This is a list of quotes that I drew up over several years to serve as epigraphs for the chapters of my PhD thesis (I was bored). Several made it in the end, but rather than waste those that didn't, I've ported them to Wikipedia and intend to add them where appropriate.

• Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.

- Aldous Huxley

• Thousands of years ago the Egyptians worshipped cats as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.

- Anonymous

• Men Wanted for Dangerous Expedition: Low Wages for Long Hours of Arduous Labour under Brutal Conditions; Months of Continual Darkness and Extreme Cold; Great Risk to Life and Limb from Disease, Accidents and Other Hazards; Small Chance of Fame in Case of Success.

- Sir Ernest Shackleton, explorer

• Back off man. I'm a scientist.

- Dr. Peter Venkman ('Ghostbusters')

• ...one has to remark that men ought to be well treated or crushed, ... the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

- Nicolo Machiavelli ('The Prince')

• Yield to temptation... It may not pass your way again!

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Captain, whilst you make an excellent Starship Commander, your abilities as a taxi driver leave much to be desired.*

- Spock ('Star Trek', 'A Piece of the Action')

• You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.

- Anonymous

• Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Watt-Evans' Law of Literary Creativity: There is no idea so stupid or over-used that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.

- Anonymous

Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can't fuck it up.

- Anonymous

• He's dead, Jim. I'll get his tricorder. You take his wallet.

- netperson

• At the end of all battles only the victor is honored ... and no one remembers whether he was good or evil

- Windom Earle ('Twin Peaks')

• Remember to connect brain before putting mouth into gear

- Anonymous

Confusious Say: Man Who Stand On Toilet, High On Pot.

- Netperson

• Anything is possible ... we deal in quanta ...

- Al ('Quantum Leap')

• For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the battle was lost.
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

- Anonymous

• Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

- Walter Benjamin

• 15% of Americans think Dennis Hopper should go back on drugs

- 'TV Nation' Poll

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

- William James

• It's a good thing that we don't all have the same tastes; otherwise, think what an oatmeal shortage there would be!

- Apocryphal Scotsman

• Life's a bitch; now so am I!

- Catwoman ('Batman Returns')

• To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Brains are more like pomegranates than sheets of paper.

- John Haugeland

• I am not a has-been. I'm a will-be.

- Lauren Bacall

• Motto of the Electrical Engineer: Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis: it stays up as long as you don't fuck with it.

- Anonymous

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

- Arthur C. Clarke

• But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

- Arthur C. Clarke

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Arthur C. Clarke

• As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place.

- Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg on her visit to Auschwitz

• God help us, we're in the hands of engineers

- Ian Malcolm ('Jurassic Park')

• The Internet : One small step for me, One giant leap for my phone bill

- Andrew McCaddon (netperson)

• I find myself taping movie after movie. Then I take them out of the VCR, store them, and repeat the process. I never get around to watching the movies, but I've got a great collection.

- Monte Hellman (director)

• The human mind is like a knife, and the most dangerous knives are dull ones.

- Chris Way (netperson)

• The juvenile seasquirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

- Warren C. Lathe II (netperson)

• If a train station is where a train stops, what happens at a workstation?

- Frederick Wheeler

• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.

- Mitch Radcliffe

• That kitten doesn't have a brain; he just has a skull full of random numbers, and whenever he bangs his head into a chair or ricochets off a wall, it shakes up the random numbers and causes him to do something else.*

- Robert A. Heinlein

• In the summer waters, the _Anomalocaris_ basks in the warmth, dreaming of contingent futures, of the futures that might be or might not be, of great civilizations, mighty structures, works of art and literature, of the culture built by the many limbed creatures that will crawl from the sea, of their deeds, their loves, their wisdom - an entire society dedicated to the sound of the universal *O* . Serene in its vision, it passes _Pikaia_ to munch a trilobite.

- 'Song of _Anomalocaris_' vol 2, canto 8, verses 36-37 (Christopher Heiny, netperson)

• Sex is hereditary, if your parents never had it, chances are you won't either

- Anonymous

• To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

- Roger Bacon

• One can be instructed in society, but one is inspired only in solitude.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Some legends live forever. Others die on the toilet.

- M. C. Sheppard

• Everyone has a right to be stupid. Don't abuse it.

- Steve Drost (netperson)

• Uninventive people use other peoples quotes.

- Carl J. Spencer (netperson, quoting himself)

• Specialisation is for insects.

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

- Mark Twain

• They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.

- D.H Lawrence (Whales Weep Not)

• You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half of 'em are dumber than THAT.

- J.R. Dobbs

• He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

- Dave Horn (netperson)

• There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.

- Bertrand Russell

• It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent.

- Q ('Star Trek : The Next Generation')

• Of course you can get a job with a liberal arts degree - would you like fries with that?

- Chris A. Hall (netperson)

• Behind every successful man stands an astonished woman.

- Frank Capra

• You will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on a certain point of view.

- Obi Wan Kanobi ('Star Wars')

• If you argue with a fool, people might have trouble telling which is which.

- Ray Deonandan (netperson)

• After some thought the great philosopher proclaimed that while it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.

- Terry Pratchett

• A friend in the hand is worth ten on the net

- Me

• Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever.

- The Laws of Physics (courtesy of James W. Walden, netperson)

• Thought for the day: If you see a light at the end of the tunnel, it is probably a train.

- Wolfgang Wuster (netperson)

• ....males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.

- Newt Gingrich

• Erwin Schrodinger (1945) has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment ::- that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatium as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in in a medium of its own waste products.* [p. 253]

- Daly and Townsend ('Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics',

1993)

• It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man

- Jack Handey ('Deep Thoughts')

• After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of a motor accident, you begin to worry about history.

- J. McNab

• i keep six honest serving men

  (they taught me all i knew); 
their names are what and why and when
  and how and where and who.

- Kipling

• Nothing is as biased as the truth.

- Matthew P. Wiener (netperson)

• God built a compelling sex drive into every creature, no matter what style of fucking it practiced. He made sex irresistibly pleasurable, wildly joyous, free from fears. He made it innocent merriment. Needless to say, fucking was an immediate smash hit. Everyone agreed, from aardvarks to zebras. All the jolly animals ::- lions and lambs, rhinoceroses and gazelles, skylarks and lobsters, even insects, though most of them fuck only once in a lifetime ::- fucked along innocently and merrily for hundreds of millions of years. Maybe they were dumb animals, but they knew a good thing when they had one.

- Alan Sherman ('The Rape of the A*P*E*')

• Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead

- Robert Blake (netperson)

• The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced*

- Grant Hodgson (netperson)

• Environmentalists may be hell to live with, but we make great ancestors.

- Andy Kerr, Oregon Natural Resources Council

• I might be wrong, but I'm certain.

- Dan Day

• The truth isn't tolerant or pluralistic.

- Matthew P. Wiener (netperson, weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)

• Renegade academician. They're a dangerous breed when they go feral, academics are...a chemist, too.

- James P. Blaylock (in 'Lord Kelvin's Machine')

• To ask a question you must first know most of the answer.

- Robert Sheckely

• Hell, even my spell checker knows! Every time it finds 'creationism', it recommends 'cretinism'!!*

- Steve Price (netperson, raven@kaiwan.com)

• If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.

- Anonymous

• One imagines Max, the famous quantum physicist, deciding on Monday morning to face the quantum facts. Donning quantum-resistant body armor, he climbs inside his bubble chamber, waves goodbye to the workaday world, and prepares to enter the mysterious realm of the quantum. Alone in the dark, Max checks his life-support system and the crucial flyback circuit that returns him to ordinary reality. Then, taking a deep breath, he pulls the switch. Max suddenly drops through the world's phenomenal surface into deep quantum reality. Holy Heisenberg! Centuries of Newtonian certainties vanish in an instant. Solid objects melt into the undivided wholeness as he enters the Place Without Separation. Max mixes with the mystery when his subject/object membrane dissolves. In tune with totality, Max creates a new universe faster than light wherever he turns his omnipotent gaze. What's it like down there? Max's sister Maxine says it feels just like Schrodinger's equation, only more so. You've got to see it to believe it. Behind the high-security fences of Max's quantum lab, consciousness creates reality, quantum logic is spoken exclusively, and for the trip home you have your choice of a billion different universes. Sad to say, physics labs are not so exciting.

- Nick Herbert ('Quantum Reality : Beyond the New Physics')

• If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing

- Anatole France (1844-1924)

• FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

- Ambrose Bierce ('Devil's Dictionary')

• Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

- Robert A. Heinlein

• Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

- Dobzhansky

• [...] and you haven't seen untidiness until you've seen a room where the gravity has failed twice in different directions.

- Michael Marshall Smith ('Only Forward')

• Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good Blaster at your side

- Han Solo ('Star Wars')

• Never choose the lesser of two Elvises.

- Paul * Sir Robin* Duncanson (netperson, phd@otto.bf.rmit.edu.au)

• Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.

- George Washington (farewell address, 1796)

• In science there is only physics; everything else is stamp collecting.

- Ernest Rutherford

• What's really scary about the press is that everything they say sounds reasonable until they do a story on something you know anything about.

- Darren F. Provine (netperson, kilroy@copland.rowan.edu)

• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

- Bertrand Russell

• What if there were no hypothetical situations?

- Mark Meyer (netperson, mmeyer@dseg.ti.com)

• Get used to disappointment

- The Dread Pirate Roberts ('The Princess Bride')

• Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

- Howard Aiken

• POSITIVE, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• Corollary to Occam's Razor: Never attribute to ingenious malice that which can be more simply explained by sheer stupidity.

• I don't care what may be his politics. I don't care what may be his religion. I don't care what may be his color. I don't care who he is. So long as he is honest, he shall be served by me.

- Theodore Roosevelt

• Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you please.

- Mark Twain

• People can, and will, do things that no one could possibly believe anyone would do. For examples look at most of human history or the alt.sex.* hierarchy.

- Ken Boucher (on human stupidity in sci.nanotech)

• Once upon a time there was a police detective who was a Scientific Creationist. He used to solve his cases very quickly - by looking around for a few seconds and saying, * I don't understand this. God must have done it. Case closed.

- Thomas kettenring (netperson)

• Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

- G. K. Chesterton ('Orthodoxy', 1908)

• The firefly seems a fire, the sky looks flat // Yet sky and fly are neither this nor that

- Govindjee (netperson, govindje@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)

• Big whorls have little whorls // that feed on their vorticity, // and little whorls have lesser whorls // and so on to viscosity

- L. F. Richardson

• On the Internet, no one can tell if you're a dog. Woof. Damn, what a giveaway.

- Jeff T. (netperson)

• Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with.

- Mark Twain

• You can have Peace, or you can have Freedom. Don't ever count on having both at the same time.

- Robert A. Heinlein

• Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

- Henry Spencer

• It is impossible for anyone to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

- Plutarch

• If your theory ... is found to be contradicted by observations, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes.

- Sir Arthur Eddington

• The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

- T. H. Huxley

• That's the problem with believing in a supernatural being. Trying to determine what he wants.

- Counsellor Troi ('Star Trek : The Next Generation')

• Orgel's Second Rule : Evolution is cleverer than you are.

- Francis Crick

• Well, many are saying that creationism should be taught as an alternative scientific theory in biology classes. Many are saying that there should be a moment of silence in class. We can kill two birds with one stone. INSTRUCTION TO TEACHERS: Each class shall open according to the following script: 'We will now present all of the scientific evidence for creation ...' {pause} '... We shall now procede with the rest of the subject matter.'

- Larry McKnight (netperson)

• Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity.

- Albert Einstein

• If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

- John Stuart Mill

• As I see it pal, you're in charge of two things: jack and shit, and jack just left town!

- Ash ('Army of Darkness')

• If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it's good enough for me.

- Arkansas congressman to Joint National Committee on Language

• I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers

- Garrison Kiellor

• My life is like a submarine - I'm seeing how far down I can go before I crack up under the pressure

- John (Chris) Wilkins (wilkins@wehi.edu.au)

• When I found the skull in the woods, the first thing I did was call the police. But then I got curious about it. I picked it up, and started wondering who this person was, and why he had deer horns.

- Jack Handy

• Stoning non-conformists is part of science. Stoning conformists is also part of science. Only those theories that can stand up to a merciless barrage of stones deserve consideration. It is the creationist habit of throwing marshmallows that we find annoying.

- Dr. Pepper (netperson)

• In a catholic school class, a nun asked the students, what would they like to become when they grow up. One girl answered: *A prostitute.* The nun exploded. After screaming at the girl for a while, the superior came in to see what the noise was all about. Barely able to control herself, the nun pointed at the girl and said: *You! Repeat what you said you want to be when you grow up!* *A prostitute,* the girl replied. The nun was silent for a moment, then started laughing. She laughed so hard, she couldn't speak for a while. Then she said: *The first time I heard 'a protestant'*.

- Tero Sand (cust_ts@cc.helsinki.fi)

• Keep an open mind, just not so open that your brains fall out

- Al Scott

• Fear was what first made gods in the world.

- Heraclitius

• All things by immortal power // Near or far // Hiddenly // To each other linked are // That thou canst not stir a flower // Without troubling of a star

- Francis Thompson (The Mistress of Vision)

• A spokesman for the Lyon Group, producers of 'Barney and Friends', denied that Barney is an instrument of Satan.

- The Advocate (spring 1994)

• If anyone finds this offensive, I am prepared not only to retract my words, but also to deny under oath that I ever said them.

- Tom Lehrer

• Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

- 'Dr. Strangelove'

• What disqualifies war from being a true game is probably what also disqualifies the stock market and business - the rules are not fully known nor accepted by all the players. Furthermore, the audience is too fully participatory in war and business, just as in a native society there is no true art because everybody is engaged in making art. Art and games need rules, conventions, and spectators. They must stand forth from the over-all situation as models of it in order for the quality of play to persist.

- Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)

• A physicist and an economist are stuck in a doomed airplane, hurtling downwards, out of fuel and without a pilot (who left with the only parachute!). The physicist suggests that they should try quickly to estimate the amount of mass available in the plane that could be moved about, i.e. cargo, seating. They could then calculate an optimal distribution of mass throughout the plane, so as to stabilize their descent and make a crash-landing feasible. The economist scoffs, and remarks that the answer to their quandry is staightforward, elegant and analytically tractable. 'How so?' Asked the physicist? 'What's the solution to our dilemma?' 'Well,' began the economist, 'assume that we have parachutes ...'

- Loren King (lking@mit.edu)

• This is a vast and difficult subject of which I know practically nothing. Naturally this does not prevent me from volunteering to enlighten you on the subject.

- Torkel Franzen

• I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying.

- Woody Allen

• I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

- Woody Allen

• In all the arts, I think, complete inexperience and ignorance are better than half-experience and half-knowledge. For a man who realizes that he knows nothing of some art will attempt less, and consequently is less likely to come to grief - in fact, diffidence prevents rashness. But when someone ostentatiously pretends to have mastered something of which he has merely a superficial knowledge, he makes mistakes of all kinds because of his false confidence.

- Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor, in a letter to his tutor, M. Cornelius Fronto)

• Usenet is essentially a HUGE group of people passing notes in class.

- R. Kadel

• God does not play dice.

- Albert Einstein

• Everything is possible. Since the impossible hasn't happened yet, it doesn't fall under 'Everything'! Ergo: Everything's possible...

- Murphy's 29th Law (courtesy of istvan@innet.be)

• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

- Edward H. Cooper (crystalc@cpcug.org)

• In the pantheon of creationist degrees, Lane's PhD clearly stands for Piled higher and Deeper. He earned this degree after his B.S. (Bull Shit) and M.S. (More Shit) degrees.

- Howard Hershey (hersheyh@indiana.edu) on the Creationist author Lane P. Lester

• God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?

- Archbiship Desmond Tutu (1990, addressing students at West Point)

• Immediate assurance is an excellent sign of probable lack of insight into the topic.

- Josiah Royce

• Theatre is Life ... // Cinema is Art ... // Television is Furniture ...

- Joyce Grossmans

• Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

- David C. Wright (wrightd@magic.mb.ca)

• People are worried about online porn on the Internet. It's the endless `Who's better--Kirk or Picard?' threads that *should* scare them.

- Jim Mullen (Entertainment Weekly)

• A hydrogen bomb is an example of mankind's enormous capacity for friendly cooperation. Its construction requires an intricate network of human teams, all working with single-minded devotion toward a common goal. Let us pause and savor the glow of self-congratulation we deserve for belonging to such an intelligent and sociable species.

- Robert S. Bigelow ('The Dawn Warriors')

• The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.

- Mark Twain

• Belief gets in the way of learning.

- Robert A. Heinlein

• Perhaps the most important book I read was Malthus' *Principle of Population* ... it was the first work I had yet read treating of any of the problems of philosophical biology, and its main principles remained with me as a permanent possession, and twenty years later gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species

- Charles Darwin ('Darwin, My Life', Chapman and Hall, 1905, vol 1)

• Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death)

- Stephen J. Gould ('Eight Little Piggies')

• Continuity is at the heart of conservatism : ecology serves that heart.

- Garrett Hardin ('Filters Against Folly')

• Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.

- Philip K. Dick, ('Valis')

• We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated."

- Bill Gates (allegedly)

• C code. C code run. Run code, run! Please!"

- Anonymous programmer

• The way to a man's heart is through his chest."

- Iain M. Banks ('Use of Weapons')

• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

- George Bernard Shaw

• If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically."

- Jean Paul Sartre

• The value of science remains unsung by singers, so you are reduced to hearing, not a song or a poem, but an evening lecture about it."

- Richard Feynman

• A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

• The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."

- Thomas Jefferson

• In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."

- Thomas Jefferson

• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurance of the improbable."

- H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

• Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject."

- Tom Weller ('Science Made Stupid')

• Whoever wants to be a Christian should first tear out the eye of his reason."

- Martin Luther

• Fifth Law of Applied Terror: If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book. Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.

• Flon's Law: There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.

• We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."

- Jack Handey ('Deep Thoughts')

• It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it."

- Edmund Way Teale ('Circle of the Seasons')

• It never ceases to astonish me that those most eager to apply 'the survival of the fittest' to the market and to society are often those least happy with its application to biology, the field the phrase originated in."

- Me

• There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

- Jeremy S. Anderson

• The worst enemy you can possibly have is a former friend."

- Keith A. Cochran (janda@netcom.com)

• They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

- Anonymous (possibly see 'Brocas Brain' by Sagan)

• Man occasionally stumbles over the truth, but he usually picks himself up and carries on."

- Winston Churchill

• Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion."

- Thomas Hobbes

• The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

- Warren Bennis

• Your grasp of science lacks opposable thumbs."

- B. Waggoner

• Creationism is wrong; totally, utterly, and absolutely wrong. I would go further. There are degrees of being wrong. The creationists are at the bottom of the scale. They pull every trick in the book to justify their position. Indeed, at times they verge right over into the downright dishonest. Scientific Creationism in not just wrong, it is ludicrously implausible. It is a grotesque parody of human thought, and a downright misuse of human intelligence. In short, to the believer, it is an insult to God."

- Michael Ruse ('Darwinism Defended')

• Human gullibility has cash value, and enormous amounts of money can be made by any skilled manipulator ... When people learn no tools of judgement and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."

- Stephen J. Gould

• But the main reward must be satisfaction - the privilege of working on something exciting, the internal peace of accomplishment, the rare pleasure of knowing that your life made a difference."

- Stephen J. Gould

• ... computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1/2 a ton."

- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

• It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. We consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed, as highest. A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criterion."

- Charles Darwin (in his Zoonomia notebook, 1837)

• A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe."

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• If we take in our hand any volume, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

- David Hume

• Literature is psychology, the difference being that literature is fictional, whereas psychology is or should be factual. This difference is a trivial one, however."

- Calvin Hall & Gardner Lindzey, 1978

• What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what 'the stars foretell', avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable 'verdict of history', ::- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."

- Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlein)

• Of what use is a philosopher who does not hurt anybody's feelings?"

- Diogenes

• The difference between life and a movie script is that the script has to make sense."

- Humphrey Bogart

• Of course god could have worked out the logistics - but where does that end? How often is saying "well, god worked out these details", too often? Why don't creationists answer every question with "god did it" rather than trying to explain the mechanics? I mean, if your toolbox contained, among other things, a magic wand, why bother ever using the screwdrivers?

- Damian Hammontree (damian@welchlink.welch.jhu.edu)

• It is interesting to note that the death penalty for individuals is less controversial than the mere suggestion that a few corporations may have forfeited their right to exist. How many people does a company have to harm before we question if it ought to exist?"

- Paul Hawken

• Some say the world will end in fire, // Some say in ice // From what I've tasted of desire // I hold with those who favor fire."

- Robert Frost

• Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of Nature."

- St. Albertus Magnus

• OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man ::- who has no gills."

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms."

- George Wald (1906-1997)

• When I hear of Schrodinger's cat, I reach for my gun."

- Stephen W. Hawking

• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him."

- Arthur C. Clarke

• When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'"

- Quentin Crisp

• The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death."

- Gore Vidal

• I'm a born-again atheist."

- Gore Vidal

• Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money."

- Leon Lederman

• WHY must I treat the measuring device classically?? What will happen to me if I don't??"

- Eugene Wigner (1902-1995)

• What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."

- Thomas Hewitt Key (1799-1875)

• Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love"

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians."

- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

• Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

- Lord Kelvin (President of The Royal Society, 1895)

• Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

- Harry M. Warner (Warner Bros., 1927)

• Everything that can be invented has been invented."

- Charles H. Duell (commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899)

• I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

- Thomas Watson (chairman of IBM, 1943)

• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."

- Ken Olsen (president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment

Corp., 1977)

• There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear."

- Daniel Dennett

• Jesus saves ... but Gretzky gets the rebound! He shoots. HE SCORES!!"

- Anonymous

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

- Dorothy Parker

• Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired."

- R. Geis

• Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life."

- Eric Hoffer

• New York ... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you."

- David Letterman

/earth: file system full.

- Anonymous

• When I was young, all I wanted was to be ruler of the universe. Now that isn't enough."

- Alex P. Keaton

• Reading computer manuals without the hardware is a frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

- Arthur C. Clarke

• You may ask yourself, how did I get here? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!

- Talking Heads

• I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

- English Professor (Ohio University)

• Thought for the day : What if there were no hypothetical situations?

- Anonymous

• A witty saying proves nothing.

- Voltaire

• Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

- Jules Feiffer

• What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?
• I'm not sure, but he seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.

- JBS Haldane

• I liked 'Slaughterhouse 5', but I can't find the first four anywhere.

- Anonymous

• So just what ARE time flies, and why do they like an ARROW?

- Anonymous

• After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

• Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

- H. L. Mencken

• we, the unwilling, // led by the unknowing, // are doing the impossible // for the ungrateful. // we have done so much, // for so long, // with so little, // we are now qualified to do anything // with nothing.

- Anonymous

• There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you.

- A. Whitney Brown (The Big Picture)

• Booze may not be the answer, but it helps you to forget the question.

- Lt. Henry Mon (USAF, circa 1961)

• In a literature class, the students were given an assignment to write a short story involving all the important ingredients - Nobility, Emotion, Sex, Religion and Mystery. One student allegedly handed in the following story: * My god!* cried the duchess. * I'm pregnant. Who did it?*

- Anonymous

• If an infinite number of rednecks, driving an infinite number of pickup trucks, fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works, in Braille.

- Omni

• When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

- Mark Twain

• I'm one with the Universe---on a scale from 1 to 10.

- Anonymous

• Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

- Keynes

• If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.

- Hal Abelson

• So far the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.

- Albert Einstein

• Pope John Paul would be more popular if he called himself Pope John Paul George and Ringo.

- Paul Krassner

• A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

- Carl Sagan (Contact)

• Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

- Ogden Nash

• Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

- C. P. Snow (New York Times, 15 March 1971)

• If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.

- Freeman Dyson ('Disturbing the Universe', 1979 (Columbia))

• Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced without unskilled labor.

- Werner Von Braun

• ... it would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

- Daniel Bernouilli (quoted in 'The Mathematical Intelligencer', vol. 13(1), Winter 1991)

• The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

- Albert Einstein

• Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the audience.

- Oscar Wilde (aka. Butch Oscar)

• It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

- Albert Einstein (24 March 1954. In *Albert Einstein: The Human Side* , Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, eds., Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 38.)

• I think natural theology is like most of philosophy: an activity that cannot be prevented despite numerous sincere attempts.

- Gene Ward Smith

• The only good scientific paper, is a read one

- Me

• Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

- Salvor Hardin (Isaac Asimov)

• An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

- Quentin Crisp

• I'm determined to live forever, or die trying.

- Yossarian ('Catch 22', Joseph Heller)

• Did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a dog?

- Suzanne Vega (The Guardian, Thursday, August 27, 1992)

• If only politicians and economists just talked about the things they fully understood - the silence would be wonderful.

- Kevin Goldstein-Jackson (Financial Times, 19/20 July 1996)

• The things we do to the planet are not offensive nor do they pose a geophysiological threat, unless we do them on a large enough scale. If there were only 500 million people on Earth, almost nothing that we are now doing to the environment would perturb Gaia.

- James Lovelock ('The Ages of Gaia', 1989, Oxford University Press)

• In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

- Ethan Allen ('Reason the Only Oracle of Man', pamphlet, 1784)

• A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think that when Christ returns, the first thing he's going to want to see is another fucking cross?!?

- Bill Hicks

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree ...

- Charles Dickens ('A Tale of Two Cities')

• Science knows no country because it is the light that illuminates the world.

- Pasteur

• In Istanbul, I met a man who said he knew beyond a doubt that God was a cat. I asked why he was so sure, and the man said, `When I pray to him, he ignores me.'

- Lowell Thomas ('Cat Angels')

• It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to zero as makes no odds, so the average populations of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

- Douglas Adams ('The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy')

• Guess kids these days just can't tell their gravity from their rotating frame of reference.

- Iain M. Banks ('Consider Phlebas')

• Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes!!

- Captain James T. Kirk (Steven Martin, torgo@clark.net)

• Well I believe in the soul... the cock... the pussy... the small of a woman's back... the hangin' curveball... high fibre... good scotch... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap... I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. Goodnight.

- * Crash* Davies ('Bull Durham')

• People hate because they fear, and they fear because they do not understand, and they do not understand because hating is less work than understanding.

- Kenneth Collins (KPCollins@postoffice.worldnet.att.net)

• What is the use of a house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on.

- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

• In the long run, humanity has no choice but to rely on renewable energy. No matter how abundant they seem today, eventually coal and uranium will run out.

- Daniel Deudney and Christopher Flavin

• A continent ages quickly once we come.

- Ernest Hemingway

• The population of most less developed countries is doubling every twenty to thirty years. Trying to develop into a modern industrial state under these conditions is like trying to work out the choreography for a new ballet in a crowded subway car.

- Garrett Hardin

• Forests precede civilisations, deserts follow them.

- Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand

• We need that size of population in which human beings can fulfill their potentialities; in my opinion we are already overpopulated from that point of view, not just in places like India and China and Puerto Rico, but also in the United States and in Western Europe.

- George Wald (1906-1997), Nobel laureate, biology

• Does God give a prize for the maximum number of human beings?

- Garrett Hardin

• I've got a vagina, and I'm not afraid to use it!

- Lisa White

• It is the glory of science that it finds the patterns in spite of the noise.

- Daniel Dennett

• God is a dumb answer to any question.

- Tony Lawrence (apl@world.std.com)

• Men, it appears, would rather believe than know. They would rather have the void as purpose than be void of purpose.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

• We go away from our parents in youth and then we gradually come back to them; and in that moment, we have grown up.

- Ingmar Bergman

• Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers ... choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch and watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life ... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

- Mark Renton ('Trainspotting')

• He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension.

- Kurt Vonnegut ('Breakfast of Champions', 1973)

• I think it would be a good idea.

- Mahatma Gandhi (when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation)

• This is America. We don't silence our women with violence - we use fashion, diet, and psychotherapy.

- Roseanne

• McJOB : A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satifying career choice by people who have never held one.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• BRAZILIFICATION : The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• VACCINATED TIME TRAVEL : To fantasize about travelling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• NOW DENIAL : To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to the Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and still there are some misfits who insist there is no such thing as progress.

- Ransom K. Ferm ('The Sirens of Titan' by Kurt Vonnegut, 1959)

• Any smoothly functioning technology will be indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

- Isaac Asimov

• A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th century England.

- Richard Saul Wurman ('Information Anxiety')

• Every day, approximately 20 million words of technical information are recorded. A reader capable of reading 1,000 words per minute would require 1.5 months, reading eight hours a day, to get through one day's output, and at the end of that period he would have fallen 5.5 years behind in his reading.

- Hubert Murray Jr. ('Methods for Satisfying the Needs of the

Scientist and the Engineer for Scientific and Technical Communication')

• More new information has been produced within the last 30 years than in the last 5,000. Over 9,000 periodicals are published in the United States each year, and almost 1,000 books are published daily around the world.

- Susan Hubbard ('Information Skills for an Information Society')

• Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

- John Wheeler

• ... nonlinear systems are surely the rule, the the exception, outside the physical sciences.

- Robert M. May, 1974

• The choice is always the same. You can make your model more complex and more faithful to reality, or you can make it simpler and easier to handle. Only the most naive scientist believes that the perfect model is the one that perfectly represents reality.

- James Gleick ('Chaos', 1987)

• The three laws of thermodynamics :

  1. You can't win
  2. You are sure to lose
  3. You can't get out of the game

- Garrett Hardin

• Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats his whole life. Teach a village to fish, they depopulate the lake

- Matt Silberstein (netperson, matts2@ix.netcom.com)

• Hiroshima 45, Chernobyl 86, Windows 95

- M. W. Vogel (netperson, mvogel@ic.uva.nl)

• Archduke Franz Ferdinand found alive! World War I fought by mistake!

- William Dale Robertson (netperson, webcelt1@airmail.net)

• It seems you feel our work is not of benefit to the public.

- Rachel ('BladeRunner')

• The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.

- St. Augustine (354-430)

• A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there

- Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882)

• Newton sat in an orchard, and an apple, plumping down on his head, started a train of thought which opened the heavens to us. Had it been in California, the size of the apples there would have saved him the trouble of much thinking thereafter, perhaps, opening the heavens to him, and not to us.

- Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), American clergyman [clipped from *The Courier-Journal,* Louisville, KY]

• Physics-envy is the curse of biology.

- Joel Cohen

• The species of whale known as the black right whale has four kilos of brains and 1,000 kilos of testicles. If it thinks at all, we know what it is thinking about.

- Jon Lien (Professor, St. John's University, Newfoundland)

• Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

- Ashley Montague

• Yesterday we looked for little bits of a few things in some things; today we look for less of more things in anything; tomorrow we will look for nothing in everything.

- Dr. Francis Gunther (father of pesticides, on detecting infinitesimal quantities of pesticides in food)

• Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

• As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life ::- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.*

- Matt Cartmill

• In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

- Paul Dirac

• Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on.

- Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

• If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Do not trouble me with your concerns with Mathematics. I assure you, mine are greater.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

• You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? [pauses to light cigarette.] No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, * It's not what you know...*

- Karl Arbeiter (former teacher of Albert Einstein)

• Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a maasurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery.

- Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)

• First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

- Richard Feynman

• I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

- Richard Feynman

• I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

- Galileo Galilei

• It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.

- Sherlock Holmes

• Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!

- Alfred E. Neuman

• Science is built upon facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science that a heap of stones is a house.

- Henri Poincare'

• We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

- Carl Sagan

• One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

- J. D. Watson

• Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

- H. H. Williams

• No doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington, after passing through the hands of French cook, would have made good food

- John Muir

• I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

--P.G. Wodehouse

• I'm not wringing my hands, I'm drying my nails!

- Margaret Atwood

• If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.

- Robert X. Cringely

The story goes that a [Russian?] mathematician, suspecting that the government bakery was fraudulently baking undersized loaves, began weighing his weekly bread ration. The result was a normal distribution with a mean that was significantly lower than the official quota, and so he challenged the bakery. Thereafter, the mathematician received only loaves that were greater than or equal to the quota. However, his new distribution of loaves resembled the tail of a normal distribution which was still centered below the quota, and he was able to use this as evidence to challenge the bakery again.

- Anonymous

• Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

- Robert Benchley

• Just remember, in 10 years no one will care. In fact most people probably don't care right now.

- Conrad E. Muller

• A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

- Paul Erdos

• Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

- Francis Crick

• 1935 will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.

- Adolf Hitler

• As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!

- Jack Handy

• You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

- Anne Lamot

• Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

- Samuel Johnson

• I tried to make it unpleasant for the machine.

- G. Kasparov

• Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.

- Henry Kissinger

• A)bort, R)etry, B)uy a Macintosh?

- Anonymous

• I really take exception to having the compiler treat me like a moron.

- Greg Kaiser

• The wages of sin are death, but after taxes are taken out, it's just a tired feeling.

- Paula Poundstone

• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

- Albert Einstein

• The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots.

- Paul Ginsparg

• The reasonable microbiologist adapts himself to the microbial world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the microbial world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable microbe.

- D. Mirelman

• I used to think the brain was the most interesting organ, until I thought: What is it that's telling me this?

- Emo

• Bischoff, one of the leading anatomists of Europe, thrived in the 1870s. He carefully measured brain weights, and after many years' accumulation of much data he observed that the average weight of a man's brain was 1350 grams, that of a woman only 1250 grams. This at once, he argued, was infallible proof of the mental superiority of men over women. Throughout his life he defended this hypothesis with the conviction of a zealot. Being the true scientist, he specified in his will that his own brain be added to his impressive collection. The postmortem examination elicited the interesting fact that his own brain weighed only 1245 grams.

- Scientific American (March, 1992)

• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.*

- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

• Television has brought murder back into the home ::- where it belongs.*

- Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

• Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.

- Richard Linklater (Slacker* , 1991)

• To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.

- Anatole France (1844-1924)

• The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

- Alfred North Whitehead

• The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

• All Bibles are man-made.

- Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

• 'The Good Book' ::- one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

- Ashley Montagu

• Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

• If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

- Florynce Kennedy

• 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 (1889-1945; * Mein Kampf)

• A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?

- Ronald Reagan (opposing expansion of Redwood National Park, 1966)

• I have opinions of my own ::- strong opinions ::- but I don't always agree with them.

- George Bush (1924- )

• We don't have to protect the environment ::- the Second Coming is at hand.

- James Watt (1938- )

• A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office that a Republican wants.

- Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956; US Vice President 1949-1953)

• Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

• Capitalism will kill competition.

- Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950; * The Rejected Statement)

• I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

• America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)

• 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

- Kurt Vonnegut ('Breakfast of Champions', 1973)

• Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.

- Julian Jaynes

• You can't say civilization isn't advancing: In every war, they kill you in a new way.*

- Will Rogers (1879-1935)

• I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.*

- Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (1903-1989)

• Art is I; Science is we.

- Claude Bernard

• I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art anyone could ever want to own.

- Andy Warhol

• Give me four parameters and I'll draw you an elephant. Give me five, and I'll waggle its trunk.

- Linus Pauling

• It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.*

- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

• Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.

- Edward Abbey (b.1927)

• A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

- Granville Hicks (1901-1982)

• Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.

- Marvin G. Gregory

• No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

• I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.

- Emile Henry Gauvreay

• It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

• Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after 'Silent Spring' ... detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies.

- Garrett Hardin ('Filters Against Folly', 1985)

• A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future. By constrast, those who, for whatever reason, regard the resources at their disposal as an inheritance from the past that they feel obliged to pass on to their descendants, have a better chance of producing future generations prosperous enough to be able to continue to wrestle with the problems of increasing the quality of life.

- Garrett Hardin ('Filters Against Folly', 1985)

• We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

- Professor Robert Silensky (University of California)

• God offers every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please ::- you can never have both.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• But if I had to perish twice, // I think I know enough of hate // To say that for destruction ice // Is also great // And would suffice.

- Robert Frost

• To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

- Jules Henri Poincare

• We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes *the world* is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

• A .sig is a tail-feather tacked on to a turd.

- Tak Eeyawn

• Felson's Law: To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; To steal from many is research.

• Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

• 186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.

• We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes * the world* is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

• UNFAIR : Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHANDED and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.

- John Brunner ('Stand on Zanzibar')

• In Germany, they first came for the communists, // and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. // Then they came for the jews, // and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a jew. // Then they came for the trade unionists, // and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. // Then they came for the homosexuals, and I didn't speak up // because I wasn't a homosexual. // Then they came for the catholics, and I didn't speak up // because I was a protestant. // Then they came for me -- // but by that time there was no one left to speak up.

- Pastor Martin Neimoller

• We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.

- Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

• The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.

- Edsger Dijkstra

• Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

- Lenny Bruce

• God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

- Stephen Hawking

• Resolved, that the 67th General Convention affirm the glorious ability of God to create in any manner, whether men understand it or not, and in this affirmation reject the limited insight and rigid dogmatism of the 'Creationist' movement.

- from a 1982 resolution of the Episcopal Church

• The pyramid [of science] may be disrespectfully summed up by an old saying : the physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God (though you may be hard pressed to find a mathematician that modest).

- Leon Lederman ('The God Particle')

• There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. ... On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. ... Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, `But how can it be like that?', because you will get `down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

- Richard Feynman (1967; 1918-1988)

• In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

- Homer J. Simpson

• Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.

- Richard Dawkins

• JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness.

- Anonymous programmer

• Men are like parking spaces : the best ones are taken and the only ones left are handicapped!

- Stacey Hill (stacey@xtra.co.nz)

7,140   pounds on the Sun
   97   pounds on Mercury or Mars
  255   pounds on Earth
  232   pounds on Venus or Uranus
   43   pounds on the Moon
  648   pounds on Jupiter
  275   pounds on Saturn
  303   pounds on Neptune
   13   pounds on Pluto
How much Elvis Presley would weigh at various places in the solar system.

- Anonymous

• How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when clearly it is Ocean.

- Arthur C. Clarke

• Let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

- T. H. Huxley (1894)

• Being gay, the last time I looked, had nothing to do with reading a balance book, fixing a broken bone or changing a spark plug.

- Bill Clinton

• Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all of these identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

- Robert Wright ('The Moral Animal', 1994)

• The discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. ... Understanding this discovery can undermine commitment to morality - it seems silly to retrain oneself if moral behaviour is just another strategy for advancing the interests of one's genes.

- Randolph Nesse, 1994

• Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

- Garrett Hardin, 1968

• ... there was morality before the Church; trade before the state; exchange before money; social contracts before Hobbes; welfare before the rights of man; culture before Babylon; society before Greece; self-interest before Adam Smith; and greed before capitalism.

- Matt Ridley ('The Origins of Virtue', 1996)

• Karl Marx designed a social system that would only have worked if we were angels; it failed because we were beasts.

- Matt Ridley ('The Origins of Virtue', 1996)

• Taught in the 1980s, against our better natures, to be selfish and greedy we have dropped our civic responsibilities and caused our societies to descend into amorality.

- Matt Ridley ('The Origins of Virtue', 1996)

• I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word 'Communism' is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, 'Communists', just as Hitler called himself, hey presto, a 'Christian'.

- Kurt Vonnegut ('Timequake', 1997)

• Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!

- Kurt Vonnegut ('Timequake', 1997)

• Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

- Kurt Vonnegut ('Timequake', 1997)

• They asked me to go in front of the Reagans. I'm not used to going in front of President Reagan, so we went out behind the Bushes.

- Dan Quayle (former U.S. Vice President)

• HISTORICAL SLUMMING : The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages - locations where timeappears to have been frozen many years back - so as to experience relief when one returns to * the present* .

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• DORIAN GRAYING : The unwillingness to gracefully allow one's body to show signs of aging.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• THE TENS : The first decade of a new century.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• GREEN DIVISION : To know the difference between envy and jealousy.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• KNEE-JERK IRONY : The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• DERISION PREEMPTION : A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. _Derision_preemption_ is the main goal of _Knee-jerk_irony_.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• OPTION PARALYSIS : The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION : Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• PAPER RABIES : Hypersensitivity to littering.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• AIR FAMILY : Describes the false sense of community experienced among coworkers in an office environment.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• REBELLION POSTPONEMENT : The tendency in one's youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• POOR BUOYANCY : The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• VOTER'S BLOCK : The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• THE EMPEROR'S NEW MALL : The popular notion that shopping malls exist on the insides only and have no exterior. The suspension of visual belief engendered by this notion allows shoppers to pretend that the large, cement blocks thrust into their environment do not, in fact, exist.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• CULT OF ALONENESS : The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• BAMBIFICATION : The mental conversion of flesh-and-blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• OVERBOARDING : Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous interests; i.e. Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs ....

- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X', 1991)

• Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?

- Katherine Whitehorn

• When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

- Oscar Wilde

• I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

• If God dropped acid, would he see people?

- Steven Wright

• I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

- Willa Cather

• I don't believe in astrology, but then again, I'm an aquarius, and aquarians don't believe in astrology.

- Anonymous

• If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?

- Richard Nixon

• To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

- Woody Allen

• It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.

- Phil White

• BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• In India, * cold weather* is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

- Mark Twain

• Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: * Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?* , etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for.

- Dave Barry

• MANUAL, n.: A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need in in the others.

- Ray Simard

• I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

- Mark Twain

• CORRUPT, adj. In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.

- Ronald Reagan

• Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

- Mark Twain

• I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

- Hunter S. Thompson

• If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

• COMMITMENT, n.: Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

- Anonymous

• Razors pain you; // Rivers are damp; // Acids stain you; // And drugs cause cramp. // Guns aren't lawful; // Nooses give; // Gas smells awful; // You might as well live.

- Dorothy Parker

• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

- Dwight Eisenhower (April 16, 1953)

• ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.

- Ronald Reagan

• RELIEF, n. Waking up early on a cold morning to find that it's Sunday.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• RELIGION, n. A goodly tree, in which all the foul birds of the air have made their nests.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• RELIGION, n. The daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• RUIN, n. What our millionaires are coming to if they have to pay taxes.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• SELF, n. The most important person in the universe.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• TENACITY, n. A certain quality of the human hand in its relation to the coin of the realm. It attains its highest development in the hand of authority and is considered a serviceable equipment for a career in politics.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• TWICE, adv. Once too often.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• ULTIMATUM, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• UN-AMERICAN, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• UNIVERSALIST, n. One who forgoes the advantage of a Hell for persons of another faith.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• VOTE, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• WHITE, adj. and n. Black.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

- Ambrose Bierce ('The Devil's Dictionary')

• Any girl can be glamourous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid.

- Hedy Lamarr

• (On going to war over religion) You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.

- Rich Jeni

• The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat'.

- Rich Jeni

• My cousin just died. He was only 19. He got stung by a bee - the natural enemy of a tightrope walker.

- Emo Philips

• Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you're in.

- Rich Jeni

• Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps.

- Ren Hicks

• I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

- Emo Philips

• The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.

- Ronald Firbank

• A good listener is usually thinking about something else.

- Kin Hubbard

• We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

- E. M. Cioran ('The Trouble With Being Born')

• Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

- Jmes Thurber

• Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

- Don Marquis

• The world is divided into people who do things ::- and people who get the credit.

- Dwight Morrow

• I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

- John Mortimer

• Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

- Mark Twain

• You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

- Quentin Crisp

• The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

- Henry Louis Mencken

• I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.

- Lily Tomlin

• When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, pee in it, and serve it to the people that piss you off.

- Jack Handy ('Deep Thoughts')

• If you're ashamed of being a wallflower, imagine how the wall feels.

- Jacob Churosh

• The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

- Anatole France

• Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

- Jorge Luis Borges

• A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

- Elbert Hubbard

• To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

- Gustave Flaubert

• One of the keys to happiness is a real bad memory.

- Rita Mae Brown

• It was such a lovely day, I thought it a pity to get up.

- W. Somerset Maugham

• Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

- Bernard Berenson

• Democracy consists of choosing your own dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

- Alan Coren

• Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

• I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.

- Charles Schultz

• Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

- Jonathan Swift

• I only drink to make other people seem interesting.

- George Jean Nathan

• The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

- Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)

• Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

- Mark Twain

• The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist knows it.

- J. Robert Oppenheimer

• Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

- Aldous Huxley

• Life does not cease to be funny when people die anymore than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

- G.B. Shaw

• He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

- Albert Einstein

• Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it.

- James Gibbons Huneker

• Life is something to do when you can't get to sleeep.

- Fran Lebowitz

• My God - it's full of ads!

- Fry, 2001-esque, on entering the internet (Futurama)

• Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.

- W. C. Fields (My Little Chickadee)

• A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

- Narrator ('Fight Club', 1999)

• I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

- George W. Bush (Saginaw, MI, 29/09/00)

• It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.

- George W. Bush (Beaverton, OR, 25/09/00)

• Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

- George W. Bush (Florence, SC, 11/01/00)

• There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate

• Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

- Alfred Hitchcock

• If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.

- Lily Tomlin

• Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms.

- Alan Coren

• Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your own living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

- David Frost

• Television - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.

- Ernie Kovacs

• The human race is faced with a cruel choice : work or daytime television.

- Anonymous

• I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

- Groucho Marx, 1890-1977

• The great thing about television is that if something important happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the channel.

- From * Taxi

• Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked Brightness, but it doesn't work.

- Gallagher

• One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be a victim of violent crime. A day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all of the things that could have gone wrong didn't. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

- Douglas Coupland ('All Families Are Psychotic')

• I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half-empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.

- Janeane Garofalo

• Marx was wrong. Religion isn't the opiate of the masses. It's more like an overdose of PCP. The crusades certainly weren't initiated by a bunch of dopeheads.

• One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

- Oscar Wilde

• Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea ... We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex ... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961)

• Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961)

• Doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into patients of whom they know nothing.

- Moliere (1622-1673)

• Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

- Franklin P. Jones

• The evolution of plants is an important chapter in the history of life. However, it's a pretty dull chapter, so we'll skip it.

- Tom Weller

• Raysey's rules: 1. It's not wins, it's the value. 2. It's not the betting, it's the knowing when not to. 3. It's not the nags, it's the other punters. 4. Never bet shorter than 3 to 1.

- Graham Swift ('Last Orders', 1996)