Natural Laws have no pity.
     Lazarus Long
     (Robert Anson Heinlein)

It is better for civilization to be going
down the drain than coming up it.
     Henry Allen,
     The Washington Post

In the pursuit of happiness, the
difficulty lies in knowing when you have
caught up.
   R. H. Grenville.

You can lead a horticulture, but you
can't make her think.
     Dorothy Parker

Misery no longer loves company.  Nowadays
it insists on it.
     Russell Baker

You always find something the last place
you look.
     Arthur Bloch

Remember the Finagle Laws.  The
perversity of the universe tends toward
a maximum.  The universe is hostile.
    Louis Wu (Ringworld)

Democracy is that form of government
where everyone gets what the majority
deserves.
     James Dale Davidson

You have taken yourself too seriously.
     The Fifth, and only, rule of
     the British diplomatic service

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper
it's written on.
     Samuel Goldwyn

In the fight between you and the world,
back the world.
     Franz Kafka

You're not drunk if you can lie on the
floor without holding on.
     Dean Martin

The American people aren't interested in
details.
     Lyn Nofziger

The optimist thinks this is the best of
all possible worlds, and the pessimist
knows it is.
     J. Robert Oppenheimer

Celibacy is not hereditary.
     Guy Godin

If an organization carries the word
United in its title, it means it isn't.
     Charles I. Issawi

If you're confident after you've just
finished an exam, it's because you don't
know enough to know better.
     Jay Weisman

The bigger the appropriations bill, the
shorter the debate.
     Senator James Abourezk

An infallible way of conciliating a tiger
is to allow oneself to be devoured.
     Dr. Konrad Adenauer

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of
me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
     Fred Allen

Do not fix the mistake - Fix the blame.
     George Barbarow

Did you hear about the guy who married a
horse because he wanted a stable
relationship?

A 1969 District of Columbia Court of
Appeals decision on Breathalyzer tests
rules that for the test to be valid the
drunk-driving defendant must be sober
enough to give voluntary, informed
consent to letting the test be
administered.
     The Washington Star
     April 16, 1979

The problem drinker is the one who never
buys.
     Charles Conrad III

Just before being blasted off into
orbit Astronaut Walter Schirra was
asked by Dr.  E.R. Annis, "What
concerns you the most?" Schirra
thought, and then replied, "Every time
I climb up on the couch [in the capsule]
I say to myself, 'Just think, Wally,
everything that makes this thing go was
supplied by the lowest bidder.'

The law, in its majestic equality, for-
bids the rich as well as the poor to
sleep under bridges, to beg in the
streets, and to steal bread.
     Anatole France

If there is anything in the theory of
survival of the fittest, a lot of the
people we know must have been overlooked.
     Col. William C. Hunter

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he
helped design.  Unlike most automobiles,
it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage,
nor any of the numerous idiot lights
which plague the modern driver.  Rather,
if the driver makes any mistake, a giant
"?" lights up in the center of the dash-
board.  "The experienced driver", he
says, "will usually know what's wrong."

Shunning women, liquor, gambling,
smoking, and eating will not make one
live longer.  It will only seem that
way.
     Master Sergeant Robert V. Larson,
     USAF [retired]

The age of our universe is a function of
time.
     Professor Walter Lewin, M.I.T.

They call being a doctor practicing be-
cause when you get it right you can quit.
     D. Wylie Jordan, M.D.

The sooner you fall behind, the more time
you have to catch up.
     Sam Ogden

Nobody is too old to learn, but a lot of
people keep putting it off.
     William O'Neill

Lemmings know something we don't
     A.W. Quinn

Q:   Why do ducks have flat feet?
A:   To stamp out forest fires.
Q:   Why do elephants have flat feet?
A:   To stamp out flaming ducks.

The streets are safe in Philadelphia,
it's only the people who make them un-
safe.
     Philadelphia Mayor,
     Frank Rizzo

You are where you eat.
     Pierre Salinger

If love is the answer, could you rephrase
the question.
     Lily Tomlin

Concerning coeds: If all those sweet
young things were laid end to end, I
wouldn't be at all surprised.
     Dorothy Parker

I'm tired of all this nonsense about
beauty being only skin deep.  That's deep
enough.  What do you want, an adorable
pancreas?
     Jean Kerr

Brides aren't happy - they are just 
triumphant.
     John Barrymore

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

I like children.  If they're properly
cooked.
     W.C. Fields

Christ died for our sins.  Dare we make
his martyrdom meaningless by not commit-
ting them?
     Jules Feiffer

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: 
cut it.
     Alfred Hitchcock

Style is the ability to always look good. 
Fashion is the willingness to  always
look foolish.

I only drink to make other people seem
interesting.
     George Jean Nathan

A casual stroll through the lunatic
asylum shows that faith does not prove
anything.
     Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The good die young - because they see
it's no use living if you've got to be
good.
     John Barrymore

If you can't say anything good about
someone, sit right here by me.
     Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The Jews are a frightened people.  Nine-
teen centuries of Christian love have
broken down their nerves.
     Israel Zangwill

A liberal is a man too broadminded to
take his own side in a quarrel.
     Robert Frost

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

A man is as old as the woman he feels.
     Groucho Marx

It is well to read everything of some-
thing, and something of everything.    
Henry Brougham

My generation of Canadians grew up be-
lieving that, if we were very good  or
very smart, we would someday graduate
from Canada.
    Robert Fulford

You cannot run away from a weakness. 
You must sometimes fight it out or
perish; and if that be so, why not now,
and where you stand.
    Robert Louis Stevenson

It is less important to redistribute
wealth than it is to redistribute
opportunity.
    Arthur H. Vandenberg

All the strength and force of man comes
from his faith in things unseen. He who
believes is strong; he who doubts is
weak.  Strong convictions precede great
actions.
    J. F. Clarke

Business is like a man rowing a boat up-
stream.  He has no choice; he must go
ahead or he will go back.
    Lewis E. Pierson

The product that will not sell without
advertising will not sell profitably with
advertising.
    Albert Lasker

There are only two forces that unite men
- fear and interest.
    Napoleon Bonaparte

Florida:  God's waiting room
    Glenn le Grice

What is a committee?  A group of the
unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do
the unnecessary.
    Richard Harkness

Whenever you see a successful business,
someone once made a courageous decision.
    Peter Drucker

Economy is half the battle of life; it is
not so hard to earn money as to spend it
well.
    Spurgeon

It is dangerous for a national candidate
to say things that people might remember.
     Eugene McCarthy

When I was a boy I was told that anybody
could become President; I'm beginning to
believe it.
     Clarence Darrow

The trouble with the rat race is that
even if you win, you're still a rat.
     Lily Tomlin

Self-respect: The secure feeling that no
one, as yet, is suspicious.
     H.L. Mencken

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in
moderation.
     John Ciardi

Lead me not into temptation; I can find
the way myself.
     Rita Mae Brown

Most people would die sooner than think;
in fact, they do so.
     Bertrand Russell

I take life seriously, life just doesn't
take me seriously.
     Robert A. Heinlein, in "Tunnel In
     The Sky"

Always remember first rule of success in
mathematics:  Plagiarize!
     Tom Lehrer

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted
to the heavenly ether, and there will be
plenty of people unafraid of the empty
wastes.
      - Johannes Kepler -

Far better it is to dare mighty things,
to win glorious  triumphs, even though
checkered by failure, than to take rank 
with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
nor suffer much,  because they live in
the gray twilight that knows not victory 
or defeat.
      - Theodore Roosevelt -

Mankind will not remain on Earth
forever, but in its quest for light and
space will at first timidly penetrate
beyond  the atmosphere, and later will
conquer for itself all the space near
the sun.
      - Konstantin Tsiolkovski -

If you think the United States has stood
still, who built the largest shopping
center in the world?
      - Richard M. Nixon -

I'm not smart.  I try to observe.  Mil-
lions saw the apple fall but Newton was
the one who asked why.
      - B. Baruch -

We desire to open the planetary worlds to
mankind.
      - Wernher von Braun -

Set me anything to do as a task, and it
is inconceivable the  desire I have to do
something else.
      - G. B. Shaw -

Every improvement in communication makes
the bore more terrible.
      - F. M. Colby -

Leadership is making people do what they
don't want to do, and liking it.
      - H. S. Truman -

You can get much further with a kind word
and a gun than you can with a kind word
alone.
      - Al Capone -

Part of my job as a coach is to keep the
five guys who hate me away from the five
guys who are undecided.
      - Casey Stengel -

One man's red tape is another man's
system.
      - D. Waldo -

What's worth doing is worth doing for
money.
      - J. Donohue -

We are voyagers on the Earth through
space, as passengers on a ship, and many
of us have never thought of any part of
the vessel; but the cabin where we are
quartered.
      - S. P. Langley -

The universe begins to look more like a
great thought than a great machine.
      - Sir James Jeans -

Now my own suspicion is that the universe
is not only queerer than we suppose but
queerer than we can suppose.
      - J. B. S. Haldane -

It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more near the Earth than she
was wont,
And makes men mad.
      - William Shakespeare -

Astronomy offers one of those pleasures
which follows the law of increasing,
rather than diminishing, returns.  The
more you develop it, the more you enjoy
it.
      - Viscount Grey -

What is it all but a trouble of ants in
the gleam of a million million suns?
     - Alfred, Lord Tennyson -

This is the goal:  To make available for
life every place where life is possible;
to make inhabitable all worlds as yet
uninhabitable and all life purposeful.
      - Dr. Herman Oberth -

Anything anybody can say about America is
true.
      - Emmett Grogan -

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my
mind the most.

Pessimists have already begun to worry
about what is going to  replace 
automation.
      - John Tudor -

Each time we changed our environment, our
environment changed our behaviour, and
our new behaviour demanded a new 
environment.
      - Laurence J. Peter -

The totality is present even in the 
broken pieces.
      - Aldous Huxley -

I believe now that we are all psychic to
some degree but that some of us welcome
these experiences, while others fear then
and shut them out.
      - Vanna White -

I have long considered it on of God's
greatest mercies that the future is hid-
den from us.  If it were not, life would
surely be unbearable.
      - Eugene Forsey -

We seem to believe it is possible to ward
off death by following rules of good
grooming.
      - Dom DeLillo -

The world stands aside to let anyone pass
who knows where he is going.
      - David Starr Jordan -

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying
the truth.
      - Lillian Hellman -

Behind every successful is a surprised
woman.
      - Maryon Pearson -

We should distrust any enterprise that
requires new clothes.
      - David Henry Thoreau -

As far as the laws of mathematics refer
to reality, they are not certain; and as
far as they are certain, they do not re-
fer to reality.
      - Albert Einstein -

In each of seven houses there are seven
cats, each cat kills seven mice, each
mouse would have eaten seven hekat of
grain.  How much grain is saved by the
cats?
      - Ahmose the Scribe -

Such a funny, sporty, savvy, jesty, hoky-
poky lad the ocean is, oh!
      - Herman Melville -

Tip the world over on it's side and ev-
erything loose will land in Los Angeles.
      - Frank Lloyd Wright -

If you've seen one city slum, you've seen
them all.
      - Spiro Agnew -

If you've seen one redwood, you've seen
them all.
      - Ronald Reagan -

He who shits on the road will meet flies
on his return.
      - South African Saying -

Use it up... wear it out.
Make it do... or do without.
     US World War II message

The end move in politics is always to
pick up a gun.
      - Buckminster Fuller -

I always keep a supply of stimulant handy
in case I see snake . . . which I also
keep handy.
      - W. C. Fields -

Things are more like they are now than
they ever were before.
      - Dwight D. Eisenhower -

You smash it - and I'll build around it.
      - John Lennon -

College isn't the place to go for ideas.
      - Hellen Keller -

Politicians should read science fiction,
not westerns and detective stories.
      - Arthur C. Clarke -

America, how can I write a holy litany in
your silly mood?
      - Allen Ginsberg -

It is necessary for me to establish a
winner image.  Therefore, I have to beat
somebody.
      - Richard M. Nixon -

Any smoothly functioning technology will
have the appearance of magic.
      - Arthur C. Clarke -

We lived for days on nothing but food and
water.
      - W. C. Fields -

Justice is incidental to law and order.
      - J. Edgar Hoover -

Writing documentation is like trying to
put wheels and tires on a moving truck.
      - Tom Granahan -

Military intelligence is a contradiction
in terms.
      - Groucho Marx -

The first duty of a revolutionary is to
get away with it.
      - Abbie Hoffman -

Stay out of the road, if you want to grow
old.
      - Pink Floyd -

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't
know what I want to be when I grow up.
      - Peter Drucker -

How can you be two places at once when
you're not anywhere at all?
      - Firesign Theater -

I think that God in creating Man somewhat
overestimated his ability.
      - Oscar Wilde -

We are what we pretend to be.
      - Kurt Vonnegut -

We are all in the gutter, but some of us
are looking at the stars.
      - Oscar Wilde -

I could prove God statistically.
      - George Gallup -

My religion consists of a humble admira-
tion of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details
we are able to perceive with our frail
and feeble mind.
      - Albert Einstein -

Real wealth can only increase.
      - Buckminster Fuller -

Anyone can hate.  It costs to love.
      - John Williamson -

In the province of the mind, what one
believes to be true either is true or it
becomes true.
      - John Lilly -

Time is an illusion perpetrated by the
manufacturers of space.
      - Graffiti -

The most incomprehensible thing about the
world is that it is comprehensible.
      - Albert Einstein -

Nobody can be exactly like me.  Even I
have trouble doing it.
      - Tallulah Bankhead -

A physicist is an atoms way of knowing
about atoms.
      - George Wald -

Don't lose
Your head
To gain a minute
You need your head
Your brains are in it.
      - Burma Shave -

It was always thus; and even if 'twere
not, 'twould inevitably have been always
thus.
      - Dean Lattimer -

We don't know who discovered water, but
we are certain it wasn't a fish.
      - John Culkin -

Try to be the best of what you are, even
if what you are is no good.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

I waited and waited, and when no message
came, I knew it must have been from you.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

If a man understands one woman, he should
let it go at that.
      - Bob Edwards -

Please don't lie to me, unless you're
absolutely sure I'll never find out the
truth.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

There are some men who get more satisfac-
tion out of their ignorance than most
learned men get out of their knowledge.
      - Peter McArthur -

Please don't ask me what the score is,
I'm not even sure what the game is.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

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

I either want less corruption, or more
chance to participate in it.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

If you can't learn to do it well, learn
to enjoy doing it badly.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

The most certain test by which we judge
whether a country is really free is the
amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
      - Lord Acton -

Good hockey should be a game of speed,
stick-handling, and skating.  If people
want violence, they should go to the wre-
stling matches.
      - Fred Taylor -

Great literature is any old stuff you can
read without disgust.
      - Louis Dudet -

If women are expected to do the work as
men we must teach them the same things.
      - Plato -

A life spent in making mistakes is not
only more honorable but more useful than
a life spent doing nothing.
      - George Bernard Shaw -

Be nice to people on your way up because
you'll need them on the way down.
      - Wilson Mizner -

I don't have any solution, but I certain-
ly admire the problem.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

Living is more a question of what one
spends rather than what one makes.
      - Marcel Duchamp -

The only difference between myself and a
madman is that I am not mad.
      - Salvador Dali -

Today's robots are very primitive,
capable of understanding only a few
simple instruction such as 'go left',
'go right', and 'build car.'
      - John Sladek -

Pedestrians never seem to realize that
they are a threat to the safety of cars.
      - Thomas Sowell -

Any sight is a sum of different glimpses.
      - Robert Hughes -

Writing free verse is like playing tennis
with the net down.
      - Robert Frost -

A national debt, if it is not excessive,
will be to us a national blessing.
      - Alexander Hamilton -

Whenever I hear the word 'culture'.  I
reach for my revolver.
      - Hermann Goring -

Looking for temporary Edens is a
perpetual lure certainly not confined to
writers, who sooner or later discover
that the islands of their existence
are, in truth, the tops of their desks.
      - Alastair Reid -

Eternity is a mere moment, just long
enough for a joke.
      - Hermann Hesse -

To avert disaster we have to not only
teach men to make things but also produce
people who have complete moral control
over the things they make.
      - Prince Charles -

In the fight between you and the world,
back the world.
      - Frank Zappa -

Myths are public dreams.  Dreams are pri-
vate myths.
      - Joseph Campbell -

With the exception of man, no being won-
ders at his own existence.
      - Arthur Schopenhauer -

It is a mark of modern ignorance to
think that we have become progressively
smarter...
      - Thomas Goldstein -

The follies which a man regret most in
his life are those that he didn't commit
when he had the opportunity.
      - Helen Rowland -

Realism...  has more to do with reality
than anything else.
      - Hob Broun -

The large brain, like large government,
may not be able to do simple things in a
simple way.
      - Donald O. Hebb -

Adventure is simply memory, imagination,
and a touch of fantasy.
      - Joan Bosveld -

There are three arts which are concerned
with all things; one which uses, another
which makes, and a third which imitates
them.
      - Plato -

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
to have a thankless child.
      - Shakespeare -

There is only one place inflation is made
in Canada, and that's Ottawa.
      - Milton Friedman -

A critic is a man who knows the way, but
can't drive the car.
      - Kenneth Tynan -

Laugh, and the whole world laughs with
you; weep, and you weep alone.
      - Ellen Wheller Wilcox -

Without heroes, we are all plain people
and don't know how far we can go.
      - Bernard Malamud -

A mother is not a person to lean on, but
a person to make leaning unnecessary.
      - Dorothy Canfield Fisher -

More persons, on the whole, are humbugged
by believing nothing, than by believing
too much.
      - Phineas T. Barnum -

The law is bigger than money, but only if
the law works hard enough.
      - Thomas E. Dewey -

Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly,
because I may be going in the wrong di-
rection.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

By doing just a little every day, I can
gradually let the task completely over-
whelm me.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot
first, and call whatever you hit the tar-
get.
      - Ashleigh Brilliant -

America is the only country that went
from barbarism to decadence without civi-
lization in between.
      - Oscar Wilde -

The flush toilet is the basis of Western
Civilization.
      - Alan Coult -

If the Aborigine drafted an IQ test, all
of Western Civilization would presumably
flunk it.
      - Stanley Garn -

The world looks as if it has been left in
the custody of trolls.
     Father Robert F. Capon

Sure there are dishonest men in local
government.  But there are dishonest men
in national government too.
      - Richard M. Nixon -

We are going to have peace even if we
have to fight for it.
      - Dwight D. Eisenhower -

If we make peaceful revolution impossi-
ble, we make violent revolution inevita-
ble.
      - John F. Kennedy -

"Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If
it was so, it might be; and if it were
so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain-
't.  That's logic."
      - Lewis Carroll -

It takes a long time to understand noth-
ing.
      - Edward Dahlberg -

To know the world one must construct it.
      - Cesare Pavese -

Eeny meeny, jelly beanie, the spirits are
about to speak.
      - Bullwinkle Moose -

The mistake you make is in trying to fig-
ure it out.
      - Tenessee Williams -

An object never serves the same function
as its image - or its name.
      - Rene Magritte -

All I kin say is when you finds yo'self
wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go
lookin' for rutabagas.
      - Kingfish -

He who wonders discovers that this in
itself is wonder.
      - M. C. Escher -

When more and more people are thrown out
of work, unemployment results.
      - Calvin Coolidge -

The first rule of intelligent tinkering
is to save all the parts.
      - Paul Erlich -

Sex is hereditary.  If your parents never
had it, chances are you won't either.
      - Joseph Fischer -

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:
If the probability of success is not al-
most one, then it is damn near zero.
      - David Ellis -

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not
its mineral rights.
      - J. Paul Getty -

Give a small boy a hammer and he will
find that everything he encounters needs
pounding.
      - Abraham Kaplan -

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever
you are doing, there is some ordinance
under which you can be booked.
     Robert D. Sprecht
     (Rand Corp)

Real knowledge is to know the extent of
ones ignorance.
      - Confucius -

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.
      - Book of Proverbs -

It usually takes more than three weeks to
prepare a good impromptu speech.
      - Mark Twain -

The unnatural, that too is natural.
      - Goethe -

I used to be indecisive; now I'm not
sure.
      - Graffiti -

I had a monumental idea this morning, but
I didn't like it.
      - Samuel Goldwyn -

He hasn't one redeeming vice.
      - Oscar Wilde -

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
      - Graffiti -

'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can
become famous without ability.
      - George Bernard Shaw -

Science has proof without any certainty. 
Creationists have certainty without any
proof.
      - Ashley Montague -

Birth, copulation, and death.  That's all
the facts when you come to brass tacks.
      - T. S. Elliot -

Make no little plans.  They have no magic
to stir men's blood.
      - D. B. Hudson -

Software suppliers are trying to make
their software packages more 'user-
friendly'.... their best approach, so
far, has been to take all the old
brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-
friendly' on the cover.
      - Bill Gates -

Eight things your computer won't do:
 1)  It won't save you money.
 2)  It won't make your organization run
     right.
 3)  It won't solve every problem.
 4)  It won't run itself.
 5)  It won't always be right.
 6)  It won't meet all its own needs.
 7)  It won't protect itself.
 8)  It won't become obsolete.
      - J. Makower -

Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose
his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most
likely a scoundrel.
      - H. L. Mencken -

The government of the United States is
not in any sense founded on the christian
religion.
      - George Washington -

In every country and every age, the
priest has been hostile to liberty.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

During almost fifteen centuries the legal
establishment of Christianity has been
upon trial.  What has been its fruits? 
More or less, in all places, pride and
indolence in the clergy; ignorance and
servility in the laity; in both, super-
stition, bigotry, and persecution.
      - James Madison -

Money, not morality, is the principle
commerce of civilized nations.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

We must all hang together, or we will
surely all hang separately.
      - Benjamin Franklin -

Where a new invention promises to be
useful, it ought to be tried.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

Assuming that either the left wing or the
right wing gained control of the country,
it would probably fly around in circles.
      - Pat Paulsen -

An intellectual is someone whose mind
watches itself.
      - Camus -

Six years for possession of a cigarette?
...I got six months for possession of a
deadly weapon.
      - Cartoon by S. Harris -

There is no choice before us.  Either
we must succeed in providing the
rational coordination of impulses and
guts, or for centuries civilization
will sink into a mere welter of minor
excitements.  We must provide a great
age or see the collapse of the upward
striving of the human race.
      - Alfred North Whitehead -

What do you call a boomerang that
doesn't work? A stick!
      - Bill Kirchenbaum -

To err is human, to compute divine. 
Trust your computer but not its
programmer.
      - Morris Kingston -

I've seen many politicians paralyzed in
the legs as myself, but I've seen more of
them who were paralyzed in the head.
      - George Wallace -

You don't have to explain something you
never said.
      - Calvin Coolidge -

A little caution outflanks a large
cavalry.
      - Bismarck -

A billion here, a billion there, sooner
or later it adds up to real money.
      - Everett Dirksen -

The personal computer market is about
the same size as the total potato chip
market.  Next year it will be about half
the size of the pet food market and is
fast approaching the total worldwide
sales of pantyhose.
      - James Finke -

I like a man who grins when he fights.
      - Winston Churchill -

There are a lot of lies going around...
And half of them are true.
      - Winston Churchill -

God runs electromagnetics by wave
theory on Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday, and the Devil runs them by
quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday,
and Saturday.
      - William Bragg -

Pioneering basically amounts to finding
new and more horrible ways to die.
      - John W. Campbell -

That man is richest whose pleasures are
cheapest.
      - Thoreau -

The meek will inherit the earth..... the
rest of us will go to the stars.

After all is said and done, a lot more
has been said than done.

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes
straight to the bone.

There is no remedy for sex but more sex.

Tell a man that there are 300 billion
stars in the universe, and he'll believe
you.... tell him that a bench has wet
paint upon it and he'll have to touch it
to be sure.

Discovery consists in seeing what every-
one else has seen and thinking what no
one else has thought.
      - Albert Szent-Gyorgi -

Revolution is the opiate of the
intellectuals.
      - Oh, Lucky Man -

I really hate this damn machine,
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does just what I want,
But only what I tell it.

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces
impossible monsters; united with it, she
is the mother of the arts and the origin
of marvels.
      - Goya -

Some people like my advice so much that
they frame it upon the wall instead of
using it.
      - Gordon R. Dickson -

Civilization is a movement, not a
condition; it is a voyage, not a
harbor.
      - Toynbee -

We have met the enemy and he is us.
      - Walt Kelly (in Pogo) -

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians,
who never committed adultery, are now
extinct.
      - M. Somerset Maugham -

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
      - Bert Lantz -

The one charm of marriage is that it
makes a life of deception a necessity.
      - Oscar Wilde -

God is a comedian playing to an audience
too afraid to laugh.
      - Voltaire -

Ode to Turbulent Flow:
Big whirls have little whirls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whirls have lesser whirls
And so on, to viscosity.

IBM uses what I like to call the 'hole-
in-the-ground technique' to destroy the
competition..... IBM digs a big hole in
the ground and covers it with leaves.  It
then puts a big pot of gold nearby.  Then
it gives the call, 'Hey, look at all this
gold, get over here fast.' As soon as the
competitor approaches the pot, he falls
into the pit.
      - John C. Dvorak -

There are things that are so serious that
you can only joke about them.
      - Heisenberg -

It takes all sorts of in & out-door
schooling to get adapted to my kind of
fooling.
      - R. Frost -

Confound these ancestors.... they've
stolen our best ideas!
      - Ben Jonson -

Radicals who would take us back to the
roots of things often fail because they
disregard the fruit Time has produced
and preserved.  Conservatives fail
because they would preserve even what
Time has decomposed.
      - Louis D. Brandeis -

Gravitation cannot be held responsible
for people falling in love.
      - Albert Einstein -

Science is the great antidote to the
poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
      - Adam Smith -

The man who never alters his opinion is
like standing water, and breeds reptiles
of the mind.
      - William Blake -

Religion - a daughter of Hope and Fear,
explaining to Ignorance the Nature of the
Unknowable.
      - Ambrose Bierce -

Imagination is more important than
knowledge.
      - Albert Einstein -

Science has done more for Western
Civilization in 100 years then
Christianity did in 1800 years.
      - John Burroughs -

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:
  1. A robot may not injure a human be-
     ing, or, through inaction, allow a
     human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given
     to it by human beings except where
     such orders would conflict with the
     First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own exis-
     tence as long as such protection
     does not conflict with the First or
     Second Law.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only
unfaithfulness to truth.
      - Thomas H. Huxley -

A peach
Looks good
With lots of fuzz.
But man's no peach
And never was.
      - Burma Shave -

Great spirits have always found violent
opposition from mediocrities.  The
latter cannot understand it when a man
does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and
courageously uses his intelligence and
fulfills the duty to express the
results of his thoughts in clear form.
      - Albert Einstein -

All the religion we have is the ethics of
one or another holy person.
      - Emerson -

All progress is based on the universal
innate desire on the part of every
organism to live beyond its income.
      - Samuel Butler -

RABBIT FACED BABY HAS 10" EARS -
Bucktoothed mom chomped carrots while
pregnant.
      - The Sun -

Invention is 99% perspiration, 1% inspi-
ration.
      - Thomas Edison -

In this sense strict anarchy may be the
highest conceivable grade of perfection
of social existence; for, if all men
spontaneously did justice and loved
mercy, it is plain that all swords
might advantageously be turned into
plowshares, and that the occupation of
judges and police would be gone.
      - Thomas H. Huxley -

The religions of the world are the ejacu-
lations of a few imaginative men.
      - Emerson -

There aren't any hard women, just soft
men.
      - Raquel Welch -

They have wonderful minds.  So much is
stored inside - all those sports scores
and so on.
      - Jane Seymour -

I'll play with it first and tell you what
it is later.
       - Miles Davis -

I`m hungry! I`m hungry!
For good things to eat
For sugar jets, sugar jets
(whole toasted wheat)!
      - Advertisement -

I was in this prematurely air conditioned
supermarket and there were all these ais-
les and there were these bathing caps you
could buy that had these kind of fourth
of July plumes on them that were red and
yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to
buy one but I was reminded of the fact
that I had been avoiding the beach.
      - Lucinda Childs (Philip Glass:
        Einstein on the Beach) -

Religion is a stalking-horse to shoot
other fowl.
      - George Herbert -

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and
hurry off as if nothing had happened.
      - Winston Churchill -

America is the only nation in history
which miraculously has gone from barba-
rism to degeneration without the usual
intervention of civilization.
      - Clemenceau -

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the feelings of a heartless
world, just as it is the spirit of
unspiritual conditions.  It is the opium
of the people.
      - Karl Marx -

Atomic energy has created a new world in
which balance-of-power politics have be-
come utterly meaningless.  Mankind must
give up war in the Atomic Era.  What is
at stake is the life or death of humani-
ty.
      - Albert Einstein -

Does your husband
Misbehave
Grunt and Grumble
Rant and Rave?
Shoot the brute some
      - Burma Shave -

The religions we call false were once
true.
      - Emerson -

All religions die of one disease, that of
being found out.
      - John Merely -

Don't take a curve
At 60 per
We hate to lose
A customer.
      - Burma Shave -

In religion, as in friendship, they who
profess most are the least sincere.
      - Sheridan -

Formal religion was organized for slaves; 
it offered them consolation which the
earth did not provide.
      - Elbert Hubbard -

Nothing is true.  Everything is
permitted.
      - Hassan I. Sabbah -

Don't let your mouth write no check that
your tail can't cash.
      - Bo Diddley -

The opposite of a correct statement is a
false statement.  But the opposite of a
profound truth may well be another pro-
found truth.
      - Niels Bohr -

Beware of the man who works hard to
learn something, learns it and finds
himself no wiser than before.  He is
full of murderous resentment of
people who are ignorant without
having to come by their ignorance
the hard way.
      - Bokonon -

What excellent fools religion makes of
men.
      - Ben Jonson -

Every shaver
Now can snore
Six more minutes
Than before
By using
      - Burma Shave. -

Men never do evil so completely and
cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.
      - Pascal -

He played
A sax
Had no B.O.
But his whiskers scratched
So she let him go.
      - Burma Shave -

Just because everything is different doe-
sn't mean anything has changed.
      - Southern California Oracle -

The most merciful thing in the world ...
is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents.
      - H. P. Lovecraft -

Take what you can use and let the rest go
by.
      - Ken Kesey -

Science distinguishes a man of honor from
one of those athletic brutes whom
undeservedly we call heroes.
      - Dryden -

HAPPY TEEN-AGER CLAIMS - "STRANGE SPACE
CREATURE CURED MY ACNE"
      - The Globe -

The very purpose of existence is to rec-
oncile the glowing opinion we hold of
ourselves with the appalling things that
other people think about us.
      - Quentin Crisp -

Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks, and
heretics, the world would not progress.
      - Frank Gelett Burgess -

It's not the size of the ship, it's the
size of the waves.
      - Little Richard -

I never loved another person the way I
loved myself.
      - Mae West -

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
      - Sigmund Freud -

Already at the origin of the species, man
was the equal to what he was destined to
become.
      - Jean Rostand -

Every revolution evaporates and leaves
behind only the slime of a new bureaucra-
cy.
      - Franz Kafka -

It is a fact that man must control sci-
ence and occasionally check the inevita-
ble advance of technology.
      - Thomas Huxley -

Science is the meeting place of two 
kinds of poetry:  the poetry of thought
and the poetry of action.
      - George Agostinho da Silva -

Once upon a time there was magic.
      - Arthur M. Young -

Scientifically speaking, the only thing
different about life and death is that
death lasts a lot longer.
      - Terry Southern -

No animal admires another animal.
      - Blaise  Pascal -

When choosing between two evils I always
like to take the one I've never tried
before.
      - Mae West -

Her life was saved by rock and roll.
      - Lou Reed -

There is no greater disadvantage than
greed.
      - Lao-tzu -

The things that we know best are those
that we have not learned.
      - Luc de Chapiers -

No attitude is less aristocratic than
unbelief.
      - Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-
Perigord -

Honest officer, had I known my health
stood in jeopardy I would never had lit
one.
      - Maxim of the Hells Angels -

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and
ethical infants.  We know more about war
than we know about peace, more about kil-
ling than we know about living.
      - General Omar Bradley -

I like the dreams of the future better
than the history of the past.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

Even if the sky falls there are people to
hold it up.
      - Deng Xiaoping -

I can no more define poetry than a terri-
er can define a rat.
      - A. E. Housman -

The heart of religion lies in its person-
al pronouns.
      - Martin Luther -

It is precisely in its smallest and sim-
plest structures that nature shows itself
most perfect and accomplished.
      - Pliney the Elder -

Creative imagination must stop well short
of delirium.
      - Calvin Wells -

You have all the characteristics of a
popular politician: a horrible voice, bad
breeding, and a vulgar manner.
      - Aristophanes -

Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a
sack of dung, the food for worms... You
have never seen a viler dunghill.
      - St. Bernard of Clairaux -

Experience is a comb that nature gives us
when we are bald.
      - Belgian proverb -

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything
else, is powerless against truth.
      - Thomas Huxely -

I see nothing in space as promising as
the view from a Ferris wheel.
      - E. B. White -

A superstition is a premature explanation
that overstays its time.
      - George IIes -

What is the use of a house if you haven't
got a tolerable planet to put it on?
      - Henry David Thoreau -

If we could hear all the sounds existing,
we'd soon be mad.
      - Charlie Parker -

It's not that I'm afraid to die.  It's
just that I don't want to be there when
it happens.
      - Woody Allen -

Put three grains of sand inside a vast
cathedral, and the cathedral will be
more packed with sand than space with
stars.
      - Sir James Jeans -

Science commits suicide when it adopts a
creed.
      - Thomas Huxley -

There is no fate that cannot be
surmounted by scorn.
      - Albert Camus -

The future is hidden even from the man
who made it.
      - Anatole France -

All truths are easy to understand once
they are discovered, the point is to dis-
cover them.
      - Galileo -

I'm just trying to make a smudge on the
collective unconscious.
      - David Letterman -

I do not know what I may appear to the
world:  But to myself I seem to have been
only like a boy playing on the seashore
and diverting myself and now and then
finding a smoother pebble or prettier
shell than usual, whilst the great ocean
of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
      - Sir Isaac Newton -

One step away from rationality, the air
is balmy with possibility.
      - Deborah Mason -

What is characteristic of illusions is
that they are derived from human wishes.
      - Sigmund Freud -

Equipped with his five senses, man
explores the universe around him and
calls the adventure Science.
      - Edwin Powell Hubble -

Henry the Eighth
Prince of Friskers
Lost five wives
But kept
His whiskers.
      - Burma Shave -

Throughout history females have picked
providers for mates.  Males pick
anything.
      - Margret Mead -

If a man does not keep pace with his com-
panions, perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer.  Let him step to the
music he hears, no matter how measured or
far away.
      - Thoreau -

I know many books that have bored their
readers, but I know of none which has
done real evil.
      - Voltaire -

We are made wise not by the recollections
of our past but by the responsibility for
our future.
      - George Bernard Shaw -

Nine tenths of modern science is in this
respect the same: it is the produce of
men whom their contemporaries thought
dreamers - who were laughed at for caring
for what did not concern them - who, as
the proverb went, "walked into a well
from looking at the stars" - who were
believed to be useless, if anyone could
be such.
      - Walter Bagehat -

Listen, birds
Those signs cost
Money
So roost a while but
Don't get funny.
      - Burma Shave -

War is the greatest of all crimes; and
yet there is no aggressor who does not
color his crime with the pretext of jus-
tice.
      - Voltaire -

The reason the all-American boy prefers
beauty to brains is that the all-American
boy can see better than he can think.
      - Farrah Fawcett -

WOMAN GIVES BIRTH WHILE SKY-DIVING - 
Baby is born in free-fall.
      - The Globe -

My man
Won't shave
'Sez Hazel Huz
But I should worry
Dora's does.
      - Burma Shave -

The difference between men and boys is
the price of their toys.
      - Liberace -

There's a great woman behind every idiot.
      - John Lennon -

Past schoolhouses
Take it slow
Let the little
Shavers
Grow.
      - Burma Shave -

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
      - Ogden Nash -

Never try keeping up with the Joneses. 
Drag them down to your level.  It's
cheaper.
      - Quentin Crisp -

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't
ever get married.
      - Anton Chekhov -

Rip a fender
Off your car
Send it in
For a half-pound
Jar.
      - Burma Shave -

When we, the Workers, all demand:
"What are WE fighting for?"
Then, then we'll end that stupid crime,
That Devil's madness - WAR.
      - Robert W. Service -

Sex is the thing that takes the least
time and causes the most trouble.
      - John Barrymore -

The world is divided into good people and
bad people.  The good ones sleep better,
but the bad ones have a better time while
they're awake.
      - Woody Allen -

HALF-BOY, HALF-GIRL MAKES SELF PREGNANT -
He/she's both mommy and daddy to twins.
      - The Globe -

Man has always gone where he has been
able to go.  It's that simple.  He will
continue pushing back his frontiers no
matter how far it may carry him from his
homeland.
      - Michael Collins -

RAMBO WIFE KNOCKS HUBBY'S HEAD OFF! -
Doctors stitch it back on and he lives!
      - The Globe -

False facts are highly injurious to the
progress of science, for they often
endure long; but false views, if
supported by some evidence, do little
harm, for everyone takes a salutory
pleasure in proving their falseness;
and when this is done, one path towards
error is closed and the path to truth
is often at the same time opened.
      - Charles Darwin -

My political ideal is democracy.  Let
every man be respected as an individual
and no man idolized.
      - Albert Einstein -

When you know a thing, to hold that you
know it; and when you do not know a
thing, to allow that you do not know it:
this is knowledge.
      - Confusius -

The only foes that threaten America are
the enemies at home; and these are
ignorance, superstition, and
incompetence.
      - Elbert Hubbard -

Peace cannot be kept by force.  It can
only be achieved by understanding.
      - Albert Einstein -

We must, however, acknowledge, as it
seems to me, that man, with all his
noble qualities... still bears in his
bodily frame the indelible stamp of his
lowly origins.
      - Charles Darwin -

Force always attracts men of low
morality, and I believe it to be an
invariable rule that tyrants of genius
are succeeded by scoundrels.
      - Albert Einstein -

Peace rules the day, where reason rules
the mind.
      - William Collins -

If you love instruction, you will be well
instructed.
      - Isocrates -

We live in a Newtonian world of
Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein
logic.
      - David Russell -

Christianity might be a good thing if
anyone ever tried it.
      - George Bernard Shaw -

Very few men are wise by their own coun-
cil; or learned by their own teaching. 
For he that was only taught by himself,
had a fool for a master.
      - Ben Jonson -

Money - money, like everything else - is
a deception and a disappointment.
      - H. G. Wells -

You can't say that civilization don't
advance, for in every war they kill you a
new way.
      - Will Rogers -

We are all here for a spell.  Get all the
good laughs you can.
      - Will Rogers -

Using words to describe magic is like
using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
      - Tom Robbins -

The cloning of humans is on most of the
lists of things to worry about from
Science, along with behavior control,
genetic engineering, transplanted
heads, computer poetry, and the
unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
      - Lewis Thomas -

Man is flying too fast for a world that
is round.  Soon he will catch up with
himself in a great rear-end collision
and Man will never know that what hit
him from behind was Man.
      - James Thurber -

When I am working on a problem, I never
think about beauty.  I think only of how
to solve the problem.  But when I have
finished, if the solution is not beauti-
ful, I know it is wrong.
      - R. Buckminster Fuller -

The mere absence of war is not peace.
      - John F. Kennedy -

He who has imagination without learning
has wings and no feet.
      - Joubert -

The human race is governed by its imagi-
nation.
      - Napolean Bonaparte -

In the future, if nuclear weapons are
unleashed, there will be no front and no
rear.
      - Nakita S. Krushcler -

Even if you're on the right track you'll
get run over if you just sit there.
     Will Rogers

There are two ways to slide easily
through life; to believe everything or
to doubt everything.  Both ways save us
from thinking.
     Alfred Korzybski

It is not enough to have a good mind. 
The main thing is to use it.
     Descartes

Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks?
To murder men, and give God thanks?
Desist for shame! Proceed no further:
God won't accept your thanks for Murther.
      - Robert Burns -

It is the province of knowledge to speak,
and it is the privilege of wisdom to lis-
ten.
      - Oliver W. Holmes -

We don't know one millionth of one per-
cent about anything.
      - Thomas Edison -

True knowledge is modest and wary; 'tis
ignorance that is bold and presuming.
      - Joseph Glanvil -

It is better, of course, to know useless
things then to know nothing.
      - Seneca -

There is only one good, that is
knowledge; there is only one evil, that
is ignorance.
      - Socrates -

If my theory of Relativity is proven suc-
cessful, Germany will claim me as a Ger-
man and France will declare that I am a
citizen of the world.  Should my theory
prove untrue, France will say that I am a
German, and Germany will declare that I
am a Jew.
      - Albert Einstein -

There are four sorts of men:
He who knows not and knows not he knows
not: he is a fool - shun him; He who
knows not and knows he knows not: he is
simple - teach him;
He who knows and knows not he knows: he
is asleep - wake him;
He who knows and knows he knows: he is
wise - follow him.
      - Lady Burton -

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly
process, gradually changing opinions,
slowly eroding old barriers, quickly bu-
ilding new structures.  And however un-
dramatic the pursuit of peace, that pur-
suit must go on.
      - John F. Kennedy -

For man, the unexamined life is not worth
living.
      - Socrates -

The meaning of life is arrived at... by
dark gropings, by feelings not wholly
understood, by catching at hints and fum-
bling for explanations.
      - Alfred Adler -

Out yonder there was this huge world...
which stands before us like a great eter-
nal riddle...
      - Albert Einstein -

As soon as man does not take his
existence for granted, but beholds it as
something unfathomably mysterious, thoug-
ht begins.
      - Albert Schweitzer -

One can tell for oneself whether the wa-
ter is warm or cold.
      - I Ching -

There is a coherent plan in the universe,
though I don't know what it's a plan for.
      - Sir Fred Hoyle -

I have one longing only:  to grasp what
is hidden behind appearances, to ferret
out that mystery which brings me to birth
and then kills me, to discover if behind
the visible and unceasing stream of the
world an invisible and immutable presence
is hiding.
      - Nikos Kazantzakis -

Life is a comedy to those who think, a
tragedy to those who feel.
      - Racine -

Faith can move mountains, or lead a man
endlessly down a blind path...
      - James E. Gunn -

The real tragedy that may occur in any of
our lives is not the losing of faith...
The real tragedy is not to lose our fait-
h... to be satisfied, to be smug and con-
tent, to have arrived...
      - Bert C. Williams -

It is only charlatans who are certain...
Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but
certainty is a ridiculous one.
      - Voltaire -

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and under-
standing.
      - Marshall McLuhan -

What we need is not the need to believe,
but the wish to find out, which is exact-
ly the opposite.
      - Bertrand Russell -

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men
thought less of worshiping the unknown,
and more of overcoming it.
      - Will Durant -

Heretofore philosophers have only inter-
preted the world differently: the point
is, however, to change it.
      - Karl Marx -

Faith is believing things that nobody in
his right mind would believe.
      - Archie Bunker -

If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you tend to treat everything as if it
were a nail.
      - Abraham Maslow -

Science is the attempt to make the chaot-
ic diversity of our sense-experience cor-
respond to a logically uniform system of
thought... The sense experiences are the
given subject matter.  But the theory
that shall interpret them is man-made...
hypothetical, never completely final,
subject to question and doubt.
      - Albert Einstein -

We do not want a thing because we reason; 
we find reasons for a thing because we
want it.  Mind invents logic for the
whims of the will.
      - Hegel -

Sit down before fact as if a little chil-
d, be prepared to give up every precon-
ceived notion, follow humbly wherever and
to whatever abysses nature leads, or you
shall learn nothing.
      - T. H. Huxley -

The Agnostic's Prayer: "Oh, God, if there
is a God, save my soul, if I have a sou-
l".
      - Ernst Renan -

You see me as an atheist.  God sees me as
the loyal opposition.
      - Woody Allen -

An undefined problem has an infinite num-
ber of solutions.
      - Robert A. Humphrey -

You will never succeed in getting at the
truth if you think you know, ahead of
time, what the truth ought to be.
      - Marchette Chute -

He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.
      - Tao Teh Ching -

There is today - in a time when old be-
liefs are withering - a kind of
philosophical hunger, a need to know who
we are and how we got here.  There is an
ongoing search, often unconscious, for a
cosmic perspective for humanity.
      - Carl Sagan -

The real world is increasingly seen to
be, not the tidy garden of our race's
childhood, but the extraordinary, extrav-
agant universe described by the eye of
science.
      - Herman J. Muller -

The fish trap exists because of the fish: 
once you've gotten the fish, you can for-
get the trap... Words exist because of
meanings:  once you've gotten the mean-
ings, you can forget the words.
      - Chuang-Tzu -

Of all the disorder-to-order converters,
the human mind is by far the most impres-
sive.
      - Buckminster Fuller -

The last creature to discover water would
be the fish, precisely because he is al-
ways immersed in it!
      - Ralph Linton -

Every man takes the limits of his own
field of vision for the limits of the
world.
      - Schopenhaur -

Dense, unenlightened people are notori-
ously confident that they have a monopoly
on truth.
      - Joshua Loth Liebman -

We judge ourselves by what we feel capa-
ble of doing, while !!!!others judge us
by what we have already done.
      - Longfellow -

Man is something more than a carcass
loosely coupled to a ghost.
      - Sir Cyril Burt -

It makes all the difference whether one
sees darkness through the light or brigh-
tness through the shadows.
      - David Lindsay -

All children paint like geniuses.  What
do we do to them that so quickly dulls
this ability?
      - Picasso -

The surest way to corrupt a young man is
to teach him to esteem more highly those
who think alike than those who think dif-
ferently.
      - Nietzsche -

He whom love touches not, walks in dark-
ness.
      - Plato -

For young children it is primarily expe-
rience that determines character, but for
the more mature person it is character
that determines experience.
      - Haim Ginott -

If you don't know where you are going,
you will probably end up somewhere else.
      - Lawrence J. Peter -

The life so short, the craft so long to
learn.
      - Hippocrates -

We have to live today by what truth we
can get today, and be ready tomorrow to
call it falsehood.
      - William James -

Most of the great evils that man has in-
flicted on man have come through people
feeling quite certain about something
which, in fact, was false.
      - Bertrand Russell -

Anyone who conducts an argument by
appealing to authority is not using his
intelligence; he is just using his memo-
ry.
      - Leonardo da Vinci -

The universe is not to be narrowed down
to the limits of Understanding, - but the
Understanding must be stretched and en-
larged to take in the image of the Uni-
verse as it is discovered.
      - Francis Bacon -

Americans run an idea up the flagpole to
see if it gets any salutes, but the Brit-
ish let an idea get broody to see if any-
thing will hatch.
      - Paul A. Kolers -

An uneducated child and a trained astron-
omer, both relying on the naked eye and
their twenty-twenty vision, will literal-
ly see a different sky.
      - Herman Tennessen -

What a piece of bread looks like depends
on whether you are hungry or not.
      - Jallaludin Rumi -

Concepts without precepts are empty. 
Precepts without concepts are blind.
      - Immanuel Kant -

It seems that the human mind has first to
construct forms independently before we
can find them in things... knowledge can-
not spring from experience alone but only
from this comparison of the inventions of
the intellect with observed fact.
      - Albert Einstein -

I don't know what you could say about a
day in which you have seen four beautiful
sunsets.
      - John Glenn -

We have been given two ears and but a
single mouth, in order that we may hear
more and talk less.
      - Zeno of Citium -

A man of true science uses but a few hard
words... whereas the smatterer in sci-
ence... thinks that by mouthing hard
words he understands hard things.
      - Herman Melville -

Everyone in Germany is a National 
Socialist - the few outside the party
are either lunatics or idiots.
      - Adolf Hitler -

The human being who looks upon his own
future as already determined by fate...
only acknowledges a lack of will power
to struggle and win through.
      - Max Planck -

Change is avalanching down upon our
heads, and most people are utterly
unprepared to cope with it.
      - Alvin Toffler -

What experience and history teach us is
this - that people and governments
never have learned anything from
history, or acted on principles deduced
from it.
      - Hegel -

As for wars, well, there's only been
2286 years out of the last 3421 in
which there was no war.  So war, too,
is in the normal course of events.
      - Will Durant -

One dog barks at something, and a
hundred bark at the sound.
      - Chinese Proverb -

Wise men will never do battle over mere
symbols, but they may fight to the
death for what the symbols stand for.
      - James L. Christian -

The environment is always the brain-
washer, so that the well-adjusted
person, by definition, has been
brainwashed.  He is adjusted.  He's had
it.
      - Marshall Mcluhan -

Insanity in individuals is something rare
- but in groups, parties, nations and
epochs, it is the rule.
      - Nietzsche -

The simple-minded use of the notions 
'right and wrong' is one of the chief
obstacles to the progress of
understanding.
      - Alfred North Whitehead -

Contentment, even in poverty, brings
happiness; discontent is poverty, even
in riches.
      - Chinese Proverb -

Don't be silly, Ninety-Nine.  We have to
shoot, kill, and destroy.  We represent
everything that's wholesome and good in
the world.
      - Maxwell Smart (Get Smart TV show)

Sorry about that, Chief!
      - Maxwell Smart (Get Smart TV show)

There grew up in me an unshakable
conviction that we have no right to
inflict suffering and death on another
living creature unless there is some
unavoidable necessity for it, and that
we ought all of us to feel what a
horrible thing it is to cause suffering
and death out of mere thoughlessness.
      - Albert Schweitzer -

It has taken the planet Earth 4.5 billion
years to discover it is 4.5 billion years
old...
      - George Wald -

Occam's Razor:  Don't create more
hypothesis than are really necessary. 
OR: The simplest explanation that will
fit the facts is probably the best.
      - William of Occam -

Abel's Razor:  Razors should not be
thrown away as long as they give a
fairly decent shave, or until you have
a better one.
      - Reuben Abel -

I feel confident that, if evolution had
succeeded in tracing man from a fallen
angel and not from a risen ape, . . .
antagonism to evolution would have gone
by the board.
      - Sir Arthur Keith -

It is the large brain capacity which
allows man to live as a human being,
enjoying taxes, canned salmon,
television, and the atomic bomb.
      - G. H. R. von Koenigswald -

Neglect of an effective birth control
policy is a never failing source of pov-
erty which, in turn, is the parent of
revolution and crime.
      - Aristotle -

MAN: A biodegradable but nonrecyclable
animal blessed with opposable thumbs
capable of grasping at straws.
      - Bernard Rosenberg -

Man is the only animal that walks
upright and carries a slanted point of
view.
      - Anonymous -

Man is star-stuff that has taken over
its own destiny.
      - Carl Sagan -

You can always tell when it's autumn in
Hollywood.  They put away the green
plastic plants and bring out the brown
plastic plants.
      - Johnny Carson -

Anyone who wishes to cope with the
future should travel back in
imagination a single lifetime - say to
1900 - and ask himself just how much of
today's technology would be, not merely
incredible, but incomprehensible to the
keenest scientific brains of that time.
      - Arthur C. Clarke -

There was once a time when I wrote of
colonies on the Moon, and the only place
I could have such outlandish nonsense
published was in scientific magazines. 
Now I write of colonies on the Moon in
very much the same way - and the articles
are published by The New York Times.
      - Isaac Asimov -

In so far as mathematics is about reali-
ty, it is not certain, and in so far as
it is certain, it is not about reality.
      - Albert Einstein -

The earth's population is not
increasing exactly at a geometrical
rate.  Actually it is a bit faster; the
rate of population increase is itself
proportional to the population.  If
this rate could continue, the
population would become infinite in a
finite time. The present growth formula
leads to an infinite populayion in 2026
AD - in fact, and Friday, November 13,
a day dubbed 'doomsday'.
      - George O. Abell -

Is it Friday yet?

Behind every man now alive stand thirty
ghosts, for that is the ratio by which
the dead outnumber the living.  Since
the dawn of time, roughly a hundred
billion human beings have walked the
planet Earth.
      - Arthur C. Clarke -

I cannot believe God plays dice with
the cosmos.
      - Albert Einstein -

It is estimated there may be
135,000,000,000 stars in the Galaxy, and
there may be as many as 100,000,000,000
galaxies distributed through space. 
Astronomers are generally convinced
that there are unnumerable worlds on
which life might develop.
      - Isaac Asimov -

Our first astronauts must be the wisest
and the most temperate men, slow to
revulsion, quick to sympathy...
      - Ray Bradbury -

The earth is the cradle of mankind, but
one cannot live in the cradle forever.
      - Tsiolkovsky -

For the first time in the history of our
species, we have devised tools - unmanned
space vehicles and large radio telescopes
- to search for extraterrestrial life.  I
would be very ashamed of my civilization
if, with these tools at hand, we turned
away from the cosmos.
      - Carl Sagan -

Sometimes I think we're alone.  Sometimes
I think we're not.  In either case, the
thought is staggering.
      - Buckminster Fuller -

It is enough for me to contemplate the
mystery of conscious life perpetuating
itself through all eternity, to reflect
upon the marvelous structure of the uni-
verse which we can dimly perceive, and to
try humbly to comprehend even an infini-
tesimal part of the intelligence
manifested in nature.
      - Albert Einstein -

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me
say that a true revolutionary is guided
by great feelings of love.
      - Che Guevara -

If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would
have had solar energy centuries ago.
      - Sir George Porter -

Today we are faced with the pre-eminent
fact that, if civilization is to survive,
we must cultivate the science of human
relationships - the ability of all peo-
ples, of all kinds, to live together and
work together in the same world at peace.
      - F. D. Roosevelt -

Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired, signifies
in a final sense a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed - those who are
cold and not clothed.  This world in arms
is not spending money alone - it is spen-
ding the sweat of its laborers, the ge-
nius of its scientists, the houses of its
children.
      - D. Eisenhower -

I like to believe that people in the long
run are going to do more to promote peace
than are governments.  Indeed, I think
that people want peace so much that one
of these days governments had better get
out of their way and let them have it.
      - D. Eisenhower -

Every minute, throughout the world, more
than 1.3 million dollars are spent for
military purposes.  During the same min-
ute, 70 children die in the poor
countries, many of them as a result of
hunger and malnutrition.
      - Luis Echeverria -

You know, I turn back to your ancient
prophets, in the Old Testament and the
signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find
myself wondering if we're the generation
that is going to see it come about.
      - Ronald Reagan -

I have become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.
      - Dr. Robert Oppenheimer -

If I knew then what I know now I never
would have helped to develop the bomb.
      - George Kistiakowsky -

Dead things will come from underground
and by their fierce movements will send
numberless human beings out of the world.
      - Leonardo da Vinci -

A nation that continues year after year
to spend more on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death.
      - Martin Luther King -

I refuse to accept the view that mankind
is so tragically bound to the starless
midnight of racism and war that the brig-
ht daybreak of peace and brotherhood can
never become a reality.  I have the au-
dacity to believe that people everywhere
can have three meals a day for their
bodies, education and culture for their
minds, and dignity, equality and freedom
for their spirits.  I believe that what
self-
centered men have torn down, other-cen-
tered men can build up.  I still believe
that we shall overcome.
      - Martin Luther King -

We must carry the facts of atomic energy
to the village square.  From there must
come America's voice.
      - Albert Einstein -

The unleashed power of the atom has
changed everything save our modes of thi-
nking, and we thus drift towards
unparalled catastrophe.
      - Albert Einstein -

The belief that it is possible to achieve
security through armaments on a national
scale is, in the present state of mili-
tary technology, a disastrous illusion.
      - Albert Einstein -

You cannot simultaneously prevent and
prepare for war.
      - Albert Einstein -

Nature is neutral.  Man has wrested from
nature the power to make the world a des-
ert or to make the deserts bloom.  There
is no evil in the atom; only in men's
souls.
      - Adlai Stevenson -

As long as there are sovereign nations
possessing great power, war is inevita-
ble.
      - Albert Einstein -

I do not believe that civilization will
be wiped out in a war fought with the
atomic bomb.  Perhaps two-thirds of the
people of the earth might be killed, but
enough men capable of thinking, and enou-
gh books, would be left to start again,
and civilization could be restored.
      - Albert Einstein -

Human history becomes more and more a
race between education and catastrophe.
      - H. G. Wells -

The professional military mind is by ne-
cessity an inferior and unimaginative
mind; no man of high intellectual quality
would willingly imprison his gifts in
such a calling.
      - H. G. Wells -

It would be madness to let the purposes
or the methods of private enterprise at
the habits of the age of atomic energy.
      - Harold Joseph Laski -

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it
is in the minds of men that the defenses
of peace must be constructed.
      - Constitution of the United Na-
tions -

Soldiers who wish to be a hero
Are practically zero.
But those who wish to be civilians;
Jesus, they run in the millions!
      - WWII latrine graffiti -

Man is the only animal that eats when he
is not hungry, drinks when he is not thi-
rsty, and makes love at all seasons.
      - Unknown -

I lay it down as fact that, if all men
knew what others say of them, there would
not be four friends in the world.
      - Blaise Pascal -

Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter,
the whole aspect of the world would have
been changed.
      - Blaise Pascal -

The heart has its reasons which reason
knows nothing about.
      - Blaise Pascal -

I'd sooner believe that two Yankee pro-
fessors would lie than that rocks would
fall from the sky.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

Astronomy compels the soul to look
upwards and leads us from this world to
another.
      - Plato -

Comets are the nearest thing to nothing
that anything can be and still be some-
thing.
      - National Geographic Society -

The presence of humans in a system con-
taining high-speed electronic computers
and high-speed, accurate communication is
quite inhibiting.  Every means possible
should be employed to eliminate humanism
in the data processing chain.
      - Stuart L. Seaton -

The discovery of the little planet beyond
Neptune is interesting, but it is of the
same relative importance that a dime
found in the vest pocket of last winter's
suit bears to the French national debt.
      - William Allen White -

When a man laughs at his misfortunes, he
loses a great many friends.  They never
forgive the loss of their perogative.
      - H. L. Mencken -

An idealist is one who, on noticing that
roses smell better than a cabbage, con-
cludes that it will also make better
soup.
      - H. L. Mencken -

Whenever you hear a man speak of his
love for his country, it is a sure sign
he expects to be paid for it.
      - H. L. Mencken -

Democracy is the theory that the common
people know what they want and deserve
to get it good and hard.
      - H. L. Mencken -

A judge is a law student who marks his
own examination papers.
      - H. L. Mencken -

Puritanism - the haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be happy.
      - H. L. Mencken -

Adultery is the application of democracy
to love.
      - H. L. Mencken -

The Arithmetic of Cooperation:
When you're adding up committees
There's a useful rule of thumb:
That talents make a difference,
And follies make a sum.
      - Piet Hein -

The Ultimate Wisdom: Philosophers must
ultimately find their true perfection in
knowing all the follies of mankind by
introspection.
      - Piet Hein -

The future, according to some scientists,
will be exactly like the past, only far
more expensive.
      - John Sladek -

Man is so made that when anything fires
his soul, impossibility vanishes.
      - Jean de la Fontaine -

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
      - Ralph Waldo Emerson -

We are on a threshold of a change in the
universe comparable to the transition of
nonlife to life.
      - Hans Moravec (on artificial in-
telligence) -

When you're through changing, you're
through.
      - Bruce Barton -

Every generation is born as ignorant and
as willful as the first man.
      - George Santayana -

Technology is a way of organizing the
universe so that man doesn't have to
experience it.
      - Max Frisch -

Rivers in the United States are so
polluted that acid rain makes them
cleaner.
      - Andrew Malcolm -

The idea of all-out nuclear war is
unsettling.
      - Walter Goodman -

What is inconceivable about the universe
is that it is at all conceivable.
      - Albert Einstein -

A stitch in time would have confused
Einstein.
      - Anonymous -

It is impossible to experience one's
death objectively and still carry a tune.
      - Woody Allen -

Those who welcome death have only tried
it from the ears up.
      - Wilson Mizner -

In America everybody is, but some are
more than others.  I was more than
others.
      - Gertrude Stein -

The pyramids will not last a moment
compared with the daisy.
      - D. H. Lawrence -

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of
knowledge.
      - Abraham Joshua Heschel -

Gods are born and die, but the atom
endures.
      - Alexander Chase -

I don't know if God exists, but it
would be better for His reputation if
He didn't.
      - Jules Renard -

If only God would give me some clear
sign!  Like making a large deposit in
my name at a Swiss bank.
      - Woody Allen -

When we all remember we are mad, the
mysteries disappear and life stands
explained.
      - Mark Twain -

We manipulate nature as if we were
stuffing an Alsatian goose.  We create
new forms of energy; we make new
elements; we kill crops; we wash
brains.  I can hear them in the dark
sharpening their lasers.
      - Erwin Chargaff -

A man lives by believing something, not
by debating and arguing about many
things.
      - Thomas Carlyle -

There are two ways to slide easily
through life: to believe everything or
to doubt everything; both ways save us
from thinking.
      - Alfred Korzybski -

Creative minds always have been known to
survive any kind of bad training.
      - Anna Freud -

A single death is a tragedy; a million
deaths is a statistic.
      - Joseph Stalin -

Perceiving reality is a biological
necessity.
      - Francois Jacob -

It is people that lie by rules that are
always hoping to get them changed.
      - Robert Harbison -

What an incredible achievement of fantasy
is the scientific mind!.
      - E. L. Doctorow -

If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue
he would never have wondered what women
wanted.
      - Nora Ephron -

Men love to wonder.  And that is the seed
of our science.
      - Ralph Waldo Emerson -

The major advances in civilization are
processes which all but wreck the
societies in which they occur.
      - Alfred North Whitehead -

We shall have a race of men who are stro-
ng on telemetry and space communications
but who cannot read anything but a blue-
print or write anything but a computer
program.
      - John K. Galbraith -

Who can really feel comfortable in this
culture now except maybe a few guys who
are good at mathematics?
      - Thomas Hart Benton -

I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-
teller's parlors], and have been told
thousands of things, but nobody ever
told me I was a policewoman getting
ready to arrest her.
      - New York City detective -

The natural history of science is the
study of the unknown.  If you fear it,
then you're not going to study it, and
you're not going to make any progress.
      - Dr. Michael E. DeBakey -

I'm astounded by people who want to
'know' the universe when it's hard enough
to find your way around Chinatown.
      - Woody Allen -

To consider the Earth the only populated
world in infinite space is as absurd as
to assert that in an entire field sown
with millet one one grain grows.
      - Metrodorus -

The trouble with jogging is that the ice
falls out of your glass.
      - Martin Mull -

Marriage is the only adventure open to
the cowardly.
      - Voltaire -

Why are we now traveling into space? 
Why, indeed, did we trouble to look
past the next mountain?  Our prime
obligation to ourselves is to make the
unknown known.  We are on a journey to
keep an appointment with whatever we
are.
      - Gene Roddenberry -

You do not believe your first Pygmy when
you see him.
      - Negley Farson -

Nothing is more terrible than activity
without insight.
      - Thomas Carlyle -

The concrete world has slipped through
the scientific net.
      - Alfred North Whitehead -

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of
knowledge.
      - Abraham Joshua Heschel -

Is he who opens the door and he who
closes it the same being?
      - Gaston Bachelard -

Nothing is more common than a fool with a
strong memory.
      - Anonymous -

There is no excellent beauty that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion.
      - Francis Bacon -

Modern life is so thoroughly mediated
by electronic images that we cannot
help responding to others as if their
actions - and our own - were being
recorded and simultaneously transmitted
to an unseen audience or stored up for
close scrutiny at some later time.
      - Christopher Lasch -

A man can no more possess a private
religion than he can possess a private
sun or moon.
      - G. K. Chesterton -

Most of the evils of life arise from
man's being unable to sit still in a
room.
      - Blaise Pascal -

The Sun, with all those planets revolving
around it and dependent upon it, can
still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it
had nothing else in the universe to do.
      - Galileo -

If the sun is really putting out all that
energy, how come we get so lazy when we
sit under it?
      - Bill Vaughan -

Despair and grief suit the Celtic mind
more than do joy and victory.  Every
Celtic joy has its mixture of grief. 
Every victory leads to despair.
      - Fintan Craig Doheny -

I believe it was Tacitus who said there
is a principle of human nature requiring
us to hate those we have wronged.
      - William Beckett -

It must certainly be more dangerous to
live in ignorance than to live with know-
ledge.
      - Phillip Handler -

There's nothing so passionate as a vested
interest disguised as an intellectual
conviction.
      - Sean O'Casey -

There is no truth on earth that I fear to
be known.
      - Thomas Jefferson -

The secret of happiness is freedom, and
the secret of freedom is courage.
      - Thucydides -

What is now proved was only once
imagined.
      - William Blake -

War is delightful to those who have no
experience in it.
      - Desiderius Erasmus -

The civilized man is a more experienced
and wiser savage.
      - Henry Thoreau -

All warfare is based on deception.
      - Sun Tzu Wu -

We will either find a way... or make one.
      - Hannibal -

The hungry sheep look up, and are not
fed,
But swollen with wind, and the rank mist
they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
      - Milton -

On a clear, moonless night in midwinter
or midsummer, a plume of starlight
rises motionless behind the scattering
of constellations... the Milky Way is
our island universe - our galaxy...
      - Charles A. Whitney -

Like the fifteenth-century navigators,
astronomers today are embarked on
voyages of exploration, charting
unknown regions. The aim of this
adventure is to bring back not gold or
spices or silks but something more
valuable: a map of the universe that
will tell of its origins, its texture,
and its fate.
      - Robert Kirshner -

I want to know how God created this
world.  I want to know his thoughts. 
The rest are details.
      - Albert Einstein -

It is often said that you can't get some-
thing for nothing.  But the universe may
be the ultimate free lunch.
      - Alan Guth -

In answer to the question of why it hap-
pened, I offer the modest proposal that
our Universe is simply one of those
things which happen from time to time.
      - Edward P. Tryon -

Heard melodies are sweet, but those un-
heard are sweeter.
      - John Keats -

The cruelest lies are often told in
silence.
      - Robert Louis Stevenson -

I maintain that the cosmic religious
feeling is the strongest and noblest
motive for scientific research.
      - Albert Einstein -

Looking at the stars always makes me
dream, as simply as I dream over the
black dots representing towns and
villages on a map.  Why, I ask myself,
shouldn't the shining dots of the sky
be as accessible as the black dots on
the map of France.
      - Vincent van Gogh -

Human speech is like a cracked kettle
on which we tap crude rhythms for bears
to dance to, while we long to make
music that will melt the stars.
      - Gustave Flaubert -

Popular theology... is a massive incon-
sistency derived from ignorance... the
gods exist because nature herself has
imprinted a conception of them on the
minds of men.
      - Cicero -

It is not impossible that to some
infinitely superior being the whole
universe may be as one plain, the
distance between planet and planet
being only as the pores in a grain of
sand, and the spaces between system and
system no greater than the intervals
between one grain and the grain
adjacent.
      - Samuel Taylor Coleridge -

The known is finite, the unknown is
infinite; intellectually we stand on an
islet in the midst of an illimitable
ocean of inexplicability.  Our business
in every generation is to reclaim a
little more land.
      - T. H. Huxley -

Probably all the organic beings which
have ever lived on this earth have
descended from some one primordial
form, into which life was first
breathed...  There is grandeur in this
view of life...  that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according to
the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being, evolved.
      - Charles Darwin -

To tell us that every species of thing
is endowed with an occult specific
quality by which it acts and produces
manifest effects, it to tell nothing; 
but to de- rive two or three general
principles of motion from phenomena,
and afterwards to tell us how the
properties and actions of all corporeal
things follow from those manifest
principles, would be a very great step.
      - Isaac Newton -

We do not ask what useful purpose the
birds do sing, for song is their
pleasure since they were created for
singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask
why the human mind troubles to fathom
the secrets of the heavens...
      - Johannes Kepler -

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.
      - Albertus Magnus -

I have... a terrible need... shall I say
the word?... of religion.  Then I go out
at night and paint the stars.
      - Vincent van Gogh -

We had the sky, up there, all speckled
with stars, and we used to lay on our
backs and look up at them, and discuss
about whether they was made, or only just
happened.
      - Mark Twain, 'Huckleberry Finn' -

When the history of the nuclear
controversy comes to be written, those
who killed nuclear technology will be
seen to have been its most avid
promoters, who systematically mistook
hopes for facts, advocacy for analysis,
commercial zeal for national interest,
expertise for infallibility, engineering
for politics, public relations for
truth, and the people for fools.
      - A. B. Lovins -

There is no field of science opened to
the exploration of man in search of know-
ledge than astronomical observation.
      - John Quincy Adams -

I gradually came to disbelieve in
Christianity as a divine revelation... 
Thus disbelief crept over me at a very
slow rate, but was at last complete.
      - Charles Darwin -

I am conscious that I am in an utterly
hopeless muddle.  I cannot think that the
world, as we see it, is the result of
chance; and yet I cannot look at each
separate thing as a result of Design.
      - Charles Darwin -

God has been forced to abdicate his
kingdom section by section. 
Operationally, God is beginning to
resemble, not a ruler, but the last
fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
      - Charles Darwin -

We [analysts] are not reformers... we are
merely observers; but we cannot help ob-
serving with critical eyes, and we have
found it impossible to give our support
to conventional morality [which] demands
more sacrifices than it is worth.
      - Sigmund Freud -

Parents are the bones on which children
sharpen their teeth.
      - Peter Ustinov -

After the final no there came a yes,
and on that yes the future of the world
depends.
      - Wallace Stevens -

...human society is too diverse, national
passion too strong, human aggressiveness
too deep-seated for the peaceful and the
warlike atom to stay divorced for long. 
We cannot embrace one while abhorring the
other; we must learn, if we want to live
at all, to live without both.
      - Jacques-Yves Cousteau -

After all the ingenuity displayed in the
development of nuclear power, we would
demonstrate unbelievable incompetence if
we were suddenly to lose confidence in
our ability to cope with the problem of
proliferation.
      - S. Eklund -

Leaders are best when people scarcely
know they exist, not so good when people
obey and acclaim them, worst when people
despise them.  Fail to honor people, they
fail to honor you.  But of good leaders
who talk little, when their work is done,
their aim fulfilled, the people will say:
"We did this ourselves".
      - Lao Tse -

Trifles make perfection and perfection is
no trifle.
      - Michelangelo -

It is a very sad thing that nowadays
there is so little useless information.
      - Oscar Wilde -

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
      - Peter de Vries -

I read 'War and Peace' in ten minutes;
it's about Russia.
      - Woody Allen -

The real problem is in the hearts and
minds of men... it is easier to denature
plutonium that to denature the evil spir-
it in man... Man's skills have
outstripped his morals...
      - Albert Einstein -

We won't copy you any more, making planes
to catch up with your planes, missiles to
catch up with your missiles.  We'll take
asymmetrical means with new scientific
principles available to us.  Genetic en-
gineering could be a hypothetical exam-
ple.  Things can be done for which nei-
ther side could find defenses or counter-
measures, with very dangerous results. 
If you develop something in space, we
could develop something on Earth.  These
are not just words.  I know what I am
saying.
      - Valentin Falin -

If everybody contemplates the infinite
instead of fixing the drains many of us
will die of cholera.
      - John Rich -

The nature of men is always the same; it
is their habits that separate them.
      - Confucius -

The truth is incontrovertible.  Panic may
resent it; ignorance may deride it; mal-
ice may distort it; but there it is.
      - Winston Churchill -

In the unplanned economy, it's dog eat
dog; in the planned one, both of them
starve to death.
      - Richard Needham -

All men that are ruined are ruined on the
side of their natural propensities.
      - Edmund Burke -

The first half of our lives is ruined by
our parents.  And the second half by our
parents.
      - Richard Needham -

Politics is the art of the possible, the
attainable... the art of the next best...
      - Otto von Bismark -

Murphy's Laws

Nature sides with the hidden flaw.

Ralph's Observation:
It is a mistake to allow any mechanical
object to realize that you are in a hur-
ry.

Cole's Law:
Thinly sliced cabbage.

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies
like a banana.

Firestone's Law of Forcasting:
Chicken Little only has to be right once.

Manly's Maxim:
Logic is a systematic method of coming to
the wrong conclusion with confidence.

Moer's Truism:
The trouble with most jobs is the job
holder's resemblance to being one of a
sled dog team.  No one gets a change of
scenery except the lead dog.

Cannon's Comment:
If you tell the boss you were late for
work because you had a flat tire, the
next morning you will have a flat tire.

Murphy's Law:
If anything can go wrong, it will.

Murphy's Corollary:
Left to themselves, things tend to go
from bad to worse.

Murphy's Corollary:
It is impossible to make anything fool-
proof because fools are so ingenious.

Murphy's Constant:
Matter will be damaged in direct propor-
tion to its value.

Quantized Revision of Murphy's Law:
Everything goes wrong all at once.

O'toole's Commentary:
Murphy was an optimist.

Scott's Second Law:
When an error has been detected and cor-
rected, it will be found to have been
correct in the first place.

Finagle's First Law:
 If an experiment works, something has
gone wrong.

Finagle's Second Law:
 No matter what the experiment's result,
there will always  be someone eager to:
 (a) misinterpret it.
 (b) fake it, or
 (c) believe it supports his own pet the-
ory.

Finagle's Third Law:
 In any collection of data, the figure
most obviously correct, beyond all need
of checking, is the mistake.

Finagle's Fourth Law:
 Once a job is fouled up, anything done
to improve it only makes it worse.

Gumperson's Law:
 The probability of anything happening is
in inverse ratio to its desirability

Rudin's Law:
 In crises that force people to choose
among alternative courses of action, most
people will choose the worst one possi-
ble.

Ginsberg's Restatement of the Three Laws
of Thermodynamics:
 You can't win.
 You can't break even.
 You can't quit.

Ehrman's Commentary
 Things will get worse before they will
get better.
 Who said things would get better?

Commoner's Second Law of Ecology:
 Nothing ever goes away.

Howe's Law:
 Everyone has a scheme that will not
work.

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems
Dynamics:
 Once you open a can of worms, the only
way to recan them is to use a bigger can

Non-reciprocal Law of Expectations:
 Negative expectations yield negative
results.
 Positive expectations yield negative
results.

Klipstein's Law:
 Tolerances will accumulate unidirection-
ally toward maximum difficulty of assem-
bly.

Interchangeable parts won't.

You never find a lost article until you
replace it.

Glatum's Law of Materialistic
Acquisitiveness:
 The perceived usefulness of an article
is inversely proportional to its actual
usefulness once bought and paid for.

Lewis' Law:
 No matter how long or hard you shop for
an item, after you've bought it, it will
be on sale somewhere cheaper.

If nobody uses it, there's a reason.

You get the most of what you need the
least.

The Airplane Law:
 When the plane you are on is late, the
plane you want to transfer to is on time.

Etorre's Observation:
 The other line moves faster.

First Law of Revision:
 Information necessitating a change of
design will be conveyed to the designer
after - and only after - the plans are
complete.
 (often called the 'Now They Tell Us'
law)

Second Law of Revision:
 The more innocuous the modification ap-
pears to be, the further its influence
will extend and the more plans will have
to be redrawn.

Corollary to the First Law of Revision:
 In simple cases, presenting one obvious
right way versus one obvious wrong way,
it is often wiser to choose the wrong
way, so as to expedite subsequent revi-
sion.

Laws of Computer Programming I
 Any program, when running, is obsolete.

Laws of Computer Programming II
 Any given program costs more and takes
longer.

Laws of Computer Programming III
 If a program is useful, it will have to
be changed.

Laws of Computer Programming IV
 If a program is useless, it will have to
be documented.

Laws of Computer Programming V
 Any program will expand to fill avail-
able memory.

Laws of Computer Programming VI
 The value of a program is proportional
to the weight of its output.

Laws of Computer Programming VII
 Program complexity grows until it ex-
ceeds the capabilities of the programmer
who must maintain it.

Laws of Computer Programming VIII
 Any non-trivial program contains at
least one bug.

Laws of Computer Programming IX
 Undetectable errors are infinite in va-
riety, in contrast to detectable errors,
which by definition are limited.

Laws of Computer Programming X
 Adding manpower to a late software proj-
ect makes it later.

Laws of Computer Programming XI
 There's always one more bug.

Shaw's Principle:
 Build a system that even a fool can use,
and only a fool will want to use it.

Law of the Perversity of Nature:
 You cannot successfully determine
beforehand which side of the bread to
butter.

Law of Selective Gravity:
 An object will fall so as to do the most
damage.

Jennings Corollary to the Law of Selec-
tive Gravity:
 The chance of the bread falling with the
butter side down is directly proportional
to the value of the carpet.

Wyszkowski's Second Law:
 Anything can be made to work if you fid-
dle with it long enough.

Sattinger's Law:
 It works better if you plug it in.

Lowery's Law:
 If it jams - force it.
 If it breaks, it needed replacing any-
way.

Schmidt's Law:
 If you mess with a thing long enough,
it'll break.

Anthony's Law of Force
 Don't force it - get a bigger hammer.

Cahn's Axiom:
 When all else fails, read the instruc-
tions.

Gordon's First Law:
 If a project is not worth doing at all,
it's not worth doing well.

Law of Research:
 Enough research will tend to support
your theory.

Maier's Law:
 If the facts do not conform to the theo-
ry, they must be disposed of.

Peer's Law:
 The solution to the problem changes the
problem.

Help a man when he is in trouble and he
will remember you when he is in trouble
again.

Don't get mad, get even.

Carson's Law:
 It's better to be rich and healthy than
poor and sick.

The Golden Rule:
 He who has the gold, makes the rules.

Mark's Mark:
 Love is a matter of chemistry;
 Sex is a matter of physics.

Korman's Conclusion:
 The trouble with resisting temptation is
it may never come your way again.

Knight's Law:
 Life is what happens to you while you
are making other plans.

Maugham's Thought:
 Only a mediocre person is always at his
best.

Krueger's Observation
 A taxpayer is someone who does not have
to take a civil service exam in order to
work for the government.

Benchley's Law of Distinction:
 There are two kinds of people in the
world, those who believe there are two
kinds of people in the world and those
who don't.

Harver's Law:
A drunken man's words are a sober
man's thoughts.

Schmidt's Observation:
All things being equal, a fat person
uses more soap than a thin person.

Gibb's Law:
Infinity is one lawyer waiting for
another.

Fools rush in where fools have been
before.

Rule of Accuracy:
When working towards the solution of a
problem, it always helps if you know the
answer.

Inside every small problem is a large
problem struggling to get out.

Wyszowski's Law:
No experiment is reproducible.

Fett's Law:
Never replicate a successful experiment.

Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely
defined, some damn fool discovers some-
thing which either abolishes the system
or expands it beyond recognition.

The First Myth of Management:
It exists.

Spend sufficient time confirming the need
and the need will disappear.

Peter's Placebo:
An ounce of image is worth a pound of
performance.

Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labour:
People are always available for work in
the past tense.

Wiker's Law:
Government expands to absorb revenue and
then some.

Clarke's First Law:
When a distinguished but elderly scien-
tist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.  When he
states that something is impossible, he
is very probably wrong.

Clarke's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.

Segal's Law:
A man with a watch knows what time it
is.  A man with two watches is never
sure.

Weiler's Law:
Nothing is impossible for the man who
does not have to do it himself.

Hartley's Second Law:
Never go to bed with anybody crazier
than you are.

Beckhap's Law:
 Beauty times brains equals a constant.

Katz's Law:
 Men and women will act rationally when
all other possibilities have been
exhausted.

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

Vique's Law:
A man without a religion is like a fish
without a bicycle.

Jone's Motto:
Friends come and go but enemies
accumulate.

The Ultimate Law:
All general statements are false.

The Unspeakable Law:
As soon as you mention something:
 if it is good, it goes away.
 if it is bad, it happens.

The Whispered Rule:
People will believe anything if you
whisper it.

The First Law of Wing Walking:
Never let hold of what you've got until
you've got hold of something else.

Eat a live toad the first thing in the
morning and nothing worse will happen to
you the rest of the day.

Farnsdick's Corollary:
After things have gone from bad to worse,
the cycle will repeat itself.

Lynch's Law:
When the going gets tough, everybody
leaves.

Law of Revelation:
The hidden flaw never remains hidden.

Langsam's Law:
Everything depends.

Hellrung's Law:
     If you wait, it will go away.
Shevelson's Extension:
     ... having done its damage.
Grelb's Continuation:
     ... if it was bad, it will be back.

Grossman's Misquote:
 Complex problems have simple, easy to
understand wrong answers.

Ducharme's Precept:
 Opportunity always knocks at the least
opportune moment.

First Postulate of Isomurphism:
Things equal to nothing else are equal to
each other.

The Unapplicable Law:
Washing your car to make it rain doesn't
work.

Witten's Law:
Whenever you cut your fingernails, you
will find a need for them an hour later.

Perkin's Postulate:
The bigger they are, the harder they hit.

Harrison's Postulate:
For every action, there is an equal and
opposite criticism.

Conway's Law:
In every organization there will always
be one person who knows what is going on. 
This person must be fired.

Stewart's Law of Retroaction:
It is easier to get forgiveness than per-
mission.

MacDonald's Second Law:
Consultants are mystical people who ask a
company for a number and give it back to
them.

First Law of Laboratory Work:
Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold
glass.

Handy Guide to Modern Science:
1.  If it's green or it wiggles, it's
biology.
2.  If it stinks, it's chemistry.
3.  If it doesn't work, it's physics.

To err is human, but to really foul thin-
gs up requires a computer.

The Sausage Principle:
People who love sausage and respect the
law should never watch either one being
made.

Horngren's Observation: (Generalized)
The real world is a special case.

Merkin's Maxim:
When in doubt, predict that the present
trend will continue.

Hawkin's Theory of Progress:
Progress does not consist of replacing a
theory that is wrong with one that is
right.  It consists of replacing a theory
that is wrong with one that is more sub-
tly wrong.

Never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity.

Matz's Warning:
Beware of the physician who is great at
getting out of trouble.

Gold's Law:
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.

Lewis' Law:
People will buy anything that's one to a
customer.

Law of Reruns:
If you have watched a TV series only
once, and you watch it again, it will be
a rerun of the same episode.

Shirley's Law:
Most people deserve each other.

Forgive and Remember.

Woltman's Law:
Never program and drink beer at the same
time.

Gallois' Revelation:
If you put tomfoolery into a computer,
nothing comes out but tomfoolery.  But
this tomfoolery, having passed through a
very expensive machine, is somehow enno-
bled, and no one dares to criticize it.

Galbraith's Law of Political Wisdom:
Anyone who says he is not going to
resign, four times, definitely will.

Allen's Law:
Almost anything is easier to get into
than out of.

Allen's Axiom:
When all else fails, follow instructions.

Allen's Distinction:
The lion and the calf shall lie down to-
gether, but the calf won't get much sle-
ep.

Avery's Observation:
It does not matter if you fall down as
long as you pick up something from the
floor while you get up.

Berra's Law:
You can observe a lot just by watching.

Bicycle Law:
All bicycles weigh 50 pounds:
A 30 pound bicycle needs a 20 pound lock.
A 40 pound bicycle needs a 10 pound lock.
A 50 pound bicycle doesn't need a lock.

Cohen's Law:
What really matters is the name you suc-
ceed in imposing on the facts, not the
facts themselves.

Colson's Law:
When you've got them by the balls, their
hearts and minds will follow.

Comin's Law:
People will accept your idea much more
readily if you tell them Benjamin Frank-
lin said it first.

Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics:
1. An object in motion will be heading in
the wrong direction.
2. An object at rest will be in the wrong
place.

Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Govern-
ment:
No man's life, liberty, or property are
safe while the legislature is in session.

Jone's Principle:
Needs are a function of what other people
have.

Langin's Law:
If things were left to chance, they'd be
better.

In America, it's not how much an item
costs that matters, it's how much you
save.

If you can keep your head when all about
you are losing theirs, you may not under-
stand the situation.

Mencken's Metalaw:
For every human problem, there is a neat,
simple solution; and it is always wrong.

Sevareid's Law:
The chief cause of problems is solutions.

Thoreau's Law:
If you see a man approaching you with the
obvious intention of doing you good, you
should run for your life.

Peer's Law:
The solution to the problem changes the
problem.

Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.

Lyall's Connecture:
If a computer cable has one end, then it
has another.

Lyall's Fundamental Observation:
The most important leg of a three legged
stool is the one that's missing.

Pournelle's Law of Costs and Schedules:
Everything costs more and takes longer.

Klipstein's Lament:
All warranty and guarantee clauses are
voided by payment of the invoice.

Klipstein's Observation:
Any product cut to length will be too
short.

Sueker's Note:
If you need N items of anything, you will
have N - 1 in stock.

Rosenfield's Regret:
The most delicate component will be
dropped.

De La Lastra's Law:
After the last of 16 mounting screws has
been removed from an access cover, it
will be discovered that the wrong access
cover has been removed.

De la Lastra's Corollary:
After an access cover has been secured by
16 hold-down screws, it will be discov-
ered that the gasket has been omitted.

Design flaws travel in groups.

You can't fight the law of conservation
of energy but you sure can bargain with
it.

Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can
organize them into a committee... that
will do them in.

Civilization Law C1:
Civilization advances by extending the
number of important operations one can do
without thinking about them.

The Swartzberg Test:
The validity of a science is its ability
to predict.

Gerrold's Fundamental Truth:
It's a good thing money can't buy happi-
ness.  We couldn't stand the commercials.

Gerrold's Law:
A little ignorance can go a long way.

Lyall's Addendum:
... in the direction of maximum harm.

Gerrold's Pronouncement:
The difference between a politician and a
snail is that a snail leaves its slime
behind.

Murphy's Military Law #1
Never share a foxhole with someone braver
than you are.

Murphy's Military Law #2
No battle plan ever survives contact with
the enemy.

Murphy's Military Law #3
Friendly fire ain't.

Murphy's Military Law #4
The most dangerous thing in the combat
zone is an officer with a map.

Murphy's Military Law #5
The problem with taking the easy way out
is that the enemy has already mined it.

Murphy's Military Law #6
The buddy system is essential to your
survival; it gives the enemy somebody
else to shoot at.

Murphy's Military Law #7
The further you are in advance of your
own positions, the more likely your ar-
tillery will shoot short.

Murphy's Military Law #8
Incoming fire has the right of way.

Murphy's Military Law #9
If your advance is going well, you are
walking into an ambush.

Murphy's Military Law #10
The quartermaster has only two sizes, too
large and too small.

Murphy's Military Law #11
If you really need an officer in a hurry,
take a nap.

Murphy's Military Law #12
The only time suppressive fire works is
when it is used on abandoned positions.

Murphy's Military Law #13
The only thing more accurate than incom-
ing enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.

Murphy's Military Law #14
There is nothing more satisfying that
having someone take a shot at you, and
miss.

Murphy's Military Law #15
Don't be conspicuous.  In the combat
zone, it draws fire.  Out of the combat
zone, it draws sergeants.

Murphy's Military Law #16
If your sergeant can see you, so can the
enemy.

Never insult seven men when all your
packin' is a six-gun.
                Zane Grey

Real Programmers don't write specs --
users should consider themselves  lucky
to get any programs at all and take what
they get...

Don't order a drink for the road, because
the road is already laid out Flip Wilson

Crayne's law:
All computers wait at the same speed.

Some years ago, when COBOL was the great
white programming
hope, one heard much talk of the possi-
bility of executives
being able to read programs  ...  nobody
can seriously have
believed [this] ...  even programmers do
not read programs.
                   -Weinberg, p.5

I was in this prematurely air conditioned
supermarket and there were all  these
aisles and there were these bathing caps
you could buy that had these  kind of
Fourth of July plumes on them that were
red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tem-
pted to buy one but I was reminded of the
fact that I had been avoiding the beach.
LUCINDA CHILDS (PHILIP GLASS: EINSTEIN ON
THE BEACH)

Real Programmers don't comment their
code.  If it was hard to write, it should
be hard to understand...

If you can fly this plane 600 miles per
hour in the dark
and find Los Angeles...
you can find my bags!
Geraldean Wilson

Just because everything is different doe-
sn't mean anything has changed. SOUTHERN
CALIFORNIA ORACLE

The most merciful thing in the world ...
is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents.
H P LOVECRAFT

What matters is not the length of the
wand, but the magic in the stick.

Love is a matter of chemistry, but Sex is
a matter of physics.

Discovery consists in seeing what every-
one else has seen and thinking what no
one else has thought.
 - Albert Szent-Gyorgi -

I write all my critical routines in as-
sembler, and my comedy
routines in FORTRAN.
                   -Anonymous

"Revolution is the opiate of the intel-
lectuals"
 - "Oh, Lucky Man" -

I really hate this damn machine,
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does just what I want,
But only what I tell it.

Never trust a man with two first names.

Never trust a man with two last names.

It is impossible to make anything fool-
proof because fools are
so ingenious.
                   -Edsel Murphy, dec.

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces
impossible monsters; united with it, she
is the mother of the arts and the origin
of marvels"  - Goya -

Asking for efficiency and adaptability in
the same program is
like asking for a beautiful and modest
wife ...  we'll probably
have to settle for one or the other.
                   -Weinberg, p.22

It seems intuitively clear that the exis-
tence of an error in a
program will not be reflected in the test
result unless the
program component in error is executed
during the test.
          J.C. Huang, 'Program
          Instrumentation and
          Software Testing',
          Computer, Volume II
          Number 4

The meek shall inherit the earth - in
small plots, six foot by three.

"Some people like my advice so much that
they frame it upon the wall instead of
using it"
 - Gordon R. Dickson -

"Civilization is a movement, not a condi-
tion; it is a voyage, not a harbour."  -
Toynbee -

Real Programmers don't eat quiche.  They
eat Twinkies, and Szechwan food.

Take what you can use and let the rest go
by.
KEN KESEY

There are ...  programs that should be
thrown away before ever
being used.
                   -Weinberg, p.20

All women are the same height - lying
down.

It's not the size of the ship, its the
size of the waves.
LITTLE RICHARD

If a programmer is found to be
indispensable, the best thing to do is
to get rid of him as quickly as
possible.
     The Psychology of 
          Computer Programming,                    
     Gerald M. Weinberg,                     
     (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971)

I never loved another person the way I
loved myself.
     MAE WEST

Putting a bunch of people to work on the
same problem doesn't
make them a team.
                   -Weinberg, p.35

Real Programmers' programs never work
right the first time. But if you throw
them on the machine they can be patched
into working in only a few 30-hour
debugging sessions.

The first sign of a nervous breakdown
is when you start thinking your work is
terribly important
     Milo Bloom

"I try to keep an open mind, but not so
open that my brains fall out."
    - Judge Harry Stone

I regret to say that we of the FBI are
powerless to act in cases of oral-
genital intimacy, unless it has in
some way obstructed interstate
commerce.
        J EDGAR HOOVER

Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. 
FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and
crystallography weenies...

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
SIGMUND FREUD

Real Programmers don't write in COBOL. 
COBOL is for wimpy applications program-
mers...

A man should live forever, or die trying.

If the programmer is working in a
language that allows only three
dimensions, we are not likely to
observe more than three.
          -Weinberg, p.31

When choosing between two evils I
always like to take the one I've never
tried before.
     MAE WEST

Her life was saved by rock and roll.
     LOU REED

If you straddle the fence long enough,
sooner or later you'll get your balls
scraped off.

It's not whether you win or lose,
it's how good you look playing!
     David Lee Roth

Real Programmers never work 9 to 5.  If
any real programmers are around at 9 AM,
it's because they were up all night.

Honest Officer, had I known my health
stood in jeopardy I would never have lit
one.
     MAXIM OF THE HELLS ANGELS

It is a rather pleasant experience to be
alone in a bank at night.
     WILLIE SUTTON

The systems designer suffer[s] because
the better his system does its job, the
less its users know of its existence.
         -Weinberg, p.124

Never invest your money in anything that
eats or needs painting.
BILLY ROSE

The rich will do anything for the poor
but get off their backs.
KARL MARX

The rich will do anything for the poor
but get off their backs.
        KARL MARX
If Karl, instead of writing a lot about
capital, had made a lot of
it ... it would have been much better.
        KARL MARX'S MOTHER

To detect errors, the programmer must
have a conniving mind,
one that delights in uncovering flaws
where beauty and
perfection were once thought to lie.
                   -Weinberg, p.136

When I sell liquor, it's called bootleg-
ging; when my patrons serve
it on Lake Shore Drive, its called hospi-
tality.
AL CAPONE

For locating errors, however, we want a
person who has the persistence of a
mother-in-law and the collecting
instincts of a pack rat.
      -Weinberg, p.136

Anything anybody can say about America is
true.
EMMETT GROGAN

Tip the world over on its side and
everything loose will land in Los
Angeles.
         FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

It pays to be obvious, especially if you
have a reputation for subtlety.          
      - Salvor Hardin

If you ask me, the galaxy is going to
pot!
                - Salvor Hardin

To succeed, planning alone is
insufficient.  One must improvise as
well.
            - Salvor Hardin

Violence is the last refuge of the
incompetent
                - Salvor Hardin

Another effect [of not having a spoken
form] is the difficulty with which we
can talk about a programming language
without a blackboard or pencil and
paper.  Every programming office should
have a blackboard, chalk, and many
erasers.
         -Weinberg, p.207

Bove's Theorem
The remaining work to finish in order
to reach your goal increases as the
deadline approaches.

People like hot french fries.
            Bob Gaylor

Cann's Axiom
When all else fails, read the
instructions.

Franklin's Rule
Blessed is the end user who expects
nothing,  for he/she will not be
disappointed.

Estridge's Law
No matter how large and standardized
the marketplace is, IBM can redefine it.

Origin of the term DEBUG.
During WWII, the war department was using
the Mark I computer, your basic
monsterous machine that gobbled up elec-
tricity and raditated a huge amount of
heat.  The machine was used for target-
ing, trajectory and fuel consumption cal-
culations.  Since these were the days
before air conditioning, the machine was
run mostly at night.  The machine was
made of up a lot of mechanical flip-flops
(one of the primary gates in any comput-
er).  One night the computer failed to
function and it was found that a moth had
given up the ghost when caught by one of
the flip-flop contacts.  It is not hard
to imagine, that the running joke was
something to do with whether or not some-
one had "debugged" the machine lately. 
The rest is history or frustration or
something.

Things are more like they are now than
they ever were before.
DWIGHT D EISENHOWER

You smash it - and I'll build around it.
JOHN LENNON

College isn't the place to go for ideas.
HELLEN KELLER

'Programming'  -  like  'loving'  -  is a
single word that
encompasses an infinitude of activities.
                   -Weinberg, p.121

The important thing is not to stop ques-
tioning.  Curiosity has
its own reason for existing.
                   -Albert Einstein

Programming shares with prayer the fea-
ture of directional
transmission and broadcast reception.
                   -Weinberg, p.207

Better to have wrestled and lost than
played basketball!
                   -Sysop

If the poor workman hates his tools, the
good workman hates
poor tools.  The work of the workingman
is, in a sense, defined
by his tools.
                   -Weinberg, p.203  No
craftsman, if he aspires to the highest
work in his
profession, will accept [inferior] tools;
and no employer, if
he appreciates the quality of work, will
ask a craftsman to
accept them.
                   -Weinberg, p.204

You can't underestimate the power of
fear.
     TRICIA NIXON

Everyone's entitled to my opinion.

The whole earth is in jail and we're plo-
tting this incredible jailbreak.
     WAVY GRAVY

Military intelligence is a contradiction
in terms.
GROUCHO MARX

The first duty of a revolutionary is to
get away with it.
ABBIE HOFFMAN

...  in some terminal systems  ...  the
user can keep his program from being
pushed down in the priority stack by fid-
dling with the shift key while he is
thinking.
                   -Weinberg, p.209

If you make something simple enough for
an idiot to use, only an idiot will want
to use it.
              Unknown

My religion consists of a humble admira-
tion of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details
we are able to perceive with our frail
and feeble mind.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

When a programmer has a difficult time
finding a bug, it is
because he is looking in the wrong place.
                   -Weinberg, p.251

How can you be two places at once when
you're not anywhere at all?
FIRESIGN THEATER

The expert is a person who avoids the
small errors as he sweeps on to the grand
fallacy.
                   -Anonymous

The nature of programming being what it
is, there is no relationship between the
'size' of the error and the problems it
causes.
     -Weinberg, p.247

The race is not always to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong - but that's the
way to bet.
DAMON RUNYON

Documentation is the castor oil of pro-
gramming  ...  the managers know it must
be good because programmers hate it so
much.
                   -Weinberg, p.262

The human mind ordinarily operates at
only ten per cent of its capacity - the
rest is overhead for the operating sys-
tem.
                   -Anonymous

We stand at the brink of a new age, an
age made possible by the revolution that
is embodied in the computer.  Standing on
the brink, we could totter either way -
to a golden age of liberty or a dark age
of tyranny, either of which would surpass
anything the world has ever known.  Per-
haps no individual's efforts will make
any difference in the result, but we must
never cease trying, for then the result
is sure to be tyranny.
      -Weinberg, p.279

Burnt Sienna.  That's the best thing that
ever happened to Crayolas.
      KEN WEAVER

Everyone seems to have been surprised by
the stickiness of the problem, and it is
hard to discern the nature of it.
                   -Brooks, p.4

The programmed computer has all the fas-
cination of the pinball machine or the
jukebox mechanism, carried to the ulti-
mate.
          -Brooks, p.7

The programmer, like the poet, works only
slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.
                   -Brooks, p.7

One types the correct incantation on a
keyboard, and a display screen comes to
life, showing things that never were nor
could be . . . [however]  if one charac-
ter, one pause, of the incantation is not
strictly in proper form, the magic
doesn't work.
                   -Brooks, p.8

...  [OS/360]  was late, it took more
memory than planned, the costs were sev-
eral times the estimate, and it did not
perform very well until several releases
after the first.
     The Mythical Man-Month,
     Frederick Brooks, p. viii

A ship on the beach is a lighthouse to
the sea.
      -Dutch proverb

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its
teaching, therefore, should
be a criminal offense.
                   Dijkstra

If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all
of Western civilization would presumably
flunk it.
     STANLEY GARN

...  one's authority is not sufficient
for his responsibility.
                   -Brooks, p.8

...  designing grand concepts is fun;
finding nitty little bugs is just work.
                   -Brooks, p.8

As soon as one freezes a design, it be-
comes obsolete in terms of its concepts.
                   -Brooks, p.9

All programmers are optimists.
                   -Brooks, p.14

Laws of Computer Programming
 (1) Any given program, when running, is
     obsolete.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (2) Any given program costs more and
     takes longer.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (3) If a program is useful, it will have
     to be changed.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (4) If a program is useless, it will
     have to be documented.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (5) Any given program will expand to
     fill all available memory.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (6) The value of a program is
     proportional to the weight of its
     output.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (7) Program complexity grows until it
     exceeds the capability of the pro-
     grammer who must maintain it.

Laws of Computer Programming
 (8) Make it possible for programmers to
     write programs in English, and you
     will find that programmers cannot
     write in English.


When more and more people are thrown out
of work, unemployment results.
      CALVIN COOLIDGE

Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. 
PL/I is for programmers who can't decide
whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

The mistake you make is in trying to fig-
ure it out.
     TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

An object never serves the same function
as its image - or its name.
     RENE MAGRITTE

[From an announcement of a congress of
the International Ontopsychology Associa-
tion, in Rome]:  The Ontopsychological
school, availing itself of new research
criteria and of a new telematic episte-
mology, maintains that social modes do
not spring from dialectics of territory
or of class, or of consumer goods, or of
means of power, but rather from dynamic
latencies capillarized in millions of
individuals in system functions which,
once they have reached the event matura-
tion, burst forth in catastrophic phenom-
enology engaging a suitable stereotype
protagonist or duty marionette (general,
president, political party, etc.) to con-
summate the act of social schizophrenia
in mass genocide.

Good cooking takes time.  If you are made
to wait, it is to serve you better, and
to please you.
  -  Menu of Restaurant Antoine,
      New Orleans

Real Programmers don't write in BASIC.
Actually, no programmers write in BASIC,
after the age of 12.

He who wonders discovers that this in
itself is wonder.
     M C ESCHER

Law of Computability Applied to Social
Sciences:  If at first you don't succeed,
transform your data set.

I just found the last bug.
                   - Anonymous

A large programming effort ...  consists
of many tasks, some chained end-to-end. 
The probability that each will go well
becomes vanishingly small.
       -Brooks, p.16

If A equals success, then the formula is:
   A= X + Y + Z
 X is work.  Y is play.  Z is keep your
mouth shut.
     ALBERT EINSTEIN

Real Programmers don't play tennis, or
any other sport that requires you to cha-
nge clothes.  Mountain climbing is OK,
and real programmers wear their climbing
boots to work in case a mountain should
suddenly spring up in the middle of the
machine room....

Cost does indeed vary as the product of
the number of men and the number of
months.  Progress does not.  Hence the
man-month as a unit for measuring the
size of a job is a dangerous and decep-
tive myth.
                   -Brooks, p.16

Froud's Law:
 A transistor protected by a fast acting
fuse will protect the fuse by blowing
first.

Fuller's Law of Cosmic Irreversibility:
 1 Pot T == 1 Pot P
 1 Pot P == 1 Pot T
     R BUCKMINSTER FULLER

The bearing of a child takes nine months,
no matter how many women are assigned.
                   -Brooks, p.17

The fault lies not with our technologies
but with our systems.
     ROGER LEVIAN

When everything has been seen to work,
all integrated, you have four more months
work to do.
  -  Charles Portman                    
     International Computers Limited

Real Programmers don't document.  Docu-
mentation is for simps who can't read the
listing or the object deck.

Thoreau's Law:
 If you see a man approaching you with
the obvious intent of doing you good, you
should run for your life.

Vique's Law:
 A man without religion is like a fish
without a bicycle.

Observe that for the programmer, as for
the chef, the urgency of the patron may
govern the scheduled completion of the
task, but it cannot govern the actual
completion.
                   -Brooks, p.21

If builders built buildings the way pro-
grammers wrote programs, then the first
woodpecker that came along would destroy
civilization.
      GERALD WEINBERG

Real Programmers don't write in PASCAL,
or BLISS, or ADA, or C, or any of those
pinko computer science languages.  Strong
typing is for people with weak memo-
ries...

Zimmerman's Law of Complaints:
Nobody notices when things go right.

...  when [the omelette]  has not set in
two minutes, the customer has two choices
- wait or eat it raw.
                   -Brooks, p.21

Brooks Law: Adding manpower to a late
software project makes it later.
                   -Brooks, p.25

...  the sheer number of minds to be co-
ordinated affects the cost of the effort.
           -Brooks, p.30

...  conceptual integrity is the most
important consideration in system design.
          -Brooks, p.42

(To Walter Cronkite):
 "Well Walter, I believe that the Good
Lord gave us a finite number  of heart-
beats and I'm damned if I'm going to use
up mine running up and down a street"
     - Neil Armstrong -

The purpose of a programming system is to
make a computer easy to use.
             -Brooks, p.43

"You doubted Me," God tells the Lawgiver
[Moses], "But I forgave you that doubt. 
You doubted your own self and failed to
believe in your own powers as a leader,
and I forgave you that also.  But you
lost faith in these people and doubted
the divine possibilities  of Human Na-
ture.  THIS loss of faith makes it impos-
sible for you to enter the Promised Lan-
d."
     - The Midrash -

Neither function alone nor simplicity
alone defines a good design.
                   -Brooks, p.43

Add little to little and there will be a
big pile.
                   -Ovid

"We must be patient, if for no other rea-
son than this:  They have all the guns."
       Bishop Peregrino

"If your sins are not your own to choose,
then how can you repent?"
       Bishop Peregrino

He'll sit here and he'll say, 'Do this! 
Do that!' And nothing will happen.
                   -Harry S. Truman

Never go to sea with two chronometers;
take one or three.
                   -Anonymous

Bradley's Bromide:
If computers get too powerful,we can or-
ganize them into a committee...  that
will do them in.

Civilization Law #1:
Civilization advances by extending the
number of important operations one can do
without thinking about them.

I know it.  I know what needs to be done
- but every time I try to tackle a tech-
nical problem some bloody fool wants me
to make a decision about trucks - or
telephones - or some damn thing.
         -Robert Heinlein                
    The Man Who Sold the Moon

Everything you've learned in school as
"obvious" becomes less and less obvious
as you begin to study the universe.  For
example, there are no solids in the uni-
verse.  There's not even a suggestion of
a solid.  There are no absolute continu-
ums.  There are no surfaces.  There are
no straight lines.
                -- R. Buckminster Fuller

Ketterling's Law:
Logic is an organized way of going wrong
with confidence.

"Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose
his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most
likely a scoundrel"
     H. L. Mencken -

"The government of the United States is
not in any sense founded on the Christian
Religion"
     George Washington -

The problem was that everybody who was
working there, including myself, wanted
to do really neat stuff but they didn't
want neat stuff, they just wanted a lot
of stuff fast.
     Rick Baker, make-up artist for King
     Kong, Star Wars, et. al.

"In every country and every age, the pri-
est has been hostile to Liberty."      -
     Thomas Jefferson -

The generation of random numbers is too
important to be left to chance.
       -Robert R. Coveyou
        Oak Ridge National Laboratory

"Its hard to forget a girl when you buy
her a gift on time"
 - George Washington -

It's redundant!  It's redundant!
                   -R. E. Dundant

If you don't have enough time to do it
right the first time, how are you going
to find enough time to do it a second
time?
                   Unknown

I don't know any reason why we couldn't
do it, but maybe we can think of one.
                   -Mark C. Davison

Bug?  That's not a bug, that's a feature!
                   -T. John Wendel

The computer 'Doth make fools of us all'.
                   -Weinberg, p.152

The Swartzberg Test:
 The validity of a science is its ability
to predict.

"There is no choice before us.  Either we
must succeed in providing  the rational
coordination of impulses and guts, or for
centuries civilization will sink into a
mere welter of minor excitements. We must
provide a Great Age or see the collapse
of the upward striving of the human race"
 - Alfred North Whitehead -

Have an adequate day!

If once a man indulges himself in
murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he
next comes to drinking and Sabbath-
breaking, and from that to incivility
and procrastination.
  -- Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859)

Any fool without the ability to share a
laugh on himself will be unable to toler-
ate programming for long.
                   -Weinberg, p.152

About Programming
"Programming is a series of discoveries
leading you from one plateau of
understanding to another... The trick is
not to step in the stuff between the pla-
teaus."
    - taken from a cartoon

Never rub another man's rhubarb.
    - The Joker -

Have you ever danced with the devil in
the pale moonlight?
    - The Joker -

"My own life has been spent chronicling
the rise and fall of human systems, and I
am convinced that we are terribly vulner-
able....  We should be reluctant to turn
back upon the frontier of this epoch. 
Space is indifferent to what we do; it
has no feeling, no design, no interest in
whether or not we grapple with it.  But
we cannot be indifferent to space, be-
cause the grand, slow march of intelli-
gence has brought us, in our generation,
to a point from which we can explore and
understand and utilize it.  To turn back
now would be to deny our history, our
capabilities."
 - James A. Michener -

The programmer's national anthem is 
'AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH'.
                   -Weinberg, p.152

"To err is human, to compute divine. 
Trust your computer but not its program-
mer"
     - Morris Kingston -

When we finally see the light, we see how
once again we have fallen into some fool-
ish assumption, some oafish practice, or
some witless blunder.
                   -Weinberg

The job cannot be done right unless the
necessary tools are available.
   - Proceedings of the IEEE, 2/78, p.174

Origin of the GW in GWBASIC
No big deal here, the GW stands for Gee
Whiz

After all is said and done, a lot more
has been said than done.

Beauty is only skin deep, but Ugly goes
straight to the bone.

There is no remedy for sex but more sex.

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
     -Confucius

Any given program, when running correct-
ly, is obsolete.


Sex is like snow... You never know how
many inches you're going to get or how
long it will last.

On a clear disk you can seek forever.
                   -Computerworld button

Beware of programmers carrying screw-
drivers.
        - Brandwein

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System
Dynamics:  Once you open a can of worms,
the only way to recan them is to use a
larger can.

Hoare's Law of Large Programs
Inside every large program is a small
program struggling to get out.

Nixon's Theorem
The man who can smile when things go
wrong has thought of someone else to
blame it on.

For a man to truly understand rejection,
he must first be ignored by a cat.

"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. 
And my advice to you is to have nothing
whatever to do with it."
                - W. Somerset Maugham -

What, me worry?
    Alfred E. Neuman

What do you get when all the cannisters
of radioactive waste that have been
dumped in the ocean finally corrode? 
         
Nuclear fishin'

I've learned to admit it when I'm 
scared because it takes courage to
know when you ought to be afraid.
    James Michener

Civilization is the most fragile
economy of all.
    Frank Olynyk

CENSORSHIP:  Not letting me say
             whatever I want.  
EDITING FOR GOOD TASTE:  Not letting
other people say things I don't like.
     from Kelvin Throop's Lexicon of 
          Popular Parlance

TANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as
            a free lunch!

I am free for I realize that only I am
truly responsible for my own actions.   
     Professor Bernardo de la Paz 
     (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom.  One
helps you make a living; the other helps
you make a life.
    Sandra Carey

A man lives not only his personal life as
an individual, but also, consciously or
unconsciously, the life of his epoch and
his contemporaries.
     Thomas Mann

The meek shall inherit the Earth; but
having inherited the Earth, shall they
continue to be meek?
    Abba Eban

They that can give up essential liberty
to obtain a little temporary safety de-
serve neither liberty nor safety.
    Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know the
subject ourselves, or we know where to
find information upon it.
    Samuel Johnson

Reincarnation may or may not be true, but
some people should never have been
carnated in the first place.

The pace of events is moving so fast
that unless we can find some way to
keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot
expect to be in touch with today.
     Dean Rusk

Nothing is more terrible than activity
without insight.
     Thomas Carlyle

Those who speak most of progress measure
it by quantity and not quality.
     George Santayana

Judge a man by his questions rather than
his answers.
     Voltaire

There is little incentive to build a
replicator even resembling one in that
can survive in nature.  Consider cars: 
to work, they require gasoline, oil,
brake fluid, and so forth.  No mere
accident could enable a car to forage
in the wild and refuel from tree sap: 
this would demand engineering genius and
hard work.  Likewise, replicators built
in accord with suitable regulations
would not even resemble anything that
could run wild.  The problem, and it is
enormous, is one not of accidents, but
of abuse.
     K. Eric Drexler

People who falsify history don't rescue
freedom, they jeopardize it.
     Vaclav Havel,
     President of Czechoslovakia

We would know today who invented the
wheel if they'd had a spokesperson.