fortune cookie file -- part 08 of 06

[Karl Lehenbauer]

Below, the latest installment of quotes for the cookie file...

---------------------------- cut here -----------------------------
%%
"All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by
 prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power.  The swastika is
 only one example of many in recent history."
-- American Bar Association task force on flag burning
%%
"The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to 
 sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
 -- Anatole France
%%
"...as long as there is a Legion of super-Heroes, all else can surely
be made right."
-- Sensor Girl
%%
Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to Man.
%%
"I sat through it.  Why shouldn't you?"
-- David Letterman, it a spot promoting one of his shows
%%
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be 
regarded as a criminal offense."
-- E. W. Dijkstra (1982)
%%
"Mamma, don't let your babies grow up to be hackers."
-- Willie Nelson, with a little help from Bill Mathews
%%
"It's easier to get forgiveness than permission."
-- Walker Mangum (walker at ficc.uu.net)
%%
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that 
 ain't so."
-- Will Rogers
%%
"Escaping through the lily fields, I came across an empty space
 It trembled and exploded, left a bus stop in its place..."
-- unknown
%%
"Civilisation is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does 
 not know everyone else."
-- Julian Jaynes
%%
We should all remember when Burroughs was using Virtual memory it was said to 
be some kind of technical joke.  But later, hah, it was said to be ok.

And it was because the word had come down from the mountain.

IBM had spoken and the world listened.

The world as it used to be.

Amen.

-- Fred Rump (fr at icdi10.UUCP)
%%
"Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet."
-- Karl Kleinpaste
%%
"...skill such as yours is evidence of a misspent youth."
-- Herbert Spencer
%%
"One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a
 stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier."
-- Gustave Flaubert (letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 12, 1846)
%%
"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original
 in your work."
-- Gustave Flaubert
%%
"If one is going to steal, it is considered somewhat sporting to inform the 
 victims beforehand; for examples see any episodes of the BATMAN TV series."
-- Robert J Woodhead (trebor at biar.UUCP)
%%
"I HATE arbitrary limits, especially when they're small."
-- Stephen Savitzky
%%
"With friends like these, who need hallucinations?"
-- Buddy, "Night Court"
%%
 0001 Have you ever used a computer?
 0002 ... for more than 4 hours continuously?
 0003 ... more than 8 hours?
 0004 ... more than 16 hours?
 0005 ... more than 32 hours?
-- from The Hacker Test, Version 1.0, by Felix Lee, John Hayes and Angela Thomas
%%
"It just goes to show what you can do if you're a total psychotic."
-- Woody Allen
%%
"Insanity is hereditary.  You can catch it from your kids."
-- Erma Brombeck
%%
"My father was an amazing man.  The older I got, the smarter he got."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"People who live in glass houses shouldn't."
-- Author Unknown
%%
"Flextime:  Starting a 10+ hour day up to an hour early (on a regular,
 scheduled basis with the approval of an immediate supervisor)."
 -- A Controls "Volunteer"
%%
"Friends don't let friends run Xenix."
-- Stephen J. Friedl
%%
"Let me control a planet's oxygen supply, and I don't care who makes the laws."
-- Great Cthuhlu's Starry Wisdom Band (via Roger Leroux)
%%
"We have ways to make you scream." 
-- Intel advertisement, in the June 1989 Doctor Dobbs Journal
%%
"I will contend that conceptual integrity is *the* most important consideration 
 in system design."
-- Frederick Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_
%%
So where the sheer incompetence of politicians and generals used to 
start wars, the sheer incompetence of us computer people has now put an 
end to it.  No mean feat.  For centuries humanity has been looking for 
the Weapon That Would End War Forever.  We have found it.  War has 
ended, not with the bang of a bomb, but with the gentle whisper of 
crashing software.
-- Gerard Stafleu (gerard at uwovax.uwo.ca)
%%
"Let's give discredit where discredit is due."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Look ma!  Three arms!"
-- J. Eric Townsend (erict at flatline.UUCP)
%%
"If the bulk of American SF can be said to be written by robots, about
robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written
by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits."
-- Michael Moorcock
%%
"Times are bad.  Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is
writing a book." 
-- Cicero
%%
"I guess you just have to design carefully when you get near the edge."
-- Hugh LaMaster (lamaster at ames.arc.nasa.gov)
%%
"Lab rats seem to have been bred for cancer hypersensitivity by the medical
 establishment and the FDA.  We are the kings and the rats taste our food."
-- James Salsman (jps at cat.cmu.edu)
%%
This is a serious lapse of taste and judgement but does not imply that they
are stupid, lazy, or incompetent.  Indeed, their intelligence, diligence,
and competence in service to the x86 are all too depressingly obvious.
-- Henry Spencer (henry at zoo.toronto.edu)
%%
"I asked you not to have a spaz attack in tx.general, BUT NOOOOO!!!!"
-- Karl, via John Belushi
%%
I think most expert systems should be referred to as "that-guy-in-the-
corner-who-everyone-hates-but-can-answer-the-weirdest-questions systems". 
Or more succinctly, "nerd systems".
-- Peter da Silva, peter at ficc.uu.net
%%
"He who flames improperly risks making an ash of himself!"
-- Jeff Klumpp (jdk at ficc.uu.net)
%%
"Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.  Blood debts
 must be repaid in kind.  The longer the delay, the greater the interest."
-- Chinese author Lu Xun, 1926
%%
"The United States has entered an anti-intellectual phase in its history, 
perhaps most clearly seen in our virtually thought-free political life." 
-- David Baltimore
%%
"Do not speak of what men deserve.  For we each of us deserve everything,
 every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each
 of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.   Have we not eaten
 while another starved?  Will you punish us for that?  Will you reward us for
 the virtue of starving while others ate?  No man earns punishment, no man
 earns reward.  Free your mind of the idea of *deserving*, of *earning*, and
 you will begin to be able to think."
-- Odo, The Prison Letters (Ursula LeGuin, _The Dispossessed_)
---
"It has nothing to do with the size of Mr. Alnwick's company.  We go after 
 companies large and small."
-- Rita Black, spokesperson for IBM, "Unix Today!", 5/29/89, page 51
%%
"The Book says BURN and DESTROY repent and redeem and revenge and deploy and 
 rumble thee forth to the land of the unbelieving scum 'cause they don't go 
 for what's in the Book and that makes 'em BAD."
-- Frank Zappa
%%
"some people get pissed
 when you play with your mind
 in a different way
 than they play with theirs
 these people are called ASSHOLES"
-- the jambi's
%%
"Big Brother is hallucinating."  
-- Elizabeth D Zwicky (zwicky at cis.ohio-state.edu), title of a comp.risks article
%%
"When you're a child, you pledge allegiance to the flag.  When you grow up, 
 you swear to uphold the Constitution.  Compare and contrast to the 
 President's current actions."
-- Larry Wake (lkw at csun.edu)
%%
"L'extension des privileges des femmes est le principe general de tous progres 
 sociaux."
-- Charles Fourier, 1808
%%
Q. What do you call three lawyers up to their necks in quicksand?

A. Not enough quicksand.
%%
READ UNHAPPY - MAKNAM
-- LISP 1.5
%%
"There can be no offense where none is taken" 
-- Japanese proverb
%%
Q. What's all wrinkled and hangs out your underwear?

A. Your mother.
%%
"To steal from one person is theft.  To steal from many is taxation."
-- Daiell's Law (a take-off on Felson's Law)
%%
"Reliable software must kill people reliably."
-- Andy Mickel
%%
"And now that the legislators and the do-gooders have
so futilely inflicted so many system upon society,
may they end up where they should have begun: may they
reject all systems, and try liberty..."
-- Frederic Bastiat
%%
"To steal from a thief is not theft.  It is merely irony."
-- Zorro, while retrieving money taxed from Californians
%%
"That government is best which governs least."
-- Thomas Jefferson
%%
"That government is best which governs not at all."
-- Henry David Thoreau
%%
"Liberty is the mother not the daughter of order."
-- Proudhon
%%
"Care to expound, or are you just going to leave us all with the
 impression that you're merely an inarticulate asshole?"
-- Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard (jay at splut.conmicro.com)

"Lest I leave the wrong impression, I'm not inarticulate."
-- Walker Mangum (walker at ficc.uu.net)
%%
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your 
aim."
-- Santayana
%%
"Life is full of surprises when you're up th' stream of consciousness
 without a paddle..."
-- Zippy the Pinhead
%%
"I woudn't recommend sex, drugs, or Unix for everyone, but they work for me."
Jim Thompson (jthomp at central.sun.com), paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson
%%
"This one's got a lot more, uh, 640K that it can memorize."
-- CVN cable TV shopping channel
%%
"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they
 should live next door and just visit now and then."
-- Katherine Hepburn
%%
"We're the weirdest monkeys ever."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
Uh-oh.  Atarians can't hold a candle to the insecurity of Mac owners.  You 
rankled Mac owners who feel the need defend yourself, please do so by flaming 
in private.  And don't start something you can't finish.  I'm sure Apple's OS 
for the 68000-based Macintoshs will support multitasking just as soon as Jean 
Louis-Gasse invents it.  In the meantime, do whatever you need to do to make 
sure other systems that have advanced the state of personal computers don't
enter your peripheral vision.  You'll be a lot happier, we'll be a lot happier.
--Chuck McManis (cmcmanis at sun.com)
%%
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
%%
"It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the
system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some
of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp,
probably not someone here on campus."
-- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, quoted in "The Technique,"
Georgia Tech's newspaper, after the computer worm hit the Internet
%%
Personally, should I ever form a globe spanning comglomerate,
I intend to do it fairly and without malice or dirty politics.

I hope you fellows don't make that too difficult a task;
I would have to have to have you all killed.
-- David Neal (abbadon at nuchat.uucp)
%%
The notion of ideas as infectious diseases is one to which most
authoritarian religions and governments subscribe, and they hold
massive "hygienic" burnings of the "viral DNA" behind the ideas.
Promulgators of these "diseased" ideas are called "carriers of
spiritual impurity" (to use one phrase now popular in China) and
attempts are made to prevent the spread of these diseases.  This is a
naive and dangerous view of how ideas work and it is disturbing to see
it rationalized into Western pop psychology.
-- Tim Maroney (tim at toad.com)
%%
"Every institution I've ever been associated with has tried to screw me."
-- Stephen Wolfram
%%
"Fraternities have no SLACK, no matter how slack-jawed they may appear.
 I taught elementary calculus here at the University of SLACK for several
 years, and have observed these folks carefully.
 Although some of them looked like they had SLACK, it's clear to me that
 this was just the result of not getting enough sleep after the puking contest.
 I mean, those guys don't watch enough television to have real SLACK."
-- William K Glunt (bud at ms.uky.edu)
%%
"I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her . . . the
 practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand."
-- Adolf Hitler, _Mein Kampf_
%%
When asked, "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United 
States, then why do you live here?" Mencken replied, "Why do men go to zoos?"
%%
"Is it just me, or does there seem to be an inordinate number of lurkers
 whose heads are imploding lately?  Maybe all these alternative viewpoints
 are too much for them to handle."
-- Trent Wohlschlaeger (jtw at wuee1.wustl.edu)
%%
"If projectile vomiting ever becomes an Olympic event, you'll do yourself 
 proud."
-- Hobson, "Arthur II"
%%
"Oh honey, this is just the beginning.  Stick with me and we'll claw our way
 to the top."
-- John Water's "Hairspray"
%%
"The script had been written by this legendary dead guy that we know and there 
 were about fifty-eleven-hundred pages of it.  Of this eight words were 
 completely readable.  These were "oranges" in the title and "Close the 
 curtains, Geoffrey, I'm amphibious", which was right at the end.  To be 
 perfectly frank man, I wasn't even 100% sure about amphibious."
 -- Waldo "D.R." Dobbs, "D.R. and Quinch go to Hollywood".
%%
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on 
 your computer."
-- stolen from Brian Gollum
%%
"Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa; yeah, right.  To paraphrase, the net 
 finds its own uses for garbage."
-- Eric Hughes (hughes at math.berkeley.edu)
%%
"[Leslie Stahl was] a pussy compared to Rather." 
-- George Bush
%%
"Failing to get them to do it your way might mean they're stupid, but it also
 means you failed to get them to do it your way."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
"Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest."
-- Jimmy Swaggart, TV preacher, self-described pornography addict who paid
   prostitutes to commit "pornographic acts"; hypocrite
%%
"I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure."
-- Joseph Scheidler, Director, Pro-Life Action League
%%
"We are ... opposed to all forms of birth control with the exception of natural
 family planning [the rhythm method.]"
-- Judie Brown, President, American Life Lobby
%%
"I don't think Christians should use birth control.  You consummate your
 marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies."
-- Randall Terry, one of the people behind the current campaign to blockade
   health clinics and publicly harass and humiliate women
%%
"We are starting a movement in the state legislatures...to forbid the
 installation of clinics that dispense contraceptives."
-- Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum
%%
"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are failures.
 They've blown it.  Some of them have been married, but they married some
 Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom.  These women
 just need a man in the house.  That's all they need.  Most of the feminists
 need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home.  And
 they blew it and they're mad at all men.  Feminists hate men.  They're sexist.
 They hate men -- that's their problem."
-- Reverend Jerry Falwell, sexist-to-the-max
%%
"Women have babies and men provide the support.  If you don't like the way
 we're made you've got to take it up with God."
-- Phyllis Schlafly, hypocrite who has had a business career and run for 
    public office, and who apparently wishes to deny those opportunities
    to other women
%%
"Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions."
-- Phyllis Schlafly
%%
"Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part."
-- Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University, dweeb; in a pamphlet
   published by the American Life League
%%
"It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear
 of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility,
 or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby
 even ten years later when she may be happily married."
-- Phyllis Schlafly
%%
"Shake hands with your mother again."                  
-- from an old hymn
%%
"Justice, like lightning, should ever appear
 To some men hope, to other mean fear."
-- Jefferson Pierce
%%
"No!  We will not die like dogs.  We will fight like lions!"
-- The Three Amigos
%%
"'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
%%
"My head is bloodied, but unbowed."
-- From the poem "Invictus"
%%
"(Humanity) is the measure of all things."
-- Protagoras
%%
"Many are the wonders of the Universe, 
and none so wonderful as Mankind!"
-- Sophocles
%%
Q.  How many libertarians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A.  Three - one to do it and two to argue whether it's principled to change it.
-- Bill Ware (?)
%%
Q. How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?

A. None - the market will take care of it.
-- Bill Ware (?)
%%
"Oh yeah, laugh now!  But when the millions start pouring in, I'll be the one
 at Burger King, sucking down Whoppers at my own private table!"
-- Al Bundy
%%
"Everything to excess.  Moderation is for monks."
-- Lazarus Long
%%
"No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party
 or movement.  He will always find himself out of step."
-- Sidney Hook
%%
"Socialism is power, power, and more power."
-- Oswald Spengler, Hitler's intellectual forebear
%%
"The police are not there to create disorder.   The police are there to 
 preserve disorder."
-- The late Richard J. Daly, Mayor of the city of Chicago
%%
"Government sucks."
-- Ben Olson
%%
"Yea, I am a Capitalist,
the most dangerous radical of all,
the most fearsome threat to Mankind's foes,
for I am Man Himself."
-- Jeff Daiell, in "The Most Dangerous Radical"
%%
"...for the Orchestra which is Business
reflects the Symphony of the Mind,
the Crown which makes Man King."
-- Jeff Daiell, in "The Most Dangerous Radical"
%%
"Lord, defend me from my friends; I can account for my enemies."
-- D'Hericault
%%
"It had to be said: the world is perishing from an orgy
of self-sacrifice."
-- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_
%%
"Why can one call the time component of the preceding 4-vector by the name 
 energy?  For two reasons:  First, because this time component has the correct 
 units -- the units of mass..."
-- From "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler
%%
1776 - 1984
There Is No Middle Ground
-- a button from the Libertarian Party
%%
Sing and Dance the New Deal Away
-- A button from Our People's Underworld
%%
Deliver Us From Taxation
-- button, source forgotten
%%
"Life in a free society is friendly, prosperous, pleasant, cultured, and 
 ever-longer."
-- Jeff Daiell, 1989, in contrapoint to Hobbes
%%
"I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the 
 sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
-- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_
%%
Objects in your terminal are close than they appear.
%%
"The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is 
 evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for the sake 
 of something else."
-- Aristotle
%%
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind -- or not to have a mind at all.
How true that is." -- V.P. Dan Quayle, garbling the United Negro College
Fund slogan in an address to the group (from Newsweek, May 22nd, 1989)
%%
"Why do schools let anyone post?  Why not just leave it to us professionals?"
-- S. M. Ryan (smryan at garth.UUCP)
 
"Because there is no necessary relation between having a degree and the
 attribute of optical rectosis, as your posting demonstrates."
-- Bill Wells (twwells!bill)
%%
"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!"
-- Dylan Thomas
%%
"Umm, square root of two?  Ouch!"
-- The guy who blew a hole in the Pythagoreans' assertion that all numbers can
   be represented as a ratio of two integers, so they killed him
%%
Proclaim liberty throughout the land until all the inhabitants thereof.
-- Leviticus 25:10
%%
"Where is it written in the Constitution that you may take children from their 
 parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles
 of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?"
-- Daniel Webster, 1814
%%
"... they [the Indians] are not running but are coming on."
--- note sent from Lt. Col Custer to other officers
    of the 7th Regiment at the Little Bighorn
%%
"Hello to married men I've known.
I'll soon have a wife and leave yours alone."
-- Charlie, singing "Go Home With Bonnie Jean", in 
     Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon"
%%
"A poet only writes about the things he cannot do."
-- A canard, sung by Meg in "The One Love of My Life",
    in Lerner's and Lowe's "Brigadoon"
%%
Do standards inevitably cause industries to calcify into obsolete technology? 
Suppose we journey to the plains of Shinar and build a tower of bricks reaching
to heaven.  (That's the Tower of Babel, for those without a reading familiarity 
with the Book of Genesis.)  Look, God Himself knows what standards can do, he 
even said something like "The Sons of Men are all of one tongue and one 
purpose, and now nothing shall be impossible for them."  So the Ancient of Days
had to step in and give us the wonderful gift of cultural diversity, to add
such a whopping translation overhead on every information transaction that we 
bogged down forever into chaos and warfare.

-- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny at uceng.uc.edu)
%%
Vertical fragmentation is an inescapable part of technological
progress. If we compare the 8085 to the 80386 or a MIPS RISC CPU, we
can hardly expect to transparently preserve our entire intellectual
investment in the 8085 when we move up to new hardware with vastly
greater underlying capability. The bloodshed involved in upgrading is
highly variable. Since computers are in theory general-purpose
information processors, with the appropriate software tools the user
can "mine" old information and use it on new hardware. Nonetheless,
when hardware advances become revolutionary enough we eventually have
to throw out some of our old standards. In this case we face a clear
trade between the cost of junking our investment in our earlier ways
of doing things vs. foregoing the potential benefits of new and better
hardware. The bigger the previous investment, the bigger the benefits
of upgrading have to be before vertical fragmentation is justifiable.
-- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny at uceng.uc.edu)
%%
Horizontal fragmentation results from market manipulation, the whim
of vendors, sheer incompetence, contempt for users, or the inability
of rival vendors to communicate. I'm talking about nonsense like
having 50 MS-DOS programs that each somehow find a different function
key to provide on-line help. I'm talking about differences between
products that make them incompatible and inconsistent while providing
no clear-cut technical advantage. Horizontal fragmentation vastly
increases the intellectual burden separating computer users from
solving their problems. Since it decreases the value of the computer
to the user while providing no offsetting benefit, it makes the
computer market smaller. This must eventually translate on average
into smaller paychecks for everyone who has tied their fortune to that
market.
-- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny at uceng.uc.edu)
%%
Once at a dinner party when he was a young man, Winston Churchill, who
at the time had a moustache, was seated next to an older woman.   She
said to him, "Young man, I care neither for your politics nor for
your moustache."

He reassured here, "You are as unlikely to come into contact with the
one as with the other."
%%
After winning the pennant one year, Casey Stengel commented,
"I couldn'ta done it without my players."
%%
The Mets drafted a catcher as their first-ever pick.  Asked why,
Casey Stengel replied, "Well, without a catcher, we'd have a lot 
of passed balls, don'tcha think?"
%%
One time as manager, Casey Stengel was sitting next to Mickey Mantle.
He mentioned playing in  Yankee Stadium, and Mantle expressed
surprise.  Stengel asked, "You think I was *born* sixty years old?"
%%
"[In the U. S. Army] An officer does not take an oath of loyalty to the 
 Commander-in-Chief.   He takes an oath of loyalty to the Constitution."
-- Sam Donaldson
%%
"Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged
 about forever."
-- button at the Boston Computer Museum
%%
"I don't believe that the answer to white racism is black racism."
-- Spiro T. Agnew, then Governor of Maryland
%%
"When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
-- Calvin Coolidge
%%
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy."
-- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_
%%
"On the market, there can be no such thing as exploitation."
-- Murray Rothbard
%%
>This is a duplicate article, and old as hell...now, who could be doing this???

"Somebody along the line fucked up."
-- Spenser Aden
%%
Why would you WANT to port C news to your PC?  Wouldn't it be smarter
and about as cost-effective to port your PC over to the trashcan and buy
a real computer that runs a real operating system like Unix?
-- Brian Kantor (brian at ucsd.edu)
%%
"I'll tell you what kind of guy I was.  If you ordered a boxcar full of
sons-of-bitches and opened the door and only found me inside, you could
consider the order filled."  
-- Robert Mitchum
%%
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop
(seen on a wall in Down by law)
%%
"Anyone who wants to be paid for writing software is a fascist asshole."
-- Richard M. Stallman
%%
"There is no idea so sacred that it cannot be questioned, analyzed...
 and ridiculed."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
Parking fees that Universal Studios collected from picketers of _The Last
Temptation of Christ_: $4,500
-- Harper's Index Nov. 1988
%%
"Unemployment is an inconvenience."
-- John F. Haugh II
%%
"Why do trans-atlantic transfers take so long?"
"Electrons don't swim very fast."  -john at minster.york.ac.uk and whh at PacBell.COM
%%
"In general, it is best to assume that the network is filled with malevolent
entities that will send in packets designed to have the worst possible effect"
-- the draft "Requirements for Internet Hosts" RFC
%%
"SCCS, the source motel!  Programs check in and never check out!" 
-- Ken Thompson
%%
"A pacifist who calls the police isn't one; hired violence is still violence."
-- Clayton E. Cramer optilink!cramer
%%
"I am astounded ... at the wonderful power you have developed - and terrified 
at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever."
-- Arthur Sullivan, on seeing a demonstration of Edison's new talking machine
   in 1888
%%
"England's monarchy is how old?  1000 years?  Jesus, you guys must have a hell 
 of a lot of laws!"
-- an anonymous sysadmin
%%
"... users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do ninety percent
 of the job, they will be ecstatic."
-- Software Tools, p.136.
%%
"Don't worry about things that you have no control over, because you
 have no control over them.  Don't worry about things that you have
 control over, because you have control over them."
-- Mickey Rivers
%%
"Master, why is the letter 'i' the symbol for current?"  "Because there is
 no letter 'i' in the word 'current'."  "Master, why do we use the letter
 'j' for sqrt(-1)?"  "Because we use the letter 'i' for current."  Whereupon
 the Master struck the Disciple, and the Disciple became enlightened.
%%
"The hand that rocks the cradle can also cradle a rock."
--- Feminist saying, circa 1968-1972
%%
"VMS isn't an operating system, it's a playpen for DEC system programmers."
-- Herb Blashtfalt
%%
Quoting court decisions is not a very useful activity when arguing with
someone who is engaging in their constitutionally protected right to
disagree with those decisions and attempting to change the environment
in which they are made.  You might believe that any legal decision by the
courts is ipso facto correct and moral, but that's not the way most folks
in this country operate.  Look at Roe v. Wade... I happen to agree with
the goals of that decision, but there are a hell of a lot of people who
don't, and they have managed to get it changed, to some extent.  Jeff is
in the same position, and can quite reasonably argue that these statistics
are irrelevent to his position.
-- Peter da Silva (peter at sugar.hackercorp.com)
%%
"Optimization is not some mystical state of grace, it is an intricate act
 of human labor which carries real costs and real risks." 
 -- Tom Neff
%%
"Peace is our profession."
-- Motto of Strategic Air Command

"Peace in our profession.   War is just a hobby."
-- Stationery available in PX, Barksdale SAC AFB
%%
Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I
support your right to enjoy it.  However, I would appreciate it if you
exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to
share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination.
-- Frank Zappa, _The Real Frank Zappa Book_
%%
In the future, etiquette will become more and more important.  That doesn't
mean knowing which fork to pick up -- I mean basic consideration for the
rights of other animals (human beings included) and the willingness,
whenever practical, to tolerate the other guy's idiosyncracies.
-- Frank Zappa, _The Real Frank Zappa Book_
%%
If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your
mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the
people telling you how to do your shit, then you *deserve* it.  If you
want to be a schmuck, be a schmuck -- but don't wait around for respect
from other people -- a schmuck is a schmuck.
-- Frank Zappa, _The Real Frank Zappa Book_
%%
"How's YOUR Endless Project coming?"
-- Mark Diekhans
%%
listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; 
		let's go.        
-- ee cummings
%%
"Do not stop to ask what is it;
 Let us go and make our visit."
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
%%
"Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of 
 a computer in your own home."
-- Edward Yourdon, 1975.
%%
"Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that isn't immune to bullets."
-- The Brigadier, Dr Who.
%%
"Far better it is 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, because they live in the gray twilight that knows 
 not victory or defeat."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
%%
"Cache is, by definition, a compromise."
-- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute

"Yes, Cache is a compromise.  Mainly to your wallet and the speed of light."
-- Jim Hutchison (ucsd!celerity!hutch)
%%
"If it doesn't come from you, shouldn't it come from Gerber?"
-- Bristol Meyers baby formula ad
%%
"If you substitute other kinds of intellectual property into the GNU
manifesto, it quickly becomes absurd."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
Instead of whining to the net about it, why don't you talk to the news admins 
at Berkeley?  If they won't trash sci.skeptic there, pass around a petition.
Threaten to set their dog on fire.  Whatever.  If nothing works, you can, as a 
last resort, unsubscribe.
-- Dave Mack, mack at inco.UUCP, responds to a flame in news.groups
%%
"Writing programs needs genuis to save the last order or the last millisecond.
 It is great fun, but it is a young man's game.  You start it with great
 enthusiasm when you first start programming, but after ten years you get a 
 bit bored with it, and then you turn to automatic-programming languages and 
 use them because they enable you to get to the heart of the problem that you 
 want to do, instead of having to concentrate on the mechanics of getting the 
 program going as fast as you possibly can, which is really nothing more than 
 doing a sort of crossword puzzle."
-- Christopher Strachey, 1962
%%
"And the Lord God said unto Moses -- and correctly, I believe ..."
-- Field Marshal Montgomery, opening a chapel service
%%
"No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in 
 his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables."
 -- Archie Goodwin   
%%
"36 percent of the American Public believes that boiling radioactive milk
 makes it safe to drink."
-- results of a survey by Jon Miller at Northern Illinois University
%%
Annex Canada now!  We need the room, and who's going to stop us?
-- A Tom Neff .signature
%%
"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."
-- J. S. Bach
%%
"Of course, someone who knows more about this will correct me if I'm wrong,
 and someone who knows less will correct me if I'm right."
-- David Palmer (palmer at tybalt.caltech.edu)
%%
"War is the health of the State."
-- Proudhon (?)
%%
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in 
 session."
-- Lysander Spooner
%%
"I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the
 Devil was my natural master and captain and friend.  I saw that he was in
 the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only from fear."
-- Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"
%%
/*
 * this atrocity is necessary on sparc because registers modified
 * by the child get propagated back to the parent via the window
 * save/restore mechanism.
 */
-- SunOS 4.0 vfork.h
%%
"Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press, and that cannot be
 limited without being lost."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1786)
%%
Commenting on the advantages of bisexuality, Woody Allen once remarked 
"It doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night."
%%
Definition of a hermaphrodite: a bisexual built for two.
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
AN EXPOSTULATION (Against too many writers of science fiction)
	
Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empire that cover galaxies,
If at journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as well have been
The Bronx, Montmartre, or Bethnel Green?
	
Why should I leave this green floored cell,
Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
Unless, outside its guarded gates,
Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits,
Strangeness that moves us more than fear,
Beauty that stabs with tingling spear,
Or Wonder, laying on one's heart
That finger tip at which we start
As if some thought too swift and shy
For some reason's grasp had just gone by?
-- C. S. Lewis
%%
"Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I'm glad to say that I have no grasp
 of it."
-- Baron Munchausen
%%
"Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey
 wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup.  That's lost." 
-- Ivan Chtcheglov
%%
"I've brought Gatsby to life.  I've accounted for his money.  I've fixed up
 the two weak chapters (VI and VII).  I've improved his first party.  I've
 broken up his long narrative in Chapter VIII."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, on revising his galley proofs
%%
The Law of Software Envelopment

Every program at MIT attempts to expand until it can read mail.
Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.
%%
"The chain that can be yanked is not the cosmic chain."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
"Slime is the agony of water."
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
%%
"I have discovered the heart of bushido: to die!"
-- Yamamoto Tsunetomo
%%
"...an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension."
-- Roger M. Knutson, in _Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of 
  Roads, Streets,and Highways_ 
%%
"... and I realized, we did not live in a scientific society."
-- R. P. Feynman, "Cargo cult science"
%%
I think the problem isn't the amount of knowledge we have to assimilate
in our world, but the rate at which we can assimiliate it.  Science,
engineering, and technology do not yield the "whys" of truth,
only the "hows."  In fact, they are not truths, but opinions from
the current reigning theories of how we think the physical world works.
-- eugene miya, eugene at aurora.arc.nasa.gov
%%
"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how
 hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."
-- Calvin 
%%
"These patriots don't mince words... Okay, sure, they *are* dangerous, 
 hopelessly ignorant, inbred, retarded borderline lunatics with an
 insatiable lust for the blood of sinners -- but at least they're *honest*
 about it."
-- Reverend Ivan Stang, cofounder of the Church of the Subgenius, about
   a group known as Free Love Ministries, in his book _High Weirdness By Mail_
%%
"My past is my own."
-- The Shadow (DC Comics)
%%
"The Heinlein Woman to me is this woman who goes out and rules the galaxy,
 smokes a cigar, uses a machine gun and all, but what she really wants is to
 bring her husband his slippers."
-- paraphrase, based on peter at sugar's memory of a quote by Joan D. Vinge
%%
  The coming thing, Cowboy thinks.  Live forever in a bodily incarnation of
the eye-face, not limited to the speed of artifically enhanced 
neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits 
of the interface, the universe.  Brain contained in a perfect liquid-
crystal analog.  Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar.  Heart a 
spinning turbopump.  The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome
flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs.  Who was thas masked AI?
Dunno, pardner, but he left this silver casting of a crystal circuit.

  To Cowboy, it sounded pretty good.

-- Walter Jon Williams, "Hardwired"
%%
"What's the date?"
	"May the fourth."
"Then May the fourth be with you."
-- Count Duckula
%%
"Once you've had real champagne, you can never go back to Asti Spimanti."
-- Georgette Lundberg
%%
"Life is a pinball machine.  You bounce around for a while, and then you drain."
-- Joe Bak
%%
"The wife you save may be your own."
-- Unofficial slogan of supporters of one of FDR's sons,
   a notorious womanizer, during the son's first congressional race
%%
"One more drink and I would have been under the host."
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
"If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit."
-- H. L. Hunt
-- 
-- uunet!sugar!karl
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