All My Quotes

Robert Heckendorn

Search My Quotes

In the form below you can search through all of my quotes for quotes containing a given string. It is best not to enter a long string into the form because: a) You might not remember the string correctly b) I might not have the quote correct c) You or I might misspell something. For example:

If you enter: "A greater hive of scum and villainy"
you get: nothing.
If you enter: "hive"
you get: "Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

Complete List of Quotes

"The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness."

-- Ishmael by Danial Quinn p146

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children -- that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, the spit upon themselves.

This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself ..."

-- Chief Seatle

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I hoped for or imagined. How is it that this safe return brings such regret?"

--Peter Matthiessen

"It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die."

-- N. Scott Momaday (from the movie Remembered Earth)

"The character of the landscape changes from hour to hour, day to day, season to season. Nothing of the earth can be taken for granted; you feel that Creation is going on in your sight. You see things in the high air that you do not see farther down in the lowlands. In the high country all objects bear upon you, and you touch hard upon the earth. From my home I can see the huge, billowing clouds; they draw close upon me and merge with my life."

-- N. Scott Momaday (from the movie Remembered Earth)

"Once in our lives we ought to concentrate our minds upon the Remembered Earth. We ought to give ourselves up to a particular landscape in our experience, to look at it from as many angles as we can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. We ought to imagine that we touch it with our hands at every season and listen to the sounds that are made upon it. We ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. We ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."

-- N. Scott Momaday (from the movie Remembered Earth)

"I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years."

-- N. Scott Momaday (from the movie Remembered Earth)

"The one thing that does not abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

-- Harper Lee

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present."

-- Simone Weil

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

... It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

-- Oriah Mountain Dreamer from the book "The Invitation"

By the time it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, "There is no hurry. We shall get there some day."

-- Benjamin Hoff, "The Tao Of Pooh"

"Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day because there's no other way to play it."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"No one is pure evil. Find the best in everybody. Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"Brick walls are there for a reason. They are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop people who don't want it badly enough."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"It is not about achieving your dreams but living your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"We can't change the cards we're dealt, just how we play the hand. If I'm not as depressed as you think I should be, I'm sorry to disappoint you."

-- Randy Pausch in his "Last Lecture"

"To have striven, to have made an effort, to have been true to certain ideals -- this alone is worth the struggle. We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, life."

-- Sir William Osler, 1849-1919 Canadian Physician, Medical Historian

"If you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains; If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains."

-- Cicero

"Voila! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V."

-- V from the movie "V is for Vendetta"

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

-- V from the movie "V is for Vendetta"

Gusteau: "You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true - anyone can cook... but only the fearless can be great."

-- From the movie: "Ratatouille"

COLETTE: People think Haute Cuisine is snooty, so chefs must also be snooty. But not so. Lalo there-- ran away from home at twelve, got hired by circus people as an acrobat, got fired for messing around with the ringmasters daughter. Horst has done time.
LINGUINI: What for?
COLETTE: No one knows for sure. He changes the story every time you ask him.
JUMP CUTS: HORST I defrauded a major corporation.
(CUT)
I robbed the second largest bank in France using only a ballpoint pen.
(CUT)
I created a hole in the ozone over Avignon.
(CUT)
I killed a man with-- (he holds it up) --this thumb.
COLETTE: Don't ever play cards with Pompidou. He's been banned from both Las Vegas and Monte Carlo.
COLETTE: La Rousse ran guns for the resistance.
LINGUINI: Which resistance?
COLETTE: He won't say. Apparently they did not win. So you see, we are artists. Pirates. More than cooks are we.

-- From the movie: "Ratatouille"

'"Come to the edge," he said.
They said, "We are afraid."
"Come to the edge," he said.
They came.
He pushed them....
And they flew.'

--Guillaume Apollinaire

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."

--Thucydies (B.C. 460-400)

"Happiness is a direction and not a place."

-- Sydney J. Harris

"Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it."

-- Herbert Marcuse

"Let your life speak!"

-- Quaker Saying

"Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus"
(Never tickle a sleeping dragon)

-- Hogwarts School Motto (from the Harry Potter series of books)

"A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service."

-- Georges Pompidou

"Real talent is a mystery, and people who've got it, know it."

-- George Cukor, director

'In the heating and air conditioning trade, the point on the thermostat in which neither being nor cooling must operate-- around 72 degrees -- is called "The Comfort Zone." It is also known as "The Dead Zone."'

--Russell Bishop

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your mind off your goals."

--anon

"You can only make a certain amount with your hands, but with your mind, it's unlimited."

--Kal Seinfeld's advice to his son, Jerry

"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything."

--George Lois

"Habit is an outsider who supplants reason in us."

-- Sully Prudhomme (aka Rene-Francois-Armand Prudhomme)

"I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered."

-- Jean Ingelow

"Success to the strongest, who are always, at last, the wisest and best."

--Emerson

"Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumbbells? To dig a vinyard is worthier exercise."

-- Marcus Valius Martialis (40 AD-102 AD)

"The purpose of a wilderness journey is not to get from one end of the trail to the other, but to enjoy the landscape, and adapt to its ever-changing moods."

--Bill Mason

"A short life is better for mankind, for a long life would deprive man of hi soptimism."

-- Karel Capek

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose."

-- Zora Neale Huston

"This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."

-- Elmer Davis

"It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I am right."

-- Moliere

"The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit."

-- Moliere

"Always give them the old fire, even when you feel like a squashed cake of ice."

-- Ethel Merman

"There is nothing new in art except talent."

-- Anton Chekhov

"Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt."

-- William Van Horne

"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."

-- Gotthold Lessing

"television, a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done."

-- Ernie Kovacs

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

-- Archilochus, Greek poet

"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."

-- Robert Motherwell

"By annihilating desires, you annihilate the mind."

-- Claude-Adrien Helvetius

"Every successful revoution puts on in time the robe of the tyrant it has deposed."

-- Barbara Tuchman

"If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything."

-- Fred Menger

"The biggest human temptation is ... to settle for too little."

-- Thomas Merton

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

-- Thomas Pynchon

"...lack of foresight and an almost childlike decision not to worry about the future seem to be human characteristics that are timeless. Ultimately, these psychological weaknesses may be more responsible for why civilizations have failed than resouce shortages alone."

-- Stephen Leeb

"An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question."

-- John Tukey

"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it."

-- Pierre Gallois

"You can build a throne out of bayonets, but you can't sit on them long."

-- Boris Yeltsin

"No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side."

-- Jascha Heifetz

"Modern Man has lost the option of silence."

-- William Burroughs

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo."

-- Beryl Markham

"I felt exhilarated. It was like thinking that all there is to your family are your parents, brothers and sisters, and then you realize there's a whole stretch of history that is an extension of who you are."

-- Loreena McKennitt on how her travels have influenced her

"You can't get there from here if you don't know where here and there are."

-- Thom Hogan (photographer)

"No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit."

-- Ansel Adams

"Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter."

-- Ansel Adams

"The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."

-- Ansel Adams

"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."

-- Ansel Adams

"The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit."

-- Ansel Adams

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

-- Ansel Adams

"A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed."

-- Ansel Adams

"A brave heart is a powerful weapon."

-- anon

"The heart wants what it wants."

-- From the TV show "Life is Wild"

"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

-- anon

"The trouble with life is, that you're halfway through it before you realize that it's a 'do it yourself' thing.

-- anon

"God made the desert so that man could find his soul."

-- anon

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

-- Marie Curie

"In youth we learn; in age we understand."

-- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

"He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never heated."

-- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

"What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible."

-- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

"Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good."

-- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes."

-- Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

"Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

"All your base are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction
You have no chance to survive.
make your time.

-- mistranslation of threat of an opponent in a video game

"Life is a verb."

-- anon

"The Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not limit what we can know about reality; it describes that reality."

-- Barbara Burke Hubbard

"God created the integers, all else is the work of man."

-- Kronecker speaking in opposition to Cantor's use of sets as the foundation of mathematics

"If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem."

-- Krishnamurti

"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."

-- Felix Klein

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical, but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."

-- Mark Haddon, "The Curious Incident of the Dog and the Night-time"

"Tired and full of mathematical ideas, happy from the consciousness that we had found out something which one cannot find in books, we would return in the evening to Moscow."

-- B V Gnedenko, commenting on outings to Kolmogorov's house

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea."

-- Emile-Auguste Chartier

Calvera: If God hadn't meant for them to be sheared, he wouldn't have made them sheep.

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

Chris: Job for six men, watching over a village, south of the border.
O'Reilly: How big's the opposition?
Chris: Thirty guns.
O'Reilly: I admire your notion of fair odds, mister.

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

Vin: Reminds me of that fellow back home that fell off a ten story building.
Chris: What about him?
Vin: Well, as he was falling people on each floor kept hearing him say, "So far, so good. Tch...So far, so good!"

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

Calvera has just captured the Seven.]
Calvera: What I don't understand is why a man like you took the job in the first place, hum? Why, heh?
Chris: I wonder myself.
Calvera: No, come on, tell me why.
Vin: It's like this fellow I knew in El Paso. One day, he just took all his clothes off and jumped in a mess of cactus. I asked him that same question, Why?"
Calvera: And?
Vin: He said, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

Village Boy 2: We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.
O'Reilly: Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery.

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

Chris: The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

[The Villagers tell Chris they collected everything of value in their village to hire gunmen]
Chris Adams: I have been paid a lot for my work, but never everything.

-- from the movie "The Magnificent Seven"

"If you truely enjoy your work then you will never have to work again."

-- proverb

"The world steps aside for those who know where they are going."

-- proverb

"The older we get, the better we was."

-- proverb

"It's better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you're not."

-- proverb

"Idleness is the holiday of fools."

-- proverb

"Do not seek after the sages of the past. Seek what they sought."

-- Basho

"The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time."

-- James Taylor (from a song)

"A man's gotta know his limitations."

-- Dirty Harry (from the movie Magnum Force)

"I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"

-- Dirty Harry (from the movie Dirty Harry)

"I freely give all sights and sounds of nature I have known to those who have the grace to enjoy not man-made materialism but God-made beauty.

The magnificent Arizona sunsets I have watched from my enclosure, I bequeath to all who see not only with their eyes, but with their hearts. To humans who are tired, worried or discouraged, I bequeath the silence, majestry and peace of our great American desert. To those who walk the trails, I bequeath the early morning voices of the birds and the glory of the flowering desert in the springtime. To the children who have enjoyed seeing me, hearing me purr, and watching me turn my somersaults, I offer the precious gift of laughter and joy. The world so needs these things. And lastly, I bequeath my own happy spirit, and affection for others, to all who may remember me and my museum where for three years, I did my best to show people that I truly liked them."

-- Epataph for George L. Mountain Lion (Feb 1952 - Mar 1955) Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, AZ

"Morning has broken, like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird"

-- Cat Stevens

"If I had words to make a day for you,
I'd sing you a morning golden and new.
I would make this day last for all time,
Give you a night deep with moonshine."

-- annon, sung by farmer Hoggett in the movie Babe, suspected folk song

"Adults are obsolete children and the hell with them."

-- Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

"Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana."

-- Groucho Marx

"Sometimes life's so beautiful it catches you off guard."

-- anon

"Beauty.. is merciless. You do not look at it; it looks at you and does not forgive."

-- Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of "Zorba the Greek"

"The morning is such a lovely time of day. It's a shame it's so early."

-- Debra Applin

"Life is tough but, it's even tougher if you're stupid."

-- anonymous hospital emergency room staffer

"The morning is the rudder of the day."

-- anon

"Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Play with abandon. Listen well. Choose without regret. Do what you love. Appreciate your friends. Act as if this is all there is."

-- J.N.Kemsley

"Must we have 'hooter cancer survivors'?"

-- a user angry with America Online's censorship policies

"We may not be the only species on the planet but we sure do act like it."

-- anon

"Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him, for he is the harbinger of death."

-- Dr. Zaius, Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith (From the movie Planet of the Apes)

"All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors."

-- Anonymous

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

-- last line of "Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion," a personal communication to Peter van Emde Boas by Donald Knuth

"A supercomputer is a device for converting a CPU-bound problem into an I/O bound problem."

-- Ken Batcher

"A supercomputer is one that is only one generation behind what you really need."

-- Neil Lincoln

"All generalizations are false."

-- anon

"Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math."

-- anon

"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once."

-- anon

"Out of my mind. Back in five minutes."

-- anon

"Sometimes I wake up grumpy; Other times I let him sleep."

-- anon

"Numquam magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit."
Latin for "There has never been a great spirit without a touch of insanity."

-- anon

"I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it."

-- anon

"Time is a great teacher; unfortunately it kills all its pupils."

-- Hector Berlioz

"Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear."

-- anon

"Give me ambiguity or give me something else."

-- anon

"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."

-- anon

"There are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't."

-- anon

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't."

-- anon

"May you live in interesting times"

-- chinese curse

Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?"
Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky... try and take over the world!"

-- From Pinky and the Brain

"Winter is good for reading the classics, for one's mind is more collected. Summer is good for reading history, for one has plenty of time. The autumn is good for reading ancient philosophers, because of the great diversity of thought and ideas. Finally, spring is suitable for reading modern authors, for in spring one's spirit expands."

-- Chang Chan

October in my own land....
I know what glory fills
The mountains of New Hampshire
And Massachusetts hills.

I know what hues of opal
Rhode Island breezes fan,
And how Connecticut puts on
Colors of Hindustan.

-- anon

"To talk with a learned friend is like reading a remarkable book; with a romantic friend, like reading good prose and poetry; with an upright friend, like reading the classics; with a humorous friend, like reading fiction."

-- Chang Chan

"Hoyle and Wickramasinghe gave up on spontaeous generation [of life], since the likelihood of the event was comparable to the chances that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

-- Stuart Kaufman in "At Home in the Universe"

"The orange dump truck's wheels turned orange."

-- from elementary school poem

"To infinity and beyond!"

-- Buzz Lightyear

"You open it with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound. A dimension of sight. A dimension of mind. You are moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."

-- Intro to the Twilight Zone

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

-- Sherlock Holmes in "The Sign of Four"

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

-- anon

"I learn so as to be contented."

--inscription on the stone wash-basin in Ryoanji temple

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

-- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work, but teach them longing for the wide endless sea."

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Faint heart never won fair lady."

-- proverb

"As he thinketh in his heart, so is he."

-- Proverbs 23:7, Bible

"Two souls but with a single thought;
Two hearts that beat as one."

-- Von Munch Bellinghausen

"The only way to pass any test is to take the test. It is inevitable."

-- Elder Regal Black Swan

"I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn't give this game of life everything he's got."

-- Walter Cronkite

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."

-- Cree Indian Prophecy

"Born empty handed, Die empty handed. I witnessed life at its fullest, Empty handed."

-- Marlo Morgan

Vicomte de Valvert: Ah... your nose... hem! Your nose is rather large!

Cyrano (gravely): Rather.

Valvert (simpering): Oh well--

Cyrano (coolly): Is that all?

Valvert (turns away with a shrug): Well of course--

Cyrano: Ah no, young sir! You are too simple. Why, you might have said -- Oh a great many things! Mon dieu, why waste your opportunity? For example, thus:
AGGRESSIVE: I, sir, if that nose were mine, I'd have it amputated - on the spot!
FRIENDLY: How do you drink with such a nose? You ought to have a cup made specially.
DESCRIPTIVE: 'Tis a rock - a crag - a cape - A cape? say rather a peninsula!
INQUISITIVE: What is that receptacle - A razor-case or a portfolio?
KINDLY: Ah, do you love the little birds so much that they come and sing to you, you give them this to perch on?
INSOLENT: Sir, when you smoke, the neighbours must suppose your chimney is on fire.
CAUTIOUS: Take care-- A weight like that might make you topheary.
THOUGHTFUL: Somebody fech my parasol-- Those delicate colors fade so in the sun!
PEDANTIC: Does not Aristophanes mention a mythologic monster called hippocampelephantocamelos? Surely we have here the original!
FAMILIAR: Well, old torchlight! Hang your hat over that chandelier-- it hurts my eyes.
ELOQUENT: When it blows, the typhoon howls, and the clouds darken.
DRAMATIC: When it bleeds-- the Red Sea!
ENTERPRISING: What a sign for some perfumer!
LYRIC: Hark-- the horn of Roland calls to summon Charlemagne!--
SIMPLE: When do they unveil the monument?
RESPECTFUL: Sir, I recongnize in you a man of many parts, a man of prominence--
RUSTIC: Hey? What? Call that a nose? Na na-- I be no fool like what you think I be--That there's a blue cucumber!
MILITARY: Point against cavalry!
PRACTICAL: Why not a lottery with this for the grand prize? Or -- parodying Faustus in the play-- "Was this the nose that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium?"

These, my dear sir, are things you might have said had you some tinge of letters, or of wit to color your discourse.

-- Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (Brian Hooker translator)

Roxanne: I have never loved but one man in my life,
And I have lost him-- twice...

-- Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (Brian Hooker translator)

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

-- Margaret Mead

"There are no straight lines in nature."

-- A person searching for the wreckage of EgyptAir 990 using sonar

"For time changes the nature of the whole world, and all things must pass from one condition to another, nothing remains like itself."

--Lucretis 99 B.C. - 55 B.C.

"It is not half so important to know as it is to feel."

--Rachel Carson

"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives."

--Indian Proverb

"Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die."

--Joe lewis

"If people don't want to come out to the park, nobody's going to stop them."

--Yogi Berra

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

-- Yogi Berra

"Why buy good luggage? You only use it when you travel."

-- Yogi Berra

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

-- Yogi Berra

"We're lost, but we're making good time!"

-- Yogi Berra

"Pair up in threes."

-- Yogi Berra

"Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken."

-- Yogi Berra

"You can observe a lot by watching."

-- Yogi Berra

"A man in the house is worth two in the street."

--Mae West in Belle of the Nineties

"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before."

-- Mae West

"It pays to be good -- but it doesn't pay much''

-- Mae West

"My brain is open."

--Paul Erdös

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

--Paul Erdös

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work."

--John Von Neumann

"All models are wrong. Some are useful."

-- George E. P. Box

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."

--Henri Poincare

"It is not order only, but unexpected order, that has value."

--Henri Poincare

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

--John Von Neumann 1951

"3 Billion B.C.: The Earth is a swirling ball of flaming gases. Fishing is extremely poor, especially in August."

--Cliff Hauptman in The Complete History of Fishing

"One of the toughest battles in intelligence is combating conventional wisdom."

-- Robert Gates, former CIA director on why they failed to predict the soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, Nuclear tests in India, ...

"History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."

-- Clarence Darrow

"Nice guys finish last."

--Leo Durocher

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."

--Samuel Goldwyn

"Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, those watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God."

-- Hildegard von Bingen (12 c.)

"Those voices you hear are like the voice of a multitude, which lifts its sound on high; for jubilant praises, offered in simple harmony and charity, lead the faithful to that consonance in which is no discord, and make those who still live on earth sign with heart and voice for the heavenly reward."

-- Hildegard von Bingen (12 c.)

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"To affect the quality of the day, is the highest of the arts."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"Better to die like a lion than to live like sheep"

-- proverb

"Depend on it: there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace."

-- Sherlock Holmes "The Case of Identity"

"It is natural for the ordinary American when he sees something wrong to feel not only that there should be a law against it but, also that an organization should be formed to combat it."

-- Gunner Myrdal

"First get your facts; and then you can distort them ay your leisure."

-- Mark Twain

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is the lightning that does the work."

-- Mark Twain

"Facts are like stuffed animals in a glass case, only remotely suggesting the wild uncertain environment in which they had their beginning."

-- Michael Hawkins

"Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information."

-- Edward R. Tufte

"Treat a virus with antibiotics and you get better in 7 days. Do nothing and you are better in a week."

-- anon

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

-- Sherlock Holmes "A Scandal in Bohemia"

"The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things-- but the oddest part of it was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold."

-- Through the Looking Glass

'... The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'

`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'

`Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself.

`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'

`Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

`I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'

-- Through the Looking Glass

"I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still I can do something;
and because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do something I can do."

-- Edward Everett Hale

"I'm just singing for the women who think they can't speak out. Can't a man alive mistreat me, 'cause I know who I am."

-- Alberta Hunter, blues singer

"I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves."

-- Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your
one wild and precious life?"

-- Mary Oliver

"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

-- Walter Bagehot

"Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy."

-- Richard Burton (explorer)

"Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen."

-- Benjamin Disraeli

"A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."

-- Lao Tsu

"In the pursuit of learning,
everyday something is acquired.
In the pursuit of the Way,
everyday something is dropped."

-- Lao Tzu

"The reverse side also has a reverse side."

-- Japanese proverb

"What you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I hate quotations."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"This is the mark of a perfect character - to pass through each day as though it were the last, without agitation, without torpor, and without pretense."

-- Marcus Aurelius

"We do not learn by experience, but by our capacity for experience."

-- Buddha

"The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it."

-- Stanley Kubrick

"Behold, my son, with what little wisdom the world is ruled."

-- Count Axel Oxenstierna

"The world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps his cool."

-- William McFee

"The world is ruled by letting things take their course."

-- Lao-Tzu

"A wise man never loses anything if he has himself."

-- Montaigne

"`Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

"`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'"

-- Lewis Carroll

"... The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'

'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself.

'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'

'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'"

-- Lewis Carroll

"Alice laughed. `There's not use trying,' she said: `one CAN'T believe impossible things.'

"`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"

-- Lewis Carroll

"I cannot tell if what the world considers "happiness" is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness."

-- Chuang-Tzu

"The best laid shemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley"

-- Robert Burns

"If I should bow my head, let it be to a high mountain."

-- Maori Proverb

"Water is good, it benefits all things and does not compete with them."

-- Lao Tsu

"It is better to wear out than to rust out"

-- George Whitefield

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

"If you have nothing good to say about anyone, come sit next to me."

-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of Teddy Roosevelt)

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

"In my time it was different. When I knew the wind was strong, I attacked myself to make the race as hard as possible."

-- Eddy Merckx

"There is a crucial threshold that every bike racer must reach and exceed in order to be successful. But I'm not talking about a lactate threshold or anything like that; this threshold is harder to define because it's really a combination of physiological, psychological, and environmental factors. At the same time, every racer who's broken through what I refer to as the "Competitive Threshold" knows what it is, even if they can't really describe it.

When your fitness is below a given point (relative to your competition) you're racing to survive and holding on to a slight hope that if you survive long enough you might be able to launch one all-or-nothing bid for victory. But when improve beyond your Competitive Threshold, survival is no longer an issue and a whole new world of opportunities opens up. Instead of fighting for wheels so you don't get dropped, you're fighting for wheels based on strategy. Instead of viewing the peloton as a place to find shelter, you start viewing it as a tool you can use to increase your chances of winning. You start acting like a hunter instead of a scavenger."

-- Chris Carmichael

"It never gets easier, you just go faster."

-- Greg LeMond

"Pain is a big fat creature riding on your back. The farther you pedal, the heavier he feels. The harder you push, the tighter he squeezes your chest. The steeper the climb, the deeper he digs his jagged, sharp claws into your muscles." Scott Martin

-- Scott Martin

"To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain....at cycling's core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn't matter if you're sprinting for an Olympic medal, a town sign, a trailhead, or the rest stop with the homemade brownies. If you never confront pain, you're missing the essence of the sport. Without pain, there's no adversity. Without adversity, no challenge. Without challenge, no improvement. No improvement, no sense of accomplishment and no deep-down joy. Might as well be playing Tiddly-Winks."

-- Scott Martin

"The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering."

-- Roland Barthes talking of Mont Ventoux climb in the Tour de France

"There are too many factors you have to take into account that you have no control over...The most important factor you can keep in your own hands is yourself. I always placed the greatest emphasis on that."

-- Eddy Merckx

"Beware any place where they have a name for the wind."

-- Dr. Jane Kelly, The Anchorage Daily News in July 1998

"I take nothing for granted. Now I have only good days or great days."

-- Lance Armstrong, cyclist who had cancer and went on to win the Tour de France

"Lake Wobegone, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average"

-- Garrison Kiellor in "A Parire Home Companion"

"You can't scare me. I have children."

-- anon

"Don't think you're on the right road just because it's a well-beaten path."

-- anon

"Opportunity is often missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work"

-- Thomas Edison

"Adversity introduces man to himself"

-- anon.

"When you play for more than you can afford to lose, then you will really know the game."

-- Winston Churchill

"We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising."

-- Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

"I could compass my kingdom in a walnut shell and be content, were it not for dreams."

-- James Foster misremembering Hamlet

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."

-- T. E. Lawrence, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

"Don't ever name your dog Nipper or your horse Buck!"

-- Linda Taylor (on Corgi-L mailing list)

"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse, steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.

-- Iago from Othello by Shakespeare, act 3 scene 3

"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd."

-- Shakespeare, Hamlet

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

-- Henry V from Henry V by Shakespeare, act 4 scene 3

"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,--
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue--
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial."

-- Antony from Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, act 3 scene 1

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come."

-- Caesar from Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2

"Your wisdom is consumed in confidence."

-- Calpurnia from Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2

Petruchio: ...
Good morrow, Kate; for that's your name, I hear.

Katharina: Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing:
They call me Katharina that do talk of me.

Petruchio: You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation;
Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded,
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs,
Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.

Katharina: Moved! in good time: let him that moved you hither
Remove you hence: ...

-- from Taming of the Screw by Shakespeare, act 1 scene 1

"Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate."

-- Petruchio from Taming of the Screw by Shakespeare

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

-- from Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 5

ROMEO:[To a Servingman] What lady is that, which doth
enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
SERVANT: I know not, sir.
ROMEO: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

-- Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, act 1 scene 5

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that?
Her eye discourses; I will answer it.
I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

-- Romeo from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

-- Juliet from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,...

-- Jaques in As You Like it by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 7

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

-- Touchstone, As You Like It, Act V, Scene I.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

-- Macbeth from Macbeth by Shakespeare Act V scene 5

"Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care"

-- Macbeth from Macbeth by Shakespeare Act II scene 2

Number 6: Where am I?
Voice: The Village.
Number 6: What do you want?
Voice: Information.
Number 6: Whose side are you on?
Voice: Now that would be telling. We want information.
Number 6: You won't get it.
Voice: By hook or crook we will.
Number 6: Who are you?
Voice: The new number 2.
Number 6: Who is number 1?
Voice: You are number 6.
Number 6: I am not a number. I am a free man!

-- from the TV show "The Prisoner"

"Revenge is a dish best served cold."

-- Klingon proverb

"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks,
Whoever knocks!"

-- Second Witch from Macbeth by Shakespeare Act IV scene 1

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch: Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Third Witch: Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches' mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Second Witch: Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

-- Witches from Macbeth by Shakespeare Act IV scene 1

"The rose does not have a why; it blossums without reason, forgetful of self and oblivious to our vision."

-- Angelus Silesius "The Cherubinic Wanderer"

"Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose"

-- Gertrude Stein

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

-- Hamlet by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2

See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."

-- Hamlet by Shakespeare, Polonius to Laertes, Act I Scene III

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature."

-- Hamlet by Shakespeare

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

-- Troilus and Cressida, Act iii scene 3, Shakespeare

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

-- Hamlet by Shakespeare, act 1 scene 5

"I do not understand the white man. He does not seem to know where the center of the earth is."

-- from the movie Little Big Man

"By The Abyss, I'd forgotten how GOOD it feels to conquer a universe!"

-- The Dread Dormammu, Doctor Strange #3

"Things are more like the way they are now than they have ever been before!"

-- Dwight Eisenhower, sometime in the 50s

"In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

-- Dwight Eisenhower

"It is this sense of heightened awareness and perception of beauty, of being alive, of physical accomplishment, that raises adventure, despite its inevitable periods of grinding effort and agonising discomfort, from being an exercise in masochism to a much broader, richer experience."

-- Chris Bonnington

"If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having."

-- Henry Miller

"Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts.

The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes."

-- "The World We Live In" by William James

If Dogs Made the Rules

If I like it, it's mine.

If it's in my mouth, it's mine.

If I can take it from you, it's mine.

If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.

If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

If I'm chewing something, all the pieces are mine.

If it looks just like mine, it is mine.

If I saw it first, it's mine.

If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.

-- anon

"Her life was okay. Sometimes she wished she were sleeping with the right man instead of with her dog, but she never felt she was sleeping with the wrong dog."

-- Judith Collas in "Change of Life"

"He is your friend, your defender, your dog.
You are his life, his love, his leader.
He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart.
You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion"

-- anon

In order to keep a true perspective of one's importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.

-- Dereke Bruce

Mullroy: You've seen a ship with black sails that's crewed by the damned, and captained by a man so evil that Hell itself spat him back out?
Murtogg: No.
Mullroy: No.
Murtogg: But I have seen a ship with black sails. [Jack quietly slips passed them unnoticed]
Mullroy: Oh, and no ship that's not crewed by the damned and captained by a man so evil that Hell itself spat him back out could possibly have black sails, therefore couldn't possibly be any other ship than the Black Pearl. Is that what you're telling me?
Murtogg: No.
Mullroy: Like I said, there's no real ship as can match the Interceptor.

-- from the movie "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"

Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement, so I must do nothin'. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the Pirate's Code to apply, and you're not. And thirdly, the Code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.

-- from the movie "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"

Murtogg:...But there's no ship as can match the Interceptor for speed.
Jack Sparrow: I've heard of one, supposed to be very fast, nigh uncatchable: The Black Pearl.

-- from the movie "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

-- Andrew A. Rooney

And now to all the good dogs--
the special ones you loved best,
those of ours we still miss --
good-bye,
until, on some brighter day,
in some fairer place,
they run out again to greet us.

-- George Papshvily

"A faithful friend is the medicine of life."

-- anon

"Push on and faith will catch up with you."

-- Jean d'Alembert (1717 - 1783) (mathematician)

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words"

-- anon

"Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters."

-- Jeane Jordon Kirkpatrick

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.

-- Wallace Stevens

"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, norgloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

-- Herodotus, Greek historian 5c. BC also on the facade of the NYC post office

"Citius, Altus, Fortuis" (swifter, higher, stronger)

-- Motto of the Olympics

"...the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle."

-- Part of the Olympic Creed

"The dog has got more fun out of man than man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstratable reason that man is the more laughable of the two animals. The dog has long been bemused by the singular activites and the curious practices of men, cocking his head inquiringly to one side, intently watching and listening to the strangest goings-on in the world. He has seen men sing together and fight one another in the same evening. He has watched them go to bed when it is time to get up, and get up when it is time to go to bed. He has observed them destroying the soil in vast areas, and nurturing it in small patches. He has stood by while men built strong and solid houses for rest and quiet and then filled them with lights and bells and machinery. His sensitive nose, which can detect what's cooking in the next township, has caught at one and the same time the bewildering smells of the hospital and the munitions factory. He has seen men raise up great cities to heaven and then blow them to hell."

-- James Thurber

"'Sensitivity Testing' is testing in which an increasing percentage of items fail, explode, or die as the serverity of the test is increased."

-- From "Statistics Manual" by Crow, Davis and Maxfield

"Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization."

-- anon

"You are Elastigirl! Show him you remember that he is Mr. lncredible, and you will remind him who you are! Well, you know where he is. Go! Confront the problem! Fight! Win!"

-- Edna in the movie "The Incredibles"

"The bitterest words ever said over graves are for deeds undone and words left unsaid."

-- H. B. Stowe

"Man will occasionally stumble across the truth, but will usually pick himself up and carry on."

-- Winston Churchill

"Success is when you try to achieve your inward vision externally and have it come off the way you see it. Then YOU feel successful about it; that's how success is measured."

-- George Lucas

"Every man has his price, they say -- but some hold bargin sales."

-- Camden County Georgia Tribune

"Save one life and you are a hero.
Save 100 lives and you are a nurse."

-- anon

"Pride Lasts Longer Than Pain"

-- Seen on the back of a cycling jersey

"Live to ride.
Ride to live."

-- Motto seen on Harley Davidson motorcyle

"If we don't have it, you don't need it."

-- Motto of McGuckin's Hardware in Boulder, CO

"To be even a marginal cyclist you must make pain your closest of friends."

-- Unknown cyclist

"A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes."

-- Abelson and Sussman from "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

"An idean, in the highest sense of the word, cannot be conveyed buy by a symbol."

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery."

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge first stanza of poem Kubla Khan

"When you speak a new language you must see if you can translate all of the poetry of your old language into the new one."

-- Dana Scott

"The power of any language is the power to organize thought."

-- Robert Heckendorn

"There has never been a tool made that couldn't be misused for good."

-- Robert Heckendorn

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

-- J. E. E. Dalberg Acton

"Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group."

-- Edward Sapir, 1929; in Mandelbaum, 1958, p. 162

"... as young and as ancient as spring ..."

-- JRR Tolkien (Fellowship of the Ring)

"No language can prevent the bad programmer from writing bad programs unless it prevents him from writing any at all."

-- David Moon

"The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity."

-- E.W.Dijkstra

"The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim."

-- E.W.Dijkstra

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

-- E. W. Dijkstra

"The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it's clumsy, it's not mathematics".

-- E.W.Dijkstra

"For me, the first challenge for Computer Science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a teachable discipline: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs. The more you concentrate on those two challenges, the more you will see that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable".

-- E.W.Dijkstra

"We must organize the computation in such a way that our limited powers are sufficient to guarantee that the computation will establish the desired effect."

-- E.W.Dijkstra

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not. A Sense of Humor was provided to console him for what he is."

-- Horace Walpole, Man of Letters (or was it Francis Bacon?)

"Evolution is cleverer than you are."

-- Francis Crick

"The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that the warrior takes everything as a challenge while the ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse."

-- Carlos Castaneda, Anthropologist

"My compassion for someone is not limited by my estimation of their intelligence."

-- from the movie "Star Trek IV"

"Ultimately time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savor it"

-- Ellen Goodman

"Time is the fire in which we burn."

-- from the poem "For Rhoda" by Delmore Schwartz quoted in the movie "Star Trek: Generations"

"Give a man a hammer, and he will begin to see the world as a collection of nails"

-- anon.

"We see what we know."

-- proverb

"The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently."

-- Edward Abbey, "The Journey Home", 1977

"And crawling on the planet's face some insects called the human race... Lost in time and lost in space... and meaning."

-- Narrator in "Rocky Horror Picture Show"

"Science fiction double feature
Doctor X will build a creature.
See androids fighting. Brad and Janet.
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet.
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
At the late night double feature,
picture show.
"

-- Chorus to the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" Song

"One sunny Wednesday afternoon [Mother] took me to Peel Park. We sat on a high esplanade and looked far over the countless chimneys of northern Manchester to the horizon. On the skyline, green and aloof, the Pennines rose like the ramparts of paradise. "There!", she said, pointing. "Mountains!" I stared, lost for words."

-- Robert Robert, "A Ragged Schooling"

"Give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know."

-- Keats

"The first step to knowledge is a confession of ignorance."

-- old Chinese saying

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know."

-- M. King Hubbert

"The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge."

-- Daniel J. Boorstin

"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?"

-- anon

"How wealthy the gods would be if we remembered the promises we made when we were in danger."

-- Jean de La Fontaine

"When I see the wildlife, even the lions and the leopards, I feel healthy."

-- an African native whose tribe was put in charge of wildlife protection

"The death of an elderly man is like a burning library."

-- African proverb

"Don't insult the crocodile until you cross the water."

-- African proverb

"Rain beats a leopard's skin, but it does not wash out the spots"

-- African proverb

"No one tests the depth of a river with both feet."

-- African proverb

"Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

-- anon

"You're less likely to die while sitting home in your armchair. Also less likely to live."

-- anon

"When asked why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he's a Gemini and Geminis never believe in astrology."

-- John Allen Paulos

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in this world is for enough good men to do nothing."

-- Edmund Burke

"If you were born where they were born, and you were taught what they were taught, you'd believe what they believe."

-- anon

"The Anglo-Saxon conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't; it just keeps you from enjoying it."

-- Salvador de Madariaga.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality"

-- T.S.Eliot

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

-- Philip K. Dick

"Ultimately, however, conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people's heads. Truth is simple one argument - perhaps a good one, perhaps not - for dealing with the difference. The difference itself exists because it exists in their thinking."

-- Martin Luther

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all."

-- Emily Dickinson

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

-- Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

-- Emily Dickinson

"Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance."

-- Yoko Ono, Season of Glass

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

-- Rachel Carson

"I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

-- Dr Martin Luther King Jr

"Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much . . . in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"Failure lies not in falling down but rather in not getting up."

-- anon

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"I'm afraid I'm not personally qualified to confuse cats."

-- Graham Chapman

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do."

-- Andrew Carnegie

"As we grow old the beauty steals inward."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."

-- Maurice Chevalier

"The ones who love you expect the most of you."

-- anon

"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

-- Sigmund Freud

"There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable."

-- Jeffery Goldberg

Roy: Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.

Deckard:I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments, he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.

-- from the movie Blade Runner

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking

-- John Masefield

"Nothing can be said about the sea."

-- Mr Selvam, Akkrapattai, India 2004

"If you refuse, you die, she dies, everybody dies!"

-- Ard to Den in the movie Heavy Metal

"We can only hope to bury you in secrecy so your grave is not violated."

-- Legal advice to Captain Stern from the movie Heavy Metal

"The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property."

-- Salmon P. Chase

"Evil: I am evil. I existed before God. When I have the map I will be free and the world will be different. I have understanding.

Robert: Understanding of what master?

Evil: Digital watches. And soon I will have understanding of video cassette recorders. And when I have understanding of them, I shall have understanding of computers. And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being. God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the micro chip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time. Forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!

Robert: Slugs.

Evil: Slugs! He created slugs. They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate heavy machinery. If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess around with butterflies and daffodils. I would've started with lasers 8 o'clock day one!"

-- From the movie "Time Bandits"

Evil: Robert, we must plan a new world together. This time we'll start it properly. Tell me about computers.

-- From the movie "Time Bandits"

"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

-- Segal's Law

"If a man is crossing the river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, even though he is a bad tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the other boat he will scream and shout and curse at the man to steer clear. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you. Thus is the perfect man -- his boat is empty."

-- Chuang-Tzu

"Come what may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

-- Macbeth from Macbeth by Shakespeare Act I scene 3

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

-- Alfred North Whitehead

"To see what is general in what is particular and what is permanent in what is transitory is the aim of scientific thought."

-- Alfred North Whitehead

"We were two men in a land of stone, and we walked toward the same star. I was happy to be on the Drus, but here as elsewhere, my happiness was to lead a companion. What would a guide be without someone to lead? Good weather, bad weather, easy, difficult, I needed to sing the same tune as he. That was the best gift of our mountains. Climbing to the summit, one man does his job, another is on vacation and the luxury of their efforts is friendship."

-- Gaston

"There are two ways to become rich: earn more or want less."

-- Sherpa proverb

"When life gets tangled there something so reassuring about climbing a mountain. The challenge is unambiguous."

-- Stacy Allison

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and decnounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering country. If works the same in every country."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

"Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do..."

-- E. O. Wilson

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."

-- Baba Dioum, a Senegalese ecologist

"The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names."

-- E. O. Wilson, in The Diversity of Life

"What I saw so clearly when I started climbing was adventure. Difficulty was only an ingredient. I never thought to wonder about grades, just as I never thought to wonder what Tarzan might bench press. I found the closer I moved to sport, the closer I felt to science -- and the closer I moved to adventure, the closer I felt to greatness."

-- Peter Croft

"Lying on my back, staring up at the massive corners and overhangs, I wondered if we would succeed. But not knowing was our greatest pleasure."

-- Scott Cosgrove

"When life gets tangled there's something so reassuring about climbing a mountain. The challenge is unambiguous."

-- Stacy Allison

"The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death. "

-- H.S. Thompson

"Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

-- attrib. Charles Bukowski

"Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down."

-- A.E. Newman

"If you can survive death, you can probably survive anything."

-- Maxwell Smart

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."

-- Friedrich Nietzche

"That which does not kill us makes us strong."

-- Friedrich Nietzche

"That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable."

-- despair.com

"It is always darkest just before it goes pitch black."

-- despair.com

"Madness is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups."

-- a paraphrase of Friedrich Nietzche by Irving Janis

"Its amazing to me how few oil people really understand that you only find oil and gas when you drill wells!"

-- anon

"So you think that you're a failure do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs and we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure. Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free"

-- Tom Robbins

"...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre."

-- Georges Bernanos

"Nowadays people die of a sort of a creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

-- Oscar Wilde

"I didn't recognize you. I've changed a lot."

-- Oscar Wilde

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

-- Oscar Wilde

"If you don't fail on a regular basis, you are not trying hard enough."

-- attr. to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard

"The only ones who truly fail are those that never try."

-- anon

"For eternally and always there is only one now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."

-- Erwin Schrodinger

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

-- Schopenhauer, Further Psychological Observations, 1851

"It's kinda fun to do the impossible"

-- Walt Disney

"The little things in life are as interesting as the big ones."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"It is not the same thing to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring."

-- Spanish proverb

"O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight, O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there. O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

-- the first verse of the national anthem of the USA

"Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity."

-- Lao-tzu

"What is subversive today, will almost certainly be patriotic tomorrow."

-- Lucius Beebe

Work like you don't need the money,
Love like you have never been hurt,
Dance like no one is watching.

-- anonymous

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

-- Jack Kornfield

A monk asked," What is the fact of my nature?". Chao-chou said, "Shake the tree and birds take to the air, startle the fish and water becomes muddy."

-- Chao-chou

With every gust of wind, the butterfly changes its place on the willow

-- Basho

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

-- Charlotte Joko Beck

Where does a wise man kick a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.

-- G.K. Chesterton

I saw people coming towards me But all were the same man, All were myself.

-- Sokei-an

"I have seen the future and it's like the present, only longer."

-- Dan Quisenberry

"We can hold back neither the coming of the flowers nor the downward rush of the stream; sooner or later, everything comes to its fruition."

-- Loy Ching-Yuen

"We never remember days, only moments."

-- Cesare Pavese

"As evening draws near, you regret that you did not practice early in the morning. The worldly pleasure which you enjoy now becomes suffering in the future. Why then are you attached to this pleasure? One moment of practice becomes lasting pleasure. Why then do you not practice?"

-- Won Hyo

"Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in the morrow."

-- Horace

"I know what the greatest cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may be in unison with the great part of the world."

-- Henry Miller

"See into life. Don't just look at it."

-- Anne Baxter

"So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others...before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you."

-- Shunryu Suzuki

"If you don't know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it."

-- Severn Cullis-Suzuki (12 year-old who spoke for the children a the 1992 Rio Earth summit in Brazil)

"You become what you think about all day long."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Most people are so worried about their security that they are afraid to take the risks that let them really enjoy living."

-- Paul Krapf

"René Char wrote somewhere, à propos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important."

-- Heri Cartier-

"The painter constructs, the photographer discloses."

-- Susan Sontag

"Progress always involves risk. You can't steal second with your foot on first."

-- anon

"You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer."

-- Slogan of the United States Army Service Forces

"All things are difficult before they are easy."

-- Thomas Fuller

"All right, so it's impossible--how long will it take?"

-- J. J. Adams, Commander of United Planets Cruiser C57D
From the movie "Forbidden Planet"

Shadowless dusk
growing colder -
steaming teakettle

-- Mike Garofalo, Cuttings

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time--
To let the punishment fit the crime--
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment

- The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan

Two birds disputed about a kernel, when a third swooped down and carried it off.

-- proverb from the Congo

A crow
Perched on a withered tree
In the autumn evening.

-- Basho

Sweet bird! thy bow'r is ever green, Thy sky is ever clear; thou has't no sorrow in thy song, No winter in thy year.

-- John Logan

"A garden is evidence of faith. It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting."

--Gladys Taber

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
the song of the birds for mirth,
you are nearer god's heart in a garden,
than anywhere else on earth.

--A tablet in the Bok Tower gardens in Florida

"Seek in the garden shades a seat,
Far from the playground din;
The sun is warm, the air is sweet:
Stay till I call you in."

A long and pleasant afternoon
I passed in those green bowers,
All silent, tranquil, and alone
With birds, and bees, and flowers.

Yet when my master's voice I heard
Call, from the window, "Jane!"
I entered, joyful, at the word,
The busy house again.

--Charlotte Bronte (from The Professor)

"An apple never falls far from the tree."

-- anon

"A weed is but an unloved flower."

-- anon

"In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

-- Albert Camus

"I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring. Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature's rebirth?"

-- Edward Giobbi

"Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush."

-- Doug Larson

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

-- Albert Camus

"Listen! the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!"

-- HumbeIt Wolfe

"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ...The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on. "

-- Robert Finch

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

-- George Eliot

"There is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been!"

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly nintey-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concrened with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. "

-- the opeing to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Arthur DentIt's at times like this, when I'm stuck in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelegeuse about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was little

Ford PrefectWhy, what did she tell you?

Arthur DentI don't know, I didn't listen!

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

-- Marvin from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"Oh God," muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead and started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Well, you're obviously being totally naive", Said the girl, "When you've been in marketing as long as I have, you know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We've got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them."
"Stick it up your nose," Ford said.
"Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl. "Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"
"And the wheel," said the Captain, "what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look. "All right Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be."

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"Oh, the Paranoid Android," he said. "Yeah, we'll take him."

"But what are supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?"

"You think you've got problems," said Marvin as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level."

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With."

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

-- "The Graduate" 1967

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life."

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"The fool. The meddling idiot! As though his ape's brain could contain the secrets of the Krell."

-- Dr. Morbius From the movie "Forbidden Planet"

"The Lord expects you to do some things for yourself."

-- Paul "Bear" Bryant

"Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lieftime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, and have fallen asleep."

--Stanislaw Ulam in "Adventures of a Mathematician"

"In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug. Chess sometimes plays a similar role. In their unhappiness over the events of this world, some immerse themselves in a kind of self-sufficiency in mathematics. (Some have engaged in it for this reason alone.)"

--Stanislaw Ulam in "Adventures of a Mathematician"

"Any good idea can be stated in fifty words or less."

--Stanislaw Ulam

"Anybody can get hit over the head."

-- Aristotle

"If you meet a swordsman on the road show him your sword. If you meet a man who is not a poet, don't read him your poem."

-- Lao Tsu

"To make use of your mind to think conceptually is to leave substance and attach yourself to form"

-- Huang Po

"From discrimination between this and that a host of demons spring forth"

-- Huang Po

"Don't be angry when the dancing elephant steps on your feet. Be happy that the elephant can dance at all."

-- W. L. Kennedy

"We live in a world lit by lightning. After the flash, we're blind again."

-- T-Bone Burnett

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

-- T.S. Elliott in "Four Quartets"

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it the right way, did not become more complicated."

-- Poul Anderson

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space: everything else is opinion"

--Democritos of Adbera

"Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within."

-- Schopenhauer, Further Psychological Observations, 1851

"Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."

-- Wu Li

"Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success."

-- Swami Sivananda

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when the do it from religious conviction"

-- Blais Pascal

"I'm a virgin, I'm just not very good at it."

-- Valeria Golino, "Hot Shots"

"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."

-- Colette

"To give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."

-- Samuel Ullman

"The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay for our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival."

-- Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

"One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an adviser to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much from mathematics."

-- Norbert Wiener

"A professor is one who can speak on any subject -- for precisely fifty minutes."

-- Norbert Wiener

"The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation."

-- Norbert Wiener in Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth.

"The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat."

-- Norbert Wiener and A Rosenblueth in Philosophy of Science 1945

"Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all."

-- Norbert Wiener

"You can never step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are forever flowing upon you."

-- anon

"The tree in which the sap is stagnant remains fruitless."

-- Hosea Ballou

"When the student is truly ready to learn, a teacher will appear."

-- from Zen Philosophy

"Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved."

-- Western Zen Saying

"The higher the truth, the simpler it is."

-Abraham Isaac Kook

"Words are the fog one has to see through."

-- Zen Saying

"Sometimes the highest form of action is inaction."

-- Jerry Brown

"The Mind is the slayer of the Real."

-- The Voice of the Slience

"Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil, and you are bound hand and foot. Think only and entirely and completely of what you're doing at the moment and you are free as a bird."

-- R.H. Blyth

"I don't believe I can really do without teaching."

-- Richard Feynman

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

-- Richard Feynman

"Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong."

-- Richard Feynman

"One truly understands only what one can create."

-- Giambattista Vico

"Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are masured against observations."

-- Richard Feynman

"I've come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized."

-- Haim Ginott

"Raising a child is very much like building a skyscraper. If the first few stories are slightly out of line. no one will notice. But when the building is 18 or 20 stories high, everyone will see that it tilts."

-- Jim Bishop

The mediocre teacher tells,
The good teacher explains,
The superior teacher demonstrates,
The *great* teacher inspires.

-- William A. Ward

"If we expect students to be winners and expect them to do well, they will rise to the occasion."

-- Jaime Escalante

"We can talk all we want about awards and salary raises, but the real reward of teaching is teaching. The personal satisfaction you get when you do it effectively is just phenomenal."

-- David W. Pratt

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there."

-- Robert Pirsig

"Zen in the unsymbolization of the world."

-- R. H. Blyth

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

-- Robert Frost from "The Secret Sits"

And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.

-- Carl Sandburg

"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand,
but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."

-- Arab proverb

"Smooth seas do not make for good sailors."

-- proverb

?The crisis was over. What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities."

-- from the book "2010"

"Friendshipis the comfort, the inexpressable comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away."

-- anon

"Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong."

-- anon

"The only gift is a protion of thyself... therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailer, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a hankerchief of the own sewing."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The Earth is our mother; our nine months are up."

-- anon

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."

-- anon

"Remember, one treats others with courtesy and respect not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are."

-- Garth Henrichs

"Be excellent to each other!"

-- Bill and Ted

"Be usable to each other!"

-- Usability Man

"Alice: 'Where do I go from here?'

The Cheshire Cat: "That depends on where you want to get to."

-- Alice in Wonderland

"If I Had My Life to Live Over, I'd dare to make more mistakes. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I'm one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies."

-- Nadine Stair, age 85

"I think the highest and lowest points are the important ones. All the points in between are, well, in between."

-- Jim Morrison

"If you understand, things are just as they are; you do not understand, things are just as they are."

-- Zen verse

"In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons."

-- Herodotus

"There never was a good war, or a bad peace."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"For want of a nail a shoe was lost, for want of a shoe a horse was lost, for want of a horse a rider was lost, for want of a rider a army was lost, for want of an army a battle was lost, for want of a battle the war was lost, for want of the war the kingdom was lost, and all for the want of a little horseshoe nail."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"The war [in Vietnam] which we can neither win, lose, nor drop is evidence of an instability of ideas."

-- Senator Scott ?, from the movie The Fog of War

"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left."

-- anon

"Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people."

-- Jawaharlal Nehru

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."

-- Mother Teresa

"All we are saying is give peace a chance."

-- John Lennon

"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith."

-- John Foster Dulles

"The perfect life: to live in a world of peace in a lake district where the magistrate is good and honest, and to have an understanding wife and bright children."

-- Chang Chao

"The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."

-- Bruce Lee

"The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to performance in physical activities"

-- Bruce Lee

"When you are totally defeated you begin again to enjoy the small things around you.' Voytek later explained. 'Just going again to the mountains, not for victory or glory, but to enjoy nature or to enjoy fine people. If you always succeed you enjoy the admiration of many people. Being defeated means being limited to the basic existential choices of life. If you can enjoy the quiet evening hours it is beautiful; a hero who always succeeds may not have time to enjoy such things."

-- Wojtek Kurtyka, Polish high-altitude climber
from Climbing magazine, 8-9/89,
"Between the Hammer and the Anvil"

"There could be no honor in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat."

-- TE Lawrence, "Revolt in the Desert" ch 19

"Authority never matches responsibility. That's one of the great myths and delusions of all times. Winning managers and individual performers at all levels know that effectiveness means building your own network and creating your own authority. Those who succeed always reach far beyond formal deputation, take initiatives, and take the heat when things go awry. That's true in the military in times of war, true for 200 person manufacturing firms, and true at giant automakers or software companies."

-- Tom Peters

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

-- HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

-- HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey"

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

-- Michael Sinz

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

-- Aristotle

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts."

-- Aristotle (Metaphysica 330 BC)

"In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

-- Margaret Thatcher

"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."

-- Louis Armstrong

"Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instict come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day... we become seekers."

-- Peter Matthiessen

"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."

-- Gauss

"Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron."

-- attrib. Gauss

"I recognize the lion by his paw."

-- Jacob Bernoulli recognizing an anonymous solution by Newton

"If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can't solve: find it."

-- Pólya

"This sentence no verb"

-- Douglas Hofsteader

"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy."

-- Patrick Logan's weblog

"Hofsteader's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofsteader's Law into account."

-- Douglas Hofsteader

"If Jesus comes out of his tomb on Easter and sees his shadow, do we have six more weeks of Lent?"

-- anon

"Television is about watching a life instead of having one."

-- Beth Mazur

"Not everyone can be a hero, someone has to sit on the sidewalk and clap as they go by"

-- Will Rogers

"I don' tmake jokes - I just watch the government and report the facts."

-- Will Rogers

"Suffering is inevitable. Misery is a choice."

-- anon

"Men always fear things which move by themselves."

-- The Ghola (Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert)

"Nothing is so eternally adhesive as the memory of power."

-- Isaac Asimov

"A man without a woman is like a kite without the wind."

-- Robert Heckendorn

"The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, delt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not. Yet I occurred."

-- Maud 'Dib (Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert)

"He speaks of death because that's necessary, Stil. It's a tension by which the living know they're alive."

-- Ghanima (Children of Dune by Frank Herbert)

"Balance is what distinguishs a people from a mob."

-- Maud 'Dib (Dune Trilogy by Frank Herbert)

"The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you."

-- Leto Atrides (Dune Trilogy by Frank Herbert)

"Most deadly errors occur from obsolete assumptions."

-- Bene Gesserit saying (Dune Trilogy by Frank Herbert)

"The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears."

-- Montequieu

"Communism is just one big telephone company."

-- Lenny Bruce

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

-- Bill Cosby

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

-- Victor Hugo

"The cost of living is dying."

-- Seen on a T-shirt

"There is a thin line between courage and foolishness"

-- Robert Heckendorn

"A chicken is just one egg's way of making another egg."

-- anon

"A messy office is a happy office. This office is delerious."

-- anon

"There is only one true beast in the bull ring, the crowd."

-- anon

"He who truly knows has no occasion to shout.

-- Leonard Da Vinci

"Some people think the glass is half full. Others think it is half empty. I think the glass is too big."

-- George Carlin

"I keep six honest seving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who."

-- "The Elephants Child", Rudyard Kipling [1865-1904]

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."

-- H.G. Wells

"Bicycling is a big part of the future...it has to be....there is something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out at a gym."

-- Bill Nye, the Science Guy

"... she will never know what it feels like to pump first over the crest of the hill with the others strung out behind her like the beads sliding off a broken necklace."

-- anon (about bike racing)

"Klaatu barada nikto!"

-- From the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still"

"If you ever get a second chance in life for something, go all the way."

-- Lance Armstrong who won the Tour de France after fighting cancer

"Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada."

-- P.J. Plauger

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"God, who gave us life, gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"

-- Thomas Jefferson

"Sir, what you had there ...(cough)... was what we refer to as a focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm, or a class 5 full roaming vapor .... real nasty one, too!"

-- Ray Stantz (From the movie Ghost Busters)

"For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like"

-- Abraham Lincoln

"We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses"

-- Abraham Lincoln

"You're not a statesman! A statesman is a dead politician. Lord knows we need more statesmen!"

-- Milo Bloom, Bloom County

"Politicians like to see cranes on the horizon."

-- Kevin Stanley of the proposed new tallest building in the world, the Grollo Tower.

"Good tea. Nice house."

-- Lt. Worf

Guinan: "It's an Earth drink. Prune juice."
Worf: "Warrior's drink!"

--Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Yesterday's Enterprise"

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"
"Shaka, when the walls fell."
"Sokath! His eyes open!"
"Mirab, his sails unfurled!"
"Temba his arms open."
"Temba at rest."

--Star Trek: The Next Generation, metaphors from "Darmok" episode

"A syndicate makes sense to me. I'm a peaceful man at heart, but I'm sick and tired of all these hits. I hit Krako, Krako hits Teppo, Teppo hits me. There's too many bosses! We can't get anything done. I was thinking--if there was just one--maybe somebody like you as the top boss--then we could get things done!"

--Bela Oxmyx from the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action"

"A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space, and before your race was born, I have awaited ... a question."

- The Guardian of Forever from Star Trek

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."

-- Lazarus Long

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

-- Shunryu Suzuki

"If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough. One has to transcend techique so that the art becomes an 'artless art' growing out of the Unconscious."

-- D. T. Suzuki in a forward to "Zen in the Art of Archery"

Rollo Lee: Now there are your meerkats, correct? (pointing)

Lauderbee: Don't do that please sir, please! They go straight for the throat!

Rollo Lee: Now this new plack of yours, Lauderbee, says that they are the piranha of the dessert. Is that right?

Lauderbee: They can strip a human carcass in 3 minutes, sir.

Rollo Lee: My encyclopedia says they are easily tamed and are often kepts as pets.

Lauderbee: Noooo, you've not been attacked by one, sir.

Rollo Lee: Nobody's been attacked by one...or if they have they've never noticed.

"I think ordinary people in this country are sick and tried of being told that ordinary people in this country are sick and tired. I'm certainly not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am!"

-- Monty Python

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space.
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

-- Monty Python, From "The Meaning of Life", sung by Eric Eidel

Chapman: *I* don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)
(The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals.)
Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is suprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again. (Exit and exeunt)

Chapman: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

(JARRING CHORD)
(The cardinals burst in)
Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn! (To Cardinal Biggles) I can't say it - you'll have to say it.

-- Monty Python

Grapham Chapman: We were evicted from *our* hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

Terry Gilliam: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

Michael Palin: Cardboard box?

Terry Gilliam: Aye.

Michael Palin: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

Grapham Chapman: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

Terry Gilliam: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

Eric Idle: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

Michael Palin: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..

-- Monty Python (Last part of the "You Were Lucky" sketch)

King: "One day, lad, all this will be yours." Son: "What the curtains?"

-- Monty Python in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

"I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough water! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries."

-- French Soldier in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

"Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no [interrupting] basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"

-- from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

"Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of... of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying, uh, "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment. That's why we're so... dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you're alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I'm so fed up with all this. I want to make love with you, Wanda. I'm a good lover - at least, used to be, back in the early 14th century. Can we go to bed?

-- Archie in the movie "A Fish Called Wanda"

"England and America are two countries separated by the same language."

-- Attrib. George Bernard Shaw (but not found in his writings)

"The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it."

-- Adam Cooper

"We (the British and Americans) are two countries separated by a common language."

-- George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

"One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men."

-- E.O. Wilson (ant expert)

"We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

-- Petronius Arbiter ca. 60 AD

"Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination."

-- Petronius Arbiter ca. 60 AD

"This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it."

-- anon

"Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule."

-- anon

"All decisions should be made as low as possible in the organization. The Charge of the Light Brigade was ordered by an officer who wasn't there looking at the territory."

-- Robert Townsend "Up the Organization"

"If I ever hear of anyone compromising quality in order to make shipments, I will personally have them fired.

-- Dave Packard

"But of course it isn't really goodbye, because the Forest will always be there... and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it."

-- A. A. Milne

"The Government are [sic] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases!"

-- Sir Josiah Stamp, Her Majesty's Collector of Inland Revenue

"If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong."

-- Charles Kettering

"Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down."

-- William M. Winans

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."

-- anon

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"

-- Alan Kay

"School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view,..."

-- Alan Kay

"2^30(2^31-1) is the greatest perfect number that will ever be discovered, for, as they are merely curious without being useful, it is not likely that any person will attempt to find a number beyond it"

-- Peter Barlow

"The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication"

-- Western Union Executive, 1876

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

-- Popular Mechanix Magazine, 1949

"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."

-- Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board IBM, 1943

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

-- Ken Olson, President of DEC in 1977

"640K [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody."

-- Bill Gates, 1981

The first casualty of war is the truth.

-- anon

"There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made-up truths."

-- Marion Barry, mayor of Washington DC

"I'm not indecisive. Am I indecisive?"

-- mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota

"You can't see the semantic wood for the syntactic trees."

-- Christopher Strachey

"Thank God that number theory is unsullied by any application."

-- Leonard E. Dickson, number theorist

Mr. Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after the Great War, we used to call it, before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action?
Mr. Wabash: I miss that kind of clarity.

-- from the movie "Three Days of the Condor"

Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

Turner: Ask them?

Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

-- from the movie "Three Days of the Condor"

"You have good eyes. Not kind, but they don't lie and they don't look away much and they don't miss anything. I could use eyes like that."

-- from the movie "Three Days of the Condor"

"Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought."

-- Kernighan and Plauger

"... it is a fundamental principle of testing that you must know in advance the answer each test case is supposed to produce. If you don't, you are not testing; you are experimenting."

-- Kernighan and Plauger

"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."

-- Robert R. Coveyou (mathematician at Oak Ridge National Lab)

"Using TSO [an ancient operating system -ed] is like kicking a dead whale along the beach."

-- Steven C. Johnson

"Using RTE [an ancient operating system which in our configuration had a limited number of terminals attached -ed] is like standing in line to kick a dead whale along the beach."

-- Robert Heckendorn

"Counting in octal is like counting in decimal with two fingers missing."

-- Tom Lehrer

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

-- Harry Warner (1927) of Warner Brothers commenting on talking movies

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

-- Irving Fisher, Prof. of Economics, Yale University, five days before the Crash of 1929

"The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote."

-- Albert Michelson, 1903

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are not possible."

-- Lord Kelvin, 1895

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."

-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Prof. of Strategy, Ecole, 1912
Superieure do Guerre

"One does not fight with men against material; it is with material served by men that one makes war."

-- Marshal Petain

"My center is giving way, my right is pushed back, situation excellent, I am attacking."

-- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Prof. of Strategy, Ecole
Superieure do Guerre

"It doesn't matter what he does, he will never amount to anything."

-- Albert Einstein's teacher

"As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it."

-- Albert Einstein

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."

-- Albert Einstein

"He has never learned anything, and he can do nothing in decent style."

-- Beethoven's teacher

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

-- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist----."

-- General John B. Sedgwick, Union Army Civil War Officer

"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

-- Tom Cargill

"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."

-- General Gerorge S. Patton

"Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell."

-- Joan Crawford

"To a friends house the road is never long."

-- proverb

"He who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints."

-- proverb

"People born after Sputnik have grown up being imprinted by the fact that reality changes a lot."

-- Paco Xander Nathan, writer for bOING bOING magazine

"It is impossible to get anywhere without sinning against reason."

-- Albert Einstein

"The important thing is to not stop questioning."

-- Albert Einstein

"A timid question will always receive a confident answer."

-- Lord Charles Darling

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

-- Albert Einstein

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

-- Albert Einstein

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain."

-- Schiller

"A designer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

-- Anon

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

-- Albert Einstein

"A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20: Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

-- Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Who cares who's captain after the wings have fallen off."

-- Scott McNealy, president Sun MicroSystems about new IBM CEO

"O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"

-- Cassio from Othello by Shakespeare

"Remeber theory and practice are the same ... at least in theory but not in practice."

-- anon

"The difference between theory and practice in practice is greater than the difference between theory and practice in theory."

-- anon

"Not only did he look as though he had an ace up his sleeve, he looked as though God put it there."

-- anon

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is."

-- Yogi Berra

"I want to gain 1500 tor 2000 yards, whichever comes first."

-- comment by pro football player

"Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

-- Last words of author WIlliam Saroyan

"It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."

-- boxer Muhammad Ali

"The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine"

-- Lord Rutherford

"Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

-- from On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Giordano Bruno, 1584

"I'll tell you something about the universe though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space, right?"

-- From the movie "Contact"

"If they be inhabited then what a scope for folly.
If they be not inhabited then what a waste of space.

-- Thomas Carlisle speaking of the planets in the universe

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry and imagination."

-- Max Planck

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

-- Albert Einstein

"Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life."

-- Linus Pauling

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

-- Albert Einstein

"When a Man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute-- and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

-- Albert Einstein

"I shall never believe God plays dice with the world."

-- Albert Einstein (attrib. by Philipp Frank in "Einstein, His Life and Times")

"The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not."

-- Albert Einstein (attrib. in inscription in Fine Hall at Princeton University)

"For what is time? ... Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? ... If no one asks me, I know: If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not ...."

-- St. Augustine (The Confessions)

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

-- Anon

"Life has meaning only in the struggle Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the Gods... So let us celebrate the struggle!"

-- Swahili Warrior Song

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

-- Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts."

-- Max Planck

"If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction."

-- Judith Hayes

"... science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain and art is an interpretation of that miracle."

-- Ray Bradbury

"Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces."

--Marcel Proust

"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not preceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it wi with Time in one's life."

--Marcel Proust

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."

--Marcel Proust

"From causes which appear similar, we expect similar effects. This is the sum total of all our experimental conclusions."

-- David Hume, An Inquiry Concering Human Understanding

"It is unfortunate that the word 'utility' is linked historically with Victorian utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, because modern economists don't follow them in identifying utility with how much pleasure or how little pain a person may feel. The modern theory abandons any attempt to explain how people behave in terms of what is going on inside their heads. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of making no psychological assumptions at all... We therefore don't argue that some preferences are more rational than others. We follow the great philosopher David Hume in regarding reason as the 'slave of the passions'. As he extravagantly remarked, there would be nothing irrational about his preferring the destruction of the universe to scratching his finger. However, we go even further down this road by regarding reason purely as an instrument for avoiding inconsistent behavior. Any consistent behavior therefore counts as rational."

-- Ken Binmore, Game theory: A Very Short Introduction

"A learning machine is any device whose actions are influenced by past experience."

-- Nils Nilsson, Learning Machines

"A computer is a machine for constructing mappings from input to output."

-- Michael Kirby

"A computer spends most of its time doing the things it does worst."

-- Jim Parry

"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."

-- Alfred North Whitehead, 1861-1947

The Four Stages of Scientific Acceptance

This is worthless nonsense.
This is an interesting, but perverse point of view.
This is true, but quite unimportant.
I always said so.

-- J. B. S. Haldane

"The trouble with a rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

-- Lily Tomlin

"No matter how cynical you get, you can't keep up"

-- Lily Tomlin

"The romance of war marks a failure of the imagination."

-- anon

"Hey, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!"

-- From the movie Dr. Strangelove

"Well boys, I reckon this is it -- nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Ruskies"

-- Major Kong from the movie Dr. Strangelove

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

-- Gandhi

"We must be the change we wish to see."

-- Gandhi

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."

-- Gandhi

"God put me here with certain things to do and right now I'm so far behind, I'll probably never die."

-- Possibly from Calvin and Hobbes

"It's better to burn out than to fade away."

-- anon

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

-- H.L. Mencken

"The tepee is much better to live in: always clean, warm in winter, cool in summer; easy to move... Indians and animals know better how to live than white man; nobody can be in good health if he does not have all the time: fresh air, sunshine, and good water."

-- Chief Flying Eagle of the Oglala Sioux, comment in his old age

"For a woman, the odds are good, but the goods are odd."

-- anon, talking about the men in Alaska

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened."

-- Anatole France

"For war is just to those for whom war is necessary, and arms are righteous when there is no hope except in arms."

-- anon

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

-- Julius Caesar

"The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough - more than enough - of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on - not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace."

-- John F. Kennedy

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

-- John F. Kennedy, Sep 12, 1962

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

-- George F. Kennan, 1987. Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study and former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

-- Adolph Hitler, My New World Order, Proclamation to the German Nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933

"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive."

-- His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

"A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not always his enemies."

-- Richard Nixon

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Laughter is good for thinking because when people laugh, it is easier for them to admit new ideas to their minds."

-- His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are just rearranging their prejudices."

-- William James

"Any ill-formed premise may be modeled and validated with simulation"

-- Patrick Reilly

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-- Hermann Goerring

I am on the side of peace, not war.

I am on the side of justice, not vengeance.

I am on the side of the people -- no matter where they live -- who will suffer the violence; not the leaders -- no matter where they live -- who will plan it.

And most important, I am on the side of hope, not despair.

We do not have the luxury of despair right now. There is too much at stake, for too many people

-- Robert Jensen

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"How can arguments based on fact prevail in a nation where so many people know so little?"

-- Michelle Goldberg (Salon, "The Blind Leading the Blind," Oct. 21, 2004)

"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free."

-- Epictetus

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man confines himself within ancient limits."

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children-- but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."

-- Garrett Hardin

"It [the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem] underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries -- how mathematics is one of humanity's long continuous conversations with itself."

-- Barry Mazur or Harvard

"The series is divergent; therefore we may be able to do something with it."

-- O. Heaviside

"The function of an expert is not to be more right than other people, but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons."

-- David Butler

"On the other hand, it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a biquadrate into two biquadrates, or generally any power except a square into two powers with the same exponent. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which, however, the margin is not large enough to contain."

-- Pierre de Fermat (translated from his notes in latin in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica by Diophantus) c. 1637

"Perhaps I could best describe by experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you leaan where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room..."

-- Andrew Wiles (he who proved Fermat's Last Theorem)

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

-- John Muir

"Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants."

-- Robert A. Millikan - Nobel Prize winning physicist

"Politics is the science of who gets what, when and why."

-- Sidney Hillman - labor leader

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

-- William Morris - poet, artist, and interior designer

"Boldness is a crucial element of genius."

-- Horace Freeland Judson

"No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it."

-- Alberti

"Genius is one of the many forms of insanity."

-- Cesare L. Lombroso, Italian physician and criminologist

"I hate these computers. They're so naughty and so complex...I could pinch them!"

-- Marvin the Martian in the Bugs Bunny cartoons

"It was such a beautiful day I decided to stay in bed."

-- W. Somerset Maugham

"But enough about me. Let's talk about YOU. What do YOU think of me?"

-- Bette Midler

"For God, for Country, and for Yale."

-- The American-Heritage Dictionary provides this as its only
example under the definition of the word "anticlimax".

Tempus edax rurum." ("Time, the devourer of all things.")

-- Ovid

"Either this wallpaper goes, or I do."

-- The last words of Oscar Wilde

"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

-- Woody Allen

Allan: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollack, isn't it?
Museum Girl: Yes, it is.
Allan: What does it say to you?
Museum Girl: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.
Allan: What are you doing Saturday night?
Museum Girl: Committing suicide.
Allan: What about Friday night?

-- Woody Allen from "Play it Again Sam"

Bogart:"I never met a dame that didn't understand a slap in the face or a slug from a 45."

-- Woody Allen from "Play it Again Sam"

"I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."

-- J. Edgar Hoover

"The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"What does it mean 'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected.", said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "to me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

.
.
.
"My life is very monotonous," he said, "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. And that is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. "Please--- tame me!" he said.

-- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become repsonsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

-- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"What is a great life but a youthful intention carried out in maturity?"

-- Alfred de Vigny - poet of the French romantic movement

"We were told that they [federal troops] wished merely to pass through our country... to seek for gold in the west... Yet before the ashes of the council fire are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. You have heard the sound of the white soldier's axe upon the Little Piney. His presence here is... an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be plowed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war."

-- Mahpiua Luta (Red Cloud), Oglala Sioux chief at the council at Fort Laramie, Wyoming

"The reason most people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory."

-- Paul Fixx

"Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together...."

-- Carl Zwanzig

"The truth can't hurt, it's just like the dark, it scares you witless, but it time you see things cold and stark."

-- Elvis Costello

"Truth is reality as you perceive it."

-- anon

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

-- William Blake

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-- William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Devine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land.

-- William Blake

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

-- Meister Eckhart

"Football combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings."

-- George Will

"I spend most of my money on wine, women and song -- the rest I spend foolishly.

-- Dean Martin

"Money can't buy happiness. It can however, rent it."

-- anon

"When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."

-- Desiderius Erasmus

"Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark."

-- from "Time Enough for Love" by Robert A. Heinlein

"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

-- anon

"I doubt if he adviced you to carry a gun. From his reputation, Dr. Matson is a practical man. See here infant, on this tour you are the rabbit, trying to escape the fox. You aren't the fox ... Your only purpose is to stay alive. Not to be brave, not to fight, not to dominate the wilds -- but just stay breathing. One time in a hundred a gun might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly. ... if you carry a gun, it makes you feel cocky; you won't take proper cover. If you don't have one, then you'll know you are the rabbit."

-- Helen (Rod's sister) from "Tunnel in the Sky" by Robert A. Heinlein

"I know how good a gun feels. It makes you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, 3 meters tall and covered with hair. You're ready for anything and kind of hoping you'll find it. Which is exactly what is dangerous about it-- because you aren't anything of the sort. You are a feeble, hairless embryo, remarkably easy to kill. You could carry an assault gun with 2,000 meters precision range and isotope charges that will blow up a hill, but you would not have eyes in the back of your head like a janus bird, nor be able to see in the dark like the Thetis pygmies. Death can cuddle up behind you while you're drawing a bead on something in front."

-- Helen (Rod's sister) from "Tunnel in the Sky" by Robert A. Heinlein

"Wherever they burn books, they will eventually burn people."

-- H. Heine

"If it wasn't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them."

-- anon

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

-- John Lennon

"Toreador pants make your feet look big too"

-- Albert Einstein

"He only opens his mouth to change feet."

-- anon

"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence."

-- anon

"The thing about explanations is friends don't need them and enemies don't believe them!"

-- anon

"A drop of water is a little thing but when will it dry away if united to a lake?"

-- Tibetan scripture

"An ambassasor is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."

-- Henry Wotton

"I am death, the destroyer of worlds ... the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one...
I am become Death,
The destroyer of Worlds.

-- from the Bhagavad-Gita

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey.
Along came a glider,
dropped an A-bomb beside her,
and scared little Miss Muffet to bits.

-- anon

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

-- Neils Bohr

"I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair, and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question:"Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?""

-- Werner Heisenberg

"A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality."

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Pragmatism is an intellectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy."

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer

"The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality "ought to be.""

-- Richard Feynman

"No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."

-- John Archibald Wheeler

"What we learn about is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning."

-- Werner Heisenbeerg

"Muddy water
let stand
becomes clear."

-- Lao Tse

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."

-- Thomas Reed

"Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment."

-- David Hume

"In every treaty, insert a clause which can easily be violated, so that the entire agreement can be broken in case the interests of the State make it expedient to do so."

-- Louis XIV

"Those who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it"

-- Joel Barker, Futurist "Discovering the Future" (video)

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin 1759

"TV is chewing gum for the eyes."

-- Frank Lloyd Wright

"No house should ever be on any hill... It should be of the hill."

-- Frank Lloyd Wright

"A house is a machine for living in."

-- Le Corbusier

"Lack of ornamentation is a sign of spiritual strength."

-- Adolf Loos

"Any sufficiently advanced technology, is indistinguishable from magic!"

-- Arthur C. Clarke

"The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds."

-- Claude Bernard

"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

-- Eden Philpots

"Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

"If there were no beauty in the observer then he would not find beauty outside. The mere fact that beauty is seen proves that there is beauty already present in the state of being the observer."

-- Shantanand Saraswati

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear"

-- George Orwell

"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in the air? You have done no better than a bluebottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody."

-- Ansari of Herat

"Who is not liberal when young, does not have a heart. Who is not conservative when old, does not have a brain."

-- W. Churchill

"Conservatives have a deeper intellect and tend to have occupations of the brain in fields like engineering, science, and economics. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to flock to occupations of the heart."

-- Dick Armey

"I'm not young enough to know everything."

-- J. M. Barrie

"Wisdom is experience assimilated."

-- anon

"He who would avoid suspicion would not lace his shoes in a melon patch."

-- Ancient Chinese saying

"Journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

-- Chinese proverb

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will do."

-- Chinese proverb

"If you don't know where you are, a map won't help."

-- Watts S. Humphrey

"'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'"

-- from "The Once and Future King" by T.H. White

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."

-- James Thurber?

"Something that would have been purple, if there had been light to see it by, scuttled across the floor."

-- James Thurber in "The Thirteen Clocks"

"What's the Todal?"

A lock of the guard's hair turned white and his teeth began to chatter. "The Todal looks like a blob of glup," he said. "It makes a sound like rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms..."

-- James Thurber in "The Thirteen Clocks"

"The problem with Christianity is not that it's been tried and found impossible, but that it's been found difficult and, therefore, not tried."

-- Gilbert Keith Chesterson

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."

-- Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

"Some people dress for comfort.
Some people dress for style.
Some people dress because it's the law."

-- anon

"My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past 'DOS.'"

--Dave Barry, columnist

"Some call it hell. I call it home."

--Rambo

"Pura Vida"

-- unofficial motto of the people of Costa Rica

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-- The version inscribed at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts attributed to Martin Niemoller

"In the [Baboon] community, it is not how strong you are that is important, but who you know that counts"

-- David Attenborough

"The first rule of gun fighting is-bring a gun."

-- anon

" 1. Do not think dishonestly
2. Study hard
3. Learn every technique
4. Learn all you can of other professions
5. Distinguish between gain and loss
6. Develop intuitive judgement
7. Perceive things below the surface
8. Pay attention to trifles
9. Do nothing which is of no use"

-- Miamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings, 1645 AD

"Do not set your limits by the limits of others."

-- Robert Heckendorn

"We are never so helpless as when we must face the death of a friend."

-- Robert Heckendorn

Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?

Calvin: When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We 'laugh' at nonsense. We like it. We think it is funny.

Calvin: Don't you think it's odd that we 'appreciate' absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?

Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

Calvin: I can't tell if that's funny or really scary.

-- Calvin and Hobbes cartoon by Waterson

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."

-- e.e.cummings

"That's why I've never thought of retiring because I do it all the time whether on the stage or off. I found that in a precarious situation, a smile is the shortest distance between people. When one needs to reach out for sympathy or a link with people, what better way is there?"

-- Victor Borge

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what life has to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

-- Henry David Thoreau "Waldon"

"Learning mean change"

-- Bart Kosko

"Life's a journey. Enjoy the ride."

-- anon

"Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan seed, which, though appearing tiny as a mustard seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent with it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great."

--Swami Vivekananda

"No act of kindness, however small, is wasted."

--anon

"Nothing shocks me; I am a scientist."

--Indiana Jones (from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

--George Santayana (from the Life of Reason)

"Why should I listen to you? You're just a mermaid in a wheelchair!"

--Bette Midler

"We instinctively fear snakes, but we appear not to be afraid of fast cars, which are a real danger now. This suggests our emotions were shaped by our evolutionary environment not the one we grew up in."

--Steven Pinker

"A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension."

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life."

--Charles Darwin

"I always make special notes about evidence that contridicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying."

--Charles Darwin

"We will now discuss, in little more detail, the struggle for existence."

--Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species"

"Nothing in biology makes sense, except in light of evolution."

-- Theodosius Dobzhansky

"... if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection."

--Charles Darwin

"Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do -- not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle."

-David Quammen

The Four Requirements for Evolution

Reproduction of individuals in the population

Variation that affects the likelihood of survival of individuals

Heredity in reproduction (like begets like)

Finite resources causing competition

--From Genetic Programming an Introduction by Banzhof et al.

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"

-- Ernst Haeckel's Law of Embryological Parallelism

"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn."

-- David Russell

"My name is Enigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

--The movie "Princess Bride"

"Repetition is beautiful"

-- The performer formerly known as Prince

"In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also."

--George Santayana

"Restlessness is discontent-- and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure."

-- Thomas Edison

"Chance favors the prepared mind"

-- Louis Pasteur

"There is no substitute for hard work."

-- Thomas Edison

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

-- Thomas Edison

"My goal in life is to become as wonderful as my dog thinks I am."

-- Toby & Eileen Green

"The will to win is not nearly so important as the will to prepare to win."

-- Bobby Knight

"In games against humans, you often win because the opponent blunders a piece, and you can often survive when you do it yourself. Against the computer, you make only one mistake -- the last one."

--Valimir Kramnik, (chess grandmaster)

"Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."

-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire"

"In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the deamons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer."

-- the intro the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

"She wouldn't even kill me. She just left me. She didn't even care enough to cut off my head or set me on fire. I mean, is that too much to ask? You know, some little sign that she cared. It was that truce with Buffy that did it. Drew said I'd gone soft... wasn't demon enough for her. I told her it didn't mean anything. I was thinking of her the whole time.

We got to Brazil and she was just ... different. I gave her everything, beautiful jewels, beautiful dresses with beautiful girls in them but nothing would make her happy. And she would flirt. I caught her on a parkbench with a chaos demon! Have you ever seen a chaos demon? They're all slime and antlers. They're disgusting!"

-- Spike lamenting the loss of Drew from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

"It's the good girls who keep the diaries, the bad girls never have the time."

-- Tallulah Bankhead

"If you want to improve be content to be thought of as foolish and stupid..."

-- Epictetus

"The Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died, "Did he have passion?".

-- From the movie "Serendipity"

"Passion does not make careful arguments:
it declares itself, and that is enough."

-- Jane hirshfield

"Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousand fold."

-- Khan Noonian Singh (from Star Trek episode "Space Seed")

Sam Lowry: How are the twins?
Jack Lint: Triplets.
Sam Lowry: My, how time flies!

-- From the movie Brazil

"Space the final frontier. Theses are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

-- intro to Star Trek

"Maybe we weren't meant for Paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through. Struggle. Claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of lutes. We must march to the sound of drums."

-- Kirk (from Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise")

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."

-- Spock (from Star Trek episode "Amok Time")

"Not keeping an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may was well borrow a person's money as his time."

-- Horace Mann

"Encouragement after censure is as sun after a shower."

-- Goethe

"Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

-- Goethe

"What you are we used to be,
What we are, you will be."

-- inscription in the crypt of the Capuchin Friars,
Santa Maria della Concezione, Roma, Italia

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-- Marianne Williamson in Return to Love

"Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"

-- banditos in "The Treasuer of the Sierra Madre"

Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I've done a lot of it since then, and it all adds up to one thing: you're getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.

Ilsa: But, Richard, no, I... I...

Rick: Now, you've got to listen to me! You have any idea what you'd have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we'd both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn't that true, Louie?

Captain Renault: I'm afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You're saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: What about us?

Rick (romantically): We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it. We'd - we'd lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you...

Rick: And you never will. I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now. Here's looking at you, kid."

-- from the movie "Casablanca"

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

-- Rick from the movie "Casablanca"

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

-- Rick from the movie "Casablanca"

"You don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."

-- Slim from the movie "To Have and Have Not" played by Lauren Bacall

Marion Ravenwood: "You're not the same man I knew ten years ago."

Indiana Jones: "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."

-- from the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

"Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

-- Obi-wan Kenobi from the movie "Star Wars"

Darth Vader: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.
Obi-wan: Only a master of evil, Darth.
Darth Vader: Your powers are weak, old man.
Obi-wan: You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

-- from the frist "Star Wars" movie

C3PO: He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help it.
Han Solo: Give it to him. It's not wise to upset a wookie.
C3PO: But Sir, nobody worries about upsetting a droid.
Han Solo: That's because droids don't pull peoples arms out of their sockets if they lose. Wookies are known to do that.
C3PO: I see your point, Sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2... Let the wookie win.

-- from the first "Star Wars" movie

"Try not! Do or do not. There is no try."

-- Yoda from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back"

"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

-- Ishmael by Danial Quinn p84

"The gods have played three dirty tricks on the Takers," he began, "In the first place, they didn't put the world where the Takers thought it belonged, in the center of the universe. They really hated hearing this, but they got used to it. Even if man's home was stuck off in the boondocks, they could still believe he was the central figure in the drama of creation. "The second of the gods' tricks was worse. Since man was the climax of creation, the creature for whom all the rest of was made, they should have had the decency to produce him in a manner suited to his dignity and importance -- in a separate, special act of creation. Instead they arranged for him to evolve from the common slime, just like ticks and liver flukes. The Takers 'really' hated hearing this, but they're beginning to adjust to it. Even if man evolved from the common slime, it's still his divinely appointed destiny to rule the world and perhaps even the universe itself. "but the last of the gods' tricks was the worst of all. Though the Takers don't know it yet, the gods did not exempt man from the law that governs the lives of grubs and ticks and shrimps and rabbits and mollusks and deer and lions and jellyfish. They did not exempt him from this law any more than they exempted him form the law of gravity, and this is going to be the bitterest blow of all to the Takers. To the gods' other dirty tricks, they could adjust. To this one, no adjustment is possible."

-- Ishmael by Danial Quinn p103

"I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world -- our traditional source of direct insights -- is rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man's place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty-four hours, is denied them. It's no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about."

-- Michael Crichton

"The most wonderful thing about Tiggers,
is Tiggers are wonderful things.
Their tops are made out of rubber,
their bottoms are made out of springs.
They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy,
Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun!
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is,
I'm the only one.
Oh, III'm the only one!

Oh, the wonderful thing about Tiggers is,
Tiggers are wonderful chaps.
They're loaded with vim and vigor.
They love to leap in your lap.
They're jumpy, bumpy, clumpy, thumpy,
Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun!
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is ...
III'm the only one!"

-- The Tigger Song - from the Disney Winnie the Pooh movie

"Here comes Edward Bear now, down the stairs behind Christopher Robin. Bump! Bump! Bump! on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. He is sure that there must be a better way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment to think of it."

-- Winnie-The-Pooh, A.A. Milne, 1926

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet"
"Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you."

-- from an Hallmark anniversary card

"You have a lot of friends, don't you, Pooh?"
"Yes, but only one Piglet." Pooh answered.

-- from an Hallmark card

" I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of measdowflowers and butterfiles
in cummers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
oh how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen!
in every wood in in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and of people who will see a world
that I shall never know."

-- from Bilbo's Song from "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R.Tolkien

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

-- from "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R.Tolkien

Fodo: I can't do this Sam.
Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding on to Sam?
Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.

-- from the movie "The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers"

"We often look for silver bullets instead of silver buckshot."

-- Anthony Leiserowitz

"to the extent people can't solve a problem, they tend to ignore the problem."

-- Tom Bowman

"Unless you enter the tiger's lair, you cannot get hold of the tiger's cub's."

-- Pan Ch'ao from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"

"The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected."

-- first line of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"

"Physicists ask what kind of place this is and seek to characterize its behavior systematically. Biologists ask what it means for a physical system to be living. We in AI wonder what kind of information-processing system can ask such questions."

-- Avron Barr and Edward Feigenbaum, "The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence", Vol. 1, p 11

"We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge."

-- John Naisbitt

"The missionaries go forth to christianize the savages--
as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already."

-- Edward Abbey

Three things are known to no man: the hour of his death, the true name of Allah, and the source of his next meal.

-- Islamic proverb

"A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life."

-- Hal Borland

"The most beautiful music is the music of what happens."

-- Irish proverb

"May you - Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, dance like no-one is watching, screw like it's being filmed, and drink like a true Irishman"

-- Irish toast

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence... He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him."

-- Amos Bronson Alcott

"For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference."

-- Albert Camus

"Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!"

-- Pai-Chang

"Some people will never learn anything, because they understand everything too soon."

-- Alexander Pope

"Travelers, there is no path, pass are made by walking."

-- Antonio Machado

"'Studying the Way' is just a figure of speech, a method of arousing people's interest in the early stages of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study leads to the retention of concepts, and so the Way is entirely misunderstood"

-- Huang-Po

"There is no reality except in action."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

"The only real education comes from what goes counter to you."

-- Andre Gide

"Near the first group of arches, looming over a bend in the road, is a balanced rock about fifty feet high, mounted on a pedestal of equal height; it looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god of a petrified ogre.

Lke a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a jumiper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock."

-- from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

"The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock-- cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock -- ten thousand strangely carved forms.

When spekaing of these rocks, we must not conceive of piles of boulders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished."

-- John Wesley Powell, 1875

"He's working his way through medical school ... as a patient."

-- Warren Miller talking about one of his stunt skiers

"Golf is a good walk ruined."

-- Mark Twain

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."

-- Mark Twain

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

-- Mark Twain

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

-- Mark Twain

"Happy trails to you, until we meet again.
Happy trails to you. Keep smiling until then.
Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.
Happy trails to you, till we meet again."

-- Roy Rogers and Dale Evans

"We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions."

-- Dwight Marrow

"Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain."

-- Aubrey de Vere

"A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others"

-- Wizard of Oz

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."

-- Wizard of Oz

"Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable."

-- Wizard of Oz

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that moked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestall these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"One of the most time consuming things is to have an enemy."

-- E. B. White

"Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing that you haven't got: a diploma."

-- Wizard of Oz

Tinman: "What have you learned, Dorothy?"

Dorothy Gale: "Well, I - I think that it - it wasn't enough to just want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em - and it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?"

-- from the movie "The Wizard of Oz"

All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

-- Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle i, 1. 284

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

-- Dorothy from the movie "The Wizard of Oz"

"I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog, too!"

-- Wicked Witch of the West from the movie "The Wizard of Oz"

"Who ever thought a little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?"

-- Wicked Witch of the West from the movie "The Wizard of Oz"

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

--Bertrand Russell

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

--Bertrand Russell

"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them."

--Bertrand Russell

"The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts."

--Bertrand Russell

"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the word uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence."

--Bertrand Russell

"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow."

-- Dorothy Thompson

"What men really want is not knowledge but certainty."

--Bertrand Russell

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never killing for their country."

--Bertrand Russell (attributed)

"The desert can kill you with its water, or its lack of water, depending on its mood."

-- anon

"A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform."

-- anon

"You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days."

-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The reason that we don't have 'bear-proof' garbage cans in the park is that there is a significant overlap in intelligence between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans."

-- Yosemite Park Ranger

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."

-- English Professor, Ohio University

"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock."

-- anon

Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for very large values of 2.

-- anon

"There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

-- anon

"Worry is the traitor in our cmap that dampens our power and weakens our aim."

-- William George Jordon

"Terrific! I've got a trig mid-term tomorrow, and I'm being chased by Guido the killer pimp."

-- Miles from the movie "Risky Business"

"Joel, you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

-- Miles from the movie "Risky Business"

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."

-- Janis Joplin

The Three Laws of Robotics

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

-- Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'I found it!', but 'That's funny...'"

-- Isaac Asimov

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

-- Sir Isaac Newton

"Each thought becomes an anxiety in my brain. I am becoming the ugliest of all things: a busy man."

-- Andre Glde

"Taking the lead means accurately preceding the flow of events"

-- Masashi in "Ring of Fire"

Qui haesitans prandium est.
(He who hesitates is lunch.)

-- anon

"What I have figured out is that I can predict the future. I just can't predict when."

-- Steve Case CEO when pressured about keeping AOL on top of the competition

"Prediction is difficult, especially of the future."

-- Niels Bohr

"Be undeniably good. When people ask me how do you make it in show business or whatever, what I always tell them and nobody ever takes note of it 'cuz it's not the answer they wanted to hear -- what they want to hear is here's how you get an agent, here's how you write a script, here's how you do this -- but I always say, 'Be so good they can't ignore you. ' If somebody's thinking, 'How can I be really good?', people are going to come to you. It's much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties."

-- Steve Martin's advice on how to "make it" in any field

"It is a fine day for science!"

-- Dexter, from the cartoon Dexter's Laboratory

"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous."

-- Tom Servo, from "Mystery Science Theater"

"We turn the cube and it twists us."

-- Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik's cube

"If you do what you have always done you will get what you've always got."

-- country saying

"One finger can't lift a pebble."

-- Hopi proverb

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn's rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush,
of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there,
I did not die.

-- Hopi prayer

Eagle soaring, see the morning
see the new mysterious morning
something marvelous and sacred
though it happens every day.

-- Souix prayer

"If we dig precious things form the land,
we will invite disaster.
Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs
spun back and forth in the sky.
A container of ashes might one day be thrown
from the sky, which could burn the land
and boil the oceans."

-- Hopi passages from the moive "Koyaanisqatsi"

Koyaanisqatsi n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

-- Definition of "Koyaanisqatsi" from Hopi language

"Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself."

-- Eugen Herrigel from "The Zen of Archery"

"We are not human beings in a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings in a human experience."

-- anon

"... and what good is a baby?"

-- Michael Faraday (in response to a question about what possible use is electricity)

"We are on a mission from God."

-- The Blues Brothers

"It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses... Hit It!"

-- The Blues Brothers

"People who think they know everything are very irritating to those of us who do."

-- anon

"Give me ambiguity or give me something else."

-- anon

"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped."

-- Groucho Marx

"It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark."

-- Howard Ruff

"It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works."

-- Noam Chomsky

"Even in a largely depoliticized society such as the United States, with no political parties or opposition press beyond the narrow spectrum of the business-dominated consensus, it is possible for populate action to have a significant impact on policy, though indirectly. That was an important lesson for the Indochina Wars."

-- Noam Chomsky

"It matters not whether you win or lose;
what matters is whether I win or lose.

-- Darin Weinberg

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."

-- Mark Twain

"It takes about 10 years to get used to how old you are."

-- anon

"I like life. It's something to do."

-- Ronnie Shakes

"Never eat more than you can lift"

-- Miss Piggy

"Start off each day with a smile and get it over with."

--W.C. Fields

Jessica Rabbit: You don't know what it's like being a woman looking the way I do.
Eddie Valiant: You don't know what it's like being a man looking at a woman looking the way you do.

-- from the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

-- Jessica Rabbit

"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone."

-- Anthony Burgess

".. are all alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they are different."

-- from "The Miser" by Moliere

"Worry does not change the future, It saps the strength from the present."

-- anon

When planning for a year, plant corn.
When planning for a decade, plant trees.
When planning for life, train and educate people.

-- Chinese proverb

"If you educate a boy, you educate an individual, if you educate a a girl, you educate a community."

-- African proverb

I find trees, woodlands and forest,
Places that increase my spiritual awareness,
Places of quiet peace, tranquillity and wonder.

All the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves.

-- Virginia Wolff

"They can because they think they can."

-- Virgil (The Aeneid)

"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself."

-- Ethel Barrymore

"Love this Earth as if you won't be here tomorrow; show reverence for your Garden as if you will be here forever."

-- Scottish proverb

"Everyone dies but not everyone lives."

-- anon

It's easy to die.
Just give your breath
back to the trees
and the wind.

-- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies

"You are the kind of friend who would overlook my broken fence to admire my flowers"

-- anon

"We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden."

-- anon

"The best fertilizer is the gardeners shadow."

-- anon

"Some people never learn anything because they understand everything too soon."

-- Alexander Pope

"In beauty before me, I walk.
In beauty behind me, I walk.
In beauty above me, I walk.
In beauty below me, I walk.
In beauty all around me, I walk.
In beauty inside me, I walk."

-- Navajo saying, commenting on man's place in the world

"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

-- Declaration of Independence

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood. At best, he knows the triumph of high achievement; if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

-- Teddy Roosevelt

"The language is an instrument of reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought."

-- George Boole

"No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful."

-- George Boole

"Weep not for the dead, they are but empty cages from which the bird has flown."

-- Tibetan Book of the Dead

"It is never too late to become the person you might have been."

-- John Lennon

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

-- H P Lovecraft

"100,000 lemmings can't be wrong."

-- anon

"A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can see from the top of a mountain."

-- proverb

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudice"

-- William James

"The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees
The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas
The road was a ribbon of moolight, over the purple moor
And the Highwayman came riding --
Riding -- riding,
And the Highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door."

-- Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman"

"It is not a small world to a man who chases his hat on a windy day."

-- proverb

"Politics is like rollerskating. You go partly where you want to go and partly where the damned things take you."

-- Henry Fountain Ashurst

"One trouble with the world today is that there are too many people in it who are willing to put in their owars but not willing to row."

-- Hugh Allen

"With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well too."

-- yiddish proverb

"If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."

-- Isaac Newton

"Errors are not in the art but in the artificers."

-- Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica)

So as regards these two great obelisks,
Wrought with electrun by my majesty for my father Amun,
In order that my name may endure in this temple,
For eternity and everlastingness,
They are each of one block of hard granite,
Without seam, without joining together!"

-- Queen Hatshepsut (1468 B.C.)

"God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!

-- attrib. Henry Carey, 1740

"What we do in life echos in eternity."

-- Maximus from the movie "Gladiator"

"The intelligent man is never bored."

-- Isaac Asimov

"All things which can be known, have number; for it is not possible that without number anthing can be conceived or known."

-- Phillaus

"Take what you can use and let the rest go by."

-- Ken Kesey

"If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."

-- Ronald Reagan

"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories."

-- Arthur C Clarke

"Justice is incidental to law and order."

-- J Edgar Hoover

"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."

-- Groucho Marx

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

-- Groucho Marx

"Religion is the opiate of the masses."

-- Karl Marx

"How can you be two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"

-- Firesign Theater

"I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability."

-- Oscar Wilde

"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowwhere."

-- Empedocles

"Every day people are straying away from Church and going back to God."

-- Lenny Bruce

"Anyone can hate. It costs to love."

-- John Williamson

"If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it."

-- Stanley Garn

"Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. "

-- Richard Nixon

"A jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one"

-- Sam Rayburn, speaker of the house

"An object never serves the same function as its image... or its name."

-- Rene Magritte

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts."

-- Paul Erlich

"Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked."

-- Robert D Sprecht (Rand Corp.)

"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof"

-- Ashley Montague

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood."

-- Attrib. D. H. Burnham

"Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations"

-- Thomas Jefferson

"We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately"

-- Benjamin Franklin

"You may delay, but time will not."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles"

-- Pat Paulsen

"The validity of a science is its ability to predict."

-- anon

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money"

-- Senator Everett Dirksen

"I like a man who grins when he fights."

-- Winston Churchill

"After all is said and done, a lot more has been said than done."

-- anon

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels"

-- Goya

"We have met the enemy and he is us"

-- Walt Kelly (in POGO)

Mongol General: What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

-- Conan the Barbarian movie (does Conan really know the word lamentations?)

"When you imitate the enemy's tactics, you take on his liabilities."

-- attrib. Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India

"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a necessity."

-- Oscar Wilde

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually immitate each other."

-- Oscar Wilde

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

-- Voltaire

"The one thing I've learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous."

-- Margot Fonteyn

"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them"

-- Heisenberg

"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

-- Rev. Pat Robertson, during his campaign for President

"When you decide why you reject all other gods you will understand why I reject yours as well."

-- Stephen F. Roberts

"Standard is better than better."

-- proverb inside Hewlett-Packard Corporation

"Oh my God! They've killed Kenny! You bastards!"

-- the kids in the TV show "South Park"

"The early bird may get the worm but it is the late mouse that gets the cheese."

-- proverb

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth."

-- Taleswapper in Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son

"There isn't enough darkness in all the world to snuff out the light of one little candle."

-- Anon

"It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

-- Chinese proverb

"There is a crack in everything. Tha's how the light gets in."

-- Leonard Cohen

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

-- Kierkegaard

"Life can only be understood by looking backwards, but it must be lived looking forwards."

-- Kierkegaard

"There exists a simple equation between freedom and numbers. The more people, the less freedom."

-- Royal Robbins

"There's nothing like good food, good beer, and a bad girl."

-- anon

"Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever."

-- anon

"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and other represents opportunity."

-- John F. Kennedy

"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning withou liberty is always in vain."

-- John F. Kennedy

"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being.

-- Pearl S. Buck

"The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them."

-- Giacomo Leopardi

"Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!"

-- The Robot in the TV show "Lost in Space"

"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

-- Winston Churchill

"No victory is ever final, and no defeat is ever forever."

-- anon

"Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God."

-- Jean Rostand

"If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.

-- William Orton

"Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart."

-- Mencius (Meng-Tse), 4th century B.C.

"I'm still a small boy inside. I only got old on the outside."

-- Stan L. Zundel, I Climb to Live

"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

-- Winston Churchill

"Resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die."

-- attrib. to Carrie Fischer

"He who deliberates fully before taking a step will spend his entire life on one leg."

-- Chinese proverb

"You don't grow old. You get old by not growing."

-- E. Stanley Jones, minister

"Making a living is necessary and often satisfying; eventually, making a difference becomes more important."

-- David Campbell

"Just living is not enough," said the caterpillar. "One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

-- Hans Christian Andersen

"They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable-- and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

-- Patrick Henry to the Virginia Convention of Delegates in Richmond

"Amateurs hope. Professionals work."

-- Carson Kanin, director

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

-- Dolly Parton

"People spend most of their lives worrying about things that never happen."

-- Moliere

"About the only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way you use them."

-- Bernard Meltzer

"Silence is the virtue of fools."

-- Francis Bacon 1561-1626

"To spend too much time in studies is sloth."

-- Francis Bacon 1561-1626

"There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it."

-- Cicero 106-43 BC

"War is much too serious a thing to be left to the military."

-- Georges Clemenceau 1841-1929

"The French will only be united under the threat of danger. Nobody can simply bring together a country that has 265 kinds of cheese."

-- Charles De Gaulle 1890-1970

"A man is only truly great when he acts from the passions."

-- Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

"My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me."

-- Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

"Little things affect little minds."

-- Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

-- Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

"Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor."

-- Queen Elizabeth I 1533-1603

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

"Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

"My people and I have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please."

-- Frederick the Great 1712-1786

"We are just statistics, born to consume resources."

-- Horace 65-8 BC

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

-- James Joyce 1882-1941

"Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own."

-- Vladmir Lenin 1870-1924

"Fast is fine, but accuracy is final."

-- Wyatt Earp

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

-- Vladmir Lenin 1870-1924

"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State."

-- Vladmir Lenin 1870-1924

"Woman was God's second blunder."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

"Morality is the herd-instinct of the individual."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

-- Elbert Hubbard

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

-- Arthur C.Clarke, "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in the collection "Profiles of the Future",1962, revised 1973, Harper & Row, paperback by Popular Library, ISBN 0-445-04061-0.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

"God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen."

-- Stephen Hawking

"A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

-- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

-- Douglas Adams

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

-- George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."

-- Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910

"In historical events great men - so called - are but the labels that serve to give a name to the event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free will at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity."

-- Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910

"If you see the whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives, ... but close up, a world is all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job. You get tired and lose the pattern."

-- Ursula K. LeGuin

"Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be."

-- Pink Floyd (Breathe)

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

-- Mark Twain

"He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing."

-- James Gleick on Feynman

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

-- Gore Vidal

"Cowardly dogs bark loudest."

-- John Webster

"In our country there is freedom of speech, but not freedom for corruption"

-- Gholamreza Hassani, Iranian cleric

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

-- Lew Wallace (author of Ben Hur)

For me, walking the tightrope is living. Everything else is waiting.

-- Karl Wallenda

There is absolutely nothing special about walking on a rope stretched along the ground. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in a deed accomplished, and therefore no happiness.

-- Ray Kroc

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward, they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We must be careful about what we pretend to be.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

-- Neil Simon

When lobsters grow to be about one pound, they instinctively know they are facing a crisis. They have lived in a hard shell that protects them, but inhibits their growth. To become mature, the lobsters must shed their old shell and grow a new one, a process that takes about two days. This isn't long but during that time, they are left naked and vulnerable. Other denizens of the deep may eat the naked lobster. Or waves may slam it against a rock and damage it. Yet there is no alternative. The lobster must endure two days of risk to grow a new shell and become mature. Humans often have to do that too.

-- anon

One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.

-- John W. Gardner

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

-- Erica Jong

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

-- Helen Keller

There is no collection of dust on the one who is under fire.

-- Magnus von Platen

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

-- Anais Nin

"Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop."

-- Publius Ovidius Naso

"Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."

-- Hans Margolius

"One should respect public opinion insofar as it is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

-- Bertrand Russell

The risk of insult is the price of clarity. To be clearly understood one must speak the simple, essential truth as plainly as he is able.

-- Roy H. Williams

As I stood at the airport one day waiting for the plane to bring my family back from holidays, I thought of the frightful risk involved in loving. If the plane had crashed, most of myself would have gone down with it, and yet, there is no way to love without risk.... Those who can't love are those who are afraid or unable to run the risks involved. They want to keep themselves safe and protected: they fear that their love may be rejected or betrayed or weakly returned. Yet, unless we are willing to take such chances, to accept the fact that in loving we leave ourselves wide open to disappointment or disaster, we cannot escape from the web of our own selfish egos.

-- Sydney Harris

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

-- T.S. Eliot

Great things are only possible with outrageous requests.

-- Thea Alexander

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

-- Vincent Van Gogh

Don't play what's there. Play what's not there.

-- Miles Davis

The challenge isn't to keep your eye on big competitors. It's to pay attention to the innovators.

-- Dave Duffield

Inventing is a combination of brains and materials, the more brains you have, the less material you need.

-- Charles Kettering

Growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.

-- Paul Romer

Defending yesterday is far more risky than making tomorrow.

-- Peter Drucker

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

-- Francis Bacon

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions

-- Anthony Jay

Don�t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

-- Robert Fulghum

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

-- Jean Kerr

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

-- Ernest Dimnet

When I have something to say that is too difficult for adults, I write for children. They have not closed the shutters. They like it when you rock the boat.

-- Madeline L'Engle

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

-- Carl Jung

"So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones."

-- John Maynard Smith on artificial life

There are no illegitimate children - only illegitimate parents.

-- Leon R. Yankwich

When you give to your mate, you give to your children. There is no better way to teach love than to practice love. Kids are much better at watching and emulating than they are at listening.

-- Gregory J.P. Godek

View young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit.

-- Robert H. Shaffer

Boundaries can be good. A river with no banks is a big puddle.

-- anon

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

-- Peter De Vries

If you are a happy parent, you give your son or daughter an invaluable legacy. It doesn't matter too much whether you are rich or poor; if the choice is between happy poor and unhappy rich the children of a laughing pauper are the ones to envy. For they will grow up with the expectation that life is good, that the world is a sunny and friendly place, that other people are as human and decent as they are, that it is fun to be alive. And with that attitude, they can accomplish almost anything.

-- Guy Wright

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

I had the total attention of both my parents, and was secure in the knowledge of being loved ... My memories of falling asleep at night are to the comfortable sound of my parents' voices, voices which conveyed in their tones the message that these two people loved and trusted one another.

-- Jill Kerr Conway

Common sense comes from experience, and kids need to fail as well as succeed in order to learn it. It's difficult to develop common sense when you spend a lot of time in your room where nothing much happens.

-- Marilyn vos Savant

If you want to make an easy job harder, just keep putting it off. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

-- William James

Do what you know best; if you�re a runner, run, if you�re a bell, ring.

-- Ignas Bernstein

You can't imagine how much more work I had when I was a god.

-- Emperor Hirohito

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

-- Theodore Roosevelt

Quality is never an accident.

-- Will A. Foster

People will remember how badly the work was carried out long after they forget how fast it went.

-- Roger L. Cason

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.

-- Katharine Hepburn

A leading difficulty with the average player is that he totally misunderstands what is meant by concentration. He may think he is concentrating hard when he is merely worrying.

-- R T Jones

"We are not here to merely make a living. We are here to enrich the world, and we impoverish ourselves if we forget this errand."

-- Woodrow T. Wilson

"Bending over his workbench in Cremona, Italy, Antonio Stradivari made a vow, "Other men will make violins, but no one will make a better one." More than 250 years have passed, and this remains true. Although people have copied his violins in every detail, Stradivari�s perfect workmanship has never been equaled."

-- Economics Press

Live and work to make a difference, to make things better, even the smallest things. Give full consideration to the rights and interests of others. No business is successful, even if it flourishes, in a society that does not care for or about its people.

-- Eugene C. Dorsey

A very rich man once commissioned a famous artist to do a painting of a fish. One year later the man returned and asked for his painting. The artist took out a clean sheet of paper and painted a beautiful fish while the man waited. The man then asked why it had taken a year to get the painting of the fish. The artist opened a door to a closet, which was filled with 1,000 paintings of that fish.

-- anon

Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.

-- Anon

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his life and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he's always doing both.

-- James Michener

Passion is what we are most deeply curious about, most hungry for, will most hate to lose in life. It is the most desperate wish we need to yell down the well of our lives. It is whatever we pursue merely for its own sake, what we study when there are no tests to take, what we create, though no one may ever see it. It makes us forget that the sun rose and set, that we have bodily functions and personal relations that could use a little tending. It is what we'd do if we weren't worried about consequences, about money, about making anybody happy but ourselves. It is whatever we could be tempted to sell our souls for in order to have a hundred extra years just to devote to it, whatever fills us with the feeling poet Anne Sexton was referring to when she said that "when I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do." It is what matters most, whether we're doing it or not.

-- Gregg Levoy

After the cheers have died and the stadium is empty, after the headlines have been written, and after you are back in the quiet of your own room and the Super Bowl ring has been placed on the dresser and all the pomp and fanfare have faded, the enduring things that are left are: the dedication to excellence, the dedication to victory; and the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.

-- Vince Lombardi

The most damaging phrase in the language is: It's always been done that way.

-- Grace Hopper, Ph.D. U.S. Navy admiral and computer scientist

Nothing I do can't be done by a 10-year-old-with 15 years of practice.

-- Harry Blackstone, Jr. Magician

You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.

-- Jerry Gillies

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

-- From a poster created by the Animal Society

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

-- Sir Edmund Hillary

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

-- Samuel Johnson

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. The rest will be given.

-- Mother Teresa

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

-- Colin Powell

Obstacles are cowards, but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them, they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.

-- Orison Swett Marden

The inner master, when confronted with an obstacle, uses it as fuel, like a fire which consumes things that are thrown into it. A small lamp would be snuffed out, but a big fire will engulf what is thrown at it and burn hotter; it consumes the obstacle and uses it to reach a higher level.

-- Marcus Aurelius

"Dance as though no one can see you, sing as though no one can hear you, love as though you have never been hurt before. Live as though heaven is on earth."

-- anon

No one is discontented at not being a king except a discrowned king ... unhappiness almost invariably indicates the existence of a road not taken, a talent undeveloped, a self not recognized.

-- Blaise Pascal

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.

-- Arthur C Clarke

"When a man dies, if he can pass enthusiasm along to his children, he has left them an estate of incalculable value."

-- Thomas Edison

"Many of life's failures are people who didn't realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

-- Thomas Edison

"The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change."

-- Thomas Edison

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

-- Bertrand Russell

Man, like a bridge, was designed to carry the load of the moment, not the combined weight of a year all at once.

-- William A. Ward

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."

-- William A. Ward

When a man blames others for his failures, it�s a good idea to credit others with his successes.

-- Howard W. Newton

Statistically, 100% of the shots you don�t take, don�t go in.

-- Wayne Gretzsky

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been."

-- Wayne Gretzsky

Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.

-- Sydney Smith

We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.

-- Heinmot Tooyalaket (Chief Joseph) of the Nez Perc�s, 1873

All things in the world are two. In our minds we are two - good and evil. With our eyes we see two things - things that are fair and things that are ugly . . . . We have the right hand that strikes and makes for evil, the left hand full of kindness, near the heart. One foot may lead us to an evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, all two.

-- Eagle Chief, Letakots-Lesa, (late 19th century) Pawnee

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: "Inside of me there two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time." When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."

-- anon

We had no churches, no religious organizations, so sabbath day, no holidays, and yet we worshiped. Sometimes the whole tribe would assemble and sing and pray; sometimes a smaller number, perhaps only two or three. The songs had a few words, but were not formal. The singer would occasionally put in such words as he wished instead of the usual tone sound. Sometimes we prayed in silence; sometimes each prayed aloud; sometimes an aged person prayed for all of us. At other times one would rise and speak to us of our duties to each other and to Usen [Apache God]. Our services were short.

-- Geronimo, Goyathlay, Chiricahua Apache Chief

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

-- Mary Ellen Kelly

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools.

-- Jean-Luc Godard

To love God truly one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow man, you will know that he's lying.

-- Hassidic saying

He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.

-- Thomas Fuller

The best way to know God is to love many things.

-- Vincent van Gogh

The religious is afraid of going to hell, the spiritual has been there.

-- anon

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.

-- Max Born

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car.

-- Laurence J. Peter

It is not enough to belong to a religion. You also have to put it into practice. Religion is like medicine. You have to ingest it to combat the illness.

-- the Dalai Lama

There are no ordinary cats.

-- Colette

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'."

-- Beverly Clark in the movie "Shall we Dance?"

"The rumba is the vertical expression of a horizontal wish. You have to hold her, like the skin on her thigh is your reason for living. Let her go, like your heart's being ripped from your chest. Throw her back, like you're going to have your way with her right here on the dance floor. And then finish, like she's ruined you for life."

-- Paulina in the movie "Shall we Dance?"

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

-- Leonardo da Vinci

It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.

-- Agnes Reppllier

The really great thing about cats is their endless variety. One can pick a cat to fit almost any kind of decor, color scheme, income, personality, mood. But under the fur, whatever color it may be, there still lies, essentially unchanged, one of the world's free souls.

-- Eric Gurney

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually immitate each other."

-- Eric Hoffer

No tame animal has lost less of its native dignity or maintained more of its ancient reserve. The domestic cat might rebel tomorrow.

-- William Conway, Archbishop of Armagh

The cat, like the genius, draws into itself as into a shell except in the atmosphere of congeniality, and this is the secret of its remarkable and elusive personality.

-- Ida M. Mellen

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

-- Mark Twain

At dinner time he would sit in a corner, concentrating, and suddenly they would say, "Time to feed the cat," as if it were their own idea.

-- Lilian Jackson Braun

"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!"

-- attrib. Andrew Jackson

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

-- Abraham Lincoln

A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the forepart plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her until you tread on it.

-- Henry Davis Thoreau

A cat sleeps fat, yet walks thin.

-- Fred Schwab

Because of our willingness to accept cats as superhuman creatures, they are the ideal animals with which to work creatively.

-- Roni Schotter

As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over

-- estimated. He suggests so much grac

e, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.

-- Carl Van Vechten

Cats everywhere asleep on the shelves like motorized bookends.

-- Audrey Thomas

Way deep down we are motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

-- Jim Davis

Even overweight cats instinctively know the cardinal rule: when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses.

-- John Weitz

A dog is a dog, a bird is a bird, and a cat is a person.

-- Mugsy Peabody

A dog is prose, a cat poetry.

-- anon

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then a cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

-- Doris Lessing

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

-- Jean Cocteau

For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

-- Christopher Smart

Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.

-- Dave Platt

There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.

-- anon

Thousands of years ago, cats were worshiped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.

-- anon

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."

-- Albert Szent-Gyorgi

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

-- Albert Schweitzer

The cat has too much spirit to have no heart.

-- Ernest Menaul

Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.

-- anon

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

-- Colette

Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.

-- Missy Dizick

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch

Cats aren't clean, they're just covered with cat spit.

-- anon

The softness of a kitten's feet, like raspberries held in the hand.

-- Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Does the Cheshire cat drink evaporated milk?

-- anon

Rule 46 of the Oxford Union Society in London reads, "Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one Pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat."

-- anon

So I laugh when I hear them make it plain That dogs and men never meet again. For all their talk who'd listen to them, With the soul in the shining eyes of him? Would God be wasting a dog like Tim?

-- W M Letts, Songs of Leinster

At the dog-show held at our local hospital fete, there were many handsome dogs with equally handsome owners. But my attention was drawn to a small mongrel and his owner, a boy of about eleven. For nearly an hour, the boy had been gently grooming and hugging his pet in turn. When his name was called the boy tenderly took the dog's head into his cupped hands and looked at him with all the love a small boy could show. "Now you mustn't be upset if you don't win a prize," he said, "you see, they don't know you as well as I do."

-- anon

The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.

-- Henry Ward Beecher

I would rather see a portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

-- Samuel Johnson

My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money.

-- Joe Weinstein

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."

-- Milan Kun

"We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan."

--Irving Townsend

"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."

-- Woodrow Wilson

"Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac who stays up all night wondering if there really is a Dog?"

-- anon

"When the Man waked up he said, 'What is Wild Dog doing here?' And the Woman said, 'His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always.'"

-- Rudyard Kipling

"My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I 'should' be doing."

-- Lonzo Idolswine

"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog."

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance."

-- James Thurber

"There is an Indian legend which says when a human dies there is a bridge they must cross to enter into heaven. At the head of that bridge waits every animal that human encountered during their lifetime. The animals, based upon what they know of this person, decide which humans may cross the bridge.... and which are turned away..."

-- Unknown

"Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for."

-- Dave Barry

"Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?"

-- Edith Sitwell

"Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is but a Just Tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog."

-- Epitaph, on Lord Byron's dog, Boatswain, at Newstead Abbey

"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, Or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

-- Michaelangelo

"I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them."

-- Pablo Picasso

"Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art."

-- Remy de Gourmont

"Without great solitude, no serious work is possible."

-- Pablo Picasso

"Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves... Honor and love him...do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night."

-- Edward E. Cummings

"Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?"

-- Pablo Picasso

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

-- Robert Hughes, Time Magazine

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

-- Winston Churchill, To Royal Academy of Arts, Time 11 May 53

"There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius."

-- Victor Hugo

"Life is a big canvas, throw all the paint on it you can."

-- Danny Kaye

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

-- Pablo Picasso

"All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself."

-- W. H. Auden

"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness."

-- George Jean Nathan

"I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life-the power to create."

-- Vincent Van Gogh

"The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither immoral or illegal."

-- The Dark Corner

"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

-- Michelangelo

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."

-- Salvador Dali

"Some years ago, I saw a remarkable television interview that Dick Cavett conducted with Isaac Stern. During their conversation, Stern, at Cavett's request, picked up a violin and played an arpeggio. It was so full of feeling, so smooth and perfect, that Cavett and his audience were stunned.

Stern then played the arpeggio again, with the notes separated by perhaps a quarter of a second. He played it a dozen more times; each time the notes were fractionally closer, until they once again became a seamless whole again.

'How did you do that?' demanded Cavett, astonished. Stern began to talk about how he practiced six hours a day for 25 years, until the muscles in his hands were extremely strong and completely under his command. He grew reflective for a moment, and then said that because he had achieved absolute control of his instrument, he felt comfortable being completely spontaneous. 'When I perform,' Stern said, 'all I pay attention to is my feelings.'"

-- Bruno Bettelheim and Alvin A. Rosenfeld, The Art of the Obvious

"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.'

-- Pablo Picasso

"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."

. -- Dick Cavett

"If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either."

. -- Dick Cavett

"The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience."

-- Leo Tolstoy

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

-- Leo Tolstoy

"Fear is the mind killer."

--Frank Herbert, Dune

"The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice."

-- Bruce Lee

"The man that conquers himself is superior to the one who conquers a thousand men in battle."

-- Buddha

J: Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.
K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

-- Men in Black (the movie)

"I said, 'I've broken my arm in several places.' She said, 'Don't go to those places.' You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it."

-- Margaret Thatcher

"They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards."

-- General Creighton W. Abrams

"Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality. To me, defeat in anything is merely temporary, and its punishment is but an urge for me to greater effort to achieve my goal. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth."

-- Bruce Lee

The fastest draw is when the sword never leaves the scabbard, The strongest way to block, is never to provoke a blow, And the cleanest cut is the one withheld.

-- anon

The ultimate aim of karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of it's participants.

-- Master Gichin Funakoshi

Ahisma, "non-violence," is therefore much more than the absence of destruction. It is the absence of the desire to destroy.

-- Mark Juergensmeyer

Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.

-- anon

Everything - mountains, rivers, plants, trees - should be your teacher.

-- anon

As soon as you compare yourself with the good and bad of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weaken and defeat you.

-- anon

"Don't hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"Emphasis on the physical aspects of warriorship is futile, for the power of the body is always limited."

-- anon

"I am prolonging the fight because I can see that you need the practice."

-- Zorro

"The Way of the warrior does not include other ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments, and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly, you will see it in everything."

-- Miyamoto Mushashi, A Book of Five Rings

"Budo is supposed to enhance your life, not replace it."

-- F. J. Lovret

"The Spartans do not enquire how many the enemy are, but where they are."

-- Agis II, 427 B.C.

"It is a good day to fight: it is a good day to die."

-- battle cry of Crazy Horse

"My lands are where my dead lie buried."

-- Crazy Horse?

"Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with the face of fear."

-- Abraham Lincoln

" Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth, we have spoken it."

-- Whitney Griswold

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

"There is no such thing as being non-political. Just by making a decision to stay out of politics you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you."

-- Joan Kirner at Women Into Power Conference, Adelaide, October 1994

"Because women's liberation is a movement of the powerless for the powerless, its attraction is not immediately clear to the powerless, who feel they need alliance with the powerful to survive."

-- Rosemary O'Grady (Lawyer and Book Reviewer)

"It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant--first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served."

-- Robert Greenleaf, in his essay "The Servant as Leader"

"War is not women's history."

-- Virginia Woolf

"I am not pro-this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression."

-- Naim Ateek, brother of Desmond Tutu

"It is what we make of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another."

-- Nelson Mandela

"The roots of effective leadership lie in simple things, one of which is listening. Listening to someone demonstrates respect; it shows that you value their ideas and are willing to hear them."

-- John Baldoni

"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."

-- Mark McCormack, Author and sports entrepreneur

"Psychologists tell us that money is a satisfier, not a motivator... Recognition . That�s why we do what we do. .. Recognition is critical to self-esteem. Without it, we feel undervalued, even insignificant. Money is nice, sure. But once you establish a basis of monetary rewards, without the accompanying verbal and social affirmation, the employee will quickly become disgruntled and ask for more. Eventually, more will never be enough."

-- John Baldoni has created a series of radio commentaries called Life, Leadership, and Laughter.

"Trainers use humor to point out negative behaviors in ways that teach rather than preach. Mediators tell us that the right joke, or the right moment of levity, can reduce tensions to the point that two adversaries can sit down at the table to consider the possibility of agreement. So why does humor work? Because it shatters preconceptions at the moment when people are forming new perceptions about their work, their spouse, or life itself. Laughter is a release; it is a moment of sheer pleasure. And in our world of tension and turmoil, the belly laugh is a physical escape valve. Choosing the humor is another matter. We live an era of the put-down, the snide aside, the searing retort. These comments do have their place, but all too often they make us laugh at someone else�s expense. Good humor, nourishing humor for example, enables us to laugh at ourselves for being human. It serves as a window into our souls."

-- John Baldoni

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

-- Aldo Leopold

"The condition of man is already close to satiety and arrogance, and there is danger of destruction of everything in existence."

-- a Brahmin to Onesicritus, 327 BC, reported in Strabo's Geography (Jones trans.)

"America does four things better than any other country in the world: rock music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are sacred American art forms."

-- Courtney Love (apparently quoting Neal Stephenson)

"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never."

-- William Friedkin, in a NYT interview

"Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are."

-- Charles J. Sykes' advice to teenagers

"Get up very early and get going at once, in fact work first and wash afterwards." - Auden "The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and dread of poverty."

-- Johnson?

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

-- Albert Einstein, reported in NYT, 1946

"The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it-- the speed of his acceptance."

-- E. B. White, "Notes on Our Time," 1954

"A subeditor can do no worse disservice to the text before him and thus to the writer, the reader, and the newspaper, than to impose his or her own preferences for words, for the shape of sentences and how they link, for a pedantic insistence on grammar in all cases as it used to be taught in school; in the process destroying nuances and possibly even the flow of a piece."

-- Michael McNay, The Guardian Style Guide

"Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses."

-- George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft

"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."

-- Clause in the agreement to allow the Smithsonian to display the Wrights' plane

"The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money."

-- Henry Ford

"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right."

-- Henry Ford

"Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all."

-- Winston Churchill

"The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion."

-- Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 1975

"Who knows how many Silver Surfers, Demons, New Gods, Deathloks, Ambush Bugs, Cables, Shatterstars, Ferals, Elektras, Mr. As, Ronins, Shrapnels, Terminuses, Alpha Flights, and many others aren't being created, because artists are being overshadowed by lazy writers?"

-- Erik Larsen

"An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men."

-- Thomas Fuller

John Connor: We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.
The Terminator: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.
John Connor: Yeah. Major drag, huh?

-- from the movie "Terminator 2"

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."

-- James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798

"Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology."

-- Adrian Desmond on Huxley

..it may be that there is no God, that "the existence of all that is beautiful and in any sense good is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms," that we are alone in a world that cares nothing for us or for the values that we create and sustain - that we and they are here for a moment only, and gone, and that eventually there will be left no trace of us in the universe. "A man may well believe that this dredful thing is true. But only the fool will say in his heart that he is glad that it is true."

-- Sterling M. McMurrin

"Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message."

-- Umberto Eco

"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."

-- Umberto Eco

"Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is at the heart of its limitations. It is also its greatest strength."

-- Michael Shermer

"I can doubt everything, except one thing, and that is the very fact that I doubt."

-- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

"African-Americans are almost invisible, especially in Renaissance art."

-- Renee Cox

"Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art."

-- Camille Paglia

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

-- Albert Einstein

"The silk hat, which has now become co-extensive with civilization, is an article of comparatively recent introduction."

-- 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

"Wit is educated insolence."

-- Aristotle

"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials."

-- Lin Yutang

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

-- Brandeis

"I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered."

-- Evelyn Waugh, Diary (26 Dec 47)

"Wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates exactly the same way. The only difference is that there is no cat."

-- Albert Einstein

"It is not only the juror's right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience, though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court."

-- John Adams

"Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance."

-- Ivor Brown, The Heart of England

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

-- Richard Feynman, Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger

"Nobody has got a vital enough sensibility to be unceasingly susceptible to aesthetic impressions all the time, even if he has the time or the health or the money. This its exponents found. Their lives were all disappointing to them because they could not maintain themselves in the ecstasy which in their view was the only right condition in which man should live."

-- David Cecil, on Romanticism, in his essay on Rossetti

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

-- Abelson & Sussman, SICP , preface to the first edition

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."

-- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."

-- Donald Knuth

"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."

-- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach

"Lisp is a programmable programming language."

-- John Foderaro, CACM , September 1991

"One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage."

-- John McCarthy, "Early History of Lisp"

"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

-- Alan Kay

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

-- Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

"Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

-- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

"Lisp is a programmer amplifier."

-- Martin Rodgers (first said by Chuck Moore about Forth)

"Lisp ... made me aware that software could be close to executable mathematics."

-- L. Peter Deutsch

"Common Lisp is politics, not art."

-- Scott Fahlman

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."

-- Alan Perlis

"Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages."

-- Eric Raymond, in Open Sources on MIT's first OS, ITS

"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."

-- David Thornley

"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it."

-- Kernighan and Ritchie

"If I had a nickel for every time I've written "for (i = 0; i < N; i++)" in C I'd be a millionaire."

-- Mike Vanier

"Language designers are not intellectuals. They're not as interested in thinking as you might hope. They just want to get a language done and start using it."

-- Dave Moon

"A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal - Panama!"

-- Guy Steele Jr., CLTL2

"The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation."

-- Guy Steele Jr.

"I'm just trying to matter."

-- June Carter Cash

"I'm just trying to matter and live a good life and make work that means something to somebody."

-- Reese Witherspoon (paraphrasing June Carter Cash)

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."

-- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

-- Alan Kay

"I object to doing things that computers can do."

-- Olin Shivers

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know, We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

-- Donald Rumsfeld

"The United States isn't going to do anything That it's not capable of doing. And if we do something, We'll be capable of doing it."

-- Donald Rumsfeld

"... the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

-- (Party slogan) from the book "1984" by George Orwell

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

-- (Party slogan) from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Winston watched [the proles] disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -- what then?"

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the Earth's center. With the feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. ... And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistance of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. ... But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The command of the old despotisims was 'Thou shalt not'. The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt'. Our command is 'Thou art'."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"What can you do ... against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?"

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about her. He disliked nearly all woman, and especially the young and pretty ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed-- would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper-- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms-- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it? All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened-- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-- if all records told the same tale-- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face-- was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." - referring to the proles.

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"...to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife..."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable..."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"Sanity is not statistical."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same-- everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same-- people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

-- from the book "1984" by George Orwell

"I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman."

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Seven Commandments of Animalism

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.

-- Animal Farm by George Orwell

"All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others".

-- Replacement rule for the seven commandments of animalism, Animal Farm by George Orwell

Small and Warm

She was small and warm.
Her hands like cotton.
Her face like rope.
Her hair like a waterfall.
Her smile like a stone.
Her mind like the sky.
Her life like a river.
Her death like a fever of sorrow.
Her memory small and warm.

--Courtney Muyah of the Pima Apache

Native American Prayer

O Great Spirit, whose breath gives life to the world, and whose voice is heard in the soft breeze:
We need your strength and wisdom.
Cause us to walk in beauty.
Give us eyes ever to behold the red and purple sunset.
Make us wise so that we may understand what you have taught us.
Help us learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
Make us always ready to come to you with clean hands and steady eyes, so when life fades, like the fading sunset, our spirits may
come to you without shame.

Apache Wedding Blessing

Now you will feel no rain,
for each of you is shelter to the other.
Now you will feel no cold,
for each of you is warmth to the other.
Now there is no loneliness for you,
for each of you is companion to the other.
Now you are two bodies, but there is
just one life before you.
Go now to enter unto your dwelling place -
to enter into your days together.
And may your days be good and long upon the earth.

Salish marriage blessing

Now for you there is no rain, for one is shelter to the other.
Now for you the sun shall not burn, for one is shelter to the other.
Now for you nothing is hard or bad, for the hardness and badness is taken by one for the other.
Now for you there is no night, for one is light to the other,
Now for you the snow has ended always, for one is protection for the other.
It is that way, from now on, from now on. And now there is comfort.
Now there is no loneliness. Now forever, forever, there is no loneliness.

The Way

The way is long -- let us go together
The way is difficult -- let us help each other
The way is joyful -- let us share it
The way is ours alone -- let us go in love
The way grows before us -- let us begin

May all beings have happiness and its causes
May they never have suffering nor its causes
May they constantly dwell in joy transcending sorry
May they dwell in equal love for near and far.

-- Payer from Mayanana teachings

The "New Colossus"

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
Which conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome, her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin-cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-- Emma Lazarus Nov 2, 1883 From the plague on the Statue of Liberty

I am a raindrop... and I fell, crystallized. One gray
winter morning in the yesterday of your life... it was cold... so
very cold... but the year was new and you had plans... and dreams
of warm places... you drew their pictures in the frost... and I
froze them into your memory... it was January... such a long time ago.

... and I glistened at the tip of an icicle as you climbed
the hill with your sled... and when you raced down the long
icy path, I stung your nose with tiny needles of snow... and dripped
from your overshoes when you stood in the door that evening...
it was Februrary, and you were cold and tired... and hungry.

... and you looked through me one afternoon
as I ran slowly down your windowpane. The winds
were high and your newspaper kite was ready...
but the sun was gone and I was there... making you
wait 'til tomorrow... it was March, and you were impatient.

... and I followed the two of you into the woods one
gray-green day... but when I touched her face, you ran
to hide from me... I watched from a leaf as you
kissed her... gently... and she kissed you back... it was april...
and you were in love... for the first time.

... and I mixed with your tears as you said goodbye to
your father... and when the prayer had been said... and his
song had been sung... I tried to tell you that crying is
good... for how can one know happiness until one has felt
sorrow... it was May... and the flowers were coming up again.

... and I was dew, sparkling in the grass as the sun
came up one summer morning... and you had a day to
remember... it was June and everything was right with
your world... and the child you'd just brought into it...

... and I stayed away in a cloud one night and
let you lay on your back and look up at the stars... it was
July, the air was clear and you realized, at last, what a
joyous thing it is... to be alive.

I am only a raindrop... but I created the snow on
the mountain you climbed... I made the rainbow you saw...
I started the rivers you crossed and I filled the oceans
you sailed... it was August and you and I were somewhere...
doing our thing.

... and I ran as a brook in a meadow as
you walked beside me one sunny, golden day... I listened
as you told your son about the mysteries of nature, and
the realities of life... it was September... and the stream
of time had begun to flow a little faster...

... and as I danced with the leaves through
their last, mad whirl... you gathered together... family and
friends... to honor your son... and his bride... it was a
time for festival... and a farwell toast to the brilliance of autumn.
It was October, and the winter would soon be here.

... and when my sisters clung to the thin bare branches
of the trees outside your window... you sat by the fire and looked at
the fading pictures... and the tiny scraps of life that had been
saved for such a day... it was November...
and the days were getting shorter...

I am a raindrop... and I fell slowly one night...
changing to snow... covering the earth with a soft white blanket...
and as you watched the lights twinkling in the evergreen
boughs, I heard your heart say you were happy... because you
knew that if one light should fail, the others
would still burn bright...
it was December... and you were sleepy...

-- from the "Fresh Aire" album cover

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

-- Pink Floyd