From: d.moran8@genie.geis.com
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 1995 04:16:00 UTC
Subject: QUOTES DICTIONARY

I mentioned my quotes collection and was asked if I'd share it. Sure.</P>

The following quotes have been compiled by me over the course of several
years. I make no claims for them; they're an eclectic bunch. Herein we
have Thomas Jefferson, Bruce Sterling, Jim Steinman, and a comedian
whose name I can't remember.

I agree with most of the comments made herein, but certainly not all.

I own several dozen books of quotes, and I've been underlining passages
in books for close to a decade now; someday I will probably release a
freeware database application for compiling and distributing quotes.
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What men often take for women's intuition is really just their seeing
through men's transparency. . .

Rule 1: To study a subject best, understand it thoroughly before you start.
Rule 2: Always keep a record of data. It indicates you'e been working.
Rule 3: Always draw your curves, then plot the reading.
Rule 4: In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
Rule 5: Experiments should be reproducible.
        They should all fail in the same way.
Rule 6: Do not believe in miracles. Rely on them.
                -- Finagle's Rules

1) If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
2) No matter what result is anticipated, there will always be someone
eager to
     (a) misinterpret it,
     (b) fake it, or
     (c) believe it happened to his own pet theory.
3) In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
      Corollary 1: No one whom you ask for help will see it.
      Corollary 2: Everyone who stops by with unsought advice
      will see it immediately.
4) Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse.
                -- Finagle's Laws of Experiments

Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.
                -- First Law of Debate

...but touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though
capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a
nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your
face and eyes.
                -- John Adams

It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
                -- Becker's Law

CHRISTIAN, n.  One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely
inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
                -- Ambrose Bierce: The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

BIBLE, n.  A collection of fantastic legends without any scientific
support...full of dark hints, historical mistakes and contradictions.
                -- Ambrose Bierce: The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

PRAY, v.  To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf
of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
                -- Ambrose Bierce: The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary

Established technology tends to persist in spite of new technology.
                -- Blaauw's Law

1) When in doubt, mumble.
2) When in trouble, delegate.
3) When in charge, ponder.
                -- Boren's Laws

We're all jerks, honey.
                -- Joe Briggs Bob: Responding to an angry feminist in "Joe
Bob Goes to the Drive-In."

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. 
                -- Brook's Law

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
                -- Bucy's Law

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what
they, and all things really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of
the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen
everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the Immortals.
                -- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

They say some people never learn, but Never is a long time; longer than
Forever, which is simply Now.
                -- David Carradine: Spirit of Shaolin, 1991

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth but most of the time he will
pick himself up and continue on.
                -- Winston Churchill

What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not
the facts themselves.
                -- Cohen's Law

1) No action is without side-effects.
2) Nothing ever goes away.
3) There is no free lunch.
                -- Commoner's Three Laws of Ecology

Liberty is better served by presenting a clear target to one's opponents
than by joining with them in an insincere and useless brotherliness.
                -- Benedetto Croce

When God, from whom I have my reason, demands of me to sacrifice it, he
becomes a mere juggler that snatches from me what he pretended to give. If
reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has
certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct
contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are
compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
                -- Denis Diderot: 1777

1) Things will get worse before they get better.
2) Who said things would get better.
                -- Ehrman's Corollary to Ginsberg's Theorem

Confusion (entropy) is always increasing in society. Only if someone or
something works extremely hard can this confusion be reduced to order in a
limited region. Nevertheless, this effort will still result in an increase
in the total confusion of society at large.
                -- Everitt's Form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is *still* a foolish thing.
                -- Anatole France

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think
the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the
world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various
corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in
England, some doubts of his divinity.
                -- Benjamin Franklin 

1) Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
  Corollary: At the source of every error which is blamed on
  the computer you will find at least two human errors,
  including the error of blaming it on the computer.
2) Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
3) The only difference between the fool and the criminal who attacks a
system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and on a broader front.
7) Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable
errors, which by definition are limited.
9) Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable
cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
                -- Gilb's Laws of Unreliability

1) You can't win.
2) You can't break even.
3) You can't even quit the game.
                -- Ginsberg's Theorem

As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be
the slave of man.  The Bible was not written by a woman. Within its leaves
there is nothing but humiliation and shame for her.
                -- Robert G. Ingersoll: 1877

The clergy believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted
in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn
upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyrrany known
to the mind of man.
                -- Thomas Jefferson

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
He is always in alliance with the despot...they have perverted the purest
religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all
mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose.
                -- Thomas Jefferson

Shake off all fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are
servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal
for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of
a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of
reason than that of blind faith.
                -- Thomas Jefferson

Say nothing of my religion.  It is known to God and myself alone. Its
evidence before the world is to be sought in my life:  if it has been honest
and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad
one.
                -- Thomas Jefferson

And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme
Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable
of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.
                -- Thomas Jefferson

If two men agree on everything, you can be sure one of them is doing the
thinking.
                -- Lyndon Baines Johnson

It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
                -- Canada Bill Jones

A Smith and Wesson beats four aces.
                -- Canada Bill Jones

Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of
maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary
operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of
Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all
places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the
laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. . . .in no instance
have they [ecclesastical establishments] been seen the guardians of the
liberty of the people.
                -- James Madison

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with
blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of
the world.
                -- H.L. Mencken

The truth is that Christian theology like every other theology, is not only
opposed to the scientific spirit, it is also opposed to all attempts at
rational thinking.
                -- H.L. Mencken

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman
Church, by the Greek Curch, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church,
nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church.
                -- Thomas Paine

Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature
fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adopted at once to
preserve her modesty and promote the good bringing-up of children and the
well-being of the family.
                -- Pope Leo XIII: 1878

The husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife.
                -- Pope Leo XIII: 1880

The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to
attain its ends when rebels against it disturb the ecclesiastical unity,
especially obstinate heretics who cannot be restrained by any other penalty
from continuing to disturb ecclesiastical order.
                -- Pope Leo XIII: 1901

However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by
the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason
for condoning the direct murder of the innocent.
                -- Pope Pius XI: 1930

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something
and tell what he saw in a plain way.  Hundreds of people can talk for one
who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see.  To see clearly
is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
                -- John Ruskin

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind
of religious belief will die out.  I do not believe that, on the balance,
religious belief has been a force for good . . . I regard it as belonging to
the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are
outgrowing.
                -- Bertrand Russell

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than death.
Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought
is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits;
thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the
welltried wisdom of the ages.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not
afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and
the chief glory of man.
                -- 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: What I Believe

That they [the dogmas of religion] do little harm is not true. Opposition to
birth control makes it impossible to solve the population problem and
therefore postpones indefinitely all chance of world peace.
                -- Bertrand Russell

No woman can call herself free who does not own or control her body.  No
woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she
will or will not be a mother.
                -- Margaret Sanger: Founder of Planned Parenthood, 1963

In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God's omnipotence, his omnipotence
is contradicted by every Christian judgement and every Christian prayer.
                -- George Santayana

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the
human head, if only you begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by
constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
                -- Arthur Schopenhauer

Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood the
clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the
Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that
would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.
                -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Early American advocate of
women's rights)

Art has no function. It is not necessary. It has nothing to do with what
anyone wants you to do or wants it to be, nothing but you and itself. The
work generates itself and ideas and progress and learning come out of doing
the work in a particular way. Creative art is a learning process for the
artist  and not a description of what is already known. An audience is
always warming but it must never be necessary to your work. The work needs
concentration and one is often exhausted by it. It takes so much effort just
to begin and although going on is mostly a pleasure it is also  a great
effort. The only thing for a creative artist to do is to do his chosen work.
But really there is no choice. Nobody chooses. The only thing left for a
creative artist to do is to do his chosen work in spite of everything and
regardless of anything because when living draws to its end there are no
excuses he can make to himself or to anyone else for not having done it.
Either he did do it or he did not do it and very often he did not. Alas very
often he did not.
                -- Gertrude Stein

Forget trying to pass for normal.  Follow your geekdom. Embrace your
nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible
obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse
of the odd." You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You
should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized.
Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To
hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and
take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird.
Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every
ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well rounded person.
Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.
                -- Bruce Sterling

...in the long run, the "minor" virtues are the only ones that matter.
Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity,
and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of
justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of
convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and it stands
immutable in the storm of circumstance.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

Once severed from the future, the past becomes an insignificant parade of
trivial events, no longer potent or painful.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

Do not fall into the error of the artist who boasts of twenty years
experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of
experience -- twenty times.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

Generalization is flawed thinking only when it is applied to individuals. It
is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And America is a
democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of
the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile
nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the
most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or
Japanese Type-B encephalitis. Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a
shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation,
followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim
by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his
spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his
fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely
open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to
seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

Throughout all history, the merchants have cowered behind the walls of their
towns, while the paladins did battle to protect them, in return for which
the merchants have always fawned and bowed and played the lickspittle. One
cannot really blame them. They are not bred for courage. And, more
significantly, you can't put bravery in the bank.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

What they (critics and scholars) call antiheroes are really unlikely heroes,
or attractive villains -- the fat cop or Richard III. The true antihero is a
version of the hero -- not a clown with a principal role, not an audience
member permitted to work out his violent  fantasies. Like the classic hero,
the antihero leads the mass toward salvation. There was a time in the comedy
of human development when salvation seemed to lie in the direction of order
and organization, and all the great Western heroes organized and directed
their followers against the enemy: chaos.  Now we are learning that the
final enemy is not chaos, but organization; not divergence, but similarity;
not primativism, but progress. And the new hero -- the antihero -- is one
who makes a virtue of attacking the organization, of destroying the systems.
We realize now that the salvation of the race lies in the nihilist
direction, but we still don't know how far.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life,
equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage,
machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation,
fun with pleasure -- in short, all the misconceptions common to those who
assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for
equals.
                -- Trevanian: Shibumi

We have not succeeded in answering all of your problems. The answers we have
found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways, we
feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher
level and about more important things.
                -- Unknown

To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as
murder.
                -- Gore Vidal

As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the
Christian religion....
                -- George Washington: Treaty with Tripoli, signed by
Washington in 1797

When I think of all the harm that book [the Bible] has done, I despair of
ever writing anything equal to it.
                -- Oscar Wilde

Religion sanctions woman's self-love; it gives her the guide, father, lover,
divine guardian she longs for nostalgically; it feeds her  daydreams; it
fills her empty hours.  But above all, it confirms the social order, it
justifies her resignation, by giving her the hope of a better future in a
sexless heaven.  This is why women today are still a powerful trump in the
hand of the Church; it is why the Church is notably hostile to all measures
liable to help in women's emancipation.
                -- Simone de Beauvoir

Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
                -- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton: Letter from Acton to
Creighton, dated April 3, 1887, quoted in "Life and Letters of Mandell
Creighton.", pub. 1904

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of
Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the
means.
                -- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton


Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a
misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is
a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and
morality.
                -- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton :"The Study of History,"
Inaugural lecture, June 11, 1895

Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since
the rich lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were
discovered to be not unlimited.
                -- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton: "Letters to Mary
Gladstone," April 24, 1881

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be
it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative
idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
                -- John E.E. Dalberg, Lord Acton: Contribution to 
"The Home and Foreign Review", its "Essays on Freedom and Power", 1862

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember,
all men would be tyrants if they could.
                -- Abigail (Brooks) Adams: "The Book of Abigail and John:
Selected Letters of the Adams Family", 1762-1784; letter dated March 31, 1776

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
                -- Henry (Brooks) Adams: "The Education of Henry Adams,"
1907

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint;
therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself. This
principle is the philosophical foundation of anarchism, and, for anything
that science has yet proved, may be the philosophical foundation of the
universe; but it is fatal to all society and is especially
fatal to the State.
                -- Henry (Brooks) Adams: "The Degradation of the
Democratic Dogma," 1919

The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning....
And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or
dissenting sect who could tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest
billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooist brutality,
is patently endured, coutenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a
solemn truth in collusion with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the
clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the
hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.
                -- John Adams: "The Life and Works of John Adams"

Liberty cannot be preserved without a genuine knowledge amont the people ...
the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more
importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the
country.
                -- John Adams: Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal
Law, 1765

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in
it.
                -- John Adams: Letter to Jefferson, quoted by Jefferson in
a letter, June 20, 1816

I believe that no people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery
but when they deserved it.
                -- Samuel Adams: Independent Advertiser, 1748

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially
raises one man above another.
                -- Joseph Addison: The Guardian, No. 3

If ever we hear of lying, we must look for a severe parent. A lie would have
no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
                -- Alfred Adler: What Life Means to You, 1831

Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like
men.
                -- Mortimer J. Adler: Quoted in Saturday Review, Nov
22, 1958. 

In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos.
The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The
pathos is his ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The
logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people
intellectually.
                -- Mortimer J. Adler: Quoted in Time Magazine, Jun 15, 1974

Every great scientific truth goes through three states:  First, people say
it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before;
lastly, they say they always believed it.
                -- Attributed to (Jean) Louis Agassiz

The wise man is always free; he is always held in honor; he is always master
of the laws. The law is not made for the just, but for the unjust. The just
man is a man unto himself, and he does not need to summon the law from afar,
for he carries it enclosed in his heart....
                -- St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan: "Letters," Letter to
Simplicianus, c. 386

Let a woman show deference, not being a slave to her husband; let her show
she is ready to be guided, not coerced. Adam was deceived by Eve, not Eve by
Adam.... it is right that he whom that woman induced to sin should assume
the role of guide lest he fall again through feminine instability.
                -- St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan: "Letters," Letter 63, 396

The people as a body cannot deliberate. Nevertheless, they will feel an
irresistible impulse to act, and their resolutions will be dictated to them
by their demagogues....and the violent men, who are the most forward to
gratify those passions, will be their favourites. What is called the
government of the people is in fact too often the abitrary power of such
men. Here, then, we have the faithful portrait of democracy....
                -- Fisher Ames: "The Dangers of American Liberty," 1805

The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
                -- William James: 1895

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
                -- John Ruskin

To the living we owe courtesy; to the dead, only truth.
                -- Unknown

To deceive a rival, artifice is permitted.  One may employ everything
against one's enemies.
                -- Armand Jean du Plessis: "Les Thuileries"

But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are
mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence.
Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a
regime.  True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not
much mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
                -- Jean Jacques Rousseau: "The Social Contract"

. . . to make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of
education.  Make them men first, and religious men afterwards, and all will
be sound; but a knave's religion is always the rottenest thing about him.
                -- John Ruskin

Men are more easily taken in, more easily comic.  Male society is a comic
society.  Women as oppressed people, are almost more free in a certain sense
than men.  Women have fewer principles dictating their behavior.
                -- Jean-Paul Sartre

The majority of men . . . are not capable of thinking, but only of
believing, and . . . are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
                -- Arthur Schopenhauer

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice . . . that
suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the
world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life
and person.
                -- Arthur Schopenhauer

Creeds must become intellectually honest.  At present there is not a single
credible established religion in the world.  That is perhaps the most
stupendous fact in the whole world-situation.
                -- George Bernard Shaw

The simple act of any ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to
support lies! . . .Writers and artists can do more: they can VANQUISH LIES!
In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will. . . . Lies
can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
                -- Alexander I. Solzhenitsym

Atheist:  A name given by theologians to whoever differs from them in their
ideas concerning the divinity, or who refuses to believe in it in the form
of which, in the emptiness of their infallible pates, they have resolved to
present it to him.  As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not
believe in the God of the Priests.
                -- Voltaire

Reason is, of all things in the world, the most hurtful to a reasoning human
being.  God only allows it to remain with those he intends to damn, and in
his goodness takes it away from those he intends to save or render useful to
the Church. . . . If reason had any part in religion, what then would become
of faith?
                -- Voltaire

Humanly speaking, let us define truth, while waiting for a better
definition, as a statement of facts as they are.
                -- Voltaire

In America the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs for
ever and ever.
                -- Oscar Wilde

The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account
of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish
sbmission to any power but reason.
                -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly

What is truth?  Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside
from it, I would keep to the truth and let God go.
                -- Johannes Eckhard

Religion has always sanctified violence and transformed it into right.  It
has whisked away humanity, justice, and fraternity into a fictitious heaven,
so as to leave room on earth for the reign of iniquity and brutality.
                -- Bakunin A. Mikhail: Russian writer and anarchist

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never
be uprooted.
                -- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin


Faith branches off from the high road before reason begins.
                -- William James: 1890

If it weren't for what they have between their legs, there'd be a bounty on
them.
                -- Comment by a nameless acquaintance, 1990

The story went around during the glum diplomatic dog days in the late '30s.
The 13-year-old son asks his father, a retired senior diplomat: "Daddy, what
was your role in the world war?" Lord Cecil looked up from his newspaper:
"I tried to prevent the bloody thing."
                -- William F. Buckley: editorial, February 1985

Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
                -- John F. Kennedy: Speech to the Massachusetts State
Legislature, Jan 9, 1961

Peace and freedom do not come cheap, and we are destined--all of us here
today--to live out most if not all of our lives in uncertainty and challenge
and peril.
                -- John F. Kennedy: Address at the University of North
Carolina, Oct 12, 1961

Where nature makes natural allies of us all, we can demonstrate that
beneficial relationships are possible even with those with whom we must
deeply disagree, and this must someday be the basis of world peace and world
law.
                -- John F. Kennedy: State of the Union Address, Jan 29,
1961

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
                -- John F. Kennedy: Address to the United Nations, Sep 25,
1961

All of this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it
be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this a
dministration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us
begin.
                -- John F. Kennedy: Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1961

The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being
willing  to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are
both able and  willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot,
then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, then they are not
benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither
omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly,  if they are both able and willing to
annihilate evil, how does it exist?
                -- Epicurus: 300 B.C.

There are no longer "dancers," the possessed. The cleavage of men into
actors and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with
heroes who live for us and whom we punish... We have metamorphised from a
mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.
                -- Jim Morrison

  The boy awakes to find himself on the Chessboard. And, as always, it is
for the first time.
  The squares, alternately black and white, tumble to the horizon on all
sides. Countless thousands of squares. Smoothly polished, gleaming endlessly
in the white sun.
  There is no sound. Only the weight of nonsound. The terrifying weight of
silence in a great void.
  The boy sits on a white square. He blinks, stretches, and looks curiously
about him. He looks up at the sky, empty but for a huge, round sun. Swollen
a hundred times the size of the sun we know.
  The boy looks at the hard, smooth surface of his perfect white square and
can see only his reflection. He smiles down at the image. It has been a
wonderful rest, and it is certainly a glorious morning. A perfect morning.
Pure and clear and perfect.
  The boy has not the slightest thought of where he is to go, of what he is
to do.
  The others move constantly. At different intervals, in all directions,
keeping always to the white squares. The boy is pleased to have begun on a
white square. Clearly this is a fine beginning. The boy sits beautifully
still for a time. It would be foolish to set out not knowing where one was
to go.
  He watches the others moving through the endlessly alternating maze of
black and white and black, glimmering forever under the hard, white sun.
They are dressed in dull, white cloth which does not, or cannot, reflect the
brilliance of the white squares through which they move so soundlessly. The
boy believes that they are guards. He cannot imagine what there might be for
them to guard in the purity and emptiness of such a place.
  There is no air. There is no sound. The awesome enormity of his
surroundings holds the boy. Black and white and black and white and black.
Sterile and clear, shimmering to infinity.
  The boy sits through the bright, hot morning. It is late in the afternoon
when he first sees the ones who are not guards. They are few, and they are
very far away, but he sees them clearly. Their cloth is black, but they are
set apart from the guards even more certainly by the grace and ease of their
movements. The boy believes that they are thieves but cannot imagine what
their might be for them to steal in such a place. They walk with a fluid
nobility that entrances the boy, and he strains his eyes to watch them until
the last one is only a speck at an immeasurable distance.
  The boy rises without knowing why. He unfolds his long young legs and
walks to a black square. The black squares are empty, and he can look down
the gleaming black diagonal to the far end of the Chessboard.
  The boy walks the black diagonal, but he does not see another thief.
After a time he doubts that he has ever seen one.
                -- Ronald J. Bass: "The Perfect Thief"

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjecture.
                -- Anatole France: "La Revolt des anges," 1914

  We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will
be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can
compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the
clash of interests without conceding our ideals. And even the necessity for
the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists
and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead, who prevent all
political situations from meeting the description supplied by Shaw:
"smirched with compromise, rotted with opportunism, mildewed by expedience,
stretched out of shape with wirepulling and putrefied with permeation."
  Compromise need not mean cowardice--
                -- John F. Kennedy: Profiles in Courage

Make love now, by night and by day, in winter and in summer...You are in the
world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste.
There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy,
love. To make love is all the law, and the prophets.
                -- Anatole France: Quoted in J.J. Brousson, "Anatole
France en pantoufles" 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
                -- Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden

He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an
inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I
hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will
wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the
sun if it insulted me.
                -- Herman Melville: Moby Dick

A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything
were titular and ephemeral but he.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

And if life is just a highway
   then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear-view mirror
   may appear closer than they are
                -- Jim Steinman: "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May
Appear Closer Than They Are," from Bat Out of Hell II, 1993

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
                -- C. A. R. Hoare

The demonic paradox of writing: when you put something down that happened,
people often don't believe it; whereas you can make up anything, and people
assume it must have happened to you.
                -- Andrew Holleran

God damn the society that will permit such poverty! God damn the religions
that stand for such a putrid system!
                -- Sinclair Lewis

The violence we know is a thing of beauty to us.
                -- Comment overheard.

Ahimsa, infinite love, is a weapon of matchless potency . . . It is an
attribute of the brave, in fact it is their all. It does not come within the
reach of the coward. It is no wooden or lifeless dogma but a living and
lifegiving force.
                -- Mohandes K. Gandhi: 1924

For the little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For the big
stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you
croaks.
                -- Eugene O'Neill: "The Emperor Jones", 1920

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by sloppy code.
                -- Unknown

I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
                -- Friedrich Nietzche: "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
                -- Brook Monroe: Programmer's Guide to Life

Badness comes in waves.
                -- SNAFU Equation #6

No free man needs a God.
                -- Vladimir Nabokov: "Pale Fire," 1962

Some people find me irritating. I say, fuck them.
                -- A comedian whose name I forget.