"A witty saying proves nothing."
- Voltaire.

"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

"America has no native criminal class except for congress." -Mark Twain

There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.

A man ain't no better than his Rhythm Section!" - J. R. Chatwell

"You're either with the people who have polarizing world views, or you're against them."
- Seen on SlashDot

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Nothing is too cruel if it's funny enough."
- Dave "Thermos" Setser

"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

" The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children."
- Clarence Darrow

"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine."
- Abraham Lincoln

"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

"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

milli-helen : The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful."
- A. S. LaVey

"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

"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

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

"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

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

"There are no secrets to success. Don't waste time looking for them. Success is the result of perfection, hard work, and learning from failure." -General Colin Powell

"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

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

"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