fix Dijkstra quote and stand on Zanzibar underbars

[lib.git] / signature_stuff / quote.txt

What I can't stand is the feeling that my brain is leaving me for 
someone more interesting.
%
I leave the show floor, but not before a pack of caffeinated Jolt gum
is thrust at me by a hyperactive girl screaming, "Chew more! Do more!"
The American will to consume more and produce more personified in a
stick of gum. I grab it.
 -- Chad Dickerson
%
I never until now realized that the primary job of any emoticon is to
say "excuse me, that didn't make any sense." ;-P
 -- Cory Doctorow
%
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien
a ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien a retrancher.
(Perfection is apparently not achieved when nothing more can be added,
but when nothing else can be removed.)
 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupe'ry, Terres des Hommes
%
I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was:
"We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel."
 -- Cory Doctorow
%
She was alot like starbucks.
IE, generic and expensive.
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm
%
Tell me something interesting about yourself.
Lie if you have to.
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/archives/batch20.php
%
We were at a chinese resturant.
He was yelling at the waitress because there was a typo in his fortune
cookie.
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch31.php
%
Three little words. (In decending order of importance.)
I
love
you
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/graphics/batch35.php
%
N: Why should I believe that?"
B: Because it's a fact."
N: Fact?"
B: F, A, C, T... fact"
N: So you're saying that I should believe it because it's true. 
   That's your argument?
B: It IS true.
-- "Ploy" http://www.mediacampaign.org/multimedia/Ploy.MPG
%
UF: What's your favourite coffee blend?
PD: Dark Crude with heavy water. You are understandink? "If geiger
    counter does not click, the coffee, she is just not thick."
%
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the    
right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
 -- Bach 
%
Quite the contrary; they *love* collateral damage. If they can make
you miserable enough, maybe you'll stop using email entirely. Once
enough people do that, then there'll be no legitimate reason left for
anyone to run an SMTP server, and the spam problem will be solved.
 -- Craig Dickson in <20020909231134.GA18917@linux700.localnet>
%
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong
 -- Chris Torek
%
Filing a bug is probably not going to get it fixed any faster.
 -- Anthony Towns
%
Build a fire for a man, an he'll be warm for a day.  Set a man on   
fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
 -- Jules Bean
%
"...Yet terrible as UNIX addiction is, there are worse fates. If UNIX
is the heroin of operating systems, then VMS is barbiturate addiction, the
Mac is MDMA, and MS-DOS is sniffing glue. (Windows is filling your sinuses
with lucite and letting it set.) You owe the Oracle a twelve-step program."
 --The Usenet Oracle
%
Dropping non-free would set us back at least, what, 300 packages? It'd
take MONTHS to make up the difference, and meanwhile Debian users will
be fleeing to SLACKWARE.

And what about SHAREHOLDER VALUE? 
 -- Matt Zimmerman in <gYuD3D.A.ayC.nGB39@murphy>
%
She was alot like starbucks.
IE, generic and expensive.
 -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm
%
You could say she lived on the edge... Well, maybe not exactly on the edge,
just close enough to watch other people fall off.
  -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch8.htm
%
Guns Don't Kill People.
*I* Kill People.
%
DIE!
 -- Maritza Campos http://www.crfh.net/d/20020601.html
%
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
%
Miracles had become relative common-places since the advent of
entheogens; it now took very unusual circumstances to attract public
attention to sightings of supernatural entities. The latest miracle
had raised the ante on the supernatural: the Virgin Mary had
manifested herself to two children, a dog, and a Public Telepresence
Point.
 -- Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ p228
%
Junkies were all knitted together in a loose global macrame, the
intercontinental freemasonry of narcotics.
 -- Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ p257
%
America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The
world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic bi-polar
stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of
socially responsible centurions.
 -- Bruce Sterling, _Distraction_ p122
%
The attackers hadn't simply robbed the bank. They had carried off
everything portable, including the security cameras, the carpets, the
chairs, and the light and plumbing fixtures. The conspirators had
deliberately punished the bank, for reasons best known to themselves,
or to their unknown controllers. They had superglued doors and
shattered windows, severed power and communications cables, poured
stinking toxins into the wallspaces, and concreted all of the sinks
and drains. In eight minutes, sixty people had ruined the building so
thouroughly that it had to be condemed and later demolished.
 -- Bruce Sterling, _Distraction_ p4
%
Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did, we'd be
running around in darkened rooms, popping pills and listening to
repetitive music.
%
"It's not Hollywood. War is real, war is primarily not about defeat or
victory, it is about death. I've seen thousands and thousands of dead
bodies. Do you think I want to have an academic debate on this
subject?"
 -- Robert Fisk
%
THERE IS NO GRAVITY THE WORLD SUCKS
 -- Vietnam War Penquin Lighter
http://gallery.donarmstrong.com/clippings/vietnam_there_is_no_gravity.jpg
%
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.     
 -- Robert Heinlein
%
If you have the slightest bit of intellectual integrity you cannot
support the government. -- anonymous
%
Debian's not really about the users or the software at all. It's a
large flame-generating engine that the cabal uses to heat their coffee
 -- Andrew Suffield (#debian-devel Fri, 14 Feb 2003 14:34 -0500)
%
"I was thinking seven figures," he said, "but I would have taken a
hundred grand. I'm not a greedy person." [All for a moldy bottle of
tropicana.]
 -- Sammi Hadzovic [in Andy Newman's 2003/02/14 NYT article.]
 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/14/nyregion/14EYEB.html
%
[T]he question of whether Machines Can Think, [...] is about as
relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
 -- Edsger W. Dijkstra "The threats to computing science"
%
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
 -- Jeremy S. Anderson
%
"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek: Seen on
a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..."
 -- Joshua D. Wachs - Natural Intelligence, Inc.
%
"Ban cryptography! Yes. Let's also ban pencils, pens and paper, since
criminals can use them to draw plans of the joint they are casing or
even, god forbid, create one time pads to pass uncrackable codes to
each other. Ban open spaces since criminals could use them to converse
with each other out of earshot of the police. Let's ban flags since
they could be used to pass secret messages in semaphore. In fact let's
just ban all forms of verbal and non-verbal communication -- let's see
those criminals make plans now!"
%
"There's no problem so large it can't be solved by killing the user
off, deleting their files, closing their account and reporting their
REAL earnings to the IRS."
 -- The B.O.F.H..
%
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I 
realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked
Him to forgive me.
 -- Emo Philips.
%
"People selling drug paraphernalia ... are as much a part of drug
trafficking as silencers are a part of criminal homicide."
 -- John Brown, DEA Chief
%
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
 -- Mark Twain 
%
If you wish to strive for peace of soul, then believe; if you wish to
be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
 -- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
My spelling ability, or rather the lack thereof, is one of the wonders
of the modern world.
%
Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars
has to be the HP-48 series of calculators.  They'll run almost
anything.  And if they can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into
the serial port and load up the HP-48 VT-100 emulator.
 -- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com
%
Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows NT (also known as the Good, the Bad, and
the Ugly).
 -- Matt Welsh
%
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US
forces have swooped on an Iraqi Primary School and detained 6th Grade 
teacher Mohammed Al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested,
Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square and
a calculator. US President George W Bush argued that this was clear
and overwhelming evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of maths 
instruction.
%
I'd never hurt another living thing.
But if I did...
It would be you.
 -- Chris Bishop  http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her69.html
%
Our days are precious, but we gladly see them going
If in their place we find a thing more precious growing
A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting
A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing
 -- Frederick Rükert _Wisdom of the Brahmans_ 
 [Hermann Hesse _Glass Bead Game_]
%
Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the
vision to perceive a system which governs many people's lives; a
system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then
such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that
the system really is there and that it aught to be exited from. 
 -- Douglas R. Hofstadter _Gödel Escher Bach. Eternal Golden Braid_
%
Fate and Temperament are two words for one and the same concept.
 -- Novalis [Hermann Hesse _Demian_]
%
[Panama, 1989. The U.S. government called it "Operation Just Cause".]
I think they misspelled this. Shouldn't it be "Operation Just 'Cause"?
 -- TekPolitik http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59669&cid=5664907
%
Grimble left his mother in the food store and went to the launderette
and watched the clothes go round. It was a bit like colour television
only with less plot.
 -- Clement Freud _Grimble_
%
There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good
sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.  
 -- Woody Allen
%
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is
not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a
way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is
humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
 -- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
%
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but
won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
 -- Bill Vaughan
%
A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very
easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over
expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without
discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the
syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors
are an abundant source of gain.
 -- Anatole France
%
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
 -- Gaius Julius Caesar in "The Conspiracy of Catiline" by Sallust
%
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
 -- Aesop
%
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for
the people.
 -- Oscar Wilde
%
I don't care how poor and inefficient a little country is; they like
to run their own business.  I know men that would make my wife a
better husband than I am; but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to
'em.
 -- The Best of Will Rogers
%
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its
freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it
values more, it will lose that, too.
 -- W. Somerset Maugham
%
Sentenced to two years hard labor (for sodomy), Oscar Wilde stood
handcuffed in driving rain waiting for transport to prison.  "If this
is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners," he remarked, "she
doesn't deserve to have any."
%
The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion ... refutes its thesis
far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored
effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all
the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting
on it--and is just as likely to succeed.
 -- Alex Kozinski in Silveira V Lockyer
%
                    EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN
Don't be teased or humiliated. See their look of surprise when you
step right up to a urinal and use it with a smile. Get Dr. Mary Evers'
EQUAL-NOW Adapter (pat. appld. for) -- purse size, fool proof,
sanitary -- comes in nine lovely, feminine, psychadelic patterns --
requires no fitting, no prescriptions.
 -- Robert A Heinlein _I Will Fear No Evil_ p470.
%
It has always been Debian's philosophy in the past to stick to what
makes sense, regardless of what crack the rest of the universe is
smoking.
 -- Andrew Suffield in 20030403211305.GD29698@doc.ic.ac.uk
%
If I had a letter, sealed it in a locked vault and hid the vault
somewhere in New York. Then told you to read the letter, thats not
security, thats obscurity. If I made a letter, sealed it in a vault,
gave you the blueprints of the vault, the combinations of 1000 other
vaults, access to the best lock smiths in the world, then told you to
read the letter, and you still can't, thats security.
 -- Bruce Schneier
%
Q: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the
Experience of the Past Million Years?
A: Nothing.
 -- Bokonon _The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon_ (Vonnegut _Cats Cradle_)
%
This can't be happening to me. I've got tenure.
 -- James Hynes _Publish and Perish_
%
I now know how retro SCOs OSes are. Riotous, riotous stuff. How they
had the ya-yas to declare Linux an infant OS in need of their IP is
beyond me. Upcoming features? PAM. files larger than 2 gigs. NFS over
TCP. The 80's called, they want their features back.
 -- Compactable Dave http://www3.sympatico.ca/dcarpeneto/sco.html
%
This message brought to you by weapons of mass destruction related
program activities, and the letter G.
%
Identical parts aren't.
 -- Beach's Law
%
Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.
 -- Tussman's Law
%
If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
 -- Lowery's Law
%
The solution to a problem changes the problem.
 -- Peer's Law
%
There is no mechanical problem so difficult that it cannot be solved
by brute strength and ignorance.
 -- William's Law
%
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
 -- Woody Allen
%
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing
continued to happen.
 -- Douglas Adams
%
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  _Mostly Harmless_
%
<Clint> why the hell does kernel-source-2.6.3 depend on xfree86-common?
<infinity> It... Doesn't?
<Clint> good point
%
"For those who understand, no explanation is necessary.
 For those who do not, none is possible."
%
Frankly, if ignoring inane opinions and noisy people and not flaming
them to crisp is bad behaviour, I have not yet achieved a state of
nirvana.
 -- Manoj Srivastava in 87n04pzhmh.fsf@glaurung.internal.golden-gryphon.com
%
"Because," Fee-5 explained patiently, "I was born in the fifth row.
Any fool would understand that, but against stupidity the very Gods
themselves contend in vain."
 -- Alfred Bester _The Computer Connection_ p19
%
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves
exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves
only the unanimity of the graveyard.
 -- Justice Roberts in 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
%
The beauty of the DRUNKENNESS subprogram was that you could move your
intoxication level up and down at will, instead of being caught on a
relentless down escalator to bargain basement philosophy and the
parking garage.
 -- Rudy von Bitter _Software_ p124
%
The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one
day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and
that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.
 -- Sir Karl Popper _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ §11
%
[A] theory is falsifiable [(and therefore scientific) only] if the
class of its potential falsifiers is not empty.
 -- Sir Karl Popper _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ §21
%
I shall require that [a scientific system's] logical form shall be
such that it can be singled out, by means of emperical tests, in a
negative sense: it must be possible for an emperical scientific system
to be refuted by experience.
 -- Sir Karl Popper _Logic of Scientific Discovery_ §6
%
It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course,
completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death
for free.
 -- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p25
%
"The trouble with you, Ibid" he said, "is that you think you're the
biggest bloody authority on everything"
 -- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p146
%
He was wrong. Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them
neatly away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a
lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and
the chuck keys for electric drills.
 -- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p166
%
Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but
that's not why we do it.
 -- Richard Feynman
%
Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you. If you don't
bet, you can't win.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p240
%
Cheop's Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p242
%
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p244
%
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p250
%
There is no such thing as "social gambling." Either you are there to
cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it--or you're a sucker. If you
don't like this choice--don't gamble.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p250
%
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p251
%
In all matters of government, the correct answer is usually: "Do
nothing"
 -- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p428
%
Where I sleep at night, is this important compared to what I read
during the day? What do you think defines me? Where I slept or what I
did all day?
 -- Thomas Van Orden of Van Orden v. Perry
%
No amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free
[...] You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
 -- Robert Heinlein _Revolt in 2010_ p54
%
"Facts" are the refuge of people unwilling to reassess what they hold
to be "True".
%
LEADERSHIP -- A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with
autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to
the crunch it'll be someone else's bones which go crack and not their
own. 
 -- The HipCrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan 
    (John Brunner _Stand On Zanzibar_ p256-7)
%
"I'm a rational being--of a sort--rational enough, at least, to see the
symptoms of insanity around me. And I'm human, the same as the poeple
I think of as victims when my guard drops. It's at least possible I'm
even crazier than my fellows, whom I'm tempted to pity.
"There seems only one thing to do, and that's get drunk"
 -- Chad C. Mulligan (John Brunner _Stand On Zanzibar_ p390)
%
"You have many years to live--do things you will be proud to remember
when you are old."
 -- Shinka proverb. (John Brunner _Stand On Zanzibar_ p413)
%
If you find it impossible to believe that the universe didn't have a
creator, why don't you find it impossible that your creator didn't
have one either?
 -- Anonymous Coward http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167556&cid=13970629
%
Information wants to be free to kill again.
 -- Red Robot http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1372
%
NASCAR is a Yankee conspiracy to keep you all placated so the South
won't rise again.
 -- http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=327
%
Leukocyte... I am your father.
 -- R. Stevens http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1546
%
Your village called.
They want their idiot back.
 -- xkcd http://xkcd.com/c23.html
%
S: Make me a sandwich
B: What? Make it yourself.
S: sudo make me a sandwich
B: Okay.
 -- xkcd http://xkcd.com/c149.html
%
We cast this message into the cosmos. [...] We are trying to survive
our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved
the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations.
This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill
in a vast and awesome universe.
 -- Jimmy Carter on the Voyager Golden Record
%
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they
have exhausted all other possibilities.
 -- W. Churchill
%
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both
instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly
unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware
of change in the air however slight lest we become unwitting victims
of the darkness.
 -- William O. Douglas
%
One day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back
in time.
 -- Steven Wright
%
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is
research.
 -- Steven Wright
%
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked
something.
 -- Steven Wright
%
I'm wrong to criticize the valour of your brave men. It's important to
die for one's country when it means being the subject of a king who
wears a ruffled collar or a pleated one.
 -- Cyrano de Bergerac
%
Democracy is more dangerous than fire. Fire can't vote itself immune
to water.
 -- Michael Z. Williamson
%
A Democracy lead by politicians and political parties, fails.
%
We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die
together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to
live together we have to talk. 
 -- Eleanor Roosevelt
%
A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless. 
 -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
%
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you really want to test his
character, give him power.
 -- Abraham Lincoln
%
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one
by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
 -- Edmund Burke "Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discoontents"
%
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the
rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct
these defects".
 -- Mark Twain _A Horse's Tail_
%
No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this
does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.
 -- Sir Karl Popper _Logic of Scientific Discovery_
%
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of
the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the
benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any
curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
 -- Adolf Hitler _Mein Kampf_ p403
%
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended
up where I needed to be.
 -- Douglas Adams _The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul_
%
Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what
it's like to be Beethoven, and Bach tells us what it's like to be the
universe.
 -- Douglas Adams
%
PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic
environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of
fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked
into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon
behind the computer has something significant to say.
 -- Charles Stross _The Jennifer Morgue_ p33
%
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic
 -- Terry Pratchett
%
Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or
derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But
the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer
to achieve immortality by not dying.
 -- Terry Pratchet _The Color of Magic_
%
Only one creature could have duplicated the expressions on their
faces, and that would be a pigeon who has heard not only that Lord
Nelson has got down off his column but has also been seen buying a
12-bore repeater and a box of cartridges.
 -- Terry Pratchet _Mort_
%
He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said
that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He
was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little
begun to fascinate him -- as if he had managed to outlive himself, as
if he were somehow living a posthumous life.
  -- Paul Auster _City of Glass_