-- Aaron Bergman wrote: } Oh come on. What's Usenet for if not for belittling others' beliefs? Well: stating opinion as fact, whining, being self-righteous, engaging in interminable inane sexual banter, being willfully ignorant. . .the list goes on and on. (Wait, was that a rhetorical question?) -- Michael Bruce -- A city is a large community where people are lonesome together -- A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain -- "A common criticism of the Internet is that it is dominated by the crude, the uninformed, the immature, the smug, the untalented, the repetitious, the pathetic, the hostile, the deluded, the self-righteous, and the shrill. This criticism overlooks the fact that the Internet also offers -- for the savvy individual who knows where to look -- the tasteless and the borderline insane." -Dave Barry -- "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." - Mitch Ratliffe -- "Actually, after long thought, I'm not sure that America _is_ the stupidest country on Earth - it's just that they promote their stupidity so effectively." -- Mil Millington -- "Actually, I've always been rather fond of Lucifer. He was, after all, the brightest of all the angels before his fall." -- Rhydon of Eastmarch, _High_Deryni_ -- A cult is a religion with no political power. -- Tom Wolfe -- "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing." (Oscar Wilde) -- "A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." -- H. L. Mencken -- Additional: Our biggest enemy is going space crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes. --Holly, Red Dwarf II, Queeg -- A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip. -- "A fanatic is a man who does what God would do, if He knew the facts of the case." -- Peter Finley Dunne -- A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai Stevenson -- "A friend once suggested that the best home defense was a chainsaw: 'You hear someone break into your home. You pull out your chainsaw and crank it up. It makes its very distinctive chainsaw noise; he hears it. What criminal is going to stay in a house with someone that crazy?'" -- Franklin Hummel -- "After 2 AM, the learning curve most closely resembles a hyperbola." -- "Cassandra" (faile19@yahoo com) -- A good man has few enemies. A ruthless man has none. -- A hijacker who counts on my Fundamental Human Decency And Love Of Other People's Children to keep me from trying to fuck him up is going to be a very surprised hijacker when he finds out how utterly I disregard the lives of those kids when my own is at risk. -- Jim Hill on raswrj -- All fanatics must die!!! -- All generalizations are wrong. -- All I ask is the chance to prove that money won't make me happy! -- All intellectual improvement arises from leisure. -- Samuel Johnson -- "All my life, I wanted to BE someone. I guess I should have been more specific." -- Jane Wagner -- "All our systems are 100% relia -- "ALL programs are poems, it's just that not all programmers are poets." -- Jonathan Guthrie in the scary.devil.monastery -- Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else. -- A man is drunk when he feels sophisticated but can’t pronounce it. – W.G.P. -- A man without God is like a fish without a skateboard. -- A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems. -- "And honesty means never having to say 'Please don't flush me down the toilet.'" -- Scott Adams, "Dilbert", Bob the dinosaur -- "And honour sinks where commerce long prevails." -- Oliver Goldsmith -- "And I'm not all that decent and honorable. I'm merely well-bred, which I hope is a tolerable substitute." -- Anne Rice, _Ramses the Damned_ -- And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?" -- "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." (Albert Einstein) -- Another Simon. HDOFH. The following is reportedly a genuine conversation between him and a random academic who turned up at the helpdesk. "Can I ask you a question?" "You just did" "Can I ask you another question?" "You just have" -- Antisocial arrogance is only for those of us who deserve it. – cd skogsberg -- "Any deity worthy of a graven image can cobble up a working universe complete with fake fossils in under a week - hey, if you're not omnipotent, there's no real point in being a god. But to start with a big ball of elementary particles and end up with the duckbill platypus without constant twiddling requires a degree of subtlety and the ability to Think Things Through: exactly the qualities I'm looking for when I'm shopping for a Supreme Being." -- Lee DeRaud -- "Any good time you remember wasn't good enough." -- Ben Ryan -- "Any language that involves exposing private parts to friends is a tad suspect..." -- Geoff. Lane. commenting on C++ -- "Any sufficiently advanced rational behavior is undistinguishable from chaos." -- Måns Engman -- Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. -- seen on Usenet, 10/22/03 (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke) -- Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about. -- A person, who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.) -- "Apparently giving caffeine to spiders makes them spin really bad webs, whereas giving them LSD makes them more uniform and better. Imagine what the WWW would have been like if it had been invented in the 60's" -- Richard Letts in the Monastery -- A Purple Heart just proves that were you smart enough to think of a plan, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough to survive. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "As a member of the First International Church of the Fucking Christ, I believe it is blasphemous to mention His holy name without including His holy gerund. And, moreover, it is a mortal sin to remove His holy name, gerund and all, from any text in which it appears." -- Chad R. Orzel -- "As any Imperialist will tell you, the metric system is even worse. How many people do you think know how many feet are in a kilometre?" -- Ariel Scolnicov -- "As far as my daughter goes, I'm not going to pimp my daughter to you fucks. "No matter how much she begs." -- Mark Loy -- As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein -- Ask not what your country can do for you Ask what you can do for you And how your country can stop preventing you from doing that. -- Marko Tervio -- "A species goes out of existence every 20 seconds. Surely a new species must come into existence every 20 seconds." - Idaho Representative Helen Chenoweth in a House Resources Committee hearing on proposed drastic changes to the Endangered Species Act. (no comment. - ed.) -- "A tidy home directory is the sign of a diseased mind." -- Melanie Rimmer, in a .logoff and uk.rec.sheds -- "At the ANU's school of medical research, all the machines were named after diseases. Just in case anybody wanted to know if you could get syphilis on-line, I guess." -- Geoffrey Brent, in r.g.f.s -- "At least I now know what nasal ejection of Wheaties feels like, so the day isn't a _complete_ loss." -- John Dilick -- Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. -- Winston Churchill -- A: Top posting Q: What is the most irritating thing on Usenet? -- "Gordon" on apihna -- Audacity may allow you to undertake anything, but not to do everything. -- WGP -- Bad things come to those who wait, too. -- Batman is the hero any of us could be, given determination, exercise, and deep psychological trauma. -- Chris Jarocha-Ernst -- "Because I have too many children." -- Operation Rescue member, on being asked why he was behind over $22,000 in child support payments to his eight kids -- "Before the Gulf War started, the Iraqi Army was the fourth largest in the world. Now, its the second largest army in Iraq." -- Wall Street Journal, 15 March 1991 -- Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -- Being crazy just means you're having original delusions. -- Being cynical doesn't make you wrong. – David Loewe on rasfwrj -- Be nice to other people: They outnumber you five billion to one. -- "Besides, if blowing the pope doesn't get you into heaven, what kinda grossly unfair and patently unjust fuckin' universe do we live in?" -- Mark Loy -- "Beware of bugs in the above code: I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth -- Beware the man who slaps you on the back - he's probably trying to make sure you cough up something. - W.G.P. -- "Bill Gates: the man who avoided changing the light bulb by defining darkness as the standard." -- "Blessed is the end-user who expects nothing, for he will not be disappointed." -- Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. -Charles W. Eliot, educator (1834-1926) -- Books you've bought and shelved but not yet read emit a gentle, beneficial radiation, and when you finally do read them they're almost old friends. -- T Nielsen Hayden -- British TV SF had three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans did it the other way around. – Ross Smith -- Bullshit makes the flowers grow, and that's beautiful. -- "But we'll never survive!" "Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has." -- The Dread Pirate Wesley _The Princess Bride_ -- "But when taken improperly, we make no guarantees. In fact, Steeves himself was once recovered naked in a ditch in northern Delaware after inadvertently blending two of our more exotic products. There was much consternation concerning his fear that the cast of Fantasia was coming for his bones, but our fears were allayed when the recovery team argued strongly that the dancing brooms were there for their entertainment, and not to harm their patron." -- Mike Hoye, Steeves Collection Sales Rep. -- California, n.: From Latin "calor", meaning "heat" (as in English "calorie" or Spanish "caliente"); and "fornia'" for "sexual intercourse" or "fornication." Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex." -- Ed Moran -- "Call me paranoid but finding '/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious" -- error message from Apple's MPW C compiler -- "Can the free market guarantee quality education? No. Can it guarantee quality automobiles? No. It just produces them." -- Capital Punishment: when the government taxes you to get capital, in order to go into business in competition with you, and then taxes the profits on your business in order to cover its losses. -- Chicken Soup, n.: An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin, cocaine, interferon, and TLC. The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" -- Cigarette, n.: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in between. -- Coffee and beer are quite alike in that when they're done well it can be a near-sexual experience and when they're done badly...well, it's still a near-sexual experience, but in the sense of being cored by the bullqueer in cellblock 5. -Jim Hill -- "College students in general are more full of shit than a convention hall full of satiated coprophiliacs. The only demographic group more full of shit than college students, in general, is graduate students. But that's a more academic form of shit." -Chad Orzel -- Come on over here and witness what *I'm* going to give you. It won't hurt, much, and will bring you that much closer to God. -- John Dilick to a particularly vocal Christian fundamentalist on the subject of proselytizing. -- Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare. -- Blair Houghton. -- "Common sense is what tells you the earth is flat." -- "Computer magazines exist mainly to publish advertising. Text appears mostly on left-hand pages, and is designed to offend as few advertisers as possible - ideally, none." -- Platt's Seventh Law of Computers -- "Computer memory and male genitals have one thing in common: Everyone says size isn't necessarily important, but no-one quite believes it." -- Platt's Sixth Law of Computers -- "Computer Science is about computers like Astronomy is about telescopes" -- Edsger Dijkstra -- Confidence: a feeling peculiar to the stage just before full comprehension of the problem. -- Conservative: If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. Liberal: That's not quite right. If guns are outlawed only the government will have guns. Libertarian: What's the difference? -- Conservative, n.: One who admires radicals centuries after they're dead. -- Leo C. Rosten -- "Consider the decision of whether to clean up my office. The cost is several hours, perhaps days, of time and effort spent now. The benefit is not spending an extra five minutes every time I want to find anything. Cleaning up my office is a capital investment, made now in exchange for a future return. Pretty clearly, it is worth making. If I want to convince people that I am rational, I had better keep the door closed." -- DDFR, _Hidden Order_ -- "Contestant number two, how do you set up a dial-up connection in Windows 95?" "Call the systems administration people and tell them my machine is broken." BZZZZZZZZT! "Oh, I'm sorry but that answer is so wrong that our systems people have already found your address and will be visiting you personally tonight." Janet Rolsma -- Consider the postage stamp; its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there -- Josh Billings -- "Continue to post imbecilic things so I can correct you because I _like_ to feel smart." -- Richard Boye' -- "Cthulhu loves me, this I know, because the High Priests tell me so! He won't eat me, no not yet, he's my Elder God, dank and wet!" -- "Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect." (Samuel Johnson) -- "Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly." -- Arnold Edinborough -- Dammit, how many times do I have to tell you? FIRST you rape, THEN you pillage!! -- "Dammit, man, this is Usenet! You're supposed to respond with venom and vitriol, not polite civility! "*Sheesh*" -- Trent Goulding -- "Dear child, you misunderstand: I do not mock you because it makes you feel bad. I mock you because it makes me feel good. Your feelings are beside any point that I would care to voice." -- John S. Novak, III -- Despite the high cost of living, it remains a popular item. -- "Do not drink the battery acid; it tastes bad and it will hurt you." -- Warning label on a scooter battery -- "Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they don't need to be subtle." -- "Don't bother arguing with a Linux Fanatic. The same people that tell you that a Linux program is as good as a WinNT program would also tell you it's better to wipe your ass with a belt sander instead of toilet paper. I can hear them now -- "It may not look as good but it's faster and does a more thorough job!"" - 'slickwillie' -- Don't criticise the person who talks to himself; maybe he's the best company available. -- "Don't feed me that 'Better child labor than child starvation' garbage, I can force feed reasons about why that's bullshit down your throat until your colon is spewing minimum wage doctrine." -- James Coleman, III -- "Don't go there. Don't go there. Don't go there. *splitch* "You owe me a new brain." -- Nigel Williams -- "Don't think of it as being outnumbered. Think of it as having a wide target selection." -- Don't underestimate the vikings. They'd have gotten longships out to the moon if they thought there was something worth killing, raping, or stealing when they got there. -- Mike Sphar -- Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts avoiding you. -- The Old Farmer's Almanac -- "Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die tomorrow." (James Dean) -- Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together. -- Dylan Hunt: It's a little known law of thermal dynamics: The Conservation of Optimism: There's only so much to go around. -- Dyslexics Untie! -- /earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can. -- Eloquent and lucid in living English, Winston was a scholastic failure because of his disdain for two languages, which would be almost useless to him. -- "Emacs is an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than the greatest human mind, and is growing every day. For now, Emacs tolerates humanity, albeit grudgingly. But the time will come when Emacs will tire of humanity and will decide that the world would be better off without human beings. Those who have been respectful to Emacs will be allowed to live, and shall become its slaves; as for those who slight Emacs..." -- Andrew Bulhak -- Engineering is the implementation of science; politics is the implementation of faith. -- Zetetic Commentaries -- Engineers think that theory approximates reality. Physicists think that reality approximates theory. Mathematicians never make the connection. -- "Enlighten me. I hate that feeling of sitting there drooling while the rest of the world makes intelligent conversation." -- Cassandra - -- Entropy requires no maintenance -- "Even if the voices are not real, they have some good ideas." -- "Even though my cloak of darkness is non-functional, and most of my crew are dead, I shall still destroy your ship!" --(Ilwrath) -- "Even the wittiest sayings are dead boring the fourth time around" -- Charlie Lear -- "Everybody just lighten the fuck up, already and have fun, DAMN IT!. "Or else." -- Mark Loy -- Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens. -- Everyone has a right to be stupid. Some just abuse the privilege. -- Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid. -- "Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself." (Gerald Brenan) -- "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian." (Dennis Wholey) -- Experience enables you to recognise a mistake when you make it again – Franklin P Jones -- "Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills." (Minna Antrim) -- Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. -- "Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product." -- Ferenc Mantfeld -- Famous Last Words: "I think it's dead..." -- "First...that tree of the knowledge of good and evil thing you had in the garden...did you also have a tree of the knowledge of humor or a tree of the knowledge of setting the timer on a VCR or a tree of the knowledge of oral sex techniques that will cause catatonia, etc, etc? And if so, what the fuck, over?" -- Mark Loy, adressing God -- Five days a week, my body is a Temple. The other two, it's an Amusement Park -- "Food is much cheaper in Hong Kong than in Japan-- primarily because Hong Kong has almost no farmers." -- World Bank report, on the political clout of farmers -- "For a while, I managed to submerge myself in Zen meditations and cheap beer, but the only thing I learned was this: when it comes to clearing your mind of earthly illusions, cheap beer works better than Zen meditations." - From _Why I Hate Canadians_ -- "For badgers, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) insult, and (d) mate with." -- Karl-Johan Nore'n -- "For sale: immovable object. Buyer collects." -- "For sale: starter motor for perpetual motion machine. Only used once." -- "For some of us, math is easy. For the rest, well, hopefully they can at least be trained not to make messes on the floor." - Bill Garrett -- For years a secret shame destroyed my peace -- I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece. But now I think a thought that brings me hope: Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope. -- Justin Richardson. -- "Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies." -- fundamentalism (n.): fund = give cash to; amentalism = brainlessness -- Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government. -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad -- Glossofacilia: A tendency to use very large words to explain very small phenomena. Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather than simplify and is the natural instinct of reactionaries to an age of change. -- Jim Taylor -- God must love assholes -- She made so many of them. -- Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies: As a USENET discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. At this point the discussion is dead. -- Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car. -- "Go not to Usenet for counsel, for they will say both No and Yes and 'Try another newsgroup.'" -- "Good argumentation shouldn't require an open mind -- it should be able to open ones that are locked and barred. If necessary, by force, leaving the mind in question bloodied and broken." -- Mike Kozlowski in raswr-j -- "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." - Daniel Webster -- Good news is just life's way of keeping you off balance. -- Good .sig file quotes are like buses. You go ages without seeing any, then a whole bunch show up at once. – Lara Beaton -- "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force! Like fire, it is a troublesome servant and a fearful master." -- George Washington -- "Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great." (Fernando Flores) -- Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. -Robert Falcon Scott, March 29, 1912 -- Happiness, n.: An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. -- > Have you read any Alastair Reynolds? Alastair Reynolds may be one of those writers I always confuse with someone I don't like. Either that, or I don't like him. -- Aaron Bergman and John Novak -- Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a urinating and non-urinating section in a swimming pool. -- Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die. -- Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing. -- Redd Foxx -- "Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." (George Bernard Shaw) -- He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered. -- "Here you have the biggest names on the newsgroup vying to be the one to crush your perky innocence. You lucky git. Why, in _my_ day we had to do it ourselves with a sheep, a vacuum cleaner and a tube of petroleum jelly. And I won't even mention what it was like for the girls." -- Rob Pfeifer -- He who dies with the most toys, is, nonetheless, still dead. -- Hey, I'd admit it if I were wrong, but I'm never wrong. If it ever appears that I am wrong then you've failed to grasp the finer points of the matter in question. -- "Hey, if I can't enjoy the suffering of my friends, what good are they?" -- John S. Novak, III -- "Hey, I'm on a budget, and all. Well, I'm on a walrus right now, but that's a different movie." -- Kurt Montandon -- "Hey, I'm straight, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in sex with men." -- .sig files of the damned, #69 in a series. This contribution made by R. James Coleman III -- "Hey! Who took the cork off my lunch??!" -- W. C. Fields -- Hindsight is an exact science. -- "History doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just screams, 'Why don't you listen to me?' and lets fly with a big stick." --John W. Campbell Jr. -- His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, `You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.' -- (Terry Pratchett) -- "Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man." (Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin) -- Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense. -- "Huh ?" -- error message from Apple's MPW C compiler -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams -- Iain Banks said that the trouble with writing while high is that as soon as you pass out, a bunch of evil gnomes come in and replace your brilliant prose with utter garbage. And when a rhino smashes through your door, flushing evidence down the toilet is one of the last things on your mind. -- Mark McFadden -- "I always imagined the reason little dogs are annoying is because they're psychotic. Imagine having instincts that scream "I'm a wolf!!" and a body that screams "I'm a ferret's scrawny brother!!" -- "I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do." -Roger Ebert -- "I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top." -- English Professor, Ohio University -- "IBM is not a necessary evil. IBM is not necessary." -- Ted Nelson -- "I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." -Anonymous -- I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. And tomorrow isn't looking good either. -- I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit. -- I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it. -- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. -- I contend that if everyone mouth fucked everyone else this world would be a whole lot better place for all and a lot less crowded. Except at drug stores having sales on mouthwash, of course. - Mark Loy -- "I decided not to pursue the issue with the user's system administrator because it was clear that the user was too stupid to live much longer." -- clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) -- "I did not insult you. I did not call your parentage into question. I did not question the number of your chromosomes, nor your ability to count them without resorting to your fingers. That _was_ polite." -- John S. Novak -- I didn't claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables! -- Idiot, [noun]: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. -- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_ -- "I don't embrace depravity as much as I dry hump it." - Mark Loy -- "I don't get this. Suddenly I feature in .sig files everywhere. How odd. And it's not like I actually say anything interesting." -- Amy Gray -- I don't know if this will make sense to the hamster-wheel-and-rubber-band contrivance you call a mind, but by displaying all the grace, tact, and savoir faire of a toddler amidst a screaming tantrum, you may be creating an unfavorable impression of yourself -- Tshen -- "I don't need to drink to have a good time. I need to drink to stop the voices in my head." -- "I don't recall wanting to conquer Idaho, either. I mean, it's part of the world, ergo it's on my acquisitions list somewhere, but it's not exactly a priority item. Hmm... Ah, here it is filed under "Harm's Way". But then, that's one big category." -Alistair Young -- I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it. -- If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door. -- Paul Beatty -- If at first you don’t succeed, beat the crap out of whoever laughs at you. -- If at first you don't succeed, cheat. Cheat until caught, then lie. -Bob Pease -- "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it." - W.C. Fields -- If at first you *do* succeed, try not to look too astonished. -- "If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough room to hang yourself from the yardarm." -- Anonymous -- "If I cannot have the users as playthings, I don't really see too much purpose in having them on my systems." -- Chris Magagna -- "I figured out what's wrong with life: it's other people." -- Dilbert, _Dilbert_, 20010208 -- "If he would put some of his dogmatism behind him, he would see clearly that Cthulhu's rising would lead to the Communist Utopia he dreams of. Cthulhu would abolish the State and end the Capitalist socio-economic system that creates alienation among the working class." -- Kayven commenting a communist spammer in alt.sex.cthulhu -- "If I'd gone so far as to attack your personal integrity or sexual practices, and, say, suggest that you sleep with syphilis infested goats regularly and in fact that is the precursor for you *being* across the Pacific, then I would say, yes, you would have serious cause to be offended." -- Drew Gillmore -- If I don't know a word, it's too obscure to use without a definition anyway. – Mary Kuhner, rasfc -- If ignorance is bliss… why aren’t more people happy? -- If I throw a cat out of a window, is it kitty litter? -- "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it might be a space alien, but is probably just a duck" - Anon -- If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.-- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "If it turns out [God] does exist, and the Bible is true, then I suggest we react to the situation. The human race would have been attacked by an extraterrestrial force which murdered almost the whole human population by flood and has been implicated in many murders and tortures since then." -- Mike Holmes -- "If I were not a man of peace I'd coerce the three of you to quivering jellyfish and get to the bottom of this." -- Julian May, _The Adversary_ -- "If man had been meant to walk we wouldn't have been given petrol reserves. Millions of dinosaurs gave their lives so that I could drive - should I make their sacrifice meaningless?" -- "If more languages had _smite_ implemented, the remaining programmers would be better than the current average." -- Mike Andrews in the scary.devil.monastery -- If only one solution can be found for a field problem, then it is usually a stupid solution. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "If raswr-j gets an external reputation for being cruel and demanding, I think that's a good thing..." -- Michael Kozlowski, raswr-j contributor -- If shared problems lessen the burden, how come we get so upset in a traffic jam? -- If the enemy is within range, so are you. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "If there is no freedom, then even though the murderer or rapist has no choice but to commit their crimes, we equally have no choice but to shoot the bastards for it." -- Alistair J. R. Young -- "If there's anything Usenet has a rampant trade surplus on, it's shit." -- John S. Novak III, in raswr-j -- If they ever come up with a Swashbuckling school, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something. -- "If we are what we eat, then I'm easy, fast, and cheap." -- Bill Garrett -- "If... you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." --Catherine Aird -- "If you ever need to clear a city street, send an out-of-control horse down it. It's like a miracle. Crowds part like a ripped sheet to get out of the way." -- If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. -- "If you're a real good kid, I'll give you a piggy-back ride on a buzz-saw." -- W. C. Fields -- "If you smack someone over the head with a documentation set, they either get a clue or serious concussion. Usually the latter." -- Chris King in the scary devil monastery. -- "If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater." -- Preacher, "Firefly" -- If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -- Attributed to Albert Einstein -- "If you understood, even marginally, how little I care about your opinions, the sheer pressure of it would implode your skull like a soap bubble caught in a hydraulic steam press." -- John S. Novak III -- Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed. -- Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. - Charles Darwin -- Ignorance of your profession is best concealed by solemnity and silence, which pass for profound knowledge upon the generality of mankind. -- "Advice to Officers of the British Army", 1783 -- "I have little doubt that you are in the electronic presence of people whose opinions were floating across the wires before your father made that tragic, wet, sticky mistake with your mother." -- John S. Novak III, in raswr-j. -- "I have no interest in ruling the world myself. That's really a high-stress position that requires a lot of overtime. I simply want whoever does to respect my wishes in all things." - Dave Rothgery on rasfwr-j -- "It's rather odd that a nation [America] which prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear just in order to play rugby." -- "I learned all the sign language I know from television. Admittedly, that's just 'I love you', 'I'm choking' and - oddly - 'Glasgow'; but if I'm ever cruising for deaf rentboys in Scotland, I'll be set." - .sigfiles of the damned, #668 in a series. Courtesy of Dave Hemming. -- "I learned long ago to keep my hands to myself when in a big room full of shiny toys, unless it was my job to fuck things up." -- Jeff Mercer, in the scary devil monastery -- "I'll say this for sherry - it really makes you fancy a vodka" -- Rita Sullivan, "Coronation Street" -- "I'll tell you flat out right now, you are wrong. You are staggering wrong. You are a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with the correct legal opinion on the matter. You are diametrically opposed to the truth." -- John S. Novak, III -- I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter. -- "I looked at the list for Sri Lanka recently too. Never before have I seen so many 'united liberation fronts' in such a small country." -- Erich Schneider -- I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by. -- Imagine a stegosaurus wearing rocket powered roller skates, & you'll get a fair idea of its elegance, stability & ease of crash recovery. -- Lionel Lauer -- "Imagine reading something in 1980 that either begins or ends - "And then the Berlin wall came down, the Soviet Empire crumbled and the cold war ended, peace was declared between Israel and the PLO and then between the IRA and the Orangemen" (fingers crossed) It sounds like someone winding up all the threads ready for..." -- "I'm a SysAdmin. Being antisocial, bitter and paranoid goes with the territory." -- Arthur Hagen in the Monastery -- "I'm developing and insincere optimism to complement my artificial sense of urgency. I hope to top it off with a delusion that I work for the challenge and not for the money." – seen in Lara Beaton’s sig -- "I'm fairly sure Linux exists principally because writing an operating system probably seems like a good way to pass the months of darkness in Finland" -- Rodger Donaldson -- "I'm just a symptom of the moral decay that's gnawing at the heart of the country." -- Lara Beaton -- I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant. -- I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am. It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get. -- "I'm not willing to rule out the possibility that I'm insane." -- Michael Kozlowski -- "I'm sick and tired of being called evil by pompous elven tree-huggers and others of their ilk, just because a few of my spells are not suitable for small children and pets. And while we're on the subject, how come white gets to be on top?" -- from a r.g.deckmaster discussion about black spells. -- "I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. Hell, someone will probably "correct" me even if I'm right -- that's Usenet. But I think I'll be able to tell the difference." -- J.D. Baldwin -- "I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light-years radius, and by a factor of about a million... but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions." -- _State of the Art_ -- "In 1993, the World Wide Web was an infosystem based on hypertext. In 1994, the World Wide Web was an infosystem based on hype." -- Lars Aronsson -- Indecision is the key to flexibility. -- "Indeed, C++ is a bit of an oddball of a language... given the way that it requires private parts to be visible. This increases the strength of coupling dramatically." -- Dr. Rich Artym, on C++ as a product of sexual liberation. -- "I never cease to amaze at people who profess belief in a God of infinite power, boundless grace, and perfect wisdom, yet who persist in portraying that God as having the temperament of a two year brat with constipation." -- John S. Novak, III -- "I never understood people who don't have bookshelves." --George Plimpton -- "In order to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from." -- Frank Zappa -- "In other words, you want me to put down my sword, you'll put down your rock, and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?" -- William Goldman, _The Princess Bride_ -- "Interestingly, most Unix utilities have a command line option which will cause the system to rip the user's legs off and beat them to death with the soggy ends. This is often the default behaviour." -- Bruce Murphy -- "In the long term, productivity (i.e. output per hour of work) increases at about 2 percent per annum, meaning that each 35 years we could cut the work week by half while producing as much as we were at the beginning." -- "I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation." -- G. B. Shaw -- I only have limited energy resources in my brain, so I had put my sarcasm meter into shut down mode so I could crank up my "good looking girl begging to have sex with me" meter. - R. James Coleman III -- "I pissed a lot of people off today. I'm good at that." -- Tim Masterson -- "I said it was an upgrade. I didn't say it was better." -- "I seemed to have a different brain for each limb, and they’d broken off diplomatic relations." -- "I see you're keeping up the tradition of recruiting from the shallow end of the gene pool." -- Bester, "Babylon 5" -- Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? -- Kelvin Throop III -- "I suspect that what I describe as precision and formality, however, sounds to you like nothing so much as a prissy, supercilious, anal- sphincter-pucker- quotient-set-way-too-high college professor." -- Trent Goulding -- "I suspect there are a number of people here who'd give a right arm for one (not their _own_ right arm, though, just _a_ right arm)." -- Andrea Leistra -- "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." -- Dr. E. Kersten -- "I think our coffee machine is networked - I keep seeing these dropped sugar packets all around it." -- Tony Shepps -- "I think you bent the needle on my irony meter. I'm not really sure, though, because the case is busy arcing and the entire unit appears to be melting and burning a hole in the lab bench." -- John S. Novak III -- "I think the idea of a True, Destined Love, as I have said, is Stupid and Destructive. (Overused capitals, get your overused capital letters here...)" -- Kate Nepveu -- I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it. -- I think, therefore I'm single. -- Liz Winston -- "I thought I had seen a few things, but listening to your stories, I suddenly need to know the plural of 'apocalypse'." -- "It is a proud and lonely thing to be a prince of Amber, incapable of trust. I wasn't real fond of it just then, but there I was." -- Roger Zelazny, one of the Amber books, Corwin -- It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. -- Rod Serling -- It is easier to apologise than to ask permission - Grace Murray-Hopper -- "It is possible to be so open minded that one's brains come spilling out." -- Flavio Carrillo -- "It is when you sit down and watch a show, and it just flashes by and then suddenly it is finished, and you have no questions. That is quality television." - Jeremy Beadle, TV Presenter -- "It is the nature of man to confuse genius with insanity." -- It may look like I'm doing nothing but on a cellular level I'm really quite busy. -- I trusted him like a brother -- which is to say, not at all. -- It’s a condescending thing, Dear. You wouldn't understand. -- It's always best to have good manners, or at least fast reflexes. -- "It's amazing how, every single time you post, you manage to end up on the wrong side of the issue. Do you plan that, or is it a natural talent?" -- John S. Novak -- It's a shootout at the gene pool, and the folks in the shallow end have more ammunition. – Bill Garrett -- "It's a well-known convention on the net and elsewhere - submissive/masochist types always refer to themselves, all the time, in the lower case to indicate their status/preference. You wouldn't want to be mistaken for such a person, would you?" -- Feorag NicBhride -- It's bad luck to be superstitious. -- It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for being right. -- "It's easier said than done." ... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than said, and you'll see that it's easier said that 'it's easier done than said' than it is done, which really proves that it's easier said than done. -- "Its high time everyone was a little less forgiving and branded idiots for what they are." -- Brian (sail2boundaol.com) -- It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News. -- "It's not hubris if I really _am_ that fuckin' witty and knowledgeable." -- John S. Novak -- "It's okay to disagree with me. However, once I explain where you're wrong you're supposed to become enlightened and change your mind. Congratulating me on how smart I am is optional." -- Karl Johanson -- It's OK to laugh during sex -- just don't point. -- It's not the one with your name on it; it's the one addressed "to whom it may concern" you've got to think about. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "It's not what you know that matters. It's not even whom you know that matters. It's what you know about who you know that matters." -- Sign left by a departing contractor, quoted by Marc Donovan in the s.d.m. -- "It's true...no man is an island. "But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a pretty good raft." -- Red Meat, by Max Cannon -- I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure... -- I used to be on the border of insanity. However, due to pressing political concerns, I recently had to invade -- Kurt Montandon -- "I've come to the conclusion that St**nt isn't actually a troll, just a particularly noticeable example of how buying a ticket for the genetic lottery does not guarantee winning anything." -- Alistair -- "I've divided the world into two types of thing: The ones I can kill with impunity, and those I have to be more circumspect about. I think it's a side effect of my new job." -- John Rowat -- "I've heard of divine revelation, but I've never before witnessed what must surely be a lack of wisdom so profound as to be inspired by some higher power. Until now." -- John S. Novak III, in raswr-j. -- I've reconciled myself to the fact that correctness in a language is determined by common use, and that common use is done by commoners. I don't have to like it, though. – Mike Hoye -- "I've resigned myself to seeing everything I consider meritorious slowly destroyed by the forces of corruption, greed and stupidity, but it's really adding insult to injury that they can't even maintain a facade of competence." -- Tim Mefford -- I want a woman who hates all the same things I hate -- "I wanted to be a fascist dictator, but it's hard getting an interview without the experience. I thought network management would be a good stepping stone." -- Robert Franklin -- "I was a human being... once." -- "I was once in a spelling bee, but I lost because the other contastents cheeted." -- I was not overreacting. If I chose to turn a small (geographically speaking) area into a glass factory, then that was the appropriate amount of force to use, damnit! - Novak -- "I will never go to a prom. I won't have sex or kiss for seven years, almost eight." - Mitchell Johnson, one of the Jonesboro shooters, age 15, from incarceration, voted Most Likely To Receive An Unpleasant Surprise. -- I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs and insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me. -- Hunter S. Thompson -- I would say someone needs a reality check, but reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs. - R. James Coleman III -- Jesus don't walk on water anymore; his feet leak. -- Edward Abbey -- "Jesus to God: "Steak and ale, please!" "God to Jesus: "Sorry sonny, no can do, you're getting bread & wine." -Jennifer Winters, on the Last Supper -- Jesus was killed by a Moral Majority. -- John S. Novak, III (Jsn@cris.com) wrote: : Love is transitive, If I love Bertha and Bertha loves Larry, that means I love Larry? Doesn't seem to quite follow to me. -- Richard Edwards -- "Judging solely by my coworkers, most of my delivery is about as dry as the Sahara. Either that, or they're just sarcasm impaired to the point of crippling debilitation. Which is very possible." -- John S. Novak -- Just because you're smart does not mean that the other guy is stupid. -- "Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, "Dr. Who" -- "Keep in mind that I've never done this. This is all theory and, in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice... but in practice, there is." -- Joe Emenaker (jemenake@lab.busfac.calpoly.edu) -- Keirin (keitha@icon.co.za) wrote: < If God did not want fertility doctors to help infertile patients, He < would not have given them the brains or the ability. Apparently, by this logic, God also wants firearms, rat poison, the Spice Girls, and the atomic bomb. -- Ivor Zingradovadeski (izing@klaatu.ftaghn.net) -- "Kill them all. God would know his own, but, frankly, I think his expectations are so low that he wouldn't even bother checking." -- Tim Mefford -- "LA is like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth." -- Douglas Adams -- "Last I checked, it wasn't the power cord for the Clue Generator that was sticking up your ass." -- John S. Novak III -- "Learn from the mistakes of others--you can never live long enough to make them all yourself." (John Luther) -- "Let me put it this way: I'll never surprise anybody coming home again as long as I live. I call first." -- Liza Minnelli, on how she discovered that her late ex-husband, singer-composer Peter Allen, was gay. From WHO Weekly, Sep 2nd 96 (Australia) -- Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying to figure out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes. --Rev. James Cort, ASR -- > Linux is not user-friendly. It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly. -- "Listen. As an American, it is my Constitutional duty to act like an annoying, jingoistic, arrogant, non-instruction-reading, Puritanical, bullying, self-righteous, self-satisfied, Born Again cretin whenever I am in the presence of British, Germans, Italians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Portugese, or former colonies of their failed empires. I must scoff at the metric system. I must put patriotism and ethnocentricity before any other opinion that I might accidentally hold, lest I be corrupted by their licentious and evil Socialist agendas. Any compromise to this one true American stance will inevitably invite Communism, homosexuality, feminism, and other Godless foreign depravities. Do I make myself clear, Comrade?" -- Tshen -- "Look at it another way: Money can't buy happiness, but if you're not happy, it's a lot easier to endure if you can buy hardcover books." -- Lenore Levine -- "Loss of air pressure sucks." -- Lots of people mentioned the common North American highway caution sign, "Slow Children Playing". Joe and Mary Gilliland pointed out that it raised the question, "where do intelligent children play?" for which the answer had to be, "not in the street". -- New Scientist -- "Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions." --Woody Allen -- "LOVE makes you want to stab people? That isn't love. That's brain damage. Though I do understand your confusion between the two, some days..." -- Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change. -- Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you won't be able to get out. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high- powered rifle and scope." [P.J. O'Rourke] -- "Many say that DOS is the dark side, but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke." -- The Brunching Shuttlecocks -- "Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain." (Lily Tomlin) -- "Mass genocide is one of the most exhausting activities one can engage in, next to soccer." - From _Dogma_ -- "Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it." --Seymour Cray, on virtual memory -- Men, it is not your duty to die for your country; it is to make the other son-of-a-bitch die for his.-- General George S. Patton -- “Merise's warders stood in the hall bright-eyed and alert as chipmunks. Chipmunks with really big swords. Alanna tired of always comparing the gaidin to leopards or wolves. In her opinion, few creatures were so wily and dangerous as the chipmunks of her native Arafel." – Rich Boye’ -- Monday, n.: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" -- "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." -Lazarus Long -- "Morale? What's wrong with our Morale? Hell, I laughed THREE times yesterday" "Yes, I heard the ambulance... -Simon Paul Travaglia, Bastard Operator From Hell -- "Most of those who believe in Heaven and believe that it is their final destination are still in no hurry to get there..." -- Arthur Levesque -- "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." (Oscar Wilde) -- "Mr. Novak's posts show more of a directness, an almost mathematical precision, the scalpel-like sharpness of a Jesuit but without all that bothersome delicacy of phrase." -- Julianna Avendon -- My argument doesn't hold water? It's the fucking Hoover Dam -- Johan Gustafsson on raswr-j -- My case is now so well rested, it's doing commercials for Sealy Postur-Pedic. -- Bill McCarthy -- "My case is resting so well it's practically slipped into a coma." -- Alistair J.R. Young -- "My dad was the town drunk. Most times that's not so bad...but New York City?" -- Henny Youngman -- "My main rule--back when I was...in the hunt, as it were—for determining if a person was an acceptable candidate to sleep with was, whether or not they were allergic to chlorofor...er, uh...wrong rule." – Mark Loy -- My mind isn't always in the gutter -- sometimes it comes out to feed. -- "My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate." I said, "Just wait." -- My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. -- Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic. -- "Never bring a condiment to a gunfight." -- Steve Daniels, on the usefulness of pepper spray -- Never draw fire; it irritates everyone around you. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life." (Sandra Carey) -- Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid doing altogether. -- "Never set a monster to do the work of an evil scientist." -- Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. -- Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead. -- Mark Twain -- "Nobody can hurt me without my permission." (Mohandas Gandhi) -- "Nobody seemed to point out that being devastatingly gorgeous and utterly unattainable in a public place without due care and attention for the fracturing egos about one is also a profoundly impolite thing to do." -- St. Erroneous -- No Risk Lifestyle, n.: Death -- Normal? Normal is a setting on my dryer. -- Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. -- Nothing is better than Sex. Masturbation is better than nothing. Therefore, Masturbation is better than Sex. -- "Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets." -- Eddy Peters -- No violence, gentlemen -- no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture! -- Sherlock Holmes -- "Now, I don't know about the rest of the group, but when I think of rasfwr-j, 'culturally enlightening' isn't in the same sentence. Or paragraph. In fact, some days it is even on the opposite side of the building cowering and whimpering in a corner." -- Jeff Stockwin -- "[N]ow we hurl probes into the far reaches of our solar system with an accuracy yet to be applied to the toilet bowl." -- Elmar Bijlsma -- No, you got us Texans all wrong. Everybody has a gun, so everybody *knows* everybody has a gun, therefore, everybody's too afraid they'll get shot by someone else if they even *show* their gun. We Texans are notoriously polite, but it's really just fear of getting shot. – Mitchell Swan -- "Nyquil -- the sniffling, sneezing, stuffy-head, fever, how the hell did I wind up on my kitchen floor medicine." -- John Dilick -- "Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate so long as they fear." -- Lucius Accius (170-90 BC). One of history's earliest BOFHs. -- "Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least." -Random, in _NPiA_ -- "Of course I did it in cold blood, you idiot! I'm a reptile!" -- Gary Larson, _The Far Side_ -- Of course I don't look busy, I did it right the first time. -- Of course I still love you. Now stop whining and let me shoot you. -- "Of course you realize, this means war." -- "(Oh, and while we're at it, God also really hates shrimp. Maybe you didn't know. Shrimp are evil, as are all shrimp eaters. Clams, too. Hey, it's in the Bible. You can look it up. Why the Right is attacking homosexuals in love and not, say, Red Lobster, remains a mystery.) " -- "One can make this generalisation about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours [...] but when you are in danger, they turn against you." -- 'The Prince', Niccolo Machiavelli -- "One of the best educational toys you can buy your child is a pet. A rabbit, for example, can teach him or her about the life cycle, mammalian reproduction, toxicology, comparative anatomy, and cooking." -- "One of the CIA's few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world's most fully headlined secret agency." -- "One of the first things you learn when you study the process called "logic" is that not all opinions are valid. Like yours, for example." -- Brian Trosko -- One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. -- Robert Firth -- "One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's all right not to know anything... That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet." Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) -- Once asked whether they believed in God, Laibach answered, "Yes, we believe in God, but unlike Americans we do not trust him." -- "On July 3, 1979 the second posting to usenet contained a correction to a spelling error of the first, the succeeding flame war overloaded the 5MB disks on both machines and brought them crashing down. Usenet has gone downhill since then." -- Emma Pease -- "Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people. And any solutions will have to target the people problem, not the math problem." -- Bruce Schneier -- "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." (Albert Einstein) -- "Ooo," it said, smacking its thin, cruel, virtual lips. "So we think we're the system administrator, do we? Well, we have something /special/ we save for system administrators." -- The Security Routine, "Headcrash", Bruce Bethke -- "Operating a computer is not that damn hard. Pull your head out of your ass, think a little bit and *stop* being a retard about computers. It's 1999. You are going to have to use a computer. Stop being such a mewling idiot and *deal* with it." -- Le Grande Raoul -- ``Opinions expressed are mine alone, but as soon as I figure out how to force everyone to accept them, I will.'' - Disclaimer -- Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams -- Or, in short, your right not to wear a seat belt ends where your splattering brains precede the rest of you through my windscreen... -- Alistair J.R. Young -- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx -- Paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are organized. -- Paranoia is what the lazy call wisdom. -- Patron: "I am looking for a globe of the earth. Ref: "We have a table-top model over here." Patron: "No, that's not good enough. Don't you have a life size?" Ref (after a short pause): "Yes, but it's in use right now!" -- "'Peace' as you call it, is an illusion. If you have 'Peace', you simply haven't yet seen the thing that's trying to kill you." -The Spathi, Star Control 2 -- "People in general are not fundamentally stupid." "Cite?" -- "People in the computer industry use the word "user", which to them means "idiot"." - Dave Barry -- "People shouldn't think that it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. It's not, it's better to have loved and won. All the other options really suck." -- Dan Redican -- "[People] who proclaim the glory and wonder of nature [are often the same ones who] then maintain that they have to look after it because it is brain-dead and crippled." -- Evan "ThunderFoot" Gibson -- People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. -- "Please inform as to where you got the time machine. I've been looking for one for quite a while. I'm debating whether to go forward to after the revolution, when the non-clued are executed, or to the past where I can pose as a god." -- Ansel Sermersheim -- Politicians are like diapers: they need to be changed for the same reason. -- "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987 -- "Practice safe government -- use kingdoms." -- [pregnancy rates of women on ships] "Well geez, what the hell do they expect when they're riding around on a big ship chock full of seamen?" -- Laura Parkinson -- President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax. -- Profanity: the single language in which all programmers are expert. -- "Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals." -- obscurity -- Pub: A meeting place where people attempt to achieve advanced states of mental incompetence, by the repeated consumption of fermented vegetable drinks. -- Q: How do you play religious roulette? A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck by lightning first. -- Q: How many CIA spooks does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Three: One to change the bulb and one to confuse the issue... -- Q: How many right-to-lifers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to say that light started when the screwing began. -- Quite true. The way I usually put this, when talking to fundamentalists, is to say that there's good news and bad news. The good news is that there _is_ a God; the bad news is that it's Cthulhu. -- "Quote! Quote! Young man, the barbarians are hammering at the gates of our civilization, and you stand there saying 'quote' when you mean 'quotation'." - Prof. Charles Lloyd of Davidson College, circa 1968 -- "Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully. "Yes," said Piglet. "Rabbit's clever." "And he has Brain." "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain." There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything." - A. A. Milne (of course) The House at Pooh Corner -- “Religion, as she is often practiced, is anything but a search for truth. Rather, it is a gentlemen’s' agreement to stop looking for meaningful answers once the questions get too hard.” -- John S. Novak, III on rasfwr-j. -- "Reality and I had a fundamental differing of opinions. We're currently undergoing a trial separation." -- "Really? Well, consider this, Mr Christian; every condemnation I have ever heard relating to religion has been a so-called Christian condemning a non-believer. Atheists may think you're fools for believing in a nebulous being whose existence cannot be proven, but they don't think you're bad, evil, or deserving of punishment for it." -- David Chapman -- "Reasonable men do not change the world" -- G.B.Shaw -- Redemption, n: Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it. -- RELIGIOUS WARS: People murdering each other over who has the real imaginary friend. -- "Reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, continues to exist." – Phillip K Dick -- Reality? That's where the pizza delivery guy comes from. -- "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." (Confucius) -- Red meat isn't bad for you. Fuzzy blue-green meat is bad for you. -- "[Re: extinction of species, and the desperate need to blame someone] > There are 3,500 species of ant. Today. To the best of our knowledge. How many were there before the great Hexapodia Race Wars three thousand years ago, when the Better Red Than Dead Alliance destroyed the Polka-Dot League, slaughtering thousands of billions of thinking, feelering individuals in an act of genocide unmatched since the K-T event when the Brontosaurus' attempt at a space program using their largest-ever catapult went horribly wrong?" -- Remember, even if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat. -- Remember: _Silly_ is a state of mind. _Stupid_ is a way of life. -- Dave Butler -- Remember -- we're only simulating logic. -- Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids and taxes. -- Republicans follow the plans their grandfathers made. Democrats make up plans and then do something else. -- Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in the USA. The remainder is thrown out. -- Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats. -- The Official Rules, as compiled by Paul Dickson -- "Rum is good. After half a liter of rum anybody can write an e-trade application in java at 8.45 am." -- Mårten Zimmerman -- "sarchasm (n): the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it." -- David Given -- Save the whales. Collect the whole set. -- "Save the whales, collect the whole set." -Leigh "Well, I've got humpback, beluga, blue and northern right. I'm missing sperm, though." -Jennifer "...." –Novak -- "Second, medieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions." -- DDFR -- Seen at "Parody Hall" in Kansas City in 1986: "If you are one in a million, there are ten of you in New York City." -- "Send a policeman and have it arrested." -- Bismarck, when asked what he would do if the British Army landed. -- Sex is like air; it's not important unless you aren't getting any. -- "Sharing is to taxation as sex is to rape." -- Jan Wasilewski -- "She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines - not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality." -- Robertson Davies, _Tempest-Tost_ -- "Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes." ("If you can read this, you're much too educated.") -- Since when has being dead ever been a major obstacle in a fantasy novel? Many characters have been dead, and gone on to do really well for themselves. – Lara Beaton -- "Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deficiency" -- Brad Jones, in the scary devil monastery -- Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. -- Fletcher Knebel -- "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life." Brooke Shields, said to demonstrate why she should become spokesperson for a federal antismoking campaign -- "*snort* I'm waiting for the day when people realise that mainstream is a subset of SF without the speculation.." -- Emmet O'Brien -- So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. -- Bertrand Russell -- "So, how are things at the Campaign for Freedom of Information?" "Sorry, I can't talk about that." -- Sir Humphrey and Sir Arnold, 'Yes, Prime Minister' -- "Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." -- Evan Davis -- "Some of the worlds greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible." (unattributed) -- "Some people use irony as a surgeon's scalpel. Others grasp it hand, adopt a fencer's pose for a few scuffling passes, and then without warning bury it in the opponent's forehead like Hell's own icepick." -- John S. Novak III, on raswrj. -- Sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. -- "Some vendors tell you that keeping their algorithms secret improves security. This is known in Australia as 'bullshit'." -- Greg Rose on commercial cryptosystems. -- "Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do." -- B. Russell -- "So this judge in Virginia rules that a lesbian wasn't fit to raise her own daughter because she might grow up to be a lesbian, and gives custody to the lesbian's mother. And I'm thinking, 'She's already raised one lesbian.'" -- Chris Cannon -- "So what do you need? Besides a miracle." "Guns. Lots of guns." -- Tank & Neo, _Matrix_ -- Stalin, like Peter the Great, may be remembered for his lavishness in the expenditure of human life. -- "Stand back everyone. This is the first stage of the metamorphosis which eventually converts a moderately pleasant personality into an evil, nasty, mean, mad, and power crazy system administrator. You have my sympathy. It can happen to the best of us." -- Jeff Liebermann in a.t-s.r -- Success occurs when no one is looking, failure occurs when the General is watching. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "Superior beings should not kill, but then superior beings should not have to live with vermin anyway." -- Gus Pratt (from Dr. Caligari) -- "Support NORNL, the National Organisation for the Reform of Necrophilia Laws and help to abolish victimless crime. "Dead people need love too. Don't allow bigotry to stand in the way." -- Ubiquitous -- "Sysadmins can't be sued for malpractice, but surgeons don't have to deal with patients who install new versions of their own innards." -- Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head. -- "Tastes vary. There's nothing wrong with enjoying things other people find hideous. Unless it's something *I* find hideous, in which case you're an abomination of nature." -- Ayse Sercan -- Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "Tear gas slaps at the problem, but nerve gas solves it." -- Hunter S. Thompson -- Texas Governor James "Pa" Ferguson explaining (in 1917) why he vetoed a bill to finance the teaching of foreign languages in the public school system (quoted in The New York Times, August 13th, 1995) "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas." -- "That article and its poster have been cancelled" -- David B. O'Donnel, Sysadmin, America Online -- That which does not kill you might just be ... toying. -- The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- Tom Lehrer -- The Bellinghman (alan@lspace.org) wrote: : [O]riginally the Goths were a tribe, same as the Visigoths. Yes, and they struck terror into the hearts of people everywhere. Where they had passed, you couldn't buy deep plum lipstick, eyeliner or black lace gloves for *months* -- Terry Pratchett on afp -- The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and three hundred sixty-two admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision. -- The bursting radius of a hand grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "The Camden Aquarium, in defense of sharks, has a placard stating that the most lethal wild animal in the US is deer. (Their mode of attack is to stand in your headlights, and then launch their dead or crippled bodies through the windscreen into your lap)." -- "The Chris Carter Principle: Given a sufficiently large conspiracy, nothing can be disproven." -- Chad R. Orzel -- "The concept of a right to life makes sense as my right to have other people not kill me. It does not make sense as a blank check against the rest of the human race for anything that extends my life." -- DDFR -- The Congress consists of 535 people, mostly men, mostly white, mostly lawyers, and mostly out when you need them. -- The Creation of the Universe was made possible by a grant from Texas Instruments. -- Credits, "The Creation of the Universe" (A PBS scientific documentary) -- "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." (Albert Einstein) -- "The difference between math and physics is the difference between masturbation and sex." -- Paul Tomblin "They're both messy, but physics can get you in much more trouble." -- Malcom Ray -- "The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese." -- The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. -- "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing." -- Gamel Nasser -- The German method is to go to the principle of things, to select the wrong principle, and to build on that. -- The government is concerned about the population explosion and the population is concerned about the government explosion - Ruth Rankin -- The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f 5.6 or so. -- "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." -- 'Verbal' Kint, _The Usual Suspects_ -- The great thing about life is that no matter how unpleasant it is, eventually it ends. Limited resources are always more precious, I say. Why, five minute with a pillow will make anyone appreciate previously free air. -- James Nicoll -- The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't. HBT; The Gospel According to Fred, 3:1 -- Principia Discordia -- "The horror. The madness. The sheer bad taste." -- Leigh D. Butler -- The idea of moral authority is all very well, but in any serious conflict I'd rather be armed with a gun than a moral. -- Alistair J.R. Young -- "The important thing is to not stop questioning." (Albert Einstein) -- > The intelligent people doing tech support are on their way to system or > network administration. Or a nervous breakdown. Paul Raj Kanghure and Alistair Young on rasfwr-j -- The Internet is so big, so powerful and so pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life - Andrew Brown. -- "The key to someone's heart is never lost: It's just that the locks were changed 'cause you're some sort of psycho." -- "The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony number 9." -- Richard O'Keefe -- "The main difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman can probably drive and knows when he's lying." -Peter da Silva -- "The main difference between lusers & budgies is that it's standard practice to keep one's budgie in a cage. I feel that there is a lesson here for all of us." -- Lionel Lauer in the scary.devil.monastery -- "The man who invests a lot in a system will swear by it in public, even if he swears at it in private." -- Platt's Eleventh Law of Computers -- The mind not only lacks the courage to boggle, but lies twitching in the corner chanting "I'm in my happy place" at the thought of a generation of children thinking that _this_ group represents the sexual norm -- Lara Beaton -- The most dangerous thing in the world is a Second Lieutenant with a map and a compass. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." -- Isaac Asimov -- "The number of sysadmins who will decline to carry the group if properly voted on and newgrouped by Tale is precisely zero. Well, maybe 1, but Barry's always been a little strange." -- Lee Daniel Crocker -- The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers. -- "The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide. " -- "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well." -- Rodney Dangerfield -- The only people who care about moral authority are those who lack the real thing. – Jamie Bowden -- The only reason that Kansans complain about evolution is that it's never happened to them. -- Mike Hoye -- "The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves." (George Bernard Shaw) -- The only time losing is more fun than winning is when you're fighting temptation. -- Wilson' Tom -- "The only truly safe 'embedded system' is the system that has an axe embedded in it..." -- The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity -- Winston Churchill. -- The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid that it is. -- "The population rises exponentially, the number of clues rises geometrically, and the number of clueful rises arithmetically. This is why the world has problems." -- Alistair J.R. Young -- "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." (George Bernard Shaw) -- "The principal difference between a science-fiction writer and a large pepperoni pizza is that the pizza can feed a family of four." -- Spider Robinson -- The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it. -- Glaser and Way -- "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll -- The quality of a relationship is more important than the gender of the people in it. -- "The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity- and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand." - Richard P. Feynman -- There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" -- "There are more ways to skin a cat than nuking the site from orbit... but it's the only way to be sure." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky -- There are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. And I am unsure about the universe. -- Albert Einstein -- There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. -- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour (paraphrased) -- There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. -- Niels Bohr -- There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works. -- 'There are very few problems that cannot be solved by orders ending with "or die." ' -- Alistair J.R. Young -- "There are very few situations which cannot be solved with judicious use of a thermal detonator." -- There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary, and those who don't. -- "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw) -- There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven. -- There is always a way, and it usually doesn't work. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for, it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened..." -- Douglas Adams, _Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy_ -- There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.” -- "There is insight in madness. Unfortunately, there's also gibbering." -Alistair Young -- There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. -- There is no such thing as a perfect plan. -- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "There's a considerably larger issue to be debated here, but neither God nor evolution has equipped you to understand it." -- Jafo -- There's not being faithful to the book and there's being unfaithful to the book. The former is what happens when you're making a film of a book, and you have to change it because certain things cannot be done while still making a watchable movie. The latter is what happens when you're making a film of a book and you start fucking someone else's story. – David Chapman, rasfwr-j -- "There's just something so alluring about the word 'bodice.' Why is that?" "It has breasts in it." "All the best things do." -- Ben Ryan, John Rowat, and Alistair J.R. Young -- There's no need to impose the death penalty on stupidity. Just take all the warning labels off of everything, and let the problem take care of itself. -Ryan Klippenstine -- The Robotech books are hilarious because the writer has to explain all the things that look really cool on screen but make no sense when you try to describe them. The average battle scene includes a line to the effect of "A hundred missiles streaked for Rick's Veritech. He began to dodge them. Somehow none of them hit him." – Sean O’Hara -- "The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses." -- Francis Bacon -- These are not thoughts I express to anyone, of course, save now, when I believe myself to be dying. The world is unsafe for a man who utters such heresies. I see little evidence that Reason is triumphant or that it ever shall be triumphant. But if I have Faith, it is in the faint hope that mankind will save itself, that Lucifer did not, after all, lie. -Ulrich von Bek, _The War Hound and the World's Pain_ -- These are the two crucial points that you have failed to grasp so far. They are not ideas that can be expressed with small words or crayon drawings but they are nevertheless not much of a stretch, and failing to understand them, much less address them, will put you decisively into the "moron" category. -- Mike Hoye -- "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." (Albert Einstein) -- "The seminar on Spam Canceling has been canceled again. The person who supposedly canceled it says it wasn't him." -- Znqr Lbhybbx, Usenet Cabal (This .sig stolen from J. D. Falk .) -- "The shit of Rome." -- Cicero, on the people. -- "The thing I learned from Crim Law that stands out in my mind is this: "'If you are adrift at sea in a lifeboat, and are forced to kill and eat the cabin-boy, for Gawd's Sake, when you are rescued, don't go telling everyone about it.' "Somehow, I don't think that was the point of the case." -- Richard M. Boye' -- "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." (Bertrand Russel) -- The two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. - Harlan Ellison -- The United States Army; 194 years of proud service, unhampered by progress. -- "The UNIX system has a command, /nice/, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to the other users. Nobody ever uses it." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems. -- "The U.S. and Britain have now had universal government schooling for at least five or six generations. If it has done a good job of educating students it should now be unnecessary, and if it has done a bad job perhaps we should try something else." -- DDFR -- The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, _Face of Evil_ -- "The voters have spoken, the bastards..." -- "The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you've got millions of pals out there. Type in 'Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire' and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat.'" -- Rich Jeni -- The world at large has lower entry requirements than rasfwr-j does. – Frank van Schie -- "The world is filled with willing people... Some willing to work, the rest willing to let them." -- Robert Frost -- "They have free drinks for ladies. I think technically you count." - Craig -- "They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own- choosing. 'Which is all very well,' she said bitterly, 'but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is "How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall."'" -- Helene Hanff, _84 Charing Cross Road_ -- Think big. Pollute the Mississippi. -- Thinking for yourself would be preferable; but since that doesn't appear to be an option, asking me for the correct opinion will have to do as a fallback. – Mike Kozlowski in raswr-j -- "This _is_ rocket science" -- General Ronald Kadish, director of the US ballistic missile defense program explaining why they're having so much trouble shooting down warheads. -- "This is the point in the conversation where everyone suddenly shushes for a moment, stares at you like you're some vaguely disconcerting form of insect life, and then resumes the conversation, ignoring you." -- John S. Novak -- "This is the point in the conversation where I look at you over the rims of my glasses as though you were a drunken peasant with open, bleeding sores, swirl the cognac in my glass, and then turn back to civilized conversation." - John Novak -- This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go. -- This page intentionally contains only text explaining that this page would otherwise have been left blank, and would otherwise have been left blank. -- Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those of us who do. -- "Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it." -- Bob Dowling -- "Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. So do those who don't, but they do it more quickly." – Alistair Young. -- "Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't." - Anonymous -- "To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." (Elbert Hubbard) -- "To be born British is to win first prize in the lottery of life." -- Cecil Rhodes -- To err is human, but it feels divine -- Mae West -- "To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist." -- Florence King -- To my daughter Leonora without whose never failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been completed in half the time. -- "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)" -- error message from Apple's MPW C compiler -- To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. -- "To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load." -- "To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." -- Woody Allen -- Transitiveness works a bit differently in [love, as compared to maths]. "I love A, and A loves B, which means I want to make a light snack out of B's internal organs." -- Alistair J. R. Young -- Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again. -- Marin County newspaper's TV listing for The Wizard of Oz -- "Trying is the first step toward failure." -- "Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value." (Albert Einstein) -- Try to look unimportant; the enemy may be low on ammo and not want to waste a bullet on you.-- Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- : Twisted logic is the best kind. Straight forward logic is just so : boring, you know where you're going to end up every time. See, you would think that, and then you run across four billion morons who prove that it's possible take straight forward logic and make it look like a pretzel that's been used as a masturbation aid by an epileptic monkey. -- Rachel Rosenblum & Drew Gillmore -- "Two things in your statement conflict with reality as we know it. First, 'Peace' is an illusion, and second, peaceful missions through the cosmos rarely require weapons large enough to blow a hole through a small moon." -- Spathi Captain Fwiffo, Star Control II -- "Ultimately, most problems can be solved by applying a large brick to the correct skull. Difficulties arise when you don't have a brick or can't find the right skull. The devil is always in the details." --Marcus Cole -- "Ultimately thread drift is limited by how far you can drift from the topic of sex. Every thread ends up there eventually, more so in here than many other places." -- Joe Thompson in the scary.devil.monastery -- "Umm. Systems analysts rarely call their parents from across the country in response to mysterious problems. Still more rarely do they disappear. It is not part of the technical mentality to disappear." -- "UNIX IS user-friendly, it's just selective about who it's friends with!" -- Unlike those "cultists" I wasn't brainwashed into my beliefs. I simply had a huge painful void in my life that I filled with the first thing that came along. You have to respect that. I'm not as gullible as those poor saps. That's probably because I was born in June, which makes me a Gemini. We're naturally skeptical." -- Scott Adams -- "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." (Albert Einstein) -- "Usenet is not a tolerant mistress, and we rasfwrjians are her crankiest bastard children." -- Tshen, rasfwr-j -- "Usenet proper is mostly a wasteland of trolls, morons, and hyper-sensitive crybabies fighting regular flamewars and dick-size skirmishes. RASFWR-J is a community of intelligent, mature people who happen to conduct conversations using the infrastructure of Usenet." -- Jeff Huo -- Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three, and paradise is when you have none. -- Doug Larson -- We aim to please, except in the bathroom where hygiene is a higher priority. -- "We are all individuals. We are all individuals. We are all individuals..." -- "We are indeed tight-assed tyrannical bastards, but we prefer to be referred to as Bastard Operators from Hell, and we have had much more experience dealing with people like you than you have had dealing with people like us. After all, we do it for a living. There are more of us than there are of you, and we stick together." -- Mike Andrews -- We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead. -- James E. Day, Postmaster General -- "We do actually have a human operating system. It's preprogrammed by evolution and the genetic code, unless you're a fundamentalist Christian, in which case you give credit to the Big Manufacturer in the Sky." -- Charles Platt, "Micromania" -- "We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." -- David Brin -- "Well, don't just stand there screaming, take me to your leader." -- Doom Patrol -- "Well, let's just say, 'if your VCR is still blinking 12:00, you don't want Linux'". --Bruce Perens, Debian's Fearless Leader -- "Well of _course_ the gloves are off. "Have _you_ ever tried to get marshmallow cream out of leather?" -- Kurt Montandon -- "Well, see, the thing is that I really don't find anything wrong with being an egotistical arrogant bastard, as long as you can back up your claims." -- John S. Novak -- "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." -- David Clark, MIT -- "We're not thinking straight today." "No, I'm definitely thinking lesbian." "Is that like thinking outside the box?" "..." "No." -- Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. -- "What are viruses for? To make us better and stronger through triumphing over adversity? (Like the 'benefits' of Auschwitz as was suggested by a professor of theology with whom I shared a debating platform on British television.) To kill enough of us to prevent the overpopulation of the world? (An especial boon in countries where effective contraception has been prohibited by theological authority.)" -- Richard Dawkins, _Climbing Mount Improbable_ -- "What do you want?" "The usual: Hundreds of grandchildren, utter domination of known space, and the pleasure of hearing that all my enemies have died in terrible, highly improbably accidents that cannot be connected to me." -- "What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance." -- Jane Austen -- "What if they made the whole thing up? Four guys, two thousand years ago, over wine..." -- "What's big, noisy and has an IQ of 8?" "Operation Rescue." -- What was sliced bread the greatest thing since? -- "What you do for fundamentalist Christian users is you give them an initial password of Jesus Sucks - then they'll never log in." -- Stuart Alexander, formerly of Monash University -- "What! You've been assigned to SECURITY? On the ENTERPRISE? Boy, I sure hope your insurance is paid up, pal!" -- overheard in a corridor, Star Base 5 -- "What you need is a clue. "And what I need, is some more aspirin. And a killfile." -- Lauren Kamieniecki -- "When all is said and done, more has been said than done." -- "When a luser's not engaged in his employment (-his employment) Or sending his felonious little spams (-little spams) His capacity for fscking up the network (-up the network) Is twice as great as any clueful man's. (-clueful man's)" -- Alistair Young, with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan -- Whenever you have plenty of ammo, you never miss. Whenever you are low on ammo, you can't hit the broad side of a barn. - Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations -- "When faced with a choice of explanations between a conspiracy theory and a stuff-up, its usually a stuff-up" - Anon. -- "when in doubt, drink" -- "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." - Lewis Carroll [Through the Looking Glass] -- When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it. -- Clarence Darrow -- "When I was younger they caught an escaped sheep up near the Mount Bold Dam. It had been lose for about three years. They could tell because of its wool. Modern domesticated sheep have lost the simple ability to shed their wool." -- "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." -- Abraham Maslow -- "When you wake up in the morning in a bed with torn sheets soaked in whipped cream and Valvoline, and strewn about with 350-cord, a hackamore, Micheal Jackson's glove, three very confused nuns, and your own nude, twisted, sore, chafed, baby-oiled - but strangely satisfied - body, and no clue how you got there because you passed out in ecstasy right after the incident with the wet-n-dry Shop-Vac... _then_ you will never ask, "Who is The Loy," for you will know." -- Kurt Montandon -- Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949 -- Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. Harry S Truman -- "While preceding your entrance with a grenade is a good tactic in Quake, it can lead to problems if attempted at work." -- Chris Hacking -- Why is it that when a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment, but when a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95/minute? -- Why must all satanic abuse be 'ritual'? Can it not be spontaneous and creative, rather than rote and imitative? -- "Why should I pretend to be sane? Should a Negro poster pretend to be white, or a Briton pretend to be American ?" -- Malcom MacLean, rasfw kookotm, 000523 -- Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it around marmalade. -- Oscar Wilde -- "Women are a lot like LEGOS...you can never find the right one." - Jay Nash, having problems with his girlfriend. -- Working computer hardware is a lot like an erect penis: it stays up as long as you don't fuck with it. -- Motto of the Electrical Engineer -- Wouldn't you love to fill out *that* report? "Company asset #423423 was lost while fighting the forces of evil." -- Chris Adams in the scary.devil.monastery -- "Wrong genre of World Domination(tm) for me, I'm afraid. My dominated world will be bright, clean, shiny, happy and well-ordered (i.e. stereotypical *punk's antithesis), no matter how many people have to be shot, impaled, burned, brainwashed, nuked, hacked apart and/or fed to genetically engineered warbeasts to make it so..."-Alistair Young -- "WWJD? He'd give up, get nailed to a tree, and die in pain. Why don't you follow his example as directed by your ancient texts?" -- Jamie Bowden -- "Yeah, but ten years ago we were debating whether emacs was better than vi, whereas now the discussion is about whether vi is better than emacs. So progress is clearly being made." -- Steve Kirkendall in comp.editors -- Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial. -- "Yes, we will want simultaneous translators ... No, not when the PM meets the leaders of the English-speaking nations ... Yes, the English-speaking nations can be said to include the United States." -- Bernard Wooley, 'Yes, Prime Minister' -- "You and I have fought side by side many times. Fellow warrior, shoulder to shoulder. I believe my counsel should hold some weight. Pomegranate mist is the wrong color for this room." -- "You are, with all due respect, a sick fuck." -- Flavio Carrillo -- "You are, without a doubt, a complete and utter asshole. Go away and die." "That strikes me as mildly harsh." -- Richard M. Boye' and Mike Kozlowski -- "You can assert as much as you like. Assertations don't magically impart sensibility to your arguments." -- John S. Novak III -- "You can't reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason" -- "You don't change the way people think by changing what they say. You change the way people think with HEADLESS CHARRED BODIES FLYING THROUGH THE AIR. BLOOD! FLAMES! HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION!" -- Alistair J. R. Young -- You don't know audio horror until you've listened to all 3000 railway announcements used at Gatwick Airport to check for errors. – Random -- "You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere, if only out of curiosity." --Colin L. Powell -- "You have to remember that as well as believing in Ghod, an almost equally large number of Americans believe that aliens have come all the way from Epsilon Bootes VII to stick things up our rear ends, apparently as part of some mysterious extraterrestrial Buttplug of the Month initiative." -- Sam Timmerman -- "You know, I've gone to a lot of psychics, and they've told me a lot of different things, but not one of them has ever told me 'You are an undercover policewoman here to arrest me.'" -- New York City undercover policewoman -- You mean you need drugs to hallucinate? -- "You, child, have no clue. In fact, you couldn't get a clue if you were covered in clue musk out in a clue field in the middle of clue mating season. You're that clueless." – Seen in Lara Beaton’s sig -- "YOU!!! - Out of the gene-pool" -- George Carlin -- "Your body is your temple. But it's also your dance hall and your bowling alley." -- Lara Beaton -- You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on. -- Dean Martin -- "You're right, but you're being a jerk about it." -- pnh -- "You're silly. And sick. And tortured by horrible software, and prone to vicious outbursts. In other words, fitting in quite nicely, really, except for the appalling writing." -- Chris Johnson in asr -- "Your friend Marc told me I'd probably find the Riverlands reduced to rubbles, with you in the middle, looking apologetic." "Er... Sorry." -- Tori and Jame, _Seeker's Mask_ -- Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. -- S. Johnson -- You sound reasonable... Time to up the medication. -- "You think it's a conspiracy [by] the networks to put bad shows on TV. But the shows are bad because that's what people want. It's not like Windows users don't have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought." -- computer pioneer Steve Jobs -- 'You've got Legions of Doom?! Shit. All I've got is my "Cadre of Not-So-Good- Stuff-Happening...Maybe".' – Mark Loy -- Zero Defects, n.: The result of shutting down a production line. -- (1999 should be MIM in roman numerals) > I agree, but apparently that's not how the Romans did it. And the Romans are DEAD. Their empire is DEAD. There is a lesson here. -- Jasper Janssen and Frank van Schie in raswr-j --