"A witty saying proves nothing."
- Voltaire.
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."
- Oscar Wilde
"I not only disagree totally with everything you have said, but I am revolted by the whimpering tone in which people of your kind express themselves." -Unknown
"Facebook; Chewing Gum for the Mind."
- Sparky
"America has no native criminal class except for congress." -Mark Twain
"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as
the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must
not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we
must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts,
in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from
wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they
will be happy."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and
bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we
don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly
serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up
for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along."
- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
"Hey Carl! We're already there!"
- Sparky, Election Day, 2008
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races
to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races
to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing."
- Adolf Hitler
"A man ain't no better than his Rhythm Section!" - J. R. Chatwell
"You're always just a half step away from the right note."
- Vassar Clements
"This isn't true in practice -- what we've missed out is Stradivarius's
constant. And then the aside: 'For those of you who don't know, that's
been called by others the fiddle factor...'"
- From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture.
"They don't make old stuff anymore."
-Bryan Duckworth
"Nowadays all we have on the radio is a bunch of dope sucking Kmart Cowboys that sound like dying calves in a hail storm."
-RubiTrack on YouTube
"I predict someday Chinese engineers will discover the algorithm for Nashville country music and begin mass producing hits from a computer in Shinzen."
-Slaid Cleaves
"Two degrees in bebop, a PHD in swing, he's the master of rhythm, he's a rock and roll king"
-Lowell George
"You're either with the people who have polarizing world views, or you're against them."
- Seen on SlashDot
"You cannot kill time without injuring eternity."
"In SAC, perfection is the standard. Anyone failing to exceed this standard
will be punished disproportionately to their offense. Those who commit a minor
error in judgement will be castrated and anally violated simultaneously and
constantly for an indeterminate time period. Those who drastically fuck up
will be chastised privately, then promoted to a position that is even further
above their already exceeded level of incompetence. If anyone doubts this,
just look around you."
- Found scrawled on a panel in a B-52 based at Barksdale AFB La.
"Women don't sew wild oats; they harvest them." -Sparky
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder - and vice versa." -Sparky
"She talks in her sleep but she always gets my name right..."
- Delbert
"Historically, the Baltic states have produced more warfare than they could
consume locally." -Unknown
"If I were any better (or worse), I'd be twins!" -Ed Phenicie
"If you're gonna do me wrong, do it right." - Vern Gosdin
"My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."
- Curtis LeMay
"Al Gore a Climatologist? Yeah, and maybe I'm a Chinese Jet Pilot."
- Sparky
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
- Winston Churchill
"A cleaved head no longer plots."
- Nordic Proverb
"Everything's temporary, if you give it enough time."
- Jewel
"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future."
- Niels Bohr
"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck."
- Rob Pike, on X
"A free market economy is an enormous, roiling affair subject to governmental control only at its margins. It will always offer opportunity for folly and novel forms of criminality, for which the only solution is to let the fools and scam artists go broke or go to jail or both. The system can then cleanse itself before lurching into the next period of progress, to be leavened with excesses all its own."
- Rich Lowry, in the book Legacy; Paying the Price for the Clinton Years
"The Management of Vices is the Secret of Life."
- Sparky
"Ninety nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play."
- Willie Nelson
"Modesty: The gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it."
- Oliver Herford
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not,
diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
- Ernest Benn
"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes
from the poor and campaign funds from the rich,
by promising to protect each from the other."
- Oscar Ameringer
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Pablo Picasso
"Nothing is too cruel if it's funny enough."
- Dave "Thermos" Setser
"To Err is Humor."
- Wise Man
"If the media likes a candidate, vote for the other one."
- Sparky, circa 2007
"If Al Jazeera dislikes a candidate, vote for him."
- Sparky, 2011
The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.
- Winston Churchill
"Only bad witches are ugly."
- Glinda, The Good Witch of the South
"A chronic disposition to inquiry deprives domestic felines of vital qualities."
- Wise Man
" The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half
by our children."
- Clarence Darrow
"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."
- Edgar Bergen
"If there was any justice in this world, "trust" would be a four-letter word."
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies."
- Zoso
"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old time rail journey...delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride."
- Jenkin Lloyd Jones
"Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why."
- Hunter S. Thompson
"One man's constant is another man's variable."
- A.J.Perlis
"Out to go back, back to go in, in to go forward, forward to go out."
- Orbital Mechanics Maxim from "The Integral Trees", by Larry Niven
"The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank."
- Scotty
"Indecision is the true basis for flexibility."
- Unknown
"I feed on the fear of the devil inside of the enemy faces in my sights..."
- From The Warrior Song, by S. Householder
"To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated."
- Trefor Thomas
"A man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
-Euripides
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
- H.L. Mencken
milli-helen : The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful."
- A. S. LaVey
"The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none."
"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats."
- P.J. O'Rourke
"When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot."
- Unknown
"Freedom has a taste to those who fight and almost die that the protected will never know."
-Written on the wall of Hoa Lo Prison; The "Hanoi Hilton"
"Microsoft is not evil, they have merely raised incompetence to a level that's indistinguishable from malice. Redmond is not capable of the consistency of purpose and execution that really good evil requires."
- HangingChad, seen on Slashdot
Political Correctness:
A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous main-stream media, which holds forth
the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
"Political correctness will kill this country."
-Sparky, circa 1990
"One lawyer can steal more than a hundred men with guns."
-The Godfather
"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
- Winston Churchill
"I wish I had more time to organize my ignorance" -Ed Phenicie
"Don't pull on my ears, I know what I'm doing." -Unknown
"Northrop: the cutting edge of forty-year-old technology!" -Scott D.
Larsen
"Tact is the art of making guests feel at home when that's really where
you wish they were." -George E. Bergman
"You have to have some 'Sticktoitness' to be good at something."
- Guitar Bruce Powery
Sparky's 1st Theorem of Strip Joints: Some women like money AT LEAST as
much as most men like sex.
"I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers."
-Kahil Gibran
"We're concerned about concerns over whether weather impacts impacts."
-David H. Berg
BOHICA: Bend Over Here It Comes Again -Unknown
"If they didn't pay us to come here we'd probably buy tickets to watch!"
-Ed Phenicie
13 April 1990 Los Angeles Times article states Northrop is trimming the
quality control inspection program on the B-2.
Ed Phenicie; "What are they gonna do, go negative?"
"When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber." -Winston
Churchill
"The second derivative of data is usually crap." -Dave Carlson
Data, n.: An accrual of straws on the backs of theories.
Often, an attempt at increasing an empire leads to a general and indiscriminate
Bone-arama. -Sparky
"He wouldn't be that bad of a guy if he wasn't always telling everybody
what a great guy he is."
-Sparky speaking of Rick Stuke
"Science may never come up with a better office communication system than
the coffee break." -Earl Wilson
"If you ever find two software engineers running the same Jovial program,
one of them is not needed." -Sparky
"Stinginess with privileges is kindness in disguise."
- Guide to VAX/VMS Security, Sep. 1984
"Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't
understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he
uses Perl."
- Larry Wall in <7874 at jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
"This has been a rough war for tyrants and those who try to control the thoughts
of their people. In Baghdad--but also in Manhattan, at the headquarters of
the Times, NBC, CBS and ABC." - Dick Morris
"Looks good from here!"
- Nuclear weapons testing maxim
"Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department."
- Werner von Braun
Congress is not remotely the public-spirited institution painted by eight-grade
civics books. It is grossly incompetent (think about this year's budget),
inefficient to the point of obsolescence, largely composed of men of no experience
in, and little knowledge of foreign affairs, and chiefly interested in re-election.
-Fred Reed, Air Force Times, 17 December 1990
"The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing, and
to watch someone else doing it wrong, without comment." -Theodore H. White
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)
"There are three ways of losing money: Racing is the quickest,
women the most pleasant, and farming the most certain."
- Lord Amherst
"My life is a rotating continuum of shit I've lost and found."
- CJ Romberger
"There is no such thing as inappropriate. There are just people who get offended too easily."
- Bradillac Morrow
"I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else."
- Winston Churchill
"I don't know how to make a light bulb, but I know six hundred ways how
not to do it." -Thomas Edison
"These people - who do they think they are, saying that their government
has stamped out human freedom?" -Bill Clinton, 1 May 1995
Empowerment: The right to tie a knot in the sling into which your ass is
placed. -Unknown
"Life is not a child-proof daycare center, with no toy guns, run by Kate and Allie." - Wise Man
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
- Seen on Slashdot
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."
- Douglas Adams
Powerpoint absorbs huge amounts of time that management, marketeers,
and other suits might otherwise spend doing real harm. -Unknown
Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine
doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche.
-Unknown
"We're having a hard time figuring out who has replaced Strategic Air Command."
-Col Tom Distelhorst, Nuclear Weapon System Safety Group Chairman
"Darwin's theory of safety; accidents take care of the stupid." -Major
Terry Landis
"If it don't make sense, somebody's making money." -Sparky
"Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage."
- Lazarus Long
"The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high
aims are worth-while. Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of
objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal
gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of
a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment,
the Peace brought by something worth-while."
- Alfred North Whitehead, 1963, in "The History of Manned Space Flight"
"For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill." - R. Clopton
"Those who beat their swords into plowshares are destined to plow for those
who don't" -Unknown
The Chernobyl Syndrome: The damage caused by the mistake is directly proportional
to the length of time it is hushed up. -Moscow News, April 1989
Collective responsibility means, effectively, that there is none. -Paraphrased
from Piers Paul Read in "Ablaze".
"The hands that help are better than the hands that pray." -Robert Green
Ingersoll
"Religions are all alike; founded upon fables and mythologies." -Thomas
Jefferson
"The average fighter pilot, despite the sometimes swaggering exterior, is
very capable of such feelings as deep love, affection, intimacy, and true
caring. These feelings just don't include anyone else." -Anonymous
"One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could
be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic
really is." -Frank Herbert
"Yeah, I know, I know, but we all have our pet peeves, and one of mine is
equating the calligraphy pen you get with the average UNIX-esque shell to
the broken, blunted crayon DOS gives you."
- John Buttery
"However, I can count the number of companies that became successful by partnering with Microsoft on one finger (Intel). If you shake hands with Microsoft, you better count your fingers afterwards."
- Travis H.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put
into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am
not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that
could provoke such a question."
- Charles Babbage
"Outlook Express is actually an incredibly effective virus distribution system which
only pretends to be an email program."
-Eric Lee
"Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to
your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level." -Enrico Fermi
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what
they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H. L. Mencken
"It's an XK Red 27 Technique"
-Harvey Manfredchenjensen
If you are a fatalist, what can you do about it?
-Ann Edwards-Duff
"I just love the French. They taste like chicken!"
-Hannibal Lecter
"I sympathize with your situation. Your species' reproductive arrangements
are overcomplex. Such strong attachment to females can only lead to
continuing tragedy."
-From the book "Man-Kzin Wars IX"
"There's a fine line between inspired and obsessed."
- From Sun of Suns by Karl Shroeder