great movie."
Roger Gradstud, expatiating on the many pleasures available to on in the middle of an undemanding graduate school program.
"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing."
Samuel 'Dictionary' Johnson.
"In order to be taken seriously, I had to invent my predecessors."
Benoit 'Bootstrap' Mandelbrot.
"If you're not sure where you're going, be very careful, or you might not get there."
Yogi Berra, who got there eventually.
"Don't plan to wade across a river that's four feet deep on average."
Nassim Taleb, who popularized the expression 'black swan'.
"Nowadays, the future ain't what it used to be."
Yogi Berra.
"Every joke is a little revolution."
George Orwell.
"The paper was due in the afternoon. He spent all morning not writing it and was emotionally exhausted by noon. He wondered whether, next time, he could find someone else who could not write the paper instead of him."
Jud Northbark, in 'Blots From the Copybook'.
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
Abraham Lincoln.
"Being an outspoken person, there are many bumper stickers I would like to put on my car, but I don't want the causes I believe in to be blamed for my bad driving!"
Jud Northbark, in 'Leaving the Scene'.
"Following vigorous recommendations from friends, I took up his book with much anticipation, but reading it, I found that the less I knew about a subject, the more profound he seemed, and I began to wonder if he really knew anything at all."
Brewster Bragsheer, becoming suspicious.
"They've moved me to a new office and I don't like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows."
William Caldicote, experiencing an emotional crisis, in Barbara Pym's 'Excellent Women'.
"Science is a broad church of narrow minds."
Jud Northbark, in 'At the Coffin-Fitter's'.
"Life is beautiful, and it begins tomorrow."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Crumbs in the Mustache'.
"Because I had only one rickety ship, I'm called a bandit.
Because you have a large fleet, you are called an emperor."
A condemned pirate, complaining to Alexander the Great.
"I am starting a process."
Lance Armstrong, dutifully simulating remorse upon being asked by Oprah Winfrey about his cheating seven times in the Tour de France.
"The man of many wishes is the man of little will."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Thanks for Trying, I Guess'.
"Science is the poetics of experience. It does not explain reality; rather, it helps us stage plausible re-enactments."
Jud Northbark, in 'Parade of the Dust Bunnies'.
"Our country is so small and there are so many Russians. Where will we bury them all?"
The Finns, putting up an unexpectedly fierce resistance to Russian invaders in 1939.
"A coincidence is an explanation waiting to happen."
Brewster Bragsheer, the Serendip professor of synchronology.
"I don't know how it could have happened. It started out like 'Romeo and Juliet' but it ended in tragedy."
Milhouse, Bart Simpson's buddy, after losing his girlfriend.
"Because we might meet some ladies."
Jean Jules Jusserand, French ambassador, skinny dipping in the Potomac with Teddy Roosevelt, and explaining why he kept his gloves on.
"It's the best bad idea we've had, sir, by far."
State Department employees, brainstorming a response to the hostage crisis, after realizing none of the standard approaches would work, as imagined in the movie 'Argo'.
"Skepticism is the chastity of the soul, and it is a shame to surrender it too soon."
George Santayana.
"A game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."
Bernard Suits, in 'The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia'.
"Be very careful when dealing with the minor bureaucrat behind the glass partition with his little rubber stamp. It's true that there is not much he can do, but there is no limit to what he can fail to do."
Jud Northbark, in 'My Cup is Full of Empty'.
"Those are my principles. And if you don't like them,
... well, I have others."
Groucho Marx.
"I wish he would bite my other generals!"
King George II, responding to the Duke of Newcastle's complaint that General James Wolfe, who drove the French out of Canada, had no more manners than a mad dog.
"I'm going to turn this team around 360 degrees!"
Brewster Bragsheer, newly-appointed coach of the last-place Leamington Lemmings.
"I've been playing Patsy Cline longer than Patsy Cline did."
Kaya Bondi, who starred in 'Always...Patsy Cline' for over ten years.
"Sometimes I go around in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If there's a better book than this, I haven't written it."
Stephen Colbert, blurbing his book 'America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't'.
"All I can say is that even though I can't make up my mind, when I do, I'll be mighty bitter about it."
John Kennedy, describing a conversation with a California delegate to the 1960 convention, from whom he had requested support.
"When you tell me that 9 out of 10 forest fires are caused by humans, all I hear is that somewhere out there is a crazy bear with matches."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'The Beckoning Scab'.
"A computer program written to solve problems in any spatial dimension is most likely to fail in the case of one dimension."
Frank O'Prussia, in 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Programmer'.
"Fear heard the knock at the door.
Faith got up to answer.
There was no one there."
Christopher Moltisanti.
"I used to think that the brain was the greatest organ in the human body, then I realized, 'Hey! Look who's telling me that!'"
Emo Phillips.
"No matter how many you kill, you can't kill your successor."
Seneca, as Nero prepared another bloody purge of the Roman nobles.
"This recipe is horrible! Maybe I should have left them in longer than two minutes (the recipe doesn't say how long to leave them in the freezer so I just kind of guessed) but mine came out all watery. I won't be making these again."
Chef #1408275, commenting angrily about an online recipe for ice cubes.
"Every man is guilty of all the good things he failed to do."
Voltaire.
"You are nothing but shit in a silk stocking!"
Napoleon, momentarily furious at Talleyrand.
"Napoleon was a self-made man, and he worshipped his creator."
Steven Englund, in 'Napoleon: A Political Life'.
"There is an old Latin saying - the French attack each other like wolves. This may be unfair - to wolves."
Steven Englund, in 'Napoleon: A Political Life'.
"Absence diminishes small passions and inflates large ones, as the wind extinguishes candles but whips up a fire."
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
"'Do you mind me asking how old you are, Mrs Walsh-Atkins?'
'Can you keep a secret, Inspector?'
'Yes.'
'So can I', she whispered."
Colin Dexter, in 'Service of All the Dead'.
"A word processor with automatic tabbing and indenting has all the specious advantages and disastrous consequences of an automatic flush toilet."
Jud Northbark, in 'No Vacancy at the Hilbert Hotel'.
"He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea."
G K Chesterton, speaking of a madman.
"Good career move."
Gore Vidal, commenting on the death of Truman Capote.
"A battleship's purpose is to give and not to receive."
C S Forester, putting a moral spin on naval warfare.
"Everyone knows that all your ancestors died in bed."
An Albanian insult.
"Number of persons fallen in the water: 2
Number of persons saved: 2
Total: 4"
Alexander Herzen, anarchist on internal exile, reporting an entry in the records of the Siberian bureaucracy.
"Critics meet and talk about aesthetics. Artists meet and talk about turpentine."
Pablo Picasso.
"Parmenio: If I were Alexander, I should accept this offer.
Alexander: So should I, if I were Parmenio."
An exchange between Alexander the Great and his chief general Parmenio, on receipt of a desperate and generous treaty offer from the embattled Persian king Darius.
"Sir, if there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop."
Coenus, who had accompanied Alexander on a ten year journey of conquest across Asia, asked whether he would support Alexander's desire to carry the battle into the seemingly endless plains of India.
"'Shall I come as friend or foe?'
'Neither.'"
The reply of the Lacedemonians, after Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, gathered his armies and marched towards Sparta, sending a herald to announce his approach.
"Give your children enough to do something; but don't give them enough to do nothing."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If he's such a good hitter, why doesn't he hit good?"
Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A's, challenging the formulas that expert baseball performance evaluators rely on.
"Just because you're excruciatingly critical doesn't mean you're not also naive."
A Kakanian proverb.
"At the time that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were writing, the world was very much as it is today, though to a lesser extent."
An earnest high school essayist, quoted by Meg Wolitzer in 'The Uncoupling'.
"Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."
Thomas Huxley, aka Darwin's Bulldog.
"Get your facts first. Then you can distort them as much as you please."
Mark Twain.
"My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period."
Gian-Carlo Rota, MIT professor of applied mathematics.
"A self made man is like a turtle on a fence post; no matter what he says, you know he had help getting there."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Speaker: This is going to be a fun workshop. For instance, each time you ask a question, I'm going to give you a T-shirt from our company. Ah, and I see I already have a first question. Yes?
Attendee: Can I have a T-shirt?"
Observed during a software training session.
"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
Gore Vidal.
"He has not a single redeeming defect."
Benjamin Disraeli, assessing his rival William Gladstone.
"He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met."
Abraham Lincoln.
"I was a 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate at the time suffering from what I diagnosed as 'negative charisma' - I only had to walk across a crowded room in which I knew nobody and nobody knew me and already I had ten enemies."
Toby Young, in 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
"Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures? All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."
Herman Mankiewicz, in a telegram to Ben Hecht.
"My prayer to God is a very short one:
Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous."
Voltaire.
"His mind was like a soup dish, wide and narrow. It could hold a small amount of nearly anything."
Irving Stone, on William Jennings Bryan.
"Man, The Vietnam war had such a profound effect on Music, I wish all those people didn't have to die, but wouldn't that suck if this music wasn't out there??"
Philosophy in the age of social media.
"Wall Street Exec: Now that you're my protege, it's time to clue you in on the secret of success. You know what that is?
Fry: Uh, work really really hard?
Wall Street Exec: No!
Fry: Oh, thank goodness!"
Futurama's Philip J Fry, learning from his Wall Street executive buddy.
"My greatest astronomical discovery was Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel."
Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, famous for his paradox that asks why the night sky is dark if the universe is infinite.
"Astronomer: This is the 100 inch telescope with which we are determining the structure of the universe.
Mrs Einstein: Oh, my husband just uses the back of an envelope."
Conversational exchange at Mount Wilson Observatory.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Henry Ford.
"I once drove through Nebraska, via I-80, days after my girlfriend broke up with me, on a self-imposed road trip from Los Angeles to Cedar Rapids to find my brother's shoulder and cry on it. It is a long, straight, hypnotically boring drive that not only gave me ample time to think about the loss, but also put my recent heartbreak in much-needed perspective. It could be worse, I realized. I could live here."
Kevin Bleyer, in 'Me the People'.
"I intend to open this country up to democracy, and anyone who is against that, I will jail, I will crush."
General Joao Baptista Figueiredo, the last dictator of Brazil.
"What the sober man has on his mind, the drunken man has on his tongue."
Joseph Stalin, quoting a favorite proverb, who was fond of insisting that his ministers join him for all-night drinking parties.
"When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."
Will Rogers.
"I'm so old I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Groucho Marx.
"To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn't deserve to have any."
Oscar Wilde, handcuffed, in pouring rain, and about to be taken to prison.
"TB or not TB, that is the congestion. Consumption be done about it? Of cough not!"
A Kakanian proverb.
"The French presidential election season only lasts a month. But even their system is not perfect. You still end up with a French president."
Christopher Buckley.
"The rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter."
Bat Masterson, US Marshall, and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph.
"Silvan Tomkins was the author of 'Affect, Imagery, and Consciousness', a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant, and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant."
Malcolm Gladwell, whom no one thinks is brilliant, in 'Blink'.
"Guards can keep away my enemies, but not my friends."
Julius Caesar, as quoted on the HBO series 'Rome'.
"Knowing when to stop is the beginning of wisdom."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I don't have time to ignore you."
Amy Brookheimer, harried vice-presidential assistant, a character in the HBO series 'Veep'.
"Not only does he shit on my head but I'm supposed to say thanks for the hat."
Brendan Filone, small-time hood, nursing a grudge against Tony Soprano (briefly).
"If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas."
John Scalzi, science fiction writer of the 'Old Man's War' series.
"I've walked myself into some of my best thoughts."
Soren Kierkegaard, midnight rambler.
"Yes, we got a warning. But no one told us to pay attention to the warning."
Weston Easterly, who camped with three others in a narrow canyon despite a flood warning from park rangers, and was the only survivor after a midnight storm sent a wall of water through the canyon.
"A university is a sequence of individual faculty entrepreneurs united by a common grievance over parking."
Clark Kerr, the first chancellor of UC Berkeley.
"With a stronger light you can see more darkness."
Jud Northbark, in 'Time in a Bottle'.
"Thoroughly conscious ignorance is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge."
James Clerk Maxwell, who formulated the laws of electromagnetic radiation.
"If you don't see, then you don't know what you're looking at."
John Madden, football commentator.
"When Reza Shah mounted the Peacock throne, the country was plagued by thousands of bandits and brigands, but by the end of his reign there was only one left."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Modern History of Iran'.
"Talk about God, talk about sin, and talk about five minutes."
Pastor Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Letters to a Young Preacher'.
"Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Empty Sleeve'.
"Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Minister of Spite'.
"In a bureaucracy, you meet those gray men who say 'The answer is no. What was the question?'."
Jud Northbark, in 'You First, Captain!'.
"In order to have one good idea, you must have nine bad ones."
Jud Northbark, in 'Speaking in Subtitles'.
"Beauty is merely pornography without the sex."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Wrinkled Purse'.
"In your first thirty years, you make habits;
in your next thirty years, your habits make you."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I am a recovering assaholic."
Jean-Louis Gassee, who replaced Steve Jobs as head of the Macintosh division at Apple.
"Every lie creates a parallel world."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Alan Kay, computer scientist, who created the SmallTalk language.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
The first brochure from Apple.
"People may be entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts!"
Jud Northbark, in 'The Post-Hoc Post Doc'.
"Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, what if you could ask each piece of hay if it was a needle?"
Cheryl Milone, attorney, who searches legal, government and scientific records to challenge patent claims.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I want you to know that I have suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."
Victor Borge.
"Well, for those who like that sort of thing, I should think it is just about the sort of thing they would like."
Abraham Lincoln, asked by an author to comment on his book.
"'How Gravity Works' is completely new.
It contains nothing that we have been working on."
Maurice Cotterell, quoting a review of his book by the Institute of Physics Publishing.
"It's all fun and games until someone gets blinded -
then it's all fun and games you can't see."
James Hetfield, of the band 'Metallica'.
"One generation plants trees;
the next generation gets the shade."
A Kakanian proverb.
"It took three days to try some of those accused of petty crimes, all of whom pleaded guilty in the hope of receiving prison sentences. The following day, some of those who were freed tried to break into the jail, and were arraigned for causing a riot, which resulted in at least some of them achieving their objective of incarceration."
Ciaran O Murchadha, in 'The Great Famine', describing how starving Irish peasants contrived to be fed.
"One of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty."
Newt Gingrich, who never needed encouragement.
"We're not lost. We're just finding our way."
Stephen Meeks, inept trail scout, reassuring the weary followers in his wagon train.
"John Updike simply cannot pass up any opportunity to tap dance in prose."
Joseph Epstein, author of 'Narcissus Leaves the Pool'.
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
Cicero.
"Physicists know everything about the Higgs particle, except whether it exists."
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, German particle physicist, and director of CERN.
"He wouldn't recognize subtlety if it hit him over the head with a hammer."
Jud Northbark, in 'Eyeing the Dots'.
"Would you please pass the salt, please?"
Albert Einstein, always good for a quote.
"I know that half my advertising budget is wasted.
What I don't know is which half."
John Wanamaker.
"Truth is our most precious possession. Therefore, let us economize."
Mark Twain.
"A gentleman is one who never hurts another's feelings unintentionally."
Oscar Wilde.
"Father: If I were you, I wouldn't do that.
Daughter: Papa, if you were me means you would do what I do."
Frank Wimberley, reporting a wise child's retort.
"The cook was a good cook, as cooks go,
and as cooks go, she went."
Saki.
"Half the lies our opponents tell about me are not true."
Sir Boyle Roche, Irish politician famous for contradictory phrases.
"Now, I get a kick out of this, because I'm told all the time: 'Santorum, quit trying to impose your ideas on everybody else.' But what's that? Is that not trying to impose their morality on everybody else?"
Rick Santorum, inexhaustible vaporizer, during the 2012 New Hampshire primary.
"Explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever."
Jeremy Irons, in the movie 'Margin Call', director of a financial firm that has suddenly collapsed, rejects the vague and complicated reports of his advisors.
"A battle is nothing but a sequence of mistakes. The side making the fewest mistakes wins."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Maurice Wilkes was teaching a course on elementary numerical analysis, and he was being harassed by Velvel. So he sent a polite little note: 'Mr. Kahan, for the comments, why don't you come and see me privately?' So Kahan went, and told him, of course, everything that was incorrect. Now Wilkes wasn't actually supposed to have taught that course; somebody else had died. So at the end, Wilkes said, 'Well, it's only an elementary course', to which Velvel responded: 'There's a difference between an elementary course and a superficial one.'"
Gene Golub, recalling an academic dispute.
"He who chases two rabbits catches none."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Shit has its own integrity."
Gore Vidal, quoting the Wise Hack at the Writer's Table in the MGM Commissary.
"'No class', said my father, 'and plenty of it.'"
Richard Russo, in 'The Risk Pool', in which he and his father have stopped in a trailer park to pick up a fishing buddy, who sleepily emerges in his underwear and urinates on their car bumper.
"He flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions."
Stephen Leacock, in 'Nonsense Novels'.
"Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue."
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
"I am a doormat in a world of boots."
Jean Rhys, author of 'Wide Sargasso Sea'.
"There is no antidote for the opium of time."
Thomas Browne.
"In the morning, he woke to twin realisations.
The first was that she had left him.
The second was that his sheets were on fire."
Howard Jacobson, in 'The Finkler Question'.
"The well does not walk to the thirsty man."
A Kakanian proverb.
"At his wife's wake, three silent guests remained. In the morning, the first guest arose saying, 'I am Shock, and I can go now.' Months later, the second guest remarked at the door, 'It is time for Grief to depart'. 'But don't worry,' said Loneliness, 'I can stay.'"
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Sejanus in Repose'.
"A diplomat was given a tongue in order to conceal his thoughts."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord.
"The only reason to win a Nobel prize is to be able to park on campus."
Saul Perlmutter, physics Nobelist and satisfied parker since 2011.
"Woody Allen: 'It was a boring movie.'
Interviewer: 'I rather enjoyed it.'
Woody Allen: 'Yes, but you were mistaken.'"
Woody Allen, interviewed about his first movie, 'What's New, Pussycat?'.
"It doesn't look like much, but it wasn't."
Woody Allen, revisiting his childhome home.
"In a thousand years, there will be many thousand recipients of the Nobel prize. But I have not less than four dozens of my creations identified with my name in the technical literature."
Nicola Tesla, who felt that the Nobel prize was awarded for small accomplishments rather than the discovery of new and fundamental principles, refused to consider sharing the 1915 Nobel prize in physics with Edison, which then went instead to a pair of X-ray crystallographers.
"Any job is easy as long as I don't have to do it."
Jud Northbark, in 'The Calmliest Manifesto'.
"Being lucky is as good as being right!"
Homer Joseph Stewart, NASA scientist, who liked to smoke his cigarettes to the end without ever flicking them, after showing experimental proof that the design of the Mariner spacecraft was correct, and being told he had merely been lucky.
"If you quote me, you are lying!"
Newt Gingrich, liar.
"In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man."
Mark Twain.
"In the exhibit-crammed fieldhouse in Vernal, I'd watched a couple show their daughter the models of the mastodon, bigger than a modern elephant, and of eohippus, smaller than the modern horse. To her daughter, the mother had added matter-of-factly, 'When Jesus came, he made all the animals the right size.'"
Jim Paul, in 'Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon'.
"If a man truly loves a woman, he never lets her catch him cheating."
From the movie 'Woman on Top'.
"Next time I send some dumb son-of-a-bitch for a Coca-Cola, I go myself."
Michael Curtiz, director, complaining to Vincent Price when a gofer didn't return with his drink quickly enough.
"In elections, it doesn't matter who votes, but who counts the votes."
Joseph Stalin, but who's counting?
"A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy."
Max Weinreich, Yiddish linguist.
"I believe I was the first to suggest that there should be an Arts Council grant for not writing a novel. The candidate would submit an outline of the novel he proposed not to write. If he proposed not to write a whole sequence of novels, the grant would be renewed annually."
Clive James, in the preface to 'Brilliant Creatures'.
"Cave ab homine unius libri.
(Beware the man of just one book.)"
A Kakanian proverb.
"There is no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it."
Steven Shapin, in 'The Scientific Revolution'.
"Here is six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it."
Lord Derby, appointing Charles Lever to the English consulate at Trieste.
"'Get up. Haven't you heard that the early bird catches the worm?'
'But Mom, what if I'm not a bird but a worm?'"
Jeehyun Lee, trying to rouse her son in the morning.
"It's always been my dream to be called the most modest person in the world, though I'm sure I'd never deserve it."
Jud Northbark, in 'Understudy for Godot'.
"Cheap energy from nuclear fusion is just 10 years away...and holding."
A disappointed physicist.
"The world's a city full of straying streets,
And death's the market place where each one meets."
Shakespeare, in 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'.
"Heaven grant that the burden you carry may have as easy an exit as it had an entry."
Erasmus, blessing a pregnant woman.
"Newt Gingrich has never had an unspoken thought."
Bob Beckel, political commentator for Fox and CNN.
"The fiscal exactions of the tax collectors were so exorbitant that they drove free peasants to seek refuge in voluntary servitude to owners who would be responsible for their taxes, and in a typical medieval Russian paradox, this practice was forbidden and people were commanded to remain free."
William Henry Chamberlin, in 'The Russian Revolution'.
"There's a plentiful supply of history,
and they're making more of it every day."
Jud Northbark, in 'If I May Continue'.
"It's good to know the law, but it's better to know the judge."
Boss Tweed.
"Only the shallow know themselves."
Oscar Wilde.
"Please don't be afraid to ask any question you want in this class.
Remember, there is no such thing as a stupid question,
only stupid people."
Mr Garrison.
"If your program doesn't run, that means it has an error in it.
If your program does run, that means it has two errors in it."
Detelina's First Law of Programming.
"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away."
Shakespeare, in 'Hamlet'.
"I am my own reality check."
Stephen Wolfram, taking on a thankless task.
"Year after year,
on the monkey's face,
the face of a monkey."
Basho.
"Stephen Wolfram is starting to give arrogance a bad name."
Dinsdale Pironeau, computational particle physicist.
"I once saw a book written by someone described on the flap as a Zen master, and though I didn't thumb its pages, it did seem to me a title describing something I'd known to be true - 'Mouth Open Already a Mistake'."
David Guterson, in 'The Other'.
"HISTORIANS: the prophets who look backwards."
Friedrich von Schlegel, in Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"I don't think I was ever going to slow down and relax until someone told me life was not an endless IN basket that I had to get through."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Concrete Argosies'.
"I think Michelangelo said something like, if people knew how hard I worked, they wouldn't call me a genius, and I'm like, if people knew how little I worked on these songs, they wouldn't say I sucked."
Henry Phillips, in 'Punching the Clown'.
"Any sufficiently well-meaning banality, ascribed to a famous person, acquires a luster of borrowed profundity."
Albert Einstein, in 'Before I Erase The Blackboard'.
"The Red Queen: 'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...'
Alice: 'Perhaps, but surely not all at the same time!'
The Red Queen: 'Of course all at the same time, or where's the fun?'
Alice: 'But that's impossible!'
The Red Queen: 'There, now that's seven!'"
The Looking Glass Dossier.
"Now we know there's a better gift for Valentine's Day than chocolates."
Lazar Greenfield, incoming president of the American College of Surgeons, suddenly the outgoing president, after commenting on the mood-enhancing effects of semen experienced by women having sex without condoms.
"Remember our motto - start slow and then give up."
Terry Darlington, trying to encourage his wife during a trip in which they managed to sail a five-foot-wide canal boat across the English Channel.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please."
Karl Marx, in 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'.
"As an experimental psychologist,
I have been trained not to believe anything
unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores."
Steven Pinker, in 'Words and Rules'.
"It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem, you have it read:
'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.'
The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."
Charles Babbage, correcting William Wordsworth's line:
'Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born'.
"The road to wisdom? Well, it is plain
And simple to express:
Err and err and err again,
But less and less and less."
Piet Hein.
"Those who can remember the past feel compelled to quote it."
George Sayitagainya.
"The bearing of a child takes nine months,
no matter how many women are assigned."
Frederick Brooks, in 'The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I have learned that when you say anything controversial, you are likely to be blamed not so much for what you have said as for what people think that someone who has said what you said would also say."
Steven Weinberg, occasional commentator on the dispute between science and religion.
"Madness is the ability to make fine distinctions among different kinds of nonsense."
Stanislaw Ulam, a founder of the Monte Carlo simulation technique, who determined how to initiate fusion in the hydrogen bomb, and subsequently became an advocate of arms control.
"In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong."
Steven Weinberg, particle physicist.
"The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."
Steven Weinberg, devisor of the electroweak unification theory.
"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."
Francis Bacon.
"Revenge is like serving cold cuts."
Tony Soprano, waste management specialist.
"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure."
Daniel Dennett, in 'Consciousness Explained'.
"Remember the Golden Rule: Them that has the gold makes the rules."
The Wizard of Id. "Die? Why that's the last thing I shall do!"
Lord Palmerston, last words.
"Allan Felix: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allan Felix: What about Friday night?"
Allan Felix, desperate for a date, in Woody Allen's 'Play it Again, Sam'.
"Sonya: Sex without love is an empty experience.
Boris: Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the the best!"
Woody Allen's 'Love and Death'.
"Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor died Wednesday in her hospital room, surrounded by her child."
A curiously-worded TV 'news-crawler'.
"A man can die but once: we owe God a death: and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next."
Feeble, in 'Henry IV Part II'.
"DEJA-NEW: The eerie feeling that you've probably never done this before."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Tata's best known frugal product, the Tata Nano, has run into problems: some cars have suffered what the vice-chairman calls 'thermal incidents'... and what his customers call 'catching fire'."
The Economist.
"If your aunt had wheels, she'd be a bus."
One of a pair of contradictory Kakanian proverbs.
"If your aunt had wheels, she still wouldn't be a bus."
One of a pair of contradictory Kakanian proverbs.
"When the axe came into the forest, one tree said, 'Don't worry, the handle is one of us!'"
A Kakanian proverb.
"And then there was Goff's Low Ash cat food ('contains only 1.5 percent ash'), which may have been designed to appeal to those knowledgeable about cat food ingredients, but still seems akin to naming a frankfurter 'Few Mouse Hairs'."
Neil Steinberg, in 'Complete and Utter Failure'.
"Thus did I become a 'Social Science Correspondent' on a paper that had yet to be printed: a Gogol-like ghost job which I held for about six months before its editor said something to me that made it impossible for me to go on working for him - 'You're fired' were the exact words as I remember them."
Christopher Hitchens.
"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."
W H Auden.
"Snob: I suppose you know my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror.
John Smith: Yes indeed, since mine were here waiting for you."
Trumping a snob.
"FREEMASONS: this mafia for the mediocre."
Christopher Hitchens, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you - free."
Kingsley Amis.
"Why are you engineers always bothering me for money for more expensive equipment and laboratories? Why can't you be like the math department? They only ask for paper and trashcans! Or better yet, the philosophy department. They just ask for paper!"
Professor Gradgrind, of Hardtack University.
"Wife: Don't smoke, you'll cough!
Husband: But I cough better when I smoke!"
From the Czech movie 'Autumn Spring', in which an eighty-year-old man refuses to behave.
"To be Prince of Wales is not a position; it is a predicament!"
The future George IV, impatient for his father to go mad or die, as voiced by Alan Bennett in 'The Madness of King George'.
"Lectures," said McCrimmon, "are our most flexible art form. Any idea, however slight, can be expanded to fill fifty-five minutes; any idea, however great, can be condensed to that time. And if no ideas are available, there can always be discussion. Discussion is the vacuum that fills the vacuum."
John Kenneth Galbraith, in 'A Tenured Professor'.
"They say it's important to live each day as if it were your last. What? Drunk, six cigarettes in my mouth, sobbing down the phone at all the relatives I haven't called in years?"
Tom Shone, film critic and writer.
"In Texas, anyone driving at the posted speed limit will never arrive at their destination."
Jud Northbark, in 'Third Cross on the Right'.
"I can honestly say I left the job exactly the same way that I took it up: fired with enthusiasm."
Clark Kerr, after being dismissed from his university job by governor Ronald Reagan.
"Where is the medal without the reverse?"
Karl Marx.
"When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression."
Bill Bryson, in 'The Lost Continent'.
"The longest suicide note in history."
Gerald Kaufman, describing the British Labour Party's manifesto for the 1983 election, which party leader Michael Foot had decreed would contain the text of every resolution approved at the party congress.
"Arthur Koestler was capable of reciting the truths of the multiplication table in a way to make some people indignant with him."
Sydney Hook, on the combative author of 'Darkness at Noon'.
"It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had a lot of trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization."
Washington Roebling, after thirteen years of controversy as the Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.
"I can no longer be taught by the man who taught my enemy. So what is more fitting in a mad world than to be taught by the man who taught the man who taught my enemy?"
Andre Moreau, a character in the movie 'Scaramouche', played by that ham-slinger Stewart Granger.
"No man in our annals has filled so large a space -
and left it so empty."
Charles Edward Arnold, on James G Blaine, who lost the presidential race to Grover Cleveland in 1884.
"Antoni Gaudi seems to have designed the church of the Holy Family out of melted candle wax and chicken guts."
Robert Hughes.
"Now I know I'm making a lot of fun of fat people.
But I don't want any of you fat people to be uncomfortable during my show.
So next time, why don't you go ahead and pay for two seats?"
Ricky Gervais, comedian, who can make you sorry you laughed.
"That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing."
Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, in 'English as She is Spoke'.
"If not a Hun, I thought, then an Austrian, surely - somewhere German-speaking, at any rate; all that gloom and soulfulness could only be the result of an upbringing among compound words."
John Banville, in the spy novel 'The Untouchable'.
"Can you open the shutters, please?"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, last words, which were poeticized into 'More light!'.
"It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth."
William Stanley Jevons, in 'The Coal Question', 1865, asserting that Britain's use of coal was unsustainable, and that measures to use coal more efficiently would not delay the crisis.
"The thicker the hay, the easier the mowing."
Alaric, chief of the Goths, after a delegation from Rome warned him that every man, woman and child in the city would resist his assault.
"Dig deep enough and you hit water;
think hard enough and you hit a mystery."
A Kakanian proverb.
"If you just talk, I find that your mouth comes out with stuff."
Ricky Gervais.
"Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation."
Edward Gibbon, in 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'.
"To find many things, look for one."
A Kakanian proverb.
"So might a carpenter, looking at the moon,
suppose that it is made of wood."
Steven Weinberg, dismissing Stephen Wolfram's proposal, in 'A New Kind of Science', that everything in the universe, and the universe itself, is a cellular automaton.
"Vice President Biden described the complex nature of the security problem in Afghanistan, commenting that besides the demography, geography and history of the region, we have a lot going for us."
Extract from a diplomatic cable following a meeting between British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US Vice President Joe Biden.
"During the first day or two she tried to get on with War and Peace, but found it depressing, and as time went on she suffered from that sense of unworthiness which attacks sensitive people who have been rebuffed by a classic."
Robertson Davies, in 'A Mixture of Frailties'.
"You must have a REALLY beautiful wife!"
A left-handed compliment, made after staring at the picture of a colleague's daughter for a long time, and then back at the colleague.
"You may go far with a smile and a kind word;
you'll go farther with a smile, a kind word, and a gun."
Al Capone, beverage distributor.
"No one ever learned a bad habit from a horse."
Victor 'Brute' Kruluk, Marine Corps lieutenant general, recalling advice from his father.
"My goal is to be a millionaire by the age of 25,
so I'm not wasting my time starting out at a minimum wage job."
Rob Kardashian, unemployed couch warmer and 23-year old imaginary celebrity, explains why he's turning down an internship.
"You're lucky he only showed you the dog."
Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada, after George Bush recalled how Vladimir Putin had bragged that his dog was bigger, stronger, and faster than Bush's.
"Nonsmokers die every day. And you know what doctors say? If only you'd smoked, we'd have the technology to help you. It's you people dying from nothing that are screwed!"
Bill Hicks.
"The plural of anecdote is not data!"
Ben Goldacre, in 'Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks'.
"On rereading the above paragraph I have the feeling that
the late Mr Henry James would be far from happy with it,
but as there are a great many of his paragraphs that I am
far from happy with, I shall let it stay."
Noel Coward, in 'Pomp and Circumstance'.
"Having one child makes you a parent;
having two makes you a referee."
David Frost.
"I am not an ambulance chaser;
I am usually there before the ambulance."
Melvin Belli, trial lawyer, known as 'The King of Torts' and 'Melvin Bellicose'.
"There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years, the dirt doesn't get any worse."
Quentin Crisp, author of 'The Naked Civil Servant'.
"I've not even started working yet,
but I will now have to work longer -
that is, if I can find a job."
A French student, protesting the proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, which means he'll have to wait two more years to 'inherit' a job.
"If you think you understand the way time is expressed in a novel, consider the sentence 'Tomorrow was Christmas.'"
Gordon Eugene Nelson, a much respected professor.
"It's not where you look that matters, but what you see."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond real estate developer.
"No one tests the river's depth using both feet."
A Kakanian proverb.
"A good sentence in prose should be like a good sentence in poetry: unchangeable."
Gustave Flaubert, meticulous stylist.
"Computing is no more about computers
than astronomy is about telescopes."
Edsger Dijkstra, computer science's 'go to' guy.
"He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great."
Samuel Johnson, describing the poet Thomas Gray.
"'You don't have to study.'
'How do you know I don't have to study?'
'Because you go to B.U.!'"
Mark Zuckerberg, bickering with his girlfriend Erica, as portrayed in the movie 'The Social Network'.
"He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there.
I remember he had these beer glasses that said
'pound include beer dot H'."
Priscilla Chan, recalling her first meeting with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
"'Do you think Willem could make you laugh?' I asked my wife.
'I saw him smile once and I had nightmares, but what do I know?'"
Art Linson, film producer, fishing for support after agreeing to the casting of Willem Dafoe in the starring role of an action comedy.
"Like the soil of his native New England,
his mind is naturally barren but highly cultivated."
Chauncey DePew, speaking of his fellow senator Henry Cabot Lodge.
"Without models, there are no data."
Paul Edwards, in 'A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming'.
"For every Southern boy fourteen years old,
not once but whenever he wants it,
there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock
on that July afternoon in 1863."
William Faulkner.
"The past is never dead; it's not even past."
William Faulkner.
"Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself."
The motto on the coffee cup of Joy Carroll, the inspiration for the TV show 'The Vicar of Dibley'.
"A character in an early novel of mine graded women for a hobby.
He would give them either A, B, C, D, F or Incomplete.
Incomplete was his biggest category. He was a very hard grader."
William Goldman, screenwriter and author.
"Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify, because the players are always changing, the team could move to another city. You're actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it."
Jerry Seinfeld.
"I pointed to the screen monitoring the snarled traffic at the city center and asked 'Is that the worst part?'; my guide stroked his chin, waved his hand across the wall of screens he was monitoring, and finally said, 'It's all the worst part.'"
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Stranger, Hurry By'.
"Beige for the beigeous."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Not everyone born in a stable is a horse."
A Kakanian proverb.
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
L P Hartley, in 'The Go-Between'.
"I'm dressing mod 7."
Jud Northbark, upon being told that he was wearing the same shirt this Monday as last Monday, explaining that most of his clothes were packed in preparation for a move.
"People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman ...but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him."
Art Buchwald.
"Grandma Esther was the loudmouthed immigrant who suddenly becomes a member of your family. I once heard her ask a women in her condo complex, 'Why do you hate me, fatso?'"
Rich Cohen, in 'Sweet and Low'.
"With our writing service you can be 100% sure that you will not buy a plagiarized paper and even get a free plagiarism report! Everything you pay for is completely unique!"
From the website 'Custom Essay'.
"In the 1940's, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered, under a pseudonym, and only came second."
The Economist, 17 July 2010.
"If you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks.
And directly across the street -
in the exact same building as that Starbucks -
there is another Starbucks.
There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks!
And ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of the universe."
Lewis Black.
"Computer scientists want to study computing for its own sake;
computational scientists want to build useful things."
Greg Wilson, cofounder of Software Carpentry.
"The problem with high school calculus is that it convinces students that they have mastered it; as they flounder in college calculus, they naturally accuse their instructor of having made them stupid."
Professor Lee Squires.
"I knew a lad who went to sea,
and left the land behind him.
I knew him well - the lad was me,
and now I cannot find him."
A Kakanian folksong.
"[Admiral Ernest] King's daughter described her father as an even-tempered man: 'He was always angry'."
Max Hastings, in 'Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945'.
"War: Once you've been there, once you've seen it, you never want to go there again unless you absolutely have to. It's like France."
General Miller, a character in the movie 'In the Loop', played by James Gandolfini.
"Anyone in America who might wish to be alone has only to step out onto the nearest sidewalk."
Jud Northbark, in 'An Almanac of Scorn'.
"Much was said this night against the parliament. I said that,
as it seemed to be agreed that all Members of Parliament became
corrupted, it was better to chuse men already bad,
and so save good men."
James Boswell, recalling a late night discussion.
"The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing:
finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane,
but who didn't have fish for dinner."
A stewardess, talking to the passengers in 'Zero Hour', the inspiration for 'Airplane'.
"I hope it will not shock experimental physicists too much if I say that we do not accept their observations unless they are confirmed by theory."
Sir Arthur Eddington.
"Hope is good, but it's all that waiting that spoils it."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not understand digestion?"
Oliver Heaviside, engineer, responding to attacks from mathematical purists against his ad hoc inventions of the step function and other calculational devices with which he could solve problems they had found intractable.
"The Riviera - a sunny place for shady people."
Somerset Maugham.
"Paying your creditors only encourages them."
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright, member of Parliament, and notorious debtor.
"Some folk want their luck buttered."
Thomas Hardy, expecting little from life and rarely disappointed.
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Mark Twain.
"An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."
George Orwell.
"Same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease."
Henry James (the elder), on the cantankerous historian and critic Thomas Carlyle.
"Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer,
are we next to invite an elephant to be the Professor of Zoology?"
Roman Jakobsson, explaining his opposition to appointing Vladimir Nabokov to a tenured professorship at Harvard based on his achievements as a writer.
"There's no use in meeting trouble halfway."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"
Samuel Johnson, about to publish his dictionary, responding to Lord Chesterfield's efforts to offer belated patronage.
"As a writer, he has mastered everything except language;
as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story;
as an artist, he is everything except articulate."
Oscar Wilde, on the novelist George Meredith.
"I have no wish to know anyone sitting in a sewer and adding to it."
Thomas Carlyle, refusing to be introduced to the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.
"We are all interested in the future,
for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."
Jeron 'The Amazing Criswell' King, introducing the movie 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'.
"Very small."
Paul Dirac, giving his impressions of the Queen, who had just awarded him the Order of Merit in a private ceremony in 1973.
"I promise you, you don't need a cat license. There is no such thing!"
From the Monty Python skit 'Eric the Half-a-Bee'.
"Kitty: I was reading a book the other day.
Carlotta: Reading a book?
Kitty: Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?
Carlotta: Oh, my dear. That's something you need never worry about."
The closing lines in the movie 'Dinner at Eight', between Kitty, a floozy played by Jean Harlow, and the ancient actress Carlotta Vance, played by Marie Dressler.
"The 't' is silent, as in 'Harlow'."
Margot Asquith, correcting the pronunciation of her name.
"A bad sentence cannot be corrected;
it should never have been written."
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, during his tenure as associate managing editor of The Astrophysical Journal.
"My colleagues are spherical bastards;
In other words, no matter how you look at them, they're bastards."
Fritz Zwicky, irascible Cal Tech astronomer.
"How nice to have all the wrong things in one place."
Sir Arthur Eddington, astronomer, commenting on the appearance of the book 'An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structures' by his rival Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
"'Do you like it here in Russia?'
'Yes,' I said. 'My parents are Russian. Life is difficult here sure, but ...'
Don't worry,' he said, 'Things are going to get much worse,
and then you'll like it even more.'"
Ingrid Bengis, in 'Metro Stop Dostoevsky'.
"I've got nothing, you've got nothing and he's got nothing.
That's just enough to start a factory!"
The character Karol Borowiecki in Wajda's movie 'The Promised Land'.
"What is love, except thinking you're in it?"
David Lodge, in 'Therapy'.
"The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance."
Soren Kierkegaard.
"The last 29 days of the month are the hardest."
Nikola Tesla, describing his struggle as a young man to stay afloat after impulsively moving to Paris.
"'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first - verdict afterwards.'"
Lewis Carroll, in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'.
"Notions will hurt none but those that have them."
Oliver Cromwell, addressing the opening of Parliament in 1654.
"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline.
It helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons,
but at the very least you need a beer."
Frank Zappa.
"I love to have written."
Dorothy Parker.
"If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gave it to."
Dorothy Parker.
"Alas, today for the first time in his life the good Bishop's brains came in contact with reality. The result, I'm afraid, was fatal."
Thomas Huxley, who had publicly debated Bishop 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce about evolution, upon hearing that the bishop had died after a head injury from falling from his horse, supposedly remarked.
"I'm going to tell you a delicious piece of gossip.
Now listen very carefully, because I'm only going to tell it once
because I promised not to repeat it!"
Hans Habe, quoted by Tony Randall in 'Which Reminds Me'.
"The great secret of living in the country
is not to get on too well with your neighbours."
John Mortimer, in 'Dunster'.
"Plagiarize, plagiarize,
Let no one's work escape your eyes!"
The key to academic success without all that stress.
"Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown again on the third attempt. A suggestion to this effect is usually rejected by the intellect at once. It does not appear that the two throws which have been completed, and which lie now absolutely in the Past, can have influence upon the throw which exists only in the Future. The chance for throwing sixes seems to be precisely as it was at any ordinary time - that is to say, subject only to the influence of the various other throws which may be made by the dice. And this is a reflection which appears so exceedingly obvious that attempts to controvert it are received more frequently with a derisive smile than with any thing like respectful attention. The error here involved - a gross error redolent of mischief - I cannot pretend to expose within the limits assigned me at present; and with the philosophical it needs no exposure. It may be sufficient here to say that it forms one of an infinite series of mistakes which arise in the path of Reason through her propensity for seeking truth in detail."
Edgar Allan Poe, in 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', wondering why his sure-fire gambling scheme hasn't caught on.
"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."
James Russell Lowell, in 'A Fable for Critics'.
"The following morning, a local farmer named James McShane
came across Payne sprawled facedown, sobbing in the wet grass.
The smell of alcohol hung in the air. To McShane, this could
mean only one thing. 'My dear man,', he said, 'Are you a Frenchman?'"
Daniel Stashower, in 'The Beautiful Cigar Girl'.
"Human nature is not only about as bad as it can be,
but a great deal worse."
Somerset Maugham, in 'The Moon and Sixpence'.
"Thank you Mary, you have entertained us quite enough."
Mr Bennet, in Jane Austen's novel 'Pride and Prejudice', seeking to gracefully curtail his daughter's excruciating performance.
"Isn't that the right time to stop -
when people still think you're charming?"
Elizabeth Bennet, a character in the 1940 film of 'Pride and Prejudice', played by Greer Garson.
"It is only the first bottle of wine that is expensive."
A Kakanian proverb.
"You can count the seeds in an apple,
but you can't count the apples in a seed."
Ken Kesey, author of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.
"Awards, honors and medals exert a gravitational field.
Getting the first one is very difficult; after that, they fall effortlessly into your lap."
Jud Northbark, in 'Tips for Charon'.
"Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."
Mick Jagger.
"A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you,
for the privilege of kicking you once."
William Faulkner.
"The trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing."
Tom Stoppard.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Eric Hoffer, author of 'The True Believer'.
"You may write as carelessly and badly as this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some care."
Voltaire, returning a manuscript to a would-be writer.
"No one is ever happy. It's either
we should have cancelled and we didn't, or
we didn't cancel and we should have."
Sherwood Wilson, Virginia Tech VP for Administrative Services, musing about snow day controversies.
"He who is absent is wrong."
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, the nimble diplomat who thrived before, during, and after the French Revolution.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, the subject I am about to present to you may seem appallingly difficult, but I assure you that with just six months of diligent study you will be able to fully share my current state of utter confusion."
Professor Jud Northbark, first day of class.
"Louder! Louder! I can still hear the singers!"
Richard Strauss, exhorting his orchestra.
"He's such a liar that not even the opposite is true."
Ferenc Molnar, author of 'Liliom', the inspiration for 'Carousel'.
"A fanatic redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."
George Santayana.
"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results.
I know several thousand things that won't work."
Thomas Edison, when an associate suggested that he might feel disappointment in having done so much work without any results to show for it.
"And what were you going to offer the thirteenth Caesar?"
Tiberius Caesar, turning down the Senate's offer to name September after him, following the precedents of July and August.
"Being president of the University of California
is like being manager of a cemetery:
there are many people under you, but no one is listening."
Mark Yudof, yet another sadder but wiser former president of the University of California.
"We see a low-tech version of motion-capture every time Jessica Biel acts."
Wesley Morris, film reviewer.
"Never apologize too quickly."
The first rule of married life.
"I have never put myself to the trouble of rummaging
through an immense rubbish-heap on the problematical
chance of discovering a cigar-end."
King Edward VII, after Winston Churchill suggested that he subscribe to a press-cutting agency.
"Dammit, Dad, if I spend all my time trying to find my mistakes,
I won't have time to make new ones."
David Hays, in 'My Old Man and the Sea'.
"Millions long for immortality,
who don't know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
Susan Ertz, in 'Anger in the Sky'.
"Once your in-basket is actually overflowing,
there's no point in refusing even more work."
Overworked, and learning to live with it.
"Hemingway pissed here."
A historical plaque in Key West, placed by someone who'd seen one too many of them.
"Arthur Koestler was not a skeptic at all.
Yes, he saw darkness at noon.
But he always saw another blinding light at 2pm."
Johann Hari, recalibrating the reputation of Arthur Koestler.
"The only question I ever ask a woman is
'what time is your husband coming home?'."
Hud, as played by Paul Newman, in 'Hud'.
"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable
if they last long enough."
Noah Cross, as played by John Huston, in 'Chinatown'.
"It is defeats that make one a human being.
A man who never understands his defeats
takes nothing with him into the future."
Aksel Sandemose, inventor of the Law of Jante.
"In this business, success is 99% perseverance and 1% talent.
Congratulations, gentlemen, you are 99% there!"
Arthur Planck, music executive, played by Bob Balaban in 'Dedication'.
"It has all been very interesting."
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who brought vaccination to England, last words, 1689-1762.
"I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
Jerome K Jerome, author of 'Three Men in a Boat'.
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,
it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
John von Neumann.
"Unless your words are more important than silence, hold your tongue."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
"As a historian,
I cannot believe how low the standards are in mathematics!
In my field, no one would put forth an argument
without at least ten proofs, whereas in mathematics
they stop as soon as they have found a single one!"
An irate historian, berating Andrey Kolmogorov.
"Man may escape from rope and gun;
Who takes a woman must be undone."
John Gay.
"Chaos theory - an explanation in search of a problem."
The Economist.
"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...'"
Joanne Harris, in 'Gentlemen and Players'.
"Seeing I was here for such a short time,
it was hardly worth coming at all."
Epitaph for a baby born at midnight who survived only two minutes.
"It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring."
William Butler Yeats, in 'Adam's Curse'.
"Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status."
The Federal Highway Administration, which will still forgive you.
"You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? 'Baffling'."
Mary Elizabeth Williams, in the Salon article 'How not to make love like a porn star'.
"NEVER MIND THE DOGS -
BEWARE OF OWNER!"
J. Maarten Troost, reporting a warning sign on a house on Vanuatu, in 'Getting Stoned with Savages'.
"Cousin Zeb: Is this a game of chance?
Cuthbert J Twillie: Not the way I play it, no."
Cuthbert J Twillie, as played by W C Fields in 'My Little Chickadee'.
"Euler published 228 papers after he died,
making the deceased Euler
one of history's most prolific mathematicians."
William Wade Dunham, mathematical historian.
"A Conservative is one who is enamored of existing evils,
as distinguished from the Liberal,
who wishes to replace them with others."
Ambrose Bierce, diabolical lexicographer.
"Fluids are a lot easier to drink than they are to understand."
Alan Newell, Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Arizona.
"You don't know who's swimming naked til the tide goes out."
Warren Buffett.
"Although God cannot alter the past, historians can."
Samuel Butler.
"A dirty mind is a perpetual feast."
Needlepoint slogan in a historic mansion in Savannah, Georgia.
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
Groucho Marx, making a thoughtful farewell to his host.
"Do you understand what prime numbers are? Because if you don't you should just leave now."
The warning at the beginning of the thiller 'Fermat's Room', in which the victims must solve math puzzles or be crushed to death.
"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.
I tried to imitate him,
but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes."
Goro Shimura, of the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture.
"This project is too important to be held up by projects that are more important!"
An agitated project manager.
"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."
Douglas Adams, in 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.
"Those who restrain passion do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
William Blake.
"The reason there are bugs in the bed is that they're too scared to get down on the floor."
The front desk clerk at a Third World hotel.
"People wouldn't mind rush hour nearly so much if it didn't occur just when everyone's trying to get back home."
Jud Northbark, trying out a career as traffic jamologist.
"The more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn't there."
A A Milne, in 'The House at Pooh Corner'.
"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."
Mark Twain.
"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."
Sheriff Percy Egglefield, of Essex County, New York, laying out the law to a new inmate of his jail.
"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."
Grace Olive Wiley, short-time snake curator at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo.
"I'd knock that boy's brains out if I knew where to hit him."
Big Boy Matson, in Max Evans's 'The Hi Lo Country'.
"Now the exclamation mark doesn't mean we're really excited about that letter n."
Addison Frey, mathematics professor at Alfred University, explaining the 'n!' notation for the factorial.
"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."
Richard Feynman.
"The people who live in a Golden Age go around complaining how yellow everything looks."
Randall Jarrell, poet, and former occupant of what he considered the most poetically titled job in the Air Force - Celestial Navigation Tower Operator.
"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it."
Blaise Pascal, master of the graceful surrender.
"I do not believe that gifts,
whether of mind or character,
can be weighed like butter and sugar,
not even at Cambridge."
Virginia Woolf.
"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."
Homer Hickam, in 'Rocket Boys'.
"A closed mouth gathers no feet."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I owe much, I have nothing, the rest I leave to the poor."
Rabelais, his last will and testament.
"The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world."
Paracelsus, aka Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim.
"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."
Oscar Wilde, in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.
"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?"
Bishop Berkeley, refusing to accept Newton's concept of the derivative.
"It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do before."
Louis Leroy, reviewing Claude Monet in Le Charivari.
"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?"
Oscar Mandel, in 'Chi Po and the Sorcerer'.
"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."
Galileo, in 'Dialogue on Two New Sciences' (1638).
"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."
Aristotle, in 'Physics'.
"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."
Carl Friedrich Gauss.
"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."
C P Snow, in 'The Sleep of Reason'.
"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."
Bill Bryson, in 'The Lost Continent'.
"'He seemed confident,' she said.
He smiled in spite of himself.
'Young lawyers are always confident. It's a failure of our law schools.'"
Pete Dexter, in 'Paris Trout'.
"Geometry is the art of reasoning well with badly made figures."
Henri Poincare.
"An extraordinary affair.
I gave them their orders
and they wanted to stay and discuss them."
The Duke of Wellington.
"In front of every silver lining there's a cloud."
A Kakanian proverb.
"We had the only kind of money that was respectable these days -
the kind that was all gone."
Caitlin Macy, in 'The Fundamentals of Play'.
"I never came across a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse."
Brendan Behan, author of 'Borstal Boy'.
"If you're not in bed by midnight, you'd better go home."
The philanderer's motto.
"The trouble with Germans is not that they fire artillery shells,
but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant."
Karl Kraus.
"SEED = 65539 * SEED
IF (SEED .LT. 0) SEED = (SEED + 2147483647) + 1
It is difficult to find two lines of code which violate more software engineering principles; the intent is obscure and the result is non-portable."
Stephen Park, Keith Miller, much underestimating the potential badness of code, in Communications of the ACM, 1988.
"Home in three days. Don't wash."
Napoleon, writing to Josephine.
"I am conscious of my faults,
but I hope I atone for them
by my marked disapprobation of such faults in others."
Charles James Fox, satirizing the critics of the spendthrift George IV.
"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."
Horace Lamb, hydrodynamicist, addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
"I do think the bloom of her ugliness is going off."
The chamberlain of the ill-favored Queen Charlotte, wife of George III.
"What genius does must be the best of all rules."
Carl von Clausewitz, author of 'On War'.
"There were good workmen among them.
The trouble was that they all wanted to be architects."
Napoleon, discounting the French Council of State.
"A constitution should be short, and obscure."
Napoleon.
"A poem is never finished, merely abandoned."
Paul Valery.
"I feel so good, life is running around inside of me like a squirrel!"
Boris Kolenkhov, in 'You Can't Take it With You!'.
"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!)"
Immanuel Kant.
"If the rich could hire the poor to die for them,
the poor could make a good living."
A Kakanian proverb.
"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.'"
Freeman Dyson, quoting Enrico Fermi in 'A meeting with Enrico Fermi', Nature, Volume 427, page 297, 2004.
"I made my money by selling too soon."
Bernard Baruch, who got out of the stock market before black Tuesday.
"Son, never buy something that eats while you sleep."
John Boy's father, advising against the purchase of a horse.
"Every computer program is correct up until the moment it is written."
Jud Northbark, in 'John Dvorak Folds His Arms'.
"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."
Otto Frisch, in 'What Little I Remember'.
"Sleep faster! We need the pillows."
A Kakanian proverb.
"A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle."
Jonathan Swift.
"A little inaccuracy saves tons of explanation."
Saki (H H Munro), author of 'Sredni-Vashtar', 'Tobermory', and 'The Schartz-Metterklume Method'.
"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas."
H L Mencken.
"Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers, come to dust."
Shakespeare, in 'Cymbeline', Act IV, Scene 2.
"Humans are not proud of their ape ancestors,
and rarely invite them round to dinner."
Douglas Adams, in 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.
"I can always hire some mathematicians,
but they can't hire me!"
Thomas Edison, arguing that experimental inquiry was far more valuable than theory.
"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!"
John Cleese, announcing that his firm must fire one of its two pantomime horses, a decision to be made by a death match.
"The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original."
An acquaintance of the 19th century American Clarence King.
"Most people go to their graves with their music still inside them."
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"To travel fast, go alone;
to travel far, go together."
A Kakanian proverb.
"'Shut up!', he explained."
Ring Lardner, in 'The Young Immigrants'.
"Most of the people in this house are average,
but my sister is just plain mean!"
Miles Moses, on being asked by his grandfather if anyone could tell him the difference between average and mean.
"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."
Nigel Dennis, in 'Cards of Identity'.
"The light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern,
which shines only on the waves behind."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
"I hate you and your ass face!"
Corky St Clair, flamboyant stage director, in 'Waiting for Guffman'.
"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!"
Monty Python.
"Fail again. Fail better."
Samuel Beckett.
"How many husbands have I had? You mean, besides my own?"
Zsa Zsa Gabor.
"When Charles Grodin enters a room, it is as though someone just left."
Charles Grodin, recalling just one of the many insults and putdowns he received in his career.
"Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length."
Robert Frost.
"Life must be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards."
Draagekreik Neros, trembling fearfully.
"Sir, I have given you an argument.
I am not also obliged to provide you with an understanding."
Samuel Johnson, having explained himself and being told 'But I don't understand!'.
"[1943-]"
Steven Millhauser, author, asked to give a brief biography.
"Dating younger men is like chewing gum:
ten minutes of flavor followed by bland repetition."
Heather Wolfe, a character in the movie 'Starting Out in the Evening', falling big time for an aging author played by Frank Langella.
"His conversation does not show the minute hand,
but he strikes the hour very correctly."
Samuel Johnson, of his frequent dinner host Henry Thrale.
"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."
A university department chair, in Alison Lurie's 'Truth or Consequences'.
"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."
The movie 'Music from Another Room'.
"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me!"
Nathaniel Lee, English playwright, who was confined for five years in Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, better known as 'Bedlam'.
"If Mr Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune;
if anyone pulled him out, that would be a catastrophe."
Benjamin Disraeli, explaining the difference between a misfortune and a catastrophe.
"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 gut has shit for brains."
Rob Gordon, a character in the movie 'High Fidelity', played by John Cusack.
"To see how many pieces they are cut up into."
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.
"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."
Jud Northbark, in 'Elementary Penguins'.
"Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn."
Delmore Schwartz, author of 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'.
"The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another."
J. Frank Dobie, in 'A Texan in England'.
"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."
Jane Hamilton, in 'Disobedience'.
"Winning the world title was easy.
The hard part was making the Chinese team!"
The winner of the Olympic ping pong competition.
"I believe he was jumping a little too low at the leapfrog."
Sherman Stonor, Baron Camoys, explaining with his usual delicacy why a relative had suddenly abandoned his studies at a seminary.
"There is no point in settling the precedence between a louse and a flea."
Samuel Johnson.
"In Washington, some men grow. Others merely swell."
Woodrow Wilson.
"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."
Laurence Urdang, in his preface to The New York Times Everyday Reader's Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words.
"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'."
Hannah Musgrove, a character in Russell Banks's novel 'The Darling'.
"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 software systems of 1 million lines of commented code."
S. M. de Gyurky, in a letter to 'The Futurist' magazine, makes artificial intelligence practical.
"History is just one damn thing after another."
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.
"It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It's one damn thing over and over."
Edna St Vincent Millay.
"IN DEFEAT, CLINTON GRACIOUSLY PRETENDS TO WIN"
Headline in the Washington Post, after Hilary Clinton's response to Barack Obama's declaration that he'd won the nomination.
"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."
Dana Stevens, American film critic.
"Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
Space is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening to me."
John Archibald Wheeler, physicist, who coined the phrase 'black hole'.
"Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
Woody Allen.
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Frederick Brooks, in 'The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'.
"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."
Terence Witt, giving the null explanation of Null Physics.
"A drowning man reaches for a snake."
A Kakanian proverb.
"We pledged to support her to the end. Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is."
Charles Rangel, US Representative for New York, explaining the limits of his unbounded support for Hillary CLinton.
"Ja, ja, I am shpeak the technical English, but I have great difficulty when I try to make intercourse."
German scientist Ludwig Prandtl, after being congratulated for his first conference presentation in English.
"At last the Dodo said, 'Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.'"
Lewis Carroll, in 'Alice in Wonderland'.
"Mythology is what never was, and always is."
Stephanus of Byzantium, geographer under Byzantine emperor Justinian I.
"I mean the word proof not in the sense of lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one."
Carl Friedrich Gauss.
"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?"
Shakespeare, in 'Henry IV', Part 1.
"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."
Scott Brown, reviewing 'Alone in the Dark', a movie, based on a video game, by Uwe Boll, the world's worst director.
"The most expensive thing you'll ever buy is money."
A banker in an avuncular mood.
"We die only once, and for such a long time."
Moliere [still dead].
"If you can't spot the fool when a deal's being made, then everyone else can."
The sucker's warning.
"Hello! Is this the Internet?"
The first caller, making use of Michael Wolff's NetGuide hotline, 2 January 1994, whose motto was 'No question too dumb'.
"Of course it hurts. The secret is not to mind that it hurts."
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.
"'What's the trick?'
'The trick, William Potter, is not minding 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.
"Love is giving something you don't possess to someone who doesn't exist."
Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst.
"I decide what's obvious, not my students."
Yibiao Pan, mathematics professor.
"When someone asks me to eat shit, I don't nibble."
Melissa Bank, author of 'The Wonder Spot'.
"The good thing about being nowhere in your career is you can do it anywhere."
Melissa Bank, author of 'The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing'.
"It took me a long time to get young."
Bob Dylan.
"My friends, I have discovered there are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for further disasters."
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.
"Sex dies et septem noctes Enkidu coibat cum meretrice."
The highlight of 'Gilgamesh', which suddenly switched to Latin for some reason, and so was imprinted perfectly in my mind for 40 years.
"Anxiety is fear in search of a cause."
Patricia Pearson, author of 'A Brief History of Anxiety'.
"Too much is never enough."
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.
"A diplomat is someone who thinks twice before saying nothing."
Alex Dreier, reporter and commentator.
"To hate like this is to be happy forever."
Will Blythe, a self-described insane fan of the North Carolina basketball team, and hence a despiser of the rival Duke team.
"I got here because I couldn't keep my mouth shut!"
A trophy trout, now mounted on a plaque.
"When the enemy is engaged in destroying himself, don't interfere!"
Napoleon.
"Parallel processing allows an instructor to compute an inaccurate estimate for pi before the students have completely lost interest in the topic."
A Cramputational Scientist.
"You have to understand that West Virginia is such a tightly-knit, ingrown state that everything becomes political. And everything political becomes personal."
A West Virginian.
"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."
Woody Allen.
"Say yes before your brain has time to say no!"
Secrets of the Millionaires.
"The second mouse gets the cheese."
Willie Nelson.
"What's the point of Esperanto?
There's already an international language.
It's called bad English."
Theodor von Karman.
"Q: Can you briefly describe what kind of qualities you are looking for in a new CIA director?'
A: Probably not."
Dick Cheney, US vice president, opening up to an interviewer.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you, and you sold me."
George Orwell, in '1984' in 1948.
"I hesitate to say that any mathematician suffers from social pathology when in fact so many of them seem to thrive on it."
Jud Northbark, in 'I et Eggo in Arcadia'.
"Golf is a game of luck. The more I practice, the luckier I get!"
Ben Hogan.
"No matter how long or hard I spin,
Less gold goes out than straw comes in!"
Jud Northbark, in 'Round Up the Guilty Victims!'.
"The Apple Macintosh is the first personal computer good enough to criticize."
Alan Kay, computer scientist, one of the originators of object oriented programming.
"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."
Denton Cooley, controversial heart surgeon, under cross examination.
"He runs the Department very much in the spirit of Dunkirk, as a strategic withdrawal against overwhelming odds."
David Lodge, in 'Changing Places'.
"Mooreland, Indiana, is a long way to go
not to be anywhere when you get there."
Haven Kimmel, in 'A Girl Named Zippy'.
"A fifth grader's idea of God is OK - if you're a fifth grader."
From the documentary 'Because the Bible Tells Me So'.
"The shortest distance between two lines is under construction."
A Kakanian proverb.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch."
Jack Nicholson, no longer welcome at Thanksgiving dinner.
"It was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely."
Jane Austen, in 'Persuasion'.
"KNOWLEDGE EXPLOSION TRAPS 37 DATA MINERS!"
The San Jose Logfile.
"Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get."
A meteorological proverb.
"Climate is what you affect; weather is what gets you."
An updated meteorological proverb.
"Shyness is just egotism out of its depth."
Penelope Keith, English actress, appearing in 'To the Manor Born'.
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
Penelope Ashe,
Saint Augustine,
Pearl Buck,
Winston Churchill,
Marcus Tullius Cicero,
Albert Einstein,
Pliny T. Elder,
TS Eliot,
Frederick R Ewing,
Malcolm Forbes,
Benjamin Franklin,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Ernest Hemingway,
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Thomas Jefferson,
Doctor Samuel Johnson,
Milton Keynes,
Abraham Lincoln,
Viscount Mumbles,
Alfred E Neuman,
Jud Northbark,
Lois Carmen d'Nominator,
Blaise Pascal,
Ezra Pound,
Marcel Proust,
Robert Sayre,
Madame de Sevigne,
Diogenes Small,
Madame de Stael,
Henry David Thoreau,
Kilgore Trout,
Mark Twain,
Voltaire,
EB White,
Oscar Wilde.
"A truth that is told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent."
William Blake.
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders."
Hal Abelson, MIT computer scientist and a founder of Creative Commons.
"Idries Shah's books were a good deal harder to read than to write."
Gore Vidal.
"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."
Brian Kernighan, enunciating Kernighan's Law.
"Well, I have to get back to work now, even if you don't."
The prime minister, ending a meeting with a group of unemployed men, as 'reported' by David Frost on 'That Was The Week That Was'.
"I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt."
Marshall McLuhan.
"If I were really two-faced, do you imagine this is the face I would wear?"
Abraham Lincoln.
"I'm lost, but I'm making record time."
Navy pilot, last transmission.
"Self pity has the merit that it is apt to be sincere."
Diane Johnson, in 'Le Mariage'.
"No, I didn't do that.
It was the person who wrote the paper for me."
A student, when confronted with evidence that her term paper contained plagiarized sentences and paragraphs (New Scientist, 10 February 2007).
"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."
Pat Churchland, philosopher and brain theorist, after a bad faculty meeting.
"Blues ain't about making yourself feel better; it's about making other people feel worse."
Bleeding Gums Murphy.
"Type the field name Name in the Field Name field."
Winner of Corecomm's Worst Technical Communication Sample of the Month, submitted by Susan Gallagher from a manual she was rewriting.
"Rudy Giuliani is absolutely not a racist.
He's nasty to EVERYBODY."
Ed Koch, former New York mayor, defending his successor, a bit.
"If you believe in infinity, you also believe a string can have just one end."
Jud Northbark, in 'Keep Talking, I Need a Laugh'.
"Madame, if I did not know, I would tell you."
William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, after being pressed at a party for information about the Union Army's next moves.
Miranda: "They say the sirens were half woman, half monster."
Edgardo: "And what was the other half?"
Oakley Doake, in the play 'The Crumpled Gusset'.
"I never predict anything, and I never will."
Paul John Gascoigne, renowned English football player.
"Alaska, where you can't be too fat or too drunk!"
Homer Simpson.
"I'll have to start writing your new addresses in pencil!"
Camilla Caimano, receiving yet another change of address from me.
"People come and go so quickly here!"
Dorothy Gale, a character in 'The Wizard of Oz'.
"Dvum smertiam nye by vat, I odnoi nye mino vat!"
(Two deaths cannot happen to a person, and one death can't be avoided!)
What a Russian yells when facing danger.
"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."
Barbara Amiel, consort of 'Lord' Conrad Black, perfectly expressing her frame of mind upon being criticized for her extravagant lifestyle.
"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."
Joan Anderman, writing for the Boston Globe, defending Al Gore's 'Live Earth' event of 7 July 2007.
"Unrequited love is the only kind that lasts."
Woody Allen.
"A boy chases a girl until she catches him."
A Kakanian proverb.
"You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?"
Roger Myers, Jr, producer of 'The Itchy and Scratchy Show', a character on 'The Simpsons' television series.
"In the Red Army, it takes a very brave man to be a coward."
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, whose Red Army shot 158,000 men for desertion during World War II.
"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."
Dwight Schrute, a character in the television series 'The Office'.
"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."
Jack Valenti, no longer sleeping so well.
"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 Northbark, in 'The Trope Toters'.
"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."
Jud Northbark, in 'Bugs in the Sugar'.
"Live your whole life as if it were deductible!"
Carolyn See, in the novel 'Making History'.
"You've made a choice between doughnuts and sex."
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.
"I lost two friends this year. You can take 2007 and give it back to the Indians."
Paulie Walnuts, a character on 'The Sopranos'.
"He was so crooked he could hide behind a spiral staircase."
PG Wodehouse, author of 'My Man Jeeves'.
"I have discovered from your comments that the best thing I have done was to choose my predecessor."
Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the UN, replacing John Notlob, that is, Bolton.
"Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything."
Steve Martin.
"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."
Norman Maclean, in 'Young Men and Fire'.
"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!"
Sherlock Holmes.
"Don't be so humble - you're not that great!"
Golda Meir.
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a PhD in physics than by drugs."
Jonathan Katz, physicist at Washington University at St Louis.
"A good newspaper is never quite good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever."
Garrison Keillor.
"Being a leader of the Huns is often a lonely job."
Wess Roberts, in 'Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun'.
"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."
Dave Barry.
"It's better to be at the table than on the menu."
A Kakanian proverb.
"As the popular joke goes, the problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work."
Miikka Ryokas, 22 year old computer science student in Turku, Finland.
"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."
P G Wodehouse, in 'A Damsel in Distress'.
"The older I get, the better I used to be."
Bill Layton, after a basketball game with his students.
"If you're plotting revenge, remember to take two shovels."
A Kakanian proverb.
"You can't put the shit back in the donkey."
Tony Soprano, waste management expert.
"Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."
Peter Medawar, reviewing Teilhard de Chardin's book 'The Phenomenon of Man'.
"'Did I say paradigm? I must be drunk,' said the M.O. 'I'm always drunk when I say paradigm.'"
Margery Sharp, in 'The Sun in Scorpio'.
"Only dead fish swim with the stream."
Frank Pakenham, Lord Longford, a former advocate for child murderer Myra Hyndley.
"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."
Wells Tower, attending a convention of young conservatives.
"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."
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.
"Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings."
George Will.
"The landscape is so flat and barren you could probably watch your dog run away all day long."
Charlie LeDuff, surveying the scenic wonderland around Oklahoma City.
"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up."
Ralph Smith, proactive procrastinator.
"My fourth design mantra is never, ever go barefoot in a man's bathroom."
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.
"If the captain doesn't know where he wants to go, there is no wind that will take him there."
A Kakanian proverb.
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."
Woody Allen, currently presumptively premortal.
"NASA is like welfare for bright people.
They're so smart they're useless."
Wanda Sykes.
"We would be working class, if there was any work."
Jimmy Rabbitte, in the movie 'The Commitments'.
"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
George Box, professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin.
"It's not true that I like human flesh. It's much too salty for me."
Idi Amin Dada, Ugandan tyrant, graciously brushing off accusations of cannibalism.
"May you live to see Zymotic!"
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).
"He is an utter numb-skull, a most lack-a-daisical, graspless fellow, born to stare at existence."
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.
"So they're dividing us into different ethnic groups - is that kosher?"
Parvati, a female boxer and competitor on the version of Survivor which divided 20 people into four teams by race.
"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."
Mark Twain.
"I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display."
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.
"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."
Toby Young, in 'The Sound of No Hands Clapping'.
"He was as happy as a dog with two tails."
Peter Carey, author of 'Oscar and Lucinda' and 'The True History of the Kelly Gang,' in 'My Life as a Fake'.
"Athenians: 'If we come to your city, we will raze it to the ground!'
Lacedemonians: 'If.'"
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. Thanks to Vasileios Basios for correcting the previous version of this discussion.
"When in doubt, cut up a pig."
The supposed motto of Embrey, Indiana, childhood home of Harmony Faith Lane and Harry Lockhart of 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'.
"You know my feelings. Every day is a gift. It's just, does it always have to be a pair of socks?"
Tony Soprano, musing to his therapist.
"That boy's got a lot of quit in him!"
Ron White's grandfather finds something positive to say about him.
"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."
Charles Hoare, inventor of the QuickSort algorithm, in his 1990 ACM Turing Award Lecture.
"This instructor makes it difficult for the average student to get an A!"
An anonymous student evaluator, as reported by A J Meir.
"DNA, schmee-NA!"
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 gave this reply.
"My God, Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand amazed at my own moderation!"
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.
"How long have I been married? Thirty years. If I'd killed her straightaway I would be out again by now."
The father of the bride, in 'Imagine Me and You'.
"We must remember that if we act now, it lies within our power to save two species for every one that is currently doomed."
Tim Flannery, in 'The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth'.
"I'm so hungry I could eat the ass out of a horse."
A hard working graduate student looking forward to a delayed lunch.
"If you don't show up for work on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday."
The company motto when Walt Disney first started hiring starving cartoonists.
"It's not that I dislike him. I don't like him."
Catalin Trenchea, making a fine point.
"I'm not going to be a namedropper. I'm very resistant to what Chairman Mao calls the cult of personality."
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.
"Ah yes, the anthropic principle, the inevitable conclusion that astronomy is the study of astronomers."
Jud Northbark, after reading one too many articles about habitable universes found ticking away on the beach.
"Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered!"
Larry Shepp, professor of statistics at Rutgers, on being informed that a mathematicial discovery he made had actually been discovered by an earlier mathematician.
"The God of mathematical software has an inordinate fondness for Bessel functions."
Jud Northbark, after one week of constructing documentation for all the routines in a mathematical function package.
"The problem is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants."
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.
"Nineteenth-century English village life will always loom large in the world's imagination, like Greenland in a Mercator projection map."
Michael Kinsley, in an online article in Slate about Larry David titled 'America's Jane Austen'.
"Oh no, not another fucking elf!"
Hugo Dyson, a member of the Inklings literary group, as fellow member JRR Tolkien was reading from 'The Lord of the Rings'.
"Sometimes you get the whale. And sometimes the whale gets you."
David Edelstein, suggesting a promo for a movie version of 'Moby Dick'.
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."
Oscar Wilde.
"Well, we've said it many times - if a frog had sidepockets, he'd carry a gun."
Dan Rather, planning a new line of amphibian sportswear.
"Frankly, we don't know whether to run, to watch, or to bark at the moon."
Dan Rather, off his leash.
"I don't fail anything - except for math, twice."
Nehemiah, manufactured temporary celebrity of MTV's 'The Real World'.
"I guess I should warn you if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said."
Alan Greenspan, hiding in plain sight at his 1988 confirmation hearings.
"A bureaucracy is born by asserting a monopoly on a particular activity; it flourishes by failing to accomplish it."
Jud Northbark.
"It's no use having a dog and barking too."
A Kakanian proverb.
"Woman gallery visitor: 'Well, Mr Whistler, I certainly don't see things as you do!' Whistler: 'No, ma'am, but don't you wish you could?'"
At an exhibition of Whistler's paintings.
"Evolution is cleverer than you."
Leslie Orgel's Second Rule.
"He wasn't averse to quality journalism; he just thought it should go on somewhere else."
John Cruickshank, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, describing F David Rader, the president of the publishing company, and associate of 'Lord' Conrad Black.
"My philosophy is, if you've got nothing to say, then don't say it."
Willem Dafoe, playing a drug dealer in 'Light Sleeper'.
"Just as there are wavelengths that people cannot see, and sounds that people cannot hear, computers may have thoughts that people cannot think."
Richard Hamming, a pioneer numerical analyst.
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women."
Conan the Barbarian, impersonated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, in answer to the question 'What is best in life?' (and paraphrasing a remark by Genghis Khan!).
"The greatest thing in life is:
Genghis Khan.
"Here lies the body of W W,
Who never again will trouble you, trouble you."
Epitaph.
"Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid."
Brewster Bragsheer, in 'Shoes for the Dead'.
"In a world gone mad, only a lunatic is truly insane!"
Homer Simpson, parading around with a sign announcing the coming of the apocalypse.
"So young, and already so unknown!
So jung, und schon unbekannt!"
Wolfgang Pauli, writing off a colleague.
"I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions!"
James Franck, a member of J Robert Oppenheimer's PhD committee.
"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."
Charles Babbage, a man before his time, dealing with questions beneath contempt.
"How can you ask a followup question when I didn't answer your first question?"
Ari Fischer, press secretary for George Bush II.
"Why be difficult, when, with a little effort, you can be impossible?"
A Kakanian proverb.
"JOB: a life support system for a web page."
Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."
Charles Babbage, who invented both the computer and the belief that as long as you were right it didn't matter who you irritated.
"What's it like to make a foreign movie?"
An aspiring film student, asked of a Dutch filmmaker at a festival.
"Frye [hesitantly]: I'm having one of those, uh, things... like a headache with pictures.
Leela: You mean an idea?"
An exchange on 'Futurama' between Frye, pizza delivery boy from the 20th century, and Leela, the one-eyed alien.
"George Bush's eyes are so closely set that he could get by with a monocle."
Christopher Hitchens, political gadfly.
"You can't plan for the unforeseen. God doesn't follow the linear directions of computer models."
Jeb Bush, Florida governor, after not planning for Hurricane Charley.
"Live life not expecting, then even the small tings you will be grateful for!"
Jud Northbark's fortune cookie for 8 July 2004.
"The silicon is fine. It's the carbon we have to deal with."
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.
"They showed me a newspaper, but I can't read it, because it is in Israelian."
Nouni Cisse, French fashion model, 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!'.
"We had become like bishops of opposite color."
Boris Spassky, tenth World Chess Champion, on the dissolution of his first marriage.
"Any idiot can handle a crisis. But it's the day-to-day living that wears you down!"
Anton Chekhov.
"The Indian National Congress Party is like a pillow: it reflects the shape of the last person who sat on it."
Anthony Heath and Yogengra Yadav.
"According to my models, we are doubling the paradigm shift rate approximately every decade."
Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, in a letter to Scientific American.
"The new Oral B toothbrush has amazing 3D action!"
From a television commercial.
"Call Senator Helms;
Call King Hussein;
Call Foreign Minister Moussa;
Make other congressional calls;
Prepare for China meeting;
Buy nonfat yogurt."
From 'Madame Secretary' by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
"If you see a Bulgarian on the street, beat him. He will know why."
A venerable Russian adage.
"Customer: 'I don't know if I'll like grits - can I have just one?' Waitress: 'Honey, grits only come in groups."
At a truck stop just over the Virginia state line.
"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."
Arnold Schwarzenegger, tossing his helmet into the ring for the California governorship.
"The movie 'Legally Blonde' puts the 'b' in 'subtle'."
Elvis Mitchell, film critic for the New York Times.
"Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party."
Robin Williams, in a comedy performance (and thus, probably 80 other times).
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
Mark Twain, in a quote that seems to have cut itself loose from any exact formulation or textual attribution, supposedly said, more or less.
"Indiana 66 is a road so crooked it could run for the legislature."
William Least Heat Moon, in 'Blue Highways'.
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Goon, who would patent the fart and not even let you have a free trial.
"Eternity is very long, especially towards the end."
Woody Allen.
"The thing about doing something terrible is you hardly ever remember it."
John Malkovich's T-shirt.
"You can contradict yourself successfully if you do it with conviction."
Ben Ratliff, reviewing a performance by White Stripes.
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."
Woody Allen, in 'Hollywood Ending'.
"The more, the merrier!"
Cardinal Jaime Sin, asked to comment on the ruinous population explosion of the Philippines.
"There are only so many ulcers in the world, and it's your job to see that other people get them."
John Boyd, fighter pilot and military strategist.
"Michael Jackson is the ultimate traffic accident. People can't take their eyes off him!"
Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, commenting on a sweeps week surge in Michael Jackson coverage.
"I've been surviving mostly on McDonald's food, but like I said, that gets expensive. I have to start eating at home more."
Jeffrey Dahmer, anthropophage, recorded on video at his grandmother's house in 1990.
"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."
Sophie Harris, in the New York Times Book Review of 05 January 2003.
"Unlike most pieces of software, QuickTime isn't an application, but an enabling technology."
Judith Stern and Robert Lettieri, in the manual 'QuickTime 5 for Macintosh and Windows', trying to take your breath away.
"Now with more beans!"
A can of Campbell's Pork and Beans, because 'Now with less pork!' didn't have the same appeal.
"Purgatory was merely an unpleasantness for transients, the afterlife's O'Hare."
Cullen Murphy, managing editor of The Atlantic, (which makes it a bit easier to get yourself published) writing in an article about limbo.
"I would be very careful before calling something nonsense if I didn't understand it yet."
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.
"It's about resolution, stupid!"
Richard Kunkel, Dean of the College of Education at Florida State University, speaking for the ages at a ceremony for National Mediation Week.
"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!"
Jud Northbark.
"Though I refused to age, the students and other teachers grew younger year by year."
Michael Dibdin, in the comic murder-romance 'Dirty Tricks'.
"Was one back scratching the other?"
Raymond Syufy, chief executive of Century Theaters, commenting on an unsavory executive compensation scheme at AMC.
"You could calculate pi with those things."
Joshua Milrad, codirector of the video 'Spring Break Uncensored', commenting on a pair of awesomely artificial breasts.
"I think I forget to hit RETURN."
Jud Northbark, about to leave the bathroom, but then turning around after a sudden worry.
"This paper gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error, however, is not new."
Clifford Truesdell, in a review of a paper (Mathematical Reviews, Volume 12, page 561).
"The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."
Charles De Gaulle.
"Ten years ago I might not be sitting here today."
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.
"Madison, Wisconsin, is fifty-two square miles surrounded by reality."
Lee Dreyfus, a former governor of Wisconsin.
"A modest man, who has much to be modest about!"
Winston Churchill, on Clement Atlee, whom he preceded and succeeded in the office of prime minister.
"It makes no sense to replace someone who's on the Appropriations Committee with someone who is not!"
George W Bush.
"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me!"
The motto on a pillow on Alice Longworth Roosevelt's couch.
"I am going to make my First Communion, and I intend to yodel."
Michelle Kwan's skating costume's subliminal message, according to the New Yorker, as quoted in an article in the New York Times.
"Tonight we have the great Ring trilogy: Rocky I, Rocky II, and Rocky III."
An uncredited constructor of the local television guide.
"SELF RESPECT: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."
H L Mencken, from Jud Northbark's Fictionary of Argot, Cant, and Jive.
"Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he is caught young."
Doctor Samuel 'Dictionary' Johnson.
"No one tosses a dwarf!"
The best line from the movie version of 'The Fellowship of the Ring'.
"Anyone who has ever hammered a nail into his nose owes a large debt to Melvin Burkhart."
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.
"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."
Jud Northbark.
"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..."
E F Benson, in 'Queen Lucia'.
"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."
Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly, in 'A Guide to Latex2E', with their humor parameter set to zero.
"Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?"
Macbeth, as reported by Shakespeare.
"It's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but then the unlived life is not worth examining."
Robert Hughes, crusty Australian art critic and unreliable driver.
"All those Porsches and nowhere to drive."
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.
"'Manual Count' Means Manipulation!"
A protest sign displayed during the Florida presidential recount.
"I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
Maurice Wilkes, after the first attempts to write programs for the EDSAC computer.
"I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics."
Governor Earl Long.
"We'll look back on this as the era when money was too cheap to meter."
Referring to the gaudy, grandiose, ostentatious buildings that Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has splattered around Seattle.
"Of course we are better than those damn Serbs. Our alphabet has four more letters!"
A Montenegrin, interviewed in connection with an article about Montenegro's efforts to separate from Serbia.
"Epigram #63: When we write programs that learn, it turns out that we do and they don't."
Alan Perlis, first recipient of the Turing award, first chair of the CMU Computer Science Department, and author of 'Epigrams on Programming'.
"My hesitation is final."
The caption below a picture of Prime Minister John Major, in a book about Great Britain's tortuous tango with European integration.
"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."
Paul Halmos.
"Northern Ireland is the only place I know where someone will drive 100 miles out of his way just to receive an insult."
David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, commenting after the latest collapse of a peace plan in Northern Ireland.
"Never eat a cookie with a resistance of less than 1 ohm."
Greg Hood, computational neuroscientist, 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.
"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."
Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, presenting a computer-aided proof of the Four Color Theorem.
"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."
The chef at G's, (or is it Charlie's?) in Oakland, Pittsburgh.
"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?"
Cynthia Van Ness, of Buffalo, New York, stirring the (vegetarian) shit in a letter appearing in the May-June 1998 issue of 'The Utne Reader'.
"Of course the story is true. But you must understand: That driver was very impolite!"
Eugene Wigner, Nobel prize winner 1963, confirming an anecdote in which he got into a fight with a taxi driver over a tip, and then told him 'Oh, go to hell, please!'.
"If a man speaks in a forest, and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"
On a T-shirt.
"The NSA is a self-licking ice cream cone."
An anonymous senior official of the National Security Agency.