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Favorite Quotes

I love a good quote. Some of my favorites are below. I hope you enjoy browsing through them!

Hat tip to The textfixer web site for converting my text document to HTML.



“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

— Benjamin Franklin


Life is hard, it's harder if you're stupid.

-John Wayne


“Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life”

-Brian Howard


“Any man over the age of 30 who finds himself without a shed can consider himself a failure in life”

-Lance Stater from the show "Detectorists"


Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

(?)


Happiness = reality - expectations

(author?) Elon Musk quoted it during his interview w/ Joe Rogan


Life is messy, and I don’t have any advice.

-Dan Luu


The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

-Freeman Dyson


“If you need inspiring words, you should not do it.”

-Elon Musk


"love is a better master than duty,"

-?


“As in a tale, so it is in life. What matters is not how long it is, but how good it is.”

-Seneca


“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all. In which case, you’ve failed by default.”

-JK Rowling, harvard commencement address


You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”

-JK Rowling, harvard commencement address


People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

-Russell Baker


The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope.


Only bad things happen quickly. All the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.


"Life is but a flicker of light between one eternal darkness and another"

-Alan Watts


"If happiness always depends on the future, we are chasing a will-o-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future,and ourselves,vanish in the abyss of death."

-Alan Watts


"When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money." — Oscar Wilde


"I never have to lie to anyone because I don't fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid." - John Gotti.


Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were big things.

Kurt_Vonnegut


“Of all the sins, envy is easily the worst because you can't even have any fun with it. It's a total net loss.” - Charlie Munger


“A good day is when no one shows up, and you don’t have to go anywhere.”

- Burt from Burt’s Bees


“Books have a habit of going where they want to go.”

From “Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew” by Bernard Hare


If you can't handle me at my diddliest, you don't deserve me at my doodliest.

-Ned Flanders


No fate but what we make.

-Sarah Connor, Terminator 2


The audience I am trying to reach are champion figure skaters. I think they need me the most.

-Morrissey


Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.

-Ronnie Coleman


Mike Tyson - "A room without a book is like a body without a soul, books allow us to connect the past and the future."


“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

-Mike Tyson


“Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something”

-Adventure time (cartoon show)


Danny Boyle (UK director):

“I was meant to be a priest until I was 14, I was going to transfer to a seminary near Wigan. But this priest, Father Conway, took me aside and said, ‘I don’t think you should go’. Whether he was saving me from the priesthood or the priesthood from me, I don’t know. But quite soon after, I started doing drama. And there’s a real connection, I think. All these directors — Martin Scorsese, John Woo, M. Night Shyamalan — they were all meant to be priests. There’s something very theatrical about it. It’s basically the same job — poncing around, telling people what to think.”


“The better a singer’s voice is, the harder it is to believe what they are saying.”

-David Byrne


Science is about crawling toward the truth over time.

-Scott Adams (of dilbert)


"Paradise is full of idiots who believe it exists"

-Georges Wolinski

(charlie hebdo cartoonist)


“I was dying to finish high school and start college

And then I was dying to finish college and start working

And then I was dying to marry and have children

And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work

And then I was dying to retire

And now, I am dying… and suddenly I realize I forgot to live.”

-Anonymous


Advice: “go to the bar and find the other person there who looks like they're not having any fun either. That's your guy.”


J Paul Getty’s secrets of success:

  1. Rise early

  2. Work hard

  3. Strike oil


“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ”

-Martin Luther King


The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do

-walter behehot


Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

- from article on car deaths of infants, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html



"The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination."

- Maya Angelou


Jeff Bridges on relationships and love:

Well, that's certainly true. This industry is tough on relationships. I've always thought that my wife should have a credit up alongside mine, because I couldn't do what I do without her support. And like the questioner asked, or said, we've been married since 1977, we knew each other for 2 years before that, so she's been able to do all these films with me and we've managed to get through them all together. The toughest thing about making movies is being apart from your family. One of the things I try my best to do is call my wife every day, to keep up to speed with what's going on in her life. And tell her what's going on with mine. Often when you're apart from your loved one like that for so long, your connection kind of atrophies unless you keep engaged, even if it's small everyday kind of stuff. But another aspect of keeping a marriage together, I think it's important to - you'll think I'm silly - but to love each other, which begs the question: "what is love?" Words that come to mind are openness, understanding, gentleness, kindness, and kind of working on those things, because everyone has a light and a dark side, I think, selfish aspects, and to kind of recognize those in each other and realize that we are going to have our own particular story at any given time, and those stories, they might not be the ultimate truth but they are certainly true for each of us, so to understand that we are each going through our particular version of reality, to respect that, and to nurture being in love, you know? To nurture that.

-Jeff Bridges

from: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2birwp/jeff_bridges_here_abiding_with_you_all_ama/cj5qfak


From an article on marrying the wrong person:

http://www.philosophersmail.com/relationships/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong-people/

Part of the reason we feel like getting married is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that love has over our psyches. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that marriage can conclusively end love’s painful rule over our lives. It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in a marriage as there is in single life. It’s only from the outside that a marriage looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring.



from blog entry “losing music”: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/losing-music/

When you’re young you’re the hero of a movie, and the Heifetz you play in your car or the Velvet Underground you first try out sex to isn’t just background, it’s location and weather. You feel it on your skin.


from: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/29kym8/hello_i_am_musician_roger_daltrey_and_ask_me/

Do you think we'll ever see another musical landscape like we did back in the 60s and 70s?

Edit: spelling

[–]RogerDaltreyHere[S] 267 points 4 hours ago

I hate to say "never" but I think it's impossible really. Because we were inventing it as we went along. And it was a blank canvas, and we could paint in very broad brushstrokes. And the media outlets were very limited, so you only had to make some kind of impact and meet people and make connections and the whole thing became self-perpetuatin'. I know there's this whole thing with social media that i don't really understand, it's beyond me, but it seems to me like a lot of good music gets lost in it. Whereas in our time, you had to buy an album, you had to buy 10-12 tracks, and you might have only liked 4 of them, and I always found that some of the songs I didn't like initially ended up after a few plays being my favourite songs. And the ones I bought the album for int eh first place became my least favourite! I think there's something about the internet now, that because you can download just a few tracks, that something gets lost. And that's why I'm still a great proponent of vinyl, because not only does it sound better, but as an artistic format, the album cover, the scale of it, the shape of it, it's the perfect artistic statement. And they sound so much better, there's no doubt about it. And it becomes more personal because if you scratch it, there's a scratch there from you. SO there are these things on vinyl that will never live on in digital. The coffee stains on the cover.



Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where i just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going.

-Philip Larkin


How little our careers express what lies in us and yet how much time they take up.

-Philip Larkin


Someone who thinks he will live forever is far more likely to waste his days than someone who fully understands that his days are numbered.


We are bad men living among bad men, and only one thing can calm us: we must agree to go easy on one another.

-unknown (from derek sivers review of the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - by William Irvine”

“ Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get. ”

— Dave Gardner



Fight the good fight and don’t let pressure steer you clear of your values. If someone fires you because you’ve prioritized health and love in your life, then embrace the opportunity to start your own company or find a new one that isn’t going to degrade you.

-Ben Pieratt (http://blog.pieratt.com/post/64881538909/work-versus-life-greatness-versus-family)


“the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work”

-Bertrand Russell


“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country


“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country


“Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country


“Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country


"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."

-from Feynman commencement speech at Cal Tech (includes also cult cargo reference)


Will Rogers Quotes:

The ones that learn by reading.
The few who learn by observation.
The rest of them have to touch an electric fence."


Quotes


“Happiness is not measured by the number of days you live but by the number of days you remember.”

-anonymous


If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product.

-Andrew Lewis



"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

- Mark Twain


“The problem is, we don’t understand the problem.”

Paul McCready


"sales cures all management ills"

-unknown


f2/10/11 “The smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.”

-Jeff DeChambeau


"We are all whores. Some of us are porn stars though, while the others cry themselves to sleep at night."

-Scott Marlowe


"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

-Steve Jobs


“We will find a way. Or make one.”

-Hannibal Barca, 247 BC – 182 BC


"Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times."

-Jeff Bezos


"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street."

~Doug Linder


fp. Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.

Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.

All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

-George Bernard Shaw


I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.

—Cus D’amato, legendary boxing trainer



All mankind is divided, as it was at all times, and is still, into slaves and free men; for whoever has NOT two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, be he otherwise whatever he likes, statesmen, merchant, official, scolar.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, 1890


There’s no better way to make a living than being a travel writer.

-Bill Bryson


“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool that I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

-Steve Jobs


“For the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

-Steve Jobs


If we stopped trying to find happiness we could have a pretty good time.

-Edith Wharton


f 2/12/12 'Be yourself. Everyone else is taken'.

-Oscar Wilde.


"successful people aren’t necessarily smarter or luckier than others. They just try so many things and fail until something works out."

-unknown


"I'm glad we got the criminals and you got the Puritans."

-Australian talking to an American


If the British monarchy is good for nothing else, it's superb at producing the subjects of films.

-Roger Ebert


A good gift is something that someone really wants, but feels guilty buying it for themselves.

-unknown


Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan

-?


You look at people who are extremely successful and I can almost guarantee there is at least something very weird or different about them.

They have attitudes, habits, ideas and tendencies that are very abnormal. And that makes total sense. Because winning isn’t normal.

-Jason Shen


"The best writing is rewriting,"

-E. B. White


In a Strong Wind Even Turkeys Can Fly.

-Mark Suster


When you make software, it's almost always a good idea to say no more than you say yes. Over time, you'll regret saying yes more than saying no.

-Jason Fried


"Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend."

-Rabindranath Tagore


"if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long."

-Matt Mullenweg


"Usage is like oxygen for ideas."

-Matt Mullenweg


“Real artists ship.”

— Steve Jobs, 1983


The desire to have "a plan" can also cause "paralysis of analysis" -- we put all of our energy into formulating the perfect plan,

and consequently never actually do anything. The more effective approach is to simply pick a plan with the knowledge that it's flawed,

set the plan in action, and then adapt, revise, or switch plans as the world unfolds.

-Paul Buchheit


"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."

-Eleanor Roosevelt


-Everybody ought to do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

William James


Richard Branson:

I actually think the most successful businesses are the ones where people think like that. If you think 'where is the gap in the market for me to make a lot of money?' and spend your life like that the chances are you'll fall flat on your face. You have got to have a passion for what you are doing.

from: http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/in-it-for-fun-not-just-money


The Dalai Lama's Recommendations for You


I N S T R U C T I O N S F O R L I F E


1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.


2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.


3. Follow the three Rs:


Respect for self

Respect for others and

Responsibility for all your actions.


4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.


5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.


6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.


7. When you realise you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.


8. Spend some time alone every day.


9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.


10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.


11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.


12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.


13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.


14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.


15. Be gentle with the earth.


16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.


17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.


18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.


19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.


New `


"Everyone joins the marines for a stupid reason."

-unknown


There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-Isaac Asimov


f2/15/2011 "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."

Henry David Thoreau


"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket"

-attributed to Eric Hoffer.


3/8/2010

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue."

By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Sayre's law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905-1972),

U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University.


Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, ‘equality’ is a disaster.

—Lazarus Long


In "The Kingdom of Swing," his 1939 memoir, Goodman recalled

"a couple of times when there wasn't anything to eat. I don't mean much to eat. I mean anything.

This isn't an experience you forget in a hurry. I haven't ever forgotten it."


"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

-Samuel Johnson (from http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html on high school)


A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren't real.

And that's the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do.

And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.

-Scott Adams (of Dilbert)


The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.

-Scott Adams (of Dilbert)


“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.”

WORK EFFICIENTLY DURING OFFICE HOURS AND LEAVE ON TIME. GIVE THE REQUIRED TIME TO YOUR FAMILY, FRIENDS & HAVE PROPER REST.

-Coca Cola CEO Bryan Dyson


to know another language is to have another soul

-Charlemagne


From Roger Ebert, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/go_gently_into_that_good_night.html

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

-Brendan Behan


America is often referred to as the land of the free.

But most people in this country are not really free. They are tied to debt and a treadmill existence in terms of earning a living.

-Thomas J. Stanley (author of "The millionaire next door" and "the millionaire mind"


Nothing owns you like fragile stuff.

-Paul Graham


In the great Scorsese movie The Departed, Jack Nicholson’s character opens the movie with an important monologue:

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”


DHH talk, unlearn your MBA.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2334


Make a dent in the universe.

-David H. Hansson


Most planning is guessing. (later) Planning is not just guessing, it's harmful guessing. It sucks your energy and time from worrying about what you really need to do today.

-David H. Hansson


Most decisions in a small business are incredibly temporary. What matters most is just starting. Just get going.

-David H. Hansson


Venture capital is a time-bomb. It's probably the most harmful thing you can do to a new software business.

-David H. Hansson


Once you take your "Series A of venture capital financing", you just became an addict and you'll soon be needing Series B.

-David H. Hansson


Great ideas come from a well-rested mind.

-David H. Hansson


“Where your passion intersects the needs of the world, therein lies your mission.”

-unknown


"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build."

-Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

The Ninety-Ninety Rule : "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."


Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.

The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new.


"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other,

with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

-Alan Kay


Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do.

Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface -

will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured,

brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish

double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk.

-Maciej Ceglowski, http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm, Dabblers and Blowhards


"People spend first half of their lives spending health to earn money,

and the second half of their lives spending money to recover their health"

-unknown


As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.

We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.

-Donald Rumsfeld


If you aren't embarrassed by v1.0 you didn't release it early enough.

-http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/07/if-you-arent-embarrassed-by-v10-you-didnt-release-it-early-enough/


America is often referred to as the land of the free.

But most people in this country are not really free. They are tied to debt and a treadmill existence in terms of earning a living.

-Thomas J. Stanley (author of "The millionaire next door" and "the millionaire mind"


"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

-Yoggi Berra


The third lesson I learnt was that you don't need great code to make a great product.

I take pride in my work, but there's no shame in doing what it takes to get something shipped.

I've seen plenty of projects die a lingering death thanks to creeping elegance!

-Pete Warden (petewarden.typepad.com)


There's a saying that pioneers tend to come back stuck full of arrows.

-Pete Warden


Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done.

It's intrinsic to the medium; software is always 85% done.

It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users.

-Paul Graham


Leadership is just another word for evil.

-Scott Adams


"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."

-Winston Churchill


"What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history."

-Warren Buffett


In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy.

But the most important is integrity, because if they don't have that, the other two qualities, intelligence

and energy, are going to kill you.

-Warren Buffett


Can you really explain to a fish what it is like to walk on land?

One day on land is worth a thousand years talking about it,

and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.

-Warren Buffett


When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

-Warren Buffett (meaning, when a business fails it's CEO makes elaborate excuses or lies to shareholders)


Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

-Warren Buffett


When people fear their government, there is tyranny.

When the government fears the people, there is liberty

-Thomas Jefferson


"A ship in port is safe...but that is not what ships are made for"

Grace Murray Hopper


I think the worst attribute any team member can have is not wanting to make waves.

In fact, I think it's the number one attribute I would actively seek out to exclude from a team.

Everybody has to work without nets on an agile team. If we're not taking emotional chances and communicating,

we're losing ground.

-Daniel Markham


Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed when they're gone.

-Seth Godin


Charisma comes from leading, not the other way around.

-Seth Godin


If you're not upsetting anyone then you're not changing the status quo

-Seth Godin


"God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

-Mark Twain


Asked if anything was keeping him awake at night, he said there was not.

"If it's going to keep me awake at night," Mr. Buffett said, "I am not going to go there."


A guy I really look up to (A VP of Engineering type of guy with a lot of startup experience) said once:

"At a startup, you need people who build shit and you need people who sell shit.

IF you succeed on those fronts, eventually you might need people to manage/organize shit."

-unknown


"He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing,"

-Benjamin Franklin


None too learned, but nobly bold,

Into the fight went our fathers of old.

-Rudyard Kipling couplet


It is better to be lucky than smart.

-Douglas Crockford


"Trust in God, but make your pope mobile with bullet-proof glass"

-Vatican proverb


"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things"

-By Rainer Maria Rilke


The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences i could have is uncountable,

breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over,

and we envision only a handfull of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way,

we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation of the last, every moment smoothly following the the

gentle curves of societal norms. we act like if we just get through today, tomorow our dreams will come back to us.

and no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to joly myself into seeing what each moment could become.

But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the

sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. it doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations.

It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.


This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. That. Shit."

--xkcd


Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

-Plato



I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the sidewalk. It's so fuckin' heroic.

-- George Carlin



I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted.

-George Best


"Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field,

go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out."

-XKCD 267


We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts

comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number,

but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing:

the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way."

-Victor Frankl


Corporate executives must recognize there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head.

Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees,

their customers and to society as a whole.

-Ten additional lessons from Robert McNamara


Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

-Mark Twain


No salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed two hours of actual work in any business day.

-the Two-Hour Rule, a law of American business


Strong problem-solving skills are important in business. Knowing which problems you absolutely must solve is even more important.

-Joel Spolsky


When in doubt, make your product more compelling.

-Joel Spolsky


In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong

but because of the possibility that he is right.

Antony Jay


If you're good at something, never do it for free.

-The Joker


"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

-Mark Twain


To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

-Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)


When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability.

your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

_why


if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game.

all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive.

-_why


An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

-Ernest Hemingway


Private insurance is a bit like a fire department that turns a profit by letting buildings burn down.

(in article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/24/AR2009072401876.html)

-Ezra Klein


The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education

I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words:

Learning is not the product of teaching.

Learning is the product of the activity of learners.

-John Holt


"Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez


They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves

slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war,

and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

-Eugene Debs


"They allow every excentricity in Cambridge, as long as it doesn't frighten the horses."



To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free,

for passion. I am very thankful. p. 291

In Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month:


"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

-Thomas Edison


The most expensive piece of medical equipment is a doctor's pen.

-unknown


My best adventures have been ones that have started

with "lets do a little experiment and see where it takes us."

-Bruce Eckel


Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most

wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

-John Maynard Keynes


Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

-John Maynard Keynes


We have investment instincts designed for hunting mammoths, not capital gains.

-Paul Krugman


King Solomon:

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might …


James Woolsey:

If you’re enthusiastic about the things you’re working on, people will come ask you to do interesting things.


You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you.

This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which

you are merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday-

and things which are a deep part of your life…

So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated from?’

–Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making


It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors

of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something –

of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks

and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago.

Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are.

-Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making


"The traditional interviewing process is two people pleasantly lying to one another for an hour or two

and then making a really big decision that they will live with for years to come."

(unknown)


Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government],

those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

–Thomas Jefferson, 1779


If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to

gather wood, divide the work and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery


People are often most productive when working conditions are bad.

from a talk by Richard Hamming

``You and Your Research''

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html


Let me summarize. You've got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck,

but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur's ``Luck favors the prepared mind.''

I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time

trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important.

I found in the early days I had believed `this' and yet had spent all week marching in `that' direction.

It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction?

I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched

in the direction I thought was important. It's that easy.

from a talk by Richard Hamming

``You and Your Research''

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html



If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.

-Isaac Newton


Nothing is always absolutely so.

-Theodore Sturgeon


Ninety percent of everything is crap.

-Theodore Sturgeon


"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

-Henry David Thoreau


"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire."

-William Butler Yeats


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

-Albert Einstein


One of the many problems with idiocy is that it does not yield readily to introspection.

-Ron Garret (Rondam.blogspot.com)


"Love with your heart - use your brain for everything else."

Captain Disillusion, you can watch his excellent You Tube debunking at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLRbTtd8IKM&NR=1


I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

–George Bernard Shaw


Every teacher should realize he is a social servant

set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order

and the securing of the right social growth.

-John Dewey (famous philosopher and educator)


I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.

Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

-Gandhi


When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin,

how much of a dialogue do you expect?

-Thomas Sowell


My faith is one that admits some doubt.

-Barack Obama


For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine,

so is it better to give to others the fruits of one's contemplation than merely to contemplate.

-St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,

IIa-IIae, question 188, article 6


Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.

I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

-Kurt Vonnegut


f 2/14/11 I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around,

and don't let anybody tell you different.

-Kurt Vonnegut


[...] basically, avoid comments. If your code needs a comment to be understood, it would be better to

rewrite it so it's easier to understand.

-Rob Pike (essay, Notes on Programming in C, Feb 21 1989)

(comments on data structures are more useful though).


Rob Pike on Complexity

------------------------

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time.

Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack

until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code

overwhelms the rest.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants.

Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.) For example, binary trees are always faster than splay trees for workaday problems.

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement.

Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.


The following data structures are a complete list for almost all practical programs:

array

linked list

hash table

binary tree


Of course, you must also be prepared to collect these into compound data structures.

For instance, a symbol table might be implemented as a hash table containing linked lists of

arrays of characters.


Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well,

the algorithms will almost always be self­evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

(See Brooks p. 102.)


Rule 6. There is no Rule 6.


From the essay "Notes on Programming in C, Feb 21 1989" by Rob Pike

-Rob Pike


Science is not there to tell us about the Universe, but to tell us how to talk about the Universe.

-Niels Bohr


Object-oriented computing should have been called "Messaging"

-Alan Kay


Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right

and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they,

themselves are fired because the company is out of business.

-Jason Scott


"I believe in every aspect of religion except God."

-John Mortimer (lawyer and writer, wrote 'Rumpole of the Bailey'


"No brilliance is required in law. Just common sense and relatively clean fingernails."

-John Mortimer (lawyer and writer, wrote 'Rumpole of the Bailey'


I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear...

that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

Harold Kushner


As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

-Leonardo da Vinci


Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

-Angelina Jolie


It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

-Alexandre Dumas Père


Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

-Epicurus


Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.

You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.

-Economist VILFREDO PARETO, referring to the errors of Kepler


"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

-- Plato


"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one,

an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

-- Edmund Burke


“You know you have one [a distributed system] when the crash of a computer you’ve never heard of stops you from getting any work done.”

-Leslie Lamport


The escape route from working class, middle class, any class, is in the library. The library is free.

-Billy Connolly


When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

-unknown


Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.

It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

-Albert Einstein


Contrary to popular belief, software design is not -- or should not be -- a solitary occupation.

-Josh Bloch


Computer science is an immature discipline, and I aim to keep it that way.

-Josh Bloch


If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater

than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek

not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you;

and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

-Samuel Adams


Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

-John Maynard Keynes


But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us

that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

-John Maynard Keynes



"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing

until it's too late."

-Seymour Cray


"My definition of an expert in any field is a person

who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared."

-P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983


The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’’s gotten away

with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

-Laurence Gonzales



How do we convince people that in programming simplicity

and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury,

but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

— Edsger W. Dijkstra


Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything.

One of the attractive things about programmers is that

you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them.

Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping,

or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do

is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.

-Charles M. Strauss


The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull.

He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

-Edsger Dijkstra's paper - The Humble Programmer (EWD340).


Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?

A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S.

exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem.

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our

perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them,

we would need fewer, not more.

-David Parnas



The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working.

-- John Ousterhout



It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

-Hofstadter's Law


"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath

who knows where you live."

-Rick Osborne


Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

-Edward V Berard


Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.

-Seymour Cray on virtual memory


The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries,

is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

-Isaac Asimov



The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time.

The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

-Tom Cargill


Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible,

you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

-Brian Kernighan:


That's the promise of America... the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper;

I am my sister's keeper.

--Barack Obama


Beware of geeks bearing formulas

-Warren Buffett


Trying is the first step towards failure.

-Homer Simpson


I am more concerned with the return of my money than the return on my money.

-Mark Twain


"The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom,

first ordered well their own states."

-Confucius


I think that the possibility of failure is essential to long-term success.

If you have no possibility of failure, if there's always the rich uncle or Uncle Sam to bail you out,

you have no incentive to sacrifice or compromise or take risks or stay up late

or even to see to it that your actions are serving the greater good.

-Ron of rondam ramblings.com


Functional, whether lazy or non-lazy, means no side effect.

It doesn’t mess about behind the scenes – it doesn’t launch the missiles, it doesn’t write to the disk.

So the message of the presentation I mentioned before is that purely functional programming is by default, safe for parallel programming, and mainstream programming is by default dangerous.

-Simon Peyton-Jones


In a lazy language, you don’t evaluate the 3+4 because f might ignore it,

in which case all that work computing 3+4 was wasted.

In a lazy language, you evaluate expressions only when their value is actually required,

not when you call a function - it’s call by need.

A lazy person waits until their manager says ‘I really need that report now’,

whereas an eager will have it in their draw all done, but maybe their manager will never ask for it.

-Simon Peyton-Jones


In my experience, languages almost always come out of the blue.

I vividly remember before Java arrived (I was still working on Haskell then),

and I was thinking that you could never break C++’s strangle-hold on mainstream programming.

And then Java arrived, and it broke C++’s strangle-hold!

-Simon Peyton-Jones


“In judging whether corporate America is serious about reforming itself, C.E.O. pay remains the acid test.”

-Warren Buffett


Always be Questioning: “Why are we doing this?” “What problem are we solving?”

“Is there actually something wrong?” “Are we adding value?”

Is this actually useful or is it just cool? Everything you add to your product dilutes everything else.

“Will this change behavior?”

Be thinking about is this additional piece of information going to change behavior?

“Is there an easier way?” The easy way is probably more than good enough.

-Jason Fried - 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37Signals


Give up on hard problems - there is nothing wrong with being lazy.

There is an abundance of easy problems that need to be solved.

The really hard problems are probably better left to your competitors.

Solve a bunch of simple things.

Most people’s problems are simple and you can probably solve 10 in a month over

1 in 10 months.

-Jason Fried - 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37Signals


Work less - this industry is plagued with people who work too many hours.

At 37signals they find if you work people less, their work is usually better.

32 vs 40 hours has shown that the work is just as good and people are generally

happier. People are more motivated and more refreshed when they come back on Mondays.

Most of the week is “wasted on shit that doesn’t really matter.”

-Jason Fried - 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37Signals


Currently the mind think in software engineering is that it takes a big team to

do anything worthwhile. This also happened in the mid 80s on the mainframe.

What is required is good tools to enable good developers to write large systems. It also requires experienced managers who understand

how large systems evolve.

Brooks was right and the industry still doesn't do what he said to do 30 years ago.

I've worked in small teams that have many orders of magnitude more productivity than other larger teams.

The software produced was cheap, robust and extension-able. Bug counts were zero when we shipped.

There was no secret as to how we did this.

We fired bad developers. Winners will not tolerate losers on the team.

Everybody had a clearly defined responsibility. If something did not work there was no hand waving.

We designed software as simulations not abstract models.

We automated everything. No manual time sheets. Project tracking we could identify how much time a bug cost the project and who was

responsible for the bug.

We used tools/frameworks that enabled us to work on single level abstractions.

We worked six hours a day split into three two hour periods with no interruptions. No phone calls, no visitors no distractions.

We took six+ weeks a year vacation plus used our sick days.

What made this possible was a culture that rewarded success and reported failure.

-ajmoir (on reddit.com)


Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.

--Jerry Avins


"There is nothing greater than having no one's attention."

-Edgar Whitcomb


"Mice Train to be Rats"

-Seymour Hersch


"the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

-Chaucer (1340 - 1400)


"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile",

-Hippocrates (c. 400 BC)

("Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.")


Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

-Tim O'Reilly


"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

-Kurt Vonnegut


"Developers who actually understand business are surprisingly and unfortunately rare.

Be one of the rare ones, and you'll find companies highly reluctant to let you go."

-Ted Neward, software developer


"We routinely overestimate where we will be in five years,

and vastly underestimate where we will be in ten."

-Bill Gates


"The more you know, the more you know you don't know".

-Bjarne Stroustrup


"Exclusively focusing on a single area of technology is the Kiss of Death."

"Assuming that you can stop learning is the Kiss of Death."

"Find a collection of people smarter than you."

-Ted Neward, software developer


"Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn.

Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed.

Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land.

Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.

Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death."

-Sacred scrolls from Planet Of The Apes



"I was talking to my friend from New York yesterday, and I used the expression,

'You can't polish a turd'. He looked at me, disgusted, and said, 'No, you can't, but you can roll it in glitter'.

He's a lovely guy but I wouldn't want to go to a craft fair with him"

–Steve Williams


"My granny was recently beaten to death by my granddad. Not as in, with a stick – he just died first"

–Alex Horne


"... a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently,

all character training and religion must be derived from faith. From our point of view as

representatives of the state, we need believing people. A dark cloud threatens from Poland. We

have need of soldiers, believing solders. Believing solders are the most valuable ones. They

give their all."

- Adolf Hitler, The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue by Ernst

Helmreich, page 121.


"By defending myself against the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work"

-Adolf Hitler


"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who

determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a

democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no

voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you

have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of

patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-Hermann Goering, who became second in command to Hitler


"We trained hard...

but every time we began to form teams, we would be reorganized.

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet new situations by reorganizing,

and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress

while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."

-Petronius Arbiter (around 60 AD)


"Ask the powerful five questions:

1) What power have you got?

2) Where did you get it from?

3) In whose interests do you exercise it?

4) To whom are you accountable?

5) *** How can we get rid of you? ***

-Tony Benn


Only democracy gives us that right.

That is why no-one with power likes democracy.

And that is why EVERY generation must struggle

to win it and keep it.

Including you and me, here and now.

-Tony Benn 2005


The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.

-Elie Wiesel


"We don't solve problems, we approximate solutions."

Sean Parent (on writing software)


Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

-Guy de Maupassant


"Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without hell."

-Warren Buffett


"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;

when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

-Thomas Jefferson


Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals,

which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable

generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.

-from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan


This was ridiculous: if I could get in, the laws of physics should permit me to get out.

But the laws of physics were in a foul mood that day.

Mark O'Brien


Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And Summer's lease hath all too short a date

Shakespeare's 18th sonnet


"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

Forbid it, Almighty God!

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

-Patrick Henry (American founding forefather)


"To him who desireth much, much is given;

and to him who desireth little, little is given;

but to neither according to the letter of his desire."

GILBERT CANNAN


It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory

philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought,

to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed;

and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

-Richard Feynman


To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

-proverb (buddhist?)


Learn as much as you can because everything fits together.

-Charles Petzold


Features are a one-way street

-Ryan of 37 signals


Your parents ruin the first half of your life, and your kids ruin the second half.

-Alice Adams (nee Vonnegut)


The most spiritually splendid American phenomenon of my lifetime is how African-American

citizens have maintained their dignity and self-respect, despite their having been treated

by white Americans, both in and out of government, and simply because of their skin color, as

though they were contemptible and loathsome, and even diseased.

-Kurt Vonnegut


"Death is just one more night"

-Socrates


I have heard it suggested that Roosevelt wouldn't have had such empathy for the lower classes,

would have been another rich, conceited, ruling-class Ivy League horse's ass, if he himself

hadn't been humbled by poliomyelitis, infantile paralysis.


Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in a better direction.

-alan Kay


From one gut feeling I derive much consolation:

I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues

--be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili--

are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.

-Ed Dijkstra


Make no little plans.

They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work,

remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die,

but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.

Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.

Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

-Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)


When in doubt, use brute force.

-Ken Thompson


The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and the intelligent are always filled with doubt.

-Bertrand Russell


From a keyhole point of view, this is the moral equivalent of a child spreading his vegetables around on his plate

in an attempt to convince his parents that he has eaten most of them.


Never trust anyone wearing a tie. You have to ask, "why is he wearing a tie?".

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb


There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.

-H.L. Mencken


However, if you pressed me, I’d say the purpose of life is joy in the present moment,

and anyone who tells you different is a lying conniving asshole.

-Pat Condell (http://patcondell.net/page2/page2.html)


I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way,

did not become still more complicated.

-Poul Anderson (1926-2001)



f. 2/20/12 Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

-Mark Twain


A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she is in hot water.

-Eleanor Roosevelt


Caffeine makes people do more dumb things faster.

-unknown


If it doesn't work right, we can always try something else.

-John McCarthy


The middle class is a buffer.

It keeps the hands of the poor off the throats of the rich.

Remove it at your peril.

-Unknown


If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.

-John McCarthy


It's just a pissing contest, but unfortunately the contestants never seem to run out of piss.

-John McCarthy


It's possible to program a computer in English.

It's also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.

-John McCarthy


Malthus was right.

It's hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people

or the universe more than 10^50.

-John McCarthy


My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.

-John McCarthy


Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.

-John McCarthy


No-one has yet built a monument so high that a bird can't fly over and shit on it.

-John McCarthy


Note to Douglas Hofstadter and Raymond Smullyan:

Excessive self reference is as dangerous as smoking.

-John McCarthy


People prefer dealing with machinery to dealing with bureaucracies.

-John McCarthy


Slogans rarely convince the unconvinced.

However, they do rally the troops already on your side.

-John McCarthy


The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that

to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is 'forbidden',

whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is 'compulsory'.

-John McCarthy


The politicians have a most touching faith in technology—that

it can make up for any dumb thing the politicians decide to do.

-John McCarthy


You say you couldn't live if you thought the world had no purpose.

You're saying that you can't form purposes of your own—that

you need someone to tell you what to do. The average child has more gumption than that.

-John McCarthy



You say the only alternative to nuclear war is world government.

There is only one possibility worse than nuclear war for the survival of

modern civilization, and that is world government. Civilization might recover

from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China,

it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of

external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from

becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition

by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that

their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries.

-John McCarthy


"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate,

because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

-Bertrand Russell


He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

-John McCarthy


Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.

-John McCarthy


He who claims that affairs could not be worse is very likely to make them worse.

-John McCarthy


"All men are enamored of decorations...They positively hunger for them."

-Napoleon


"The Americans will always do the right thing..."

"After they've exhausted all the alternatives."

-Winston Churchill


When they tell you the worst is over, batten down the hatches.

-unknown


“A witty saying proves nothing.”

-Voltaire


Programmers… often take refuge in an understandable, but disastrous, inclination towards complexity and

ingenuity in their work. Forbidden to design anything larger than a program, they respond by making that program

intricate enough to challenge their professional skill.


A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,

conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall,

set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,


solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,

cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

-Robert Heinlein


A programmer should be able to find a bug, market an application, refactor a spike,

lead a team, architect an application, hack a kernel, schedule a project, build a database,

route a network, give a reference, implement UserStories, analyze UserStories,

work in a team, work alone, use patterns, innovate, write documentation, have a RealLife,

create a cool website, email efficiently, resign gracefully, AdmitIgnorance,

and keep on learning.

Specialization is for recruiters.

-- with large apology to RAH and his estate, Peter Merel


"the toothpaste is already out of the tube"

Gene Kan, on peer-to-peer file sharing


Everyone [...] is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself."

-Frank Zappa


Much more successful software has been written in languages proclaimed BAD,

than has been written in languages acclaimed as saviors of suffering programmers;

much more.

-Bjarne Stroustrup


Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact

that there are only ten of them.

H. L. Mencken


"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,"

wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day


We all like a good laugh at the expense of stupidity, but never forget that,

where your rights are concerned, Christians are dangerous.

-unknown


Atheist Golden Rule:

Don't do the stupid shit that religious people do to one another.


Religious war -

‘My imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend’.


As with dogs, so with gods - by and large, you should blame the owners.

Martin Rowson


Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

-Jean Piaget


After a talk at Harvard, I told them to work for who they admired the most,

so they all become self-employed.

It’s important to go to work for someone or some organization you admire.

I've not seen many males having to make tough choices.

But women are the ones who have tough situations.

-Warren Buffett


Behaving decent is a large part of it. Out of school I offered to work for Graham for free

and he said I was overpriced. I tried to be useful and visible to him.

I gave him stock tips and kept up with him. Almost always good things come from good behavior.

Don’t keep score in life. Tom Murphy does not keep score.

He keeps doing 20 things for me and I can only hope to return the favor.

Keeping score is terrible in marriage and terrible in business. I put myself in the seller’s shoes.

With most humans there is a great desire to reciprocate. If you do something for them, they will do 2X for you.

How rare is it to work during lunch hours and be the first one there in the morning.

You’ll get noticed if you do something extra.

It’s good to have a willingness to pitch in when you aren’t going to get credit for it.

Charlie and I partnered up in 1959. We always both think we’re right.

We disagree but we’ve never fought. And we’ve never held past mistakes over each other’s heads.

I recommend reading “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”.

It’s amazing, has sold 50,000 copies and it’s still sold independently.

-Warren Buffett


I like shooting fish in a barrel,

but I like to make sure the water’s drained out.

-Warren Buffett


In my personal life, there are always things I could’ve done differently.

But so many good things have happened. It just doesn’t pay to dwell on the bad things.

Finding the right spouse is 90% of it.

If you are lucky on health and lucky on your spouse, you are a long way home.

-Warren Buffett



I know a woman in her 80’s, a Polish Jew woman forced into a concentration camp with her family

but not all of them came out. She says,

“I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind; would they hide me?”

If you get to be my age, or younger for that matter, and have a lot of people that would hide you,

then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life.

I know people on the Forbes 400 list whose children would not hide them.

“He’s in the attic, he’s in the attic.”

Some of them keep compensating by joining board seats or getting honorary degrees,

but it doesn’t change the fact that no one will give a damn when they are gone.

The most powerful force in the world is unconditional love. To horde it is a terrible mistake in life.

The more you try to give it away, the more you get it back.

At an individual level, it’s important to make sure that for the people that count to you, you count to them.

As told by Warren Buffett


I enjoy what I do, I tap dance to work every day. I work with people I love, doing what I love.

The only thing I would pay to get rid of is firing people.

I spend my time thinking about the future, not the past. The future is exciting.

-Warren Buffett


As Bertrand Russell says,

“Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.”

I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you.

We’re all successful, intelligent, educated.

To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake.

With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.

-Warren Buffett


From "Progammers at Work" by Susan Lammers, http://internetducttape.com/2007/05/09/favorite-quotations-from-programmers-at-work-by-susan-lammers/


“It’s also important to try out the program on users to make sure it solves real users’ needs.

And that’s where this company is going astray; it’s ignoring users.

They’ve gotten caught up in marketing, and what they’re really fighting are other marketers.

All the ads are done by marketers, they’re not done by users saying this is what we need.

It’s one marketer, trying to pit his or her skills against another marketer,

so they’re fighting the battle of the specs.”

-C. Wayne Ratliff, P125


While you’re working hard on a complicated program, it’s important to exercise.

The lack of physical exercise does most programmers in.

It causes a loss of mental acuity.

It also leads to physical weakness that can heighten the feeling of disillusionment

that often comes after the second or third straight programming effort.

-Jon Page, P107


“The most important goal is to define as precisely as possible the interfaces

between the system and the rest of the world,

as well as the interfaces between the major parts of the system itself.

The biggest change in my design style over the years has been to put more and more

emphasis on the problem to be solved and on finding techniques to define the interfaces precisely.

That pays off tremendously, both in a better understanding of what the program really does,

and in identification of the crucial parts.

It also help people understand how the system is put together.

That’s really the most important aspect of designing a program.”

-Butler Lampson, P33


“To hell with computer literacy. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Study mathematics. Learn to think. Read. Write.

These things are of more enduring value. Learn how to prove theorems.

…this skill is transferable to many other things.

To study only programming is absurd.”

-Butler Lampson, P38


“I think a lot before I do anything, and once I do something,

I’m not afraid to throw it away.

It’s very important that a programmer be able to look at a piece of code

like a bad chapter of a book and scrap it without looking back.

Never get too enamored with one idea, never hang onto anything tenaciously

without being able to throw it away when necessary;

that should be the programmer’s attitude.”

-John Warnock, P47


“Don’t bind early; don’t ever make decisions earlier than you have to.

Stay an order of magnitude more general than you think you need,

because you will end up needing it in the long term.

Get something working very quickly and then be able to throw it away.

Learn from small experiments rather than large ones.

Don’t go into a two-year development with nothing coming out in the middle.

Have something come out every two months, so you can evaluate, regroup, and restart.”

-John Warnock, P52


“The trick is to learn from the Hewlett-Packard approach: Keep it as twenty different, small companies.

Keep breaking it up and never let it become a huge organization, except at some level that nobody cares about.

In terms of working relationships, keep the number of people small and their focus localized, project-oriented,

so they can work at their best.”

-John Warnock, P54


“Part of our strategy is getting the programmers to think everything through before they go to the coding phase.

Writing the design document is crucial, because a lot of simplification comes when you see problems

expressed as algorithms. They’re kind of in the smallest form then, where you can see what the overlap is.”

-Bill Gates, P74


“The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures.

The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down.”

-Bill Gates, P76


“Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is.

And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, wheras speed

— if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster

— that’s worth an incredible amount.

If you can give the users a few simple commands and make the program efficient enough

to do what they want with those few commands, then you’re much better off.

One sign of very good programs is that even internally they follow that philosophy of simplicity.

If they want to do something complex, they call the code with simple operations internally,

rather than doing the complex operation from scratch.”

-Bill Gates, P78


“I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer

about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it.”

-Bill Gates, P83


“Complicated programs are far easier to write than straightforward programs

— the exact opposite of what you’d expect. It’s easy to write complicated programs because you

reflect the complexity back onto the user; you force the user to make all the hard decisions.”

-John Page, P95


“Company employees need to feel ownership of what they’re doing and have psychological ownership

of the ideas they’re implementing, otherwise they’re not motivated.”

-John Page, P97


“You can have either high productivity or a great deal of control.

That’s the trade-off programmers and users find themselves making all the time.”

-John Page, P103


“Flying is a lot like programming. A good pilot gives the passenger a flawless, boring ride,

while a good programmer gives the customer a flawless, boring experience on their computer.”

-John Page, P106


“Don’t assume you know all that much, and try to learn and question the assumptions.

Have a lot of confidence, but stay modest and assume you’re doing something wrong.

Get just enough guilt — not too much or you’ll be afraid to do anything —

but enough to develop an aesthetic sense. Try to develop a deeper understanding.”

-Bob Frankston, P159


“Bugs are often characteristic of a bad interface between subsystems,

which is frequently a result of inadequate communication among people when they design the subsystems.

When a bug is found, there is a tendency to handle it within the subsystem and not look at the

program as a whole.”

-Ray Ozzie, P186


“Programming is the ultimate field for someone who likes to tinker.

Tinkering requires tools. Electrical engineers have various components they can put together to build something.

But they’re constrained by the availability of physical equipment.

With a computer, if you can think about it, you can do it.

You can design your own tools or create the parts as you go along.

If you don’t like something, you can just change it or rewrite it.

It’s a wide-open tool box, given the resource, the computer.

The only limiting factors are the amount of time it takes the computer to do the task and the amount

of time it takes you to write the program.”

-Ray Ozzie, P188


“I’ve seen many intelligent people who are just not practical.

They get lost pursuing some academic goal that is totally useless.

Being practical is important to good programming.

You must be able to guess accurately how long it will take to complete a project,

have the ability to calculate what can and cannot be done in that time,

and then do it, resisting the temptation to go off and do other things.

Practicality is important when you’re trying to make every piece of work the best

because you always have a limited amount of time to work on it.

It’s easy to triple the time to complete a project when you’re consumed

with making it the ultimate in elegance.”

-Peter Roizen, P193


“If you’re going to do anything well, you need to have a serious interest in it.

If you don’t care, all the talent in the world will still produce a lousy result.

If you do care, you need only one-third the talent to produce something decent.”

-Peter Roizen, P196


For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

-Richard Feynman (from his report on the Challenger disaster, http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html)


If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel.

It is normal; we have taken their country.

It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them?

Our God is not theirs.

There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?

They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country.

Why would they accept that?

— David Ben Gurion


The chemistry of life is a tremendous challenge, and I realized I could spend my life studying

the pubic hair on a rat, and although I would be the world's foremost expert on the subject,

I might still not be able to explain why it is curly.

-Eugene Jarvis (programmer of the game "defender")


Regrettably, my first job was on a six year project to write a COBOL compiler. I lasted about three days.

I didn't want to end up like my colleagues at HP, bored shitless and sitting around talking about their

lawn sprinkling systems, as they toughed out another coffee break on the road to oblivion.

-Eugene Jarvis (programmer of the game "defender")


Every couple of weeks, Nolan Bushnell and his buddy Gene Lipkin would come down to engineering,

critique your game with often bizarre and thought provoking, but totally irrelevant, suggestions.

When they were gone, you'd just do what you had in mind originally, since in another two weeks time

they would forget their prior recommendations, and have new and totally unrelated bizarre suggestions.

-Eugene Jarvis (programmer of the game "defender") on working at Atari


Money can be made later, but time is lost forever.

-Eugene Jarvis (programmer of the game "defender") on working at Atari



“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be

always kept alive.”

Thomas Jefferson


"There are about a dozen great computer graphics people, and Jim Blinn is six of them."

—Ivan Sutherland


“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors

must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

James Madison


“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

John Quincy Adams


Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right,

but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.

-Andrew Jackson


It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.

Martin Van Buren


There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest

feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.

William Henry Harrison


Things may come to those who wait... but only the things left by those who hustle.

Abraham Lincoln


“There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found

to prevent the drawing of the sword.”

Ulysses S Grant


“A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence,

the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.”

Grover Cleveland


The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.

Theodore Roosevelt


“A government big enough to give you everything you want

is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Gerald Ford


Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

Jimmy Carter


Taking something off the internet? That's like taking pee out of a pool.

-Unknown


Drink Coffee. Do stupid things faster, with more energy.

-On coffee mug


I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies,

and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding,

is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

- Thomas Jefferson


"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


101 quotes about atheism (from http://atheistblogger.com/2008/02/15/101-atheist-quotes/#comments)

1. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality. - George Bernard Shaw

2. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. - Friedrich Nietzsche

3. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright

4. We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. - Gene Roddenberry

5. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. - Isaac Asimov

6. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. - Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

7. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. - Seneca the Younger

8. Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. - Anonymous

9. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. - Woody Allen

10. If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. - Isaac Asimov

11. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. - Edward Abbey

12. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg

13. I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence. - Doug McLeod

14. The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. - AbulAla al Maarri

15. Since the Bible and the church are obviously mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust them to tell us where we are going? - Anonymous

16. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. - Susan B. Anthony

17. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. - Delos B. McKown

18. Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer. - Anonymous

19. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. - Francis Bacon

20. The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins

21. A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified. - Karen Armstrong

22. It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image. - Ludwig Feuerbach

23. People ask me what I think about that woman priest thing. What, a woman priest? Women priests. Great, great. Now there's priests of both sexes I don't listen to. - Bill Hicks

24. All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science. - Matthew Arnold

25. Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. - Anonymous

26. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. - Richard Dawkins

27. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. - Christopher Hitchens

28. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. - Friedrich Nietzsche

29. It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible. - George W. Foote

30. On the first day, man created God. - Anonymous

31. I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. - Stephen Roberts

32. You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate. - Richard A. Weatherwax

33. What's "God"? Well, you know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God's the guy that ignores you. - Steve Buscemi

34. As far as I can tell from studying the scriptures, all you do in heaven is pretty much just sit around all day and praise the Lord. I don't know about you, but I think that after the first, oh, I don't know, 50,000,000 years of that I'd start to get a little bored. - Rick Reynolds

35. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish. - Anonymous

36. Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color. - Don Hirschberg

37. God should be executed for crimes against humanity. - Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez

38. To say that atheism requires faith is as dim-witted as saying that disbelief in pixies or leprechauns takes faith. Even if Einstein himself told me there was an elf on my shoulder, I would still ask for proof and I wouldn't be wrong to ask. - Geoff Mather

39. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Mark Twain

40. Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. - Voltaire

41. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. - Bertrand Russell

42. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? - Epicurus

43. I'm a polyatheist - there are many gods I don't believe in. - Dan Fouts

44. If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. - Woody Allen

45. A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it. - David Stevens

46. Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child. - Robert A Heinlein

47. I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. - Douglas Adams

48. It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. - Mark Twain

49. He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. - William Drummond

50. Remember, Jesus would rather constantly shame gays than let orphans have a family. - Steven Colbert

51. Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's? - Friedrich Nietzsche

52. Religion does three things quite effectively: Divides people, Controls people, Deludes people. - Carlespie Mary Alice McKinney

53. Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea. - Anonymous

54. When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. - Sigmund Freud

55. They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing. - Steven Weinberg

56. Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. - Robert G. Ingersoll

57. History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god. - Giulian Buzila

58. Atheism is a non-prophet organization. - George Carlin

59. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

60. A believer states everything must have a creator but fail to say how he was created. - Anonymous

61. "There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. - James Morrow

62. People will then often say, ‘But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.) - Douglas Adams

63. Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for Atheism ever conceived. - Isaac Asimov

64. If all the Christians who have called other Christians "not really a Christian" were to vanish, there'd be no Christians left. - Anonymous

65. An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. - John Buchan

66. Gods dont kill people. People with Gods kill people. - David Viaene

67. If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself. - Alexandre Dumas

68. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. - Sam Harris

69. I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose - Clarence Darrow

70. No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. - Annie Wood Besant

71. I refuse to believe in a god who is the primary cause of conflict in the world, preaches racism, sexism, homophobia, and ignorance, and then sends me to hell if I'm ‘bad'. - Mike Fuhrman

72. Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. - Frater Ravus

73. Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. - Penn Jillette

74. Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power but absolute power is corrupt only in the hands of the absolutely faithful. - Anonymous

75. Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. - Chapman Cohen

76. The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it. - Robert G. Ingersoll

77. When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. - Robert Pirsig

78. I wonder who got the shit job of scouring the planet for the 15000 species of butterfly or the 8800 species of ant they eventually took on board Noah's Ark. But at least we got that magical rainbow for all their trouble. - Azura Skye

79. I have no need for religion, I have a conscience. - Anonymous

80. Man has always required an explanation for all of those things in the world he did not understand. If an explanation was not available, he created one. - Jim Crawford

81. I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. - Richard Dawkins

82. What has been Christianity's fruits? Superstition, Bigotry and Persecution. - James Madison

83. The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. - Penn and Teller

84. If god is the alpha and the omega. The begining and the end, knows what has passed and what is to come, like it states in the bible, why do people pray and think it will make any difference. - Mark Fairclough

85. The finality of death is the coldest truth one must face. Religion makes the perfect distraction. - Anonymous

86. Religion is the opiate of the masses. - Karl Marx

87. If God created the world, the who created god? and who created whoever created god? So somewhere along the line something had to just be there. So why can we just skip god the idea of god and go straigth to earth? - Ryan Hanson

88. If we expect God to subscribe to one religion at the exclusion of all the others, then we should expect damnation as a matter of chance. This should give Christians pause when expounding their religious beliefs, but it does not. - Sam Harris

89. Atheists will celebrate life, while you're in church celebrating death. - Anonymous

90. Animals do not have gods, they are smarter than that. - Ronnie Snow

91. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. - Daniel Boorstin

92. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake… Religion is all bunk. - Thomas Edison

93. Fundamentalism, of any type, due to its prerequisite lack of intelligent thought, could prove to be the worst weapon of mass destruction, of all. - David J. Constable

94. To really be free, You need to be free in the mind. - Alexander Loutsis

95. Most religions prophecy the end of the world and then consistently work together to ensure that these prophecies come true. - Anonymous

96. Jesus hardly made the greatest sacrifice. He knew he would be resurrected anyway. - Anonymous

97. Religion is like a virus that affects the behaviour of its host in such a way as to propagate itself further. - Jack Pritchard

98. Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing. - Thomas Hobbs

99. Today's religion will be the future's mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. - Steven Crocker

100. The Bible - A Fairytale book of rules brainwashing millions. Obliviously used to help create war, kill, hate, judge and discriminate. - Anonymous

101. Why can't we see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? - Douglas Adams



If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.

If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it

by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity.

And finally: If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential,

then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can.

from "the rule of thumb for Shaker creations",

from ShakerBuilt by Paul Rochleau & June Sprigg


If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

James Madison


The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

-James Madison


When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.

Sen. Huey Long


You make money in bear markets. You just don't know it until later.

-Phil DeMuth


A Baltimore newspaperman and acute observer of the human condition (H.L. Mencken) once

commented that real motto of the United States ought to be "Safety First" not "E Pluribus Unim".

He comment was based on his observations of the irrational fears that often drove his fellow citizens into

ridiculous follies. This book supports his point.


I am an atheist, thank God

-Luis Bunuel


Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

-Henry Kissinger


All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there.

-Charles Munger


To do two things at once is to do neither.

Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.


When Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act,

they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things.

But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy

sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind.

And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God,

who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm

that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball?

Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy.[24]

-David Attenborough



War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,

or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable,

and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

-George Orwell


We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt


Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

-Thomas Hobbes' description of a man's life in times of war


Work should always be fun....

We all only have one life.

A third of life is work.

Without happiness and fun, work becomes hell.

-IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad,



Consider the following statement from C. A. R. Hoare (case statement, quicksort fame) in

"Great Papers in Computer Science", 1996. He wrote a preface in 1994 to his and Wirth's paper

"An Axiomatic Definition of the Programming Language Pascal" to put that paper in context.


"One of my goals in the study of program proof techniques is to assist in the design of better programming languages, ones which make it easier to write correct programs and harder to write incorrect ones. ...

It is a matter of continuing regret that so few languages have ever been designed to meet that goal,

or even to make significant concessions towards it. For example, the programming language C was designed to

assist in writing a small single-user operating system (UNIX) for a real-time minicomputer (PDP 11), now thankfully

obsolete. For this purpose, its low level of abstraction and plethora of machine-oriented features are entirely

appropriate. For all other purposes, they are a nuisance. The successful propagation of the language

can be explained by accidental, commercial, historical, and political factors;

it is hardly due to any inherent quality as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs. ..."

-C. A. R. Hoare, 1994.


"No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'"

-Danielle Bunten Berry (transgender computer programmer) (born Daniel Paul Bunten)


Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms


1. Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers


2. Honk If Your Religious Beliefs Make You An Asshole


3. Intelligent Design Makes My Monkey Cry


4. Too Stupid to Understand Science? Try Religion.


5. *There's A REASON Why Atheists Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings


6. "Worship Me or I Will Torture You Forever. Have a Nice Day."­ God.


7. *God Doesn't Kill People. People Who Believe in God Kill People.


8. If There is No God, Then What Makes the Next Kleenex Pop Up?


9. He's Dead.

It's Been 2,000 years.

He's Not Coming Back.

Get OVER It Already!


10. *All religion is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. Edgar Allen Poe.


11. Viva La Evolución!


12. Actually, If You Look It Up, The Winter Solstice Is The Reason For The Season


13. I Wouldn't Trust Your God Even If He Did Exist


14. Cheeses Is Lard. Argue With THAT If You Can.


15. *People Who Don't Want Their Beliefs Laughed at Shouldn't Have Such Funny Beliefs


16. Jesus is Coming? Don't Swallow That.


17. Threatening Children With Hell Is FUN!


18. GOD - APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD!


19. Jesus Told Me Republicans SUCK


20. *God + Whacky Tobacky = Platypus


21. God Doesn't Exist. So, I Guess That Means No One Loves You.


22. When the Rapture Comes, We'll Get Our Country Back!


23. Q. How Do We Know the Holy Ghost Was Catholic?

A. He Used the Rhythm Method Instead of a Condom.


24. You Say "Heretic" Like It Was a BAD Thing


25. I Love Christians. They Taste Like Chicken.


26. *Science: It Works, Bitches.


27. "Intelligent Design" Helping Stupid People Feel Smart Since 1987


28. I Found God Between The Sheets


29. I Gave Up Superstitious Mumbo Jumbo For Lent


30. My Flying Monkey Can Beat Up Your Guardian Angel


31. Every Time You Play With Yourself, God Kills a Kitten


32. *If God Wanted People to Believe in Him, Then Why Did He Invent Logic?


33. Praying Is Politically Correct Schizophrenia


34. *ALL Americans Are African Americans


35. *I Forget - Which Day Did God Make All The Fossils?


36. I Was An Atheist Until The Hindus Convinced Me That I Was God


37. The Spanish Inquisition: The Original Faith-based Initiative


38. *If we were made in his image, when why aren't humans invisible too?


39. *JESUS SAVES....You From Thinking For Yourself


40. *How Can You Disbelieve in Evolution If You Can't Even Define It?


41. *Q. How Can You Tell That Your God is Man-made?

A. If He Hates All the Same People You Do.


42. Every Time You See a Rainbow, God is Having Gay Sex


43. I Went to Public School in Kansas and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt and a

Poor Understanding of the Scientific Method.


44. WWJD = We Won. Jesus Died.


45. The Family That Prays Together is Brainwashing the Children


46. Oh, Look, Honey Another Pro-lifer For War


47. *Another Godless Atheist for Peace and World Harmony


48. God is Unavailable Right Now. Can I Help You?


49. When Lip Service to Some Mysterious Deity Permits Bestiality on

Wednesday and Absolution on Sundays, Cash Me Out.

-Frank Sinatra.


50. No Gods. No Mullets.


Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.

-unknown


Forth is called a programmer amplifier - a dubious programmer will

produce the kind of horrendous code that gave too many managers

a bad taste for the language; BUT a good programmer will reap

tremendous benefits.

-Eric Krieg


Have we failed?

I mean, if we have spent 30 years in trying to develop sound programming methods and software engineering,

and we must say, basically we are worse off than we were 20 years ago, what else can it be but a failure?

-Niklaus Wirth


Now the thing which rather frightens me is the discovery that design is a topic that is by and large

not taught in our universities. Particularly not in computer science. "Programming" has become a word that you

look down upon. Programming? That may be done in some secondary schools, you know, but certainly not in academia,

at the academic level, that's below us. You go and find a professor who does programming – well, you see one before you,

but I think that's rather the exception. Its a hard business, it's hard, and as a professor

you can earn easier brownie points doing other things.

-Niklaus Wirth


You cannot produce good software with all the case tools in the world, with all the object orientation

that you are capable of managing, with all the software metrics and quality assurance, and with a hundred teamwork

managers, if you don't have competent programmers.

-Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal)


"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

-Trotsky


"You may not be interested in finance, but finance is interested in you."

-Mencius Moldbug


"One needs to be slow to form convictions,

but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds."

-Mahatma Gandhi


"Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight.

Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster.

Your life will never be the same again."

-Og Mandino


"Don't be discouraged by a failure.

It can be a positive experience.

Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false

leads us to seek earnestly after what is true,

and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid."

-John Keats


Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

attributed to Niels Bohr


A man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

-William Faulkner


"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."

-Hemingway


"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

-Hunter S. Thompson


To have another language is to possess a second soul.

-Charlemagne


Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

-Sir Humphrey Davy


Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe:


If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein


In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French;

I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

-Mark Twain


Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

-H.L. Mencken


"Things are the way they are because they got that way ... one logical step at a time."

Gerald Weinberg


I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

-Voltaire


Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics;

the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

-Edsger Dijkstra (see his essay "how do we tell truths that hurt?" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html)


"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and

silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations....

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."

-James Madison


Anyone who can build bridges between Christianity, Judaism and Islam

deserves more than one nobel peace prize.

-Johann Galtung


I love the US Republic and hate the Us Empire

-Gore Vidal


It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

-Upton Sinclair


It's OK to make mistakes. But too many mistakes will kill you.

You don't want to make too many mistakes.

-Warren Buffett


If something can not go on forever, it will stop.

-Herbert Stein (Ben Stein's father)


If something can not go on forever, but if it does go on for a long time there will be

lots of people making up theories for why it CAN go on forever.

-Paul Krugman


Long ago, when asked what the stock market would do, the famous financier J.P. Morgan, said,

"It will fluctuate."


The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

—Thomas Paine


It’s tough to stay off the subject of the fact that we’re all gonna die.

We all need our subject changers. That’s what it all comes down to.

-Michael J. Fox


The amount of debate on an issue is inversely proportional to the issue's actual

importance.

-Parkinson's Law


Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.

-Finley Peter Dunne


Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly

intelligent and well informed just to be undecided

about them.

-Laurence Peter


To have a great writer is to have another government.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn


Men and women are like a pair of feet. They need each other to get ahead but they aren't the same.

-Ted Hughes


Love is blind

-Chaucer


Tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

-Shakespeare


The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems

is a symptom of professional immaturity.

-Ed Dijkstra


It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.

-Josif Stalin


Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(who will watch the watchers?)

-Juvenal


You have enemies? Good.

That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

-Winston Churchill


The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

-Winston Churchill


I am ready to meet my Maker.

Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

-Winston Churchill


The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it,

but in the end; there it is.

-Winston Churchill


To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

-Winston Churchill


The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings;

the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

-Winston Churchill


We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity

is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

-Winston Churchill


If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed,

if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly,

you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you

and only precarious chance for survival.

-Winston Churchill


A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

-Winston Churchill


The way that Charles Dickens once described his depression — as the child inside himself

who won’t stop crying — always seemed to me to be a better description of the entrepreneur’s

insatiable unhappiness with a world that could be so much better.

-Glenn Kelman (co-founder of plumtree at http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/14/entrepreneur-20/)


I would like to cite Warren Buffett.

He coined a phrase called the "Institutional Imperative."

Put simply, this is the inherent propensity of any company (especially large companies) to

do really dumb things. Companies are hardwired to squander capital. Banks have a lot of capital,

so they have more opportunity to squander it.


Come on off the cross, we can use the wood.

-Tom Waits


I don't mind if they tap my phones, I have a very boring life and have nothing to hide.

-Citizen upon hearing the government's plan to spy on its citizens


Half of life is showing up.

-Woody Allen


If you would have your business done, go; if not, send.

-Benjamin Franklin


What maintains one Vice, would bring up two children.

-Benjamin Franklin


If you will not hear Reason, she'll surely rap your Knuckles.

-Benjamin Franklin


Thomas Jefferson on Benjamin Franklin (from benjamin franklin's autobiography):

"He was therefore, feasted and invited to all the court parties.

At these he sometimes met the old Duchess of Bourbon, who, being a chess player of about his force,

they very generally played together. Happening once to put her king into prize, the Doctor took it.

'Ah,' says she, 'we do not take kings so.'

'We do in America,' said the Doctor."

—Thomas Jefferson


When the financial tide is down, that's when you find out who's been swimming naked.

-Warren Buffet


Our Republic and its press rise or fall together.

An able, disinterested, public-spirited press …

can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.…

The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.

-Joseph Pulitzer


Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.

-unknown


The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.

Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards

for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.

- Alan Kay (creator of smalltalk)


Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

-Martin Reiser


Real Swaraj will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few,

but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused.

-- Mahatma Gandhi


Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal.

All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.

-Alexander Solzenitsyn


I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

-Hunter S. Thompson


Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

-Steve Jobs


Letts' Law: All programs evolve until they can send email.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Furrygoat's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read RSS feeds.


On software development: fast, good, cheap. Pick two.

-unknown


Truth cannot be determined by democratic means.

-David Mills


I apologize to you for the lengthiness of this letter, but I

had no time for shortening it.

-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams



http://www.vagabox.com/BTB%2005.html


There are two kinds of people in the world: those who finish what they started.

-unknown


As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.

In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged.

And it is in such a twilight that we all must be aware of

change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwilling victims of the darkness.

-Justice William O. Douglas


There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

~ Andre Gide


One-tenth of the folks run the world. One-tenth watch them run it,

and the other eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on.

~ Jake Simmons


Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?

-Holly Near


Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.

-African proverb


The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

-Sir R. F. Burton


Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality, for one very rich man;

there must be at least five hundred poor.

-Adam Smith


When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees.

Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

-Montesquieu


Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil;

in its worst stage, an intolerable one.

-Thomas Paine


The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

-Andrew Dickson White


Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

-Allen Ginsberg


Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.

-Native American saying


A Rising tide lifts all boats

-Sean Lemass


Truth is for the minority.

-Baltasar Gracián


This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics,

perversions, pregnancies, abortions, porno-therapy, pollution, poisoning and

proliferation of crimes of all types.

-Judge Braswell Dean


There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it,

just as I believed there was a Devil. Suddenly the light broke through to me and I saw a silly story,

and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty.

Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

-H. G. Wells


The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.

-Pope Pius IX


Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary,

cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

-H. L. Mencken


It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

-Albert Einstein


I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

~ Franz Kafka


Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions

which differ from the prejudices of their social environment.

Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

~ Albert Einstein


It is a government of the people by the people for the people no longer;

it is a government of corporations by corporations for corporations.

~ Rutherford B. Hayes


In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have

long taken for granted.

~ Bertrand Russell


Religion is not merely the opium of the masses; it's the cyanide.

~ Tom Robbins


A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

~ Max Weinreich


It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

~ Voltaire


Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition

to every advance in every field of science.

~ Upton Sinclair


The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

~ Lao Tsu


Prohibition goes beyond reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite through legislation.

A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles this country was founded upon.

~ Abraham Lincoln


We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs.

~ Francois Fenelon


When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.

~ Elayne Boosler


Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.

~ Duke of Wellington


All warfare is based on deception.

-Sun tzu


The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

-Oscar Wilde


Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

-Marion Barry, former mayor Washington D.C.


When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist,

a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the

God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?’

-Quentin Crisp


Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a Christian.

-Lenny Bruce


Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you

need more than I do.

-Kahlil Gibran


You exist only in what you do.

-Federico Fellini


All truth passes through three stages.

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

-Arthur Schopenhauer


Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.

-Theodore Isaac Rubin


You can't say civilizations don't advance, because they kill you in a new way in each war.

-Will Rogers


In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

-Albert Einstein


The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.

-Elbert Hubbard


I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages;

and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.

~ Amanda Donohoe


Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

-Henry David Thoreau


I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you.

I think killing for your country can be a lot worse; because that's the memory that haunts.

-Bob Kerry told to The New York Times


It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

-Voltaire


Contraction of theological influence has at once been the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.

-William H. Lecky


Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?

-Arthur C. Clarke


Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

-Arthur Schopenhauer


There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.

-Chinese proverb


People only see what they are prepared to see.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


Lying is done with words and also with silence.

-Adrienne Rich


If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal.

If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

-Robert G. Ingersoll


The man who accumulates, whether money or knowledge, can never be free.

-J. Krishnamurthi


If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall.

If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do.

The same happens in the absence of prayers.

-Steve Allen


Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take.

-James Baldwin


The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

-Oscar Wilde


Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

-Albert Einstein


Laws are silent in time of war.

-Cicero


I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade.

And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.

-Empress Catherine the Great


Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

-Rousseau


Never go to sleep when your meat is on the fire.

-Pueblo


A treatise upon human nature:

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

-David Hume


You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.

-Henrik Ibsen


Necessity never made a good bargain.

~ Ben Franklin


You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

~ George Bernard Shaw


Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

~ Mao Tse Tung


The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well under its thumb.

This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.

~ Albert Einstein


Nothing brings people together more, than mutual hatred.

~ Henry Rollins


To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.

~ Julian Ruck


The establishment of Christianity arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over

fifteen hundred years.

~ Andrew Dickson White


News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.

~ Ex-NBC news president Rubin Frank


When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force.

When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.

~ Dorothy Thompson


People with virtue must speak out;

People who speak are not all virtuous.

~ Confucius


Don't try to teach a pig to sing,

it can't be done and it only ticks off the pig.

~ Robert Heinlein


Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

~George Bernard Shaw


Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

~ Samuel Johnson


Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority.

~ Leon Battista Alberti


Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

~ Albert Einstein


Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.


We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

~Kurt Vonnegut


You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling,

every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war,

every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery,

every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed

by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion,

as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

~ Bertrand Russell


If you keep doing what you've always done,

you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.

-Jim Rohn


It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just isn't so.

~ Satchel Paige


We've got to pause and ask ourselves, how much clean air do we need?

~Lee Iacocca


Those who see and feel beyond illusion have acquired a far greater gift

than could ever be derived from studying scripture and philosophy books,

for these were meant only to guide the blind.

~ Shawn Mikula


Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.

Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

~ Robert Heinlein


Never was anything great achieved without danger.

~ Niccolo Machiavelli


I did not know how to say goodbye.

It was harder still, when I refused to say it.

-Native American saying


The reasonable man adjusts 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


Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

~Vernon Saunders Law


Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss

about its cleverness.

~ Aleister Crowley


Before you speak, ask yourself is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?

~ Shirdi Sai Bab


A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.

~ Benjamin Disraeli


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

~ Alfred North Whitehead


In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

~ George Orwell


Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them,

and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.

~ Arundhati Roy


It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.

-Horace


Your every decision conspires to make this moment happen.

-Christi Philpott


Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor,

but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

~ Anacharsis


War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it.

It wipes out all the small nuisances of peacetime.

~ Ian Hay


This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.

Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional

right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

~ Abraham Lincoln


All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level,

that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it ...

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell,

and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

~ Adolf Hitler


If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin.

If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it,

you are deemed fit to govern the country.

~ Jonathan Meades


A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

~ William R. Inge


Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

~ Bertrand Russell


Never look a gift horse in the mouth

-Saint Jerome


Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

~ Charles Dickens


I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator.

By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.

~ Adolf Hitler


The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed

under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.

~ Mohandas Gandhi


I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

~ Oscar Wilde


The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.

~ Voltaire


Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

~ Ambrose Bierce


Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.

~ Louis Brandeis


The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

~ Woodrow Wilson


None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


All Bibles are man-made.

~ Thomas Edison


We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America?

Even if you don't agree with a law personally,

you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.

~ Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, explaining Nazi policy


Every gun that is made, every warship launched,

every rocket fired signifies in the final sense,

a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,

those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers,

the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.

Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.

The moral effect should be good and it would spread a lively terror.

~ Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I


How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy!

~ Nietzsche


The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical,

remorseless, and fully documented but nobody cares to talk about them.

~ Harold Pinter


How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass

to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.

~ Emma Goldman


To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

~ Confucius


The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else.

The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.

~ Whitney Young


All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

~ Albert Einstein


We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

~ Aesop


In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.

~ David Korten


The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster, an artificial person run amok,

responsible only to its own soulless self.

~ William Dugger


Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

~ Nietzsche


Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

~ Mark Twain


In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.

~ Mohandas Gandhi


Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

~ Thomas Carlyle


I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,

whose purposes are modeled after our own; a God, in short,

who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives

the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms…

~ Albert Einstein, obituary


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

~ Thomas Jefferson


A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any

hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

~ Carl Sagan


I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda.

Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world,

in the field of advertising, and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency.

Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious.

I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda,

is quite simple. You tend to believe yours and we tend to disbelieve ours.

~ A U.S. based Soviet correspondent


I am amazed how many people on this planet are happy and free and never even saw the US constitution.

-unknown


When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.


... The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over twenty countries.

~ John Stockwell, former CIA official


When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European,

or anything else, you are being violent.

Do you see why it is violent?

It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.

When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion,

to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

~ J. Krishnamurthi


If it were all so simple!

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,

and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them;

but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.

~ Turkish proverb


Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.

~ John Foster Dulles


To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

~ Abraham Lincoln


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

~ Philip K. Dick


As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized.

~ Ohiyesa, Sioux


Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith


Those who hate and fight must stop themselves; otherwise it is not stopped.

~ Spock, Day of the Dove


I was asked to memorize what I did not understand;

and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

~ Aleister Crowley


The greatest artists of this world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

~ H. L. Mencken


It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.

~ Voltaire


There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Where the mountains are of gold and the valleys of silver,

the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; not one comfort would be added to the human race.

~ Percy B. Shelley


Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.

~ Gary Hart, BC Comic Strip


Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

~ Nietzsche


Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal.

He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them.

He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat,

if his theology isn’t straight.

He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to

smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

~ Mark Twain


The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

~ Sophocles


The truth is more important than the facts.

~ Frank Lloyd Wright


Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

~ Thomas Huxley


The world is divided into people who think they are right.

~ Unknown


Faith is belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

~ Ambrose Bierce


Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.


Pity the warrior that kills all his foe.

~ Star Trek


Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

~ Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer,

to which Ambrose Bierce replied: ‘I beg to submit that it is the first.’


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

~ Lenny Bruce


My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography;

what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see,

fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet?

And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this,

I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it

and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life.

~ Bill Hicks


A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

~ Plato


War is an instrument entirely insufficient toward redressing wrong;

and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

~ Thomas Jefferson


I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason,

and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

~ Galileo Galilei


The wise man will love; all others will desire.

~ Afranius


Christianity makes suffering contagious.

~ Nietzsche


May your fondest wish be granted.

~ Traditional Chinese curse


Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities;

truth isn't.

~ Mark Twain


The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

~ Jean de la Bruyère


Life is too short to waste in critical peep or cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand: It will soon be dark.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Why of course the people don't want war.

Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war

when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England,

nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.

But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy,

and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along,

whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.

All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked,

and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

~ Nazi Hermann Goering


Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

~ Andre Gide


He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.

For if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

~ Nietzsche


It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

~ Niccolo Machiavelli


Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

~ Abraham Lincoln


I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave


So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

~ Bertrand Russell


You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

~ Attributed to Charles Austin Beard


At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

~ Ernesto 'Che' Guevara


The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

~ Edmund Burke


The citizen who sees his society’’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.

~ Mark Twain


The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

~ Nietzsche


The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

~ Martin Luther


If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.

~ Isaac Asimov


The modern conservative is engaged in one man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

~ John K. Galbraith


Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

~ John Stuart Mill


I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.

~ Thomas Jefferson


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

~ Arthur C. Clarke


In order to learn, one must change one's mind.

~ Orson Scott Card


Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.

~ Benito Mussolini


Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.

~ William Greider


Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

~ Oscar Wilde


Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

~ Thomas Hardy


There must be more to life than having everything.

~ Maurice Sendak


Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson


I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest,

‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’

‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’

‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’

-Annie Dillard


It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished

unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

-Voltaire


I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do

because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

-Susan B. Anthony


Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.

-Satchel Paige


It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

-Mother Teresa


God favors no group. Only religions do that.

-Bumper Sticker


Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.

-Scottish proverb


If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught,

we would believe what they believe.

-A church sign in Northern Ireland


My humble friend, we know not how to live this life which is so short yet seek one that never ends.

-Anatole France


Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything.

They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

-Malcolm X


When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

-Eugene V. Debs


When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.

-Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class"


Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

-Jeff Burroughs


It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

-Albert Einstein


I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms; you know what I mean?

We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them.

We're like the bullies of the world, y'know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane,

throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet. ‘Pick it up.’

‘I don't wanna pick it up, mister, you'll shoot me.’

‘Pick up the gun.’

‘Mister, I don't want no trouble, I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids,

some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is,

but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff.

I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister.’

‘Pick up the gun.’

The sheepherder picks up the gun, three shots ring out.

‘You all saw him, he had a gun.’

-Bill Hicks


Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.

-Norman Vincent Peale


Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education.

-Braham Flexner


It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

-General Douglas MacArthur


Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism.

Well, there's a really easy way; stop participating in it.

-Noam Chomsky


You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

~ Malcolm X


The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

~ Stanley Kubrick


Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?

-Ron Patterson


The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.

-George Washington Administration Treaty



The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

-Thomas Paine


I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.

-James Buchanan


Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

-P. J. O'Rourke


Fascism is capitalism in decay.

-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin


The police are not here to create disorder. They're here to preserve disorder.

-Ex-Chicago Mayor Daley during the 1968 riots


We need a common enemy to unite us.

-Condoleezza Rice, March 2000


I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

-President George Bush, August 27, 1988


If we could read the secret history of our enemies,

we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

-John Morley


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

~ Nietzsche


Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

~ Tom Robbins


Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam.

Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast.

Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder

but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

-Dalton Trumbo


I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war.

I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about

land reform and education and health facilities for everyone,

and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies

and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.

-Richard Cohen


Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured,

killed or disappeared, at the hands of governments or armed political groups.

More often than not, the United States shares the blame.

-Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. Military aid and human rights, 1996


I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper,

and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.

-Richard Van de Geer, letter, 1975, last American to die in Vietnam War, Time, 1985


Statistically one hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in.

-Wayne Gretsky


I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

-General Smedley Butler, Marine


Guns make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

-Nazi Hermann Goering


ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ...

No Vietcong ever called me nigger.

-Muhammad Ali, stripped of boxing title, convicted of a felony for refusing to serve during the Vietnam War


Everyone likes to say Hitler did this and Hitler did that.

But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done,

from the death camps to World War Two, was all done by citizens

who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not,

and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government,

refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire,

refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.

-Michael Rivero


Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government,

each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.

-Mark Twain


The fascist state is the corporate state.

-Benito Mussolini


We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

-Kahlil Gibran


It makes no difference as to the name of the God, since love is the real God of all in the world.

-Apache


Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear,

kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency.

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power

that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

-General Douglas MacArthur


The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side,

but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

-George Orwell


If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time,

no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

-Orson Scott Card


History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant,

which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

-Ambrose Bierce


I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues moaning about how the anti-war folk

are just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions' to global dilemmas.

Peace doesn't need a freekin moral, ethical, economical, or political qualification; war does.

Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does.

Peace does not need justification, war does.

-Unknown


What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson


Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

-Plato


Stopping terrorism is simple.

Just quit screwing around with other people's countries and the terrorists will go home.

But the government of the United States wants to go on screwing around with other people's countries,

refuses to stop, indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the United States Government to persist

in screwing around with other people's countries, and views the inconvenience,

increased tax burden, loss of civil liberties,

and even deaths among the American people as just another cost of doing business.

-Michael Rivero


If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.

-Voltaire


Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries

because you were born in it.

-George Bernard Shaw


The same people that wrote the bible thought the world was flat.

-Unknown


Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because

they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack,

they are not likely to conduct their policy, in a spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.

-Albert Einstein


I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

-Mohandas Gandhi


Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

-Elbert G Hubbard


Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction,

and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air;

consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ...

we need believing people.

-Adolf Hitler


The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait.

Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may,

and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings.

Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

-Ivan Illich


We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God,

who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

-Gene Roddenberry


A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

-Elbert Hubbard


The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

-Bertrand Russell


Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.

-Voltaire


As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

-George Orwell


Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

-Lucy Parsons


If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don't see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?

-Bill Hicks, 1993, referencing the Waco siege


Do you see now that your self-righteousness was nothing more than breeding and years of privilege?

You know, we are one nation under a god. Yes, you were right.

An angry, crack slinging god who decorates with bullets and spent condoms,

a blind god whose eyes are just like yours.

-Solipsist by Henry Rollins


The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.

-Prophet Muhammad


One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word.

-Robert Heinlein


Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.

It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

-Oscar Wilde


It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions,

a lie which is being systematically repeated.

I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

If something is in me which can be called religious,

then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

-Albert Einstein


Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

-Henry David Thoreau


You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.

-Usenet


If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

-Thomas Szasz


It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable.

-Nietzsche


Every war when it comes, or before it comes,

is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

-George Orwell


Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

-Napoleon


Because I do it with one small ship,

I am called a pirate.

You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.

~ St. Augustine


Humanity without religion is like a serial killer without a chainsaw.

-Unknown


In all the disputes, which have excited Christians against each other,

Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion

which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect

and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.

-Voltaire


When you philosophically oppose an entire power elite,

you cannot help but sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Social power is by nature a conspiracy.

-Tom N


Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem.

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty

and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.

Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves,

and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.

-Howard Zinn


A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs;

no religious basis is necessary.

Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment

and hope of reward after death.

-Albert Einstein


The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.

I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

-Abraham Lincoln


A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can’t afford an air force.

-William Blum


The philosopher has never killed any priests,

whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

-Denis Diderot


All great truths begin as blasphemies.

-George Bernard Shaw


Take only memories; leave nothing but footprints.

-Chief Seattle


The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round,

for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.

-Ferdinand Magellan - (disputed)


The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale.

-Aesop


Any intelligent fool can make things better, more complex, and more violent.

It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

-Albert Einstein


If you can conceive of morality without god, why can you not conceive of society without government?

-Peter Saint-André


Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.

Kill everyone, and you are a god.

-Jean Rostand


We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right;

but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right.

What must He think of us?

Abraham Lincoln



Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Denis Diderot


"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,

and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

-The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States


“We never keep to the present. We … anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were

trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we

wander about in times that do not belong to us and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we

dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is… [We] think of how we are going to arrange

things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching… Thus we never actually

live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy,

it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

-Pascal


You will have to search among the oddballs and black sheep, among those whose shoes aren't shined

and whose smiles aren't rehearsed. No, do not go in search of a job, but an inspiration.

Find a leader, a guide. Find friends. Look until you discover true individuals

and then plead with them to take you in.

-Dale Dauten


Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

--Pablo Picasso


Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

-Fred Brooks


Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.

~ Bernard Berenson


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

~ Steven Wright


I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.

~ Peter Walker


Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.

~ Duke Ellington


Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

~ Mark Twain


The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

~ James Branch Cabell


Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

~ Josh Billings


Truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of Time.

~ Baltasar Gracián


The more you own, the more it owns you.

~ Henry Rollins


Don't say you don't have enough time.

You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller,

Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

~ H. Jackson Brown


While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you.

~ Arab proverb


Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

~Samuel Clemens


When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

~ George Bernard Shaw


There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

~ Andre Gide


Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

~ Allen Ginsberg


Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.

~ Native American saying


One-tenth of the folks run the world. One-tenth watch them run it, and the other eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on.

~ Jake Simmons


An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

~ Albert Einstein


Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.

~ Tao Te Ching


Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?

~ Holly Near


If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

~ Cardinal Richelieu


Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.

~ African proverb


Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

~ Elwyn B. White


The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

~ Sir R. F. Burton


We are ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.

~ Saint Augustine


We live in our desires rather than in our achievements.

~ George Moore


Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality, for one very rich man; there must be at least five hundred poor.

~ Adam Smith


When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

~ Montesquieu


The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

~ Andrew Dickson White


Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst stage, an intolerable one.

~ Thomas Paine


The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

~ Sun tzu


A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

~ Lao tzu


Oh, how bitter a thing is to look through another man's eye.

~ William Shakespeare


Know all and you will pardon all.

~ Thomas à Kempis


I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing everything.

~ Vladimir Nabokov


All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

~ Thomas Paine


They that die by famine die by inches.

~ Matthew Henry


In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

~ Immanuel Kant


There is no sport in hate when all the rage is on one side.

~ Percy B. Shelley


Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.

~ Bernard Berenson


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

~ Steven Wright


You must ask your neighbor if you shall live in peace.

~ John Clark


It is true that liberty, so precious, must be rationed.

~ Nikolai Lenin


It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

~ Bertrand Russel


Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

~ Henry David Thoreau


I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.

~ Peter Walker


Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.

~ Duke Ellington


Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

~ Mark Twain


Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred battles.

~ Sun tzu


Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

~ James Branch Cabell


Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.

~ Julien Benda


It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

~ Margaret Mead


Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

~ Josh Billings


You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

~ Native Proverb


I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

~ Xenocrates


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.

~ Juvenal


He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

~ William Drummond


The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

~ George Orwell


Truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of Time.

~ Baltasar Gracián


Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.

~ Hugh Mills


...as hollow as the o in god...

~ Marilyn Manson


War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

~ Karl Kraus


It is better to be generous than just. It is sometimes better to sympathize instead of trying to understand.

~ Pierre Lecompte de Nouy


The more you own, the more it owns you.

~ Henry Rollins


Money often costs too much.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

~ Vladimir Nabokov


Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

~ David Hume


And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

~ John Steinbeck


We are condemned to kill time: thus we die bit by bit.

~ Octavio Paz


Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

~ Basho


By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity; another man's, I mean.

~ Mark Twain


Give to every other human being every right you claim for yourself.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll


Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

~ H. Jackson Brown


While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you.

~ Arab proverb


Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

~ Samuel Clemens


Ignorance is always afraid of change.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

~ Napoleon


The purpose of law is to prevent the strong from always having their way.

~ Ovid


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

~ Hector Berlioz


A man who is afraid will do anything.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


Each of us is confined to a world of our own making.

~ Shawn Mikula


Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.

~ Jessie Helms


Strange is our situation here upon Earth.

~ Albert Einstein


Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty.

~ Marquis de Lafayette


The world is too dangerous to live in, not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.

~ Albert Einstein


Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

~ Peter Ustinov


The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

~ Adolf Hitler


What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

~ Ursula K. LeGuin


When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

~ Lao tzu



When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

~ George Bernard Shaw


There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

~ Andre Gide


Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

~ Allen Ginsberg


Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.

~ Native American saying


One-tenth of the folks run the world. One-tenth watch them run it, and the other eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on.

~ Jake Simmons


An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

~ Albert Einstein


Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.

~ Tao Te Ching


Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?

~ Holly Near


If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men,

I will find something in them which will hang him.

~ Cardinal Richelieu


Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.

~ African proverb


Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

~ Elwyn B. White


The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

~ Sir R. F. Burton


We are ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.

~ Saint Augustine


We live in our desires rather than in our achievements.

~ George Moore


Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality, for one very rich man; there must be at least five hundred poor.

~ Adam Smith


When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.

~ Montesquieu


The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.

~ Andrew Dickson White


Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst stage, an intolerable one.

~ Thomas Paine


The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

~ Sun tzu


A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

~ Lao tzu


Oh, how bitter a thing is to look through another man's eye.

~ William Shakespeare


Know all and you will pardon all.

~ Thomas à Kempis


I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing everything.

~ Vladimir Nabokov


All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,

appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind,

and monopolize power and profit.

~ Thomas Paine


They that die by famine die by inches.

~ Matthew Henry


In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

~ Immanuel Kant


There is no sport in hate when all the rage is on one side.

~ Percy B. Shelley


Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.

~ Bernard Berenson


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

~ Steven Wright


You must ask your neighbor if you shall live in peace.

~ John Clark


It is true that liberty, so precious, must be rationed.

~ Nikolai Lenin


It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

~ Bertrand Russel


Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

~ Henry David Thoreau


I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.

~ Peter Walker


Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.

~ Duke Ellington


Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

~ Mark Twain


Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred battles.

~ Sun tzu


Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

~ James Branch Cabell


Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.

~ Julien Benda


It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

~ Margaret Mead


Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

~ Josh Billings


You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

~ Native Proverb


I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

~ Xenocrates


Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.

~ Juvenal


He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

~ William Drummond


The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

~ George Orwell


Truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of Time.

~ Baltasar Gracián


Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.

~ Hugh Mills


...as hollow as the o in god...

~ Marilyn Manson


War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

~ Karl Kraus


It is better to be generous than just. It is sometimes better to sympathize instead of trying to understand.

~ Pierre Lecompte de Nouy


The more you own, the more it owns you.

~ Henry Rollins


Money often costs too much.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

~ Vladimir Nabokov


Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

~ David Hume


And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

~ John Steinbeck


We are condemned to kill time: thus we die bit by bit.

~ Octavio Paz


Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

~ Basho


By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity; another man's, I mean.

~ Mark Twain


Give to every other human being every right you claim for yourself.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll


Don't say you don't have enough time.

You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

~ H. Jackson Brown


While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you.

~ Arab proverb


Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

~ Samuel Clemens


Ignorance is always afraid of change.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


Before we blame, we should first see if we can excuse.

~ G. C. Lichtenberg


Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.

~ Spanish proverb


I would have made a good pope.

~ Richard Nixon


In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

~ Napoleon


The purpose of law is to prevent the strong from always having their way.

~ Ovid


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

~ Hector Berlioz


A man who is afraid will do anything.

~ Jawaharlal Nehru


Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll


Each of us is confined to a world of our own making.

~ Shawn Mikula


Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.

~ Jessie Helms


If a person is to get to the meaning of life, he must learn to like the facts about himself, ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity, before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.

~ Eugene O'Neill


No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

~ Sir Frederick G. Banting


Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

~ General William Westmoreland


Strange is our situation here upon Earth.

~ Albert Einstein


Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty.

~ Marquis de Lafayette


If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

~ Ancient Chinese Proverb


Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

~ Sun tzu


Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

~ Confucius


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


One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes


It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves; it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

~ Agnes Repplier


Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.

~ Lao tzu


The world is too dangerous to live in, not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.

~ Albert Einstein


Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

~ Peter Ustinov


Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

~ David Starr Jordan


The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

~ George Bernard Shaw


Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

~ Mohandas Gandhi


You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

~ Steven Wright


The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.

~ Jean-Louis Gassee


A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

~ Robert Frost


Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.

~ Richard Salent, Former President CBS News


You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

~ Sacha Guitry


Two attitudes are all that is needed; do not harm anything, say and do things that make others happy.

~ dreamslaughter


In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

~ Anne Frank, holocaust victim


Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

~ Bertrand Russell


Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

~ Lao tzu


The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.

~ Henry Kissinger


The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

~ Adolf Hitler


What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

~ Ursula K. LeGuin


Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

~ Neils Bohr


Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

~ Aleister Crowley


The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.

~ Robert J. Sawyer


When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

~ Lao tzu


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

~ Henry David Thoreau


I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.

~ Alfred North Whitehead


Most people drive thru life with the parking brake on.

~ Lance Bradley


Truth is living, it is not static, and the mind that would discover truth must also be living, not burdened with knowledge or experience.

~ J. Krishnamurthi


If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

~ John Lennon


The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!

~ Michael Rivero


The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

~ Immanuel Kant


Can you sympathize with an exploding star?

~ Shawn Mikula


The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

~ Fidel Castro


Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll


Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

~ Leonardo da Vinci


All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

~ Stendhal


he greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

~ Leonardo da Vinci


Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.

~ Lao tzu


Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson


...so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible.

~ Robert McChesney


I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.

~ Thomas Edison


The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts. The less you know, the hotter you get.

~ Bertrand Russell


The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.

~ Hungarian Proverb


I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

~ Persian proverb


The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.

~ Henry Miller


The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.

~ Ramsey Clark


Someday man will imprison the power of the sun, release atomic power, and harness the rise and fall of the tides. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

~ Thomas Edison


Beware the man of one book.

~ Saint Thomas Aquinas


Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of bureaucracy.

~ Franz Kafka


Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.

~ Joseph Campbell


Always remember you are a totally unique individual; just like everyone else.

~ Unknown


You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

~ John Morley


It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless.

~ Benito Mussolini


America ... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need

to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

~ Hunter S. Thompson


The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people.

~ Jerry Fresia


The vast majority of mankind is trapped within perceptual prisons.

~ Shawn Mikula


We have a political system that awards office to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised when those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing to do anything with it.

~ Michael Rivero


Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.

~ Henry Van Dyke


It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

~ Rod Serling


Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

~ Albert Einstein


The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

~ Thomas Jefferson


If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

~ General Omar N. Bradle


Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

~ Napoleon


When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

~ Nelson Mandela


Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

~ Polybius


The radical invents the views.

When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

~ Mark Twain


It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

~ William Kingdon Clifford


We will be known by the tracks we leave behind.

~ Dakota proverb


Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

~ Thomas Szasz


When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

~ Henry Ward Beecher


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

~ Adam Smith


Quarrels would not last long if only one side was wrong.

~ Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld


Philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point is to change it.

~ Karl Marx


When a man says he approves of something in principle,

it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

~ Otto von Bismarck


A man's character is his fate.

~ Heraclitus


If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,

as far as possible, all things.

~ Rene Descartes


Time wounds all heels.

~ Jane Ace


Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

~ Henry David Thoreau


Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.

~ Voltaire


Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

~ Albert Einstein


Even if truth destroys the whole universe, still it is truth; stand by it.

~ Swami Vivekananda


The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

~John Locke


The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, the religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma.

~ Albert Einstein


To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

~ Aldous Huxley


Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

~ Ambrose Bierce


Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

~ Henry James


When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

~ Anatole France



Would you like to liberate yourself from the lower realms of life? Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness.

~ Lao tzu


It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

~ Mark Twain




Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

~ Margaret Mitchell


The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing

to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people's lives for personal gains.

~ Michael Rivero


Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

~ Mother Teresa


No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

~John A. Locke


Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.

~Robert G. Ingersoll


Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

~ Leonardo da Vinci


In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

-Robert Frost


Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines.

-unknown


If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

~ John Lennon


The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!

~ Michael Rivero


consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.

~ Alfred North Whitehead




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

~ Henry David Thoreau


The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance;

the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.

~ Robert J. Sawyer


Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

~ Neils Bohr


Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

~ David Starr Jordan


The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.

~ Henry Kissinger


In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

~Anne Frank


Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

~Bertrand Russell


The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

~George Bernard Shaw


Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

~Mohandas Gandhi


Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

~ Confucius


It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves; it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

~ Agnes Repplier


One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes


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


Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

~ Sun tzu


No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

~ Sir Frederick G. Banting


Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll


Before we blame, we should first see if we can excuse.

~ G. C. Lichtenberg


Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

~ David Hume


And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

~ John Steinbeck


Money often costs too much.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose;

then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering;

in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

~ Karl Kraus


The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

~ George Orwell




You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

~ Native Proverb


It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

~ Margaret Mead


Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.

~ Julien Benda


Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

~ Henry David Thoreau


It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether,

if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

~ Bertrand Russell


To make the statue of David, all Michaelangelo had to do

was remove the parts of the marble that weren't beautiful.

-Douglas Crockford


Know all and you will pardon all.

~ Thomas à Kempis


All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

~ Thomas Paine


Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful.

Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

~ Lao tzu


Beauty, n.: The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

-Ambrose Bierce


An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting to them than sex.

-Aldus Huxley's (allegedly)


A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson—Ralph Waldo Emerson


Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

—Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs


Not to oversee workmen is to leave them your purse open

-Benjamin Franklin


nothing I never said ever did me any harm.

-Calvin Coolidge


Disdain the chain, preserve your freedom; and maintain your independency: be industrious and free; be frugal and free

-Benjamin Franklin


Get what you can, and what you get hold; ’Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold.

-Benjamin Franklin


Writing, for me, is a search for God

-Carson McCullers


Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be

able to abide by its restrictions. Never is a long, undependable time, and

life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

-Gloria Swanson


You can only screw smart people once. So make sure it counts.

-Burt Richter?


It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

-—Albert Camus


The fact is that Atheists simply add one more “o” to their belief system. They believe in “good.”

-Margaret Downey



"I've begun worshiping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention,

I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time:

heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no

boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly

offered "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate."

--George Carlin, from his book Brain Droppings


On how a fascist state gets started

Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured,

children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ...

How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."


And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian

legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier.

There is no use now talking evolution to these people.

Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

--Luther Burbank, The Harvest of the Years


It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care

how you got your money, so long as you have got it.

--Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World


What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

--Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays


Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley


It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive

a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley


It was, of course, a lie that you read about my religious convictions,

a lie which is being systematically repeated.

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world

so far as our science can reveal it.

--Albert Einstein


If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

--Anatole France


Religion owned the past. Science owns the future.

--Anon. from the Internet.


John Adams, on political parties:

"The favorites of parties, although they have always some virtues, have always many imperfections.

Many of the ablest tongues and pens have, in every age, been employed in the foolish, deluded, and

pernicious flattery of one set of partisans, and in furious, prostitute invectives against another;

but such kinds of oratory never had any charms for me; and if I must do one or the other, I would quarrel

with both parties and with every individual of each, before I would subjugate my understanding, or prostitute

my tongue or pen to either."


All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

-Kurt Vonnegut


If you're old enough to start thinking about sex, you're old enough to start saving for retirement.

-Phil DeMuth


The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as

appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

-Kurt Vonnegut


...when a society is in great danger, [writers are] likely to sound the alarms.

I have the canary-bird-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts.

You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick.

The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over.

But it made no difference whatsoever. Nobody important cared.

But I continue to think that artists — all artists — should be treasured as alarm systems.

-Kurt Vonnegut



I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news

of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery,

and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

-Kurt Vonnegut



On another occasion he (K.Vonnegut) explained that his goal in writing novels was to

"catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents" and

"poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world."



success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo.

You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty,

of spoiling it in any way.

-Conan O'Brian


My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.

-Kurt Vonnegut


We here in the US are experts on democracy.

In democracy, after 100 years you have to let your slaves go.

In democracy, after 150 years you have to let you women vote.

At the beginning, extreme violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing are OK.

-Kurt Vonnegut


I think there is an intellent designer, and he or she knows exactly what they are doing.

That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

-Kurt Vonnegut


I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us and it should.

-Kurt Vonnegut


When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,

-Kurt Vonnegut


My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life.

But he was proud of not committing suicide.

And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children.

-Kurt Vonnegut



What work I have done I have done because it has been play.

If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said,

"Blessed is the man who has found his work"?

Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind.

Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work.

The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.

Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it.

When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great.

How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains?

The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

-Mark Twain


A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

-unknown


I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.

-Bart Simpson


If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.

-Cardinal Richelieu


You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees.

An evil system never deserves such allegiance.

Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil.

A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

-Mahatma Gandhi


Why do you, with all these grand possessions, still covet our poor huts?

-Caratacus, after being captured by the Romans


One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

-Sigmund Freud


The American Indians found out what happens when you don't control immigration.

-unknown


Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

-Ernest Hemingway


Love consists of underestimating the difference between one woman and other.

-George Bernard Shaw


He is richest whose pleasures cost the least.

-Benjamin Franklin


Quotes from "What I Believe", written in 1939 (EM Forster)


The memory of birth and the expectation of

death always lurk within the human being, making him separate

from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with

them. Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it!

And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked

under my shirt, whatever its colour.

EM Forster


As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well,

because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.

EM Forster


I believe in aristocracy, though - if that is the right word, and

if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon

rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the con-

siderate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all

nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret

understanding between them when they meet. They represent

the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer

race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in

obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others

as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being

fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and

they can take a joke.

EM forster


I realize that all society rests upon force.

But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations,

occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front.

These intervals are what matter.

I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them " civilization ".

EM Forster


The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working

and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing-holes for the human spirit.

EM Forster


Some people idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it,

instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible.

I think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the

mystics, err even more when they declare that force does not

exist.

I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its box.

It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made.

But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid.

EM Forster


So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.

Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

EM Forster


Democracy is not a beloved Republic really, and never will be.

But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that

extent it deserves our support.

It does start from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed

to make a civilization.

It does not divide its citizens into the bossers and the bossed - as an efficiency-regime tends to do.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to

create something or discover something, and do not see life in

terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a

democracy than elsewhere.

-EM Forster


If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend

I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

EM Forster


Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State.

When they do - down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.

Em Forster


"though we cannot expect to love one another, we must put up with one another.

Otherwise we shall all of us perish."

EM Forster


When someone with experience proposes a deal to

someone with money, too often the fellow with money ends up with the experience, and the fellow with

experience ends up with the money.

-Warren Buffet


If you want to get a reputation as a good businessman, be sure to get into a good business.

-friend of Warren Buffet to WB


Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

-Warren Buffet


We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.

-Benjamin Franklin


Iscar makes money because it enables its customers to make MORE money.

There is no better recipe for continued success.

-Warren Buffet


We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

-Winston Churchill


I owe my fortune to two great American institutions: monopoly and nepotism.

-unknown publisher, quoted by Warren Buffet in the 2006 berkshire hathaway shareholder's report.


As the world is ending, I’m always glad to be entertained for a few moments.

The best way to do that is with music. You should practice once a night.

-Kurt Vonnegut


To hell with the advances in computers.

YOU are supposed to advance and become, not the computers.

Find out what’s inside you. And don’t kill anybody.

-Kurt Vonnegut


There are no factories any more. Where are the jobs supposed to come from?

There’s nothing for people to do anymore.

We need to ask the Seminoles: ‘what the hell did you do?’’

after the tribe’s traditional livelihood was taken away.

-Kurt Vonnegut


Kurt Vonnegut explains the meaning of life:

“We should be kind to each other. Be civil. And appreciate the good moments by saying

‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’"


A reporter, talking to Kurt Vonnegut:

Not long ago we spoke on the phone. I asked Kurt how he was.

“Too fucking old,” he replied.


The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

Oscar Wilde


"It's probably true that hard work never killed anyone. But why take the chance?"

-Ronald Reagan


Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

Oscar Wilde


Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

-Oscar Wilde


A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

-Oscar Wilde


A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

-Oscar Wilde


America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde


America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde


Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Oscar Wilde


Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Oscar Wilde


Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde


Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Oscar Wilde


Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Oscar Wilde


Genius is born--not paid.

Oscar Wilde


I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

Oscar Wilde


I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde


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

Oscar Wilde


I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma.

In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde


If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

Oscar Wilde


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

Oscar Wilde


It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.

Oscar Wilde


Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde


One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

Oscar Wilde


Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde


The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

-Oscar Wilde


The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Oscar Wilde


The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde


There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating:

people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde


To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

Oscar Wilde


We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

Oscar Wilde


We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

Oscar Wilde


Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Oscar Wilde


Wisdom comes with winters.

Oscar Wilde


One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Oscar Wilde


The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else,

and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar Wilde


A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde


When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

Oscar Wilde


Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

Oscar Wilde


It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Oscar Wilde


Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Oscar Wilde,


One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Oscar Wilde


Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde


Politicians and diapers must be changed regularly, and for the same reason.

-Unknown


Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did

not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope

with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.

— Sigmund Freud


Ignorance feeds on ignorance.

– Carl Sagan


This site best viewed with a bottle of beer

-Maurizio Loreti (http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/mlo.html)


If the world didnt suck we would all fall off.

-Unknown


The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

-Lord Acton


"The demise of a sense of personal responsibility is the

most consistent consequence of submission to authority"

-Stanley Milgram


The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

-British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley:


A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.

-Nikos Kazantzakis


History continues even though the graveyard is full of indispensable leaders.

-Charles De Gaulle


Is it really true that the world wants to hear only one thing about science? And then continue after that, with its ongoing religious,

superstitious and political disputes? Maybe the world wants to hear only one thing from me. What could that be? All the important

things that the world has already heard from my colleagues might be incomplete — my colleagues may have forgotten to tell the world

something. What could that be? I do not know.

Gerardus 't Hooft Professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University


Thanksgiving - the only day of the year when Americans eat better than the French.

-Art Buchwald


Thanksgiving - the only day of the year when Americans THINK they eat better than the French.

-LK


The average employee [...] is no more able to competently direct his own investments than

he is to remove his child's appendix or build his own car.

William Bernstein, "The Four Pillars of Investing"


Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

-oscar Wilde


Negotiating with oneself seldom produces a bar-room brawl.

-Warren Buffett


Give judgement a fighting chance to triumph over process.

-John Bogle


The only companies that need to do marketing are those with inferior products.

-John Bogle


Everyone has got the will to win, its only those with the will to prepare that do win.

-Bobby Knight


Start at once and do the best you can.

-Jim Bellows, On investing


The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable.

The sequence is not predictable.

-Warren Buffett


Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

-Mark Twain


Fat, Drunk & Stupid is no way to go through life, Son.

-Dean Vernon Wormer


No one who can be bought is worth buying.

-Ben Stein


Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs,

even though checkered by failure,

than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much,

because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt


You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is 'never try'.

-Homer Simpson


There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and

those nobody uses.

-Bjarne Stroustrup


To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.

-Hippocrates


If one tells the truth, then sooner or later one will be found out.

-Oscar Wilde


If all else fails, we could tell the truth.

-Abdus Salam

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

-Oscar Wilde

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

-Oscar Wilde


No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.

-Sir Arthur Eddington


"Il y a en Angleterre soixante sectes religieuses differentes, et une seule sauce"

(Francesco Caraccioli)


Alcohol, if taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.

-Oscar Wilde


When a nobleman reported that he had consumed three bottles of

port the previous night, he was asked if he had drunk them all

without assistance. "Not quite," he replied, "I had the help

of a bottle of Madeira."

-Hugh Johnson


Although we, the French, love the United States, our respect and

admiration are not based on gastronomy nor on nutrition.

-Michel Montignac


The goose is a silly bird; too much for one, and not enough for two.

-Samuel Johnson


The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

-Edward John Phelps


"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"

-Sir Winston Churchill


I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

(Sir Winston Churchill)


Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves

up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

-Sir Winston Churchill


"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees

the opportunity in every difficulty"

(Sir Winston Churchill)


"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me"

(Sir Winston Churchill)


"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"

(Albert Einstein)


"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his

tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand

this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here,

they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat"

(Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio)


A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining,

but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

-Mark Twain


An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done

before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been

done before.

-Mark Twain


Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

-Mark Twain


It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a

fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

-Mark Twain


Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let

the food fight it out inside.

-Mark Twain


America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

-Oscar Wilde


There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly

what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear

and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is

another theory which states that this has already happened.

-Douglas Adams


"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes

wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it"

(Douglas Adams)


Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

-H. L. Mencken


"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards

or golf"

(H. L. Mencken)


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

(H. L. Mencken)


"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly

greater than that of any other animal"

(H. L. Mencken)


More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One

path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total

extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

-Woody Allen


You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

-Dave Barry


"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep"

(Albert Camus)


Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.

-Lewis Carroll


"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes"

(Winston Churchill)


"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"

(Neils Bohr)


An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

-Niels Bohr


Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

-Niels Bohr


I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid

and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and

I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.

-George Bush, U.S. president, 1990


The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

-W. Somerset Maugham


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

-H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare


"Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian"

(H. L. Mencken)


"A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned"

(George Bernard Shaw)


"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend

in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize"

(George Bernard Shaw)


"The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not

the power of speech"

(George Bernard Shaw)


"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

(Sir Winston Churchill)


"Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there

will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending,

ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the

journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory

of the climb."

(Sir Winston Churchill)


"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except

all the others that have been tried."

(Sir Winston Churchill)


"Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you

can stop people talking."

(Clement Atlee)


Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

-Sir Winston Churchill


Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

-Sir Winston Churchill


Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes


It is always the best policy to speak the truth--unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

-Jerome K. Jerome


I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

Jerome K. Jerome, "Three Men in a Boat", 1889


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

(Ogden Nash)


"Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy."

(Isaac Newton)


"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But

it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We

used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them

economical numbers."

(Richard Feynman)


"Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will

happen to you the rest of the day."

(Anon)


"It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will

be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste."

(Evelyn Waugh)


"I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a

language I don't understand."

(Sir Edward Appleton)


"Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible

suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house."

(James Thurber)


"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable."

(Mark Twain)


"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile -- hoping it will eat him last"

(Winston Churchill)


"Although present on the occasion, I have no clear recollection of the

events leading up to it."

(Winston Churchill, on his birth, recalled on his death 24 Jan 1965)


"My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and

also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals

and in the intervals between them."

(Winston Churchill, on dining with the abstinent

King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia)


"Playing golf is like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture"

(Winston Churchill)


"In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times"

(Winston Churchill)


"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to

the devil in the House of Commons."

(Winston Churchill)


"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever.

Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again.

Then hit it a third time--a tremendous whack."

(Winston Churchill)


"I shall always be glad to have seen it--for the same reason Papa gave for

being glad to have seen Lisbon--namely, 'that it will be unnecessary ever

to see it again.'

(Winston Churchill, on Calcutta, in 1896 letter to his mother)


"If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I

would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would

be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire."

(Winston Churchill)


"It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as

slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of

terminological inexactitude."

(Winston Churchill)


"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never--in nothing, great

or small, large or petty--never give in except to convictions of honour and

good sense."

(Winston Churchill)


"For myself I am an optimist--it does not seem to be much use being

anything else."

(Winston Churchill)


"KBO"

(Winston Churchill)


"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we

are permitted to remain children all our lives."

(Albert Einstein)


"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

(Anatole France)



During the inter-war years, Churchill once mischievously invited a party of

Mormons down to Chartwell for lunch. They duly attacked the fizzy water

and the orange juice with their accustomed gusto, while Churchill

imbibed something stronger with equal vigour. At some point, the chief

Mormon turned to his host, and observed:

"Mr Churchill, the reason I do not drink is that alcohol combines the

kick of the antelope with the bite of the viper."

Churchill fixed the Mormon with his most beatifically wicked smile, and

replied:

"All my life, I have been searching for a drink like that."



Lady Astor: "Winston, if I were your wife, I'd poison your soup."

Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it."



"And this brings me by natural sequence to the great drink question.

As you know, of course, the American does not drink at meals as a sensible

man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day.

Also he has no decent notions about the sun being over the yardarm or below

the horizon."

(Rudyard Kipling)


"I feel that philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It's

just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made."

(Paul Dirac)


I believe in intelligent design - for man-made things.

Richard Dawkins


Believe in yourself. Don't waver.

A revolutionary new product won't be understandable to most people. Don't let these people bring you down.

They only know what they're exposed to. It's a type of prejudice against the spirit of invention.

Trust your intuition, that way lies happiness.

See things in "grey scale".

Don't follow the crowd. Do a factual study.

Don't waste time supporting a bad idea. Keep your ego out of the equation.

Work alone. Don't work in a corporate environment where products are designed by committee.

-- STEVE WOZNIAK


Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties,

things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools,

and things which are actually difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve.

-Joel Spolsky


True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery


An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind

-Mahatma Gahdhi


Treat things divine with marked respect- and don't have anything to do with them.

-Ambrose Bierce


A good business is one which provides more and more for less and less.

The cost of your goods and services should spiral downwards.

-New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra


When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you

believe that you will be able to converse well with

this person into your old age? Everything else in

marriage is transitory.

-Nietzche


The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

-Theodore Roosevelt


The main challenge of computer science is how not to get lost in the complexities of [your] own making.

Edsger Dijsktra


The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr.

Seeking knowledge for one hour is better than praying for seventy years.

-(attributed to) The Prophet Muhammed


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

-Woody Allen


You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,

but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...

So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

-Richard Feynman


Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible,

you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

-Brian W. Kernighan


There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success,

nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.

For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order,

and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new...

-Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince


The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull;

therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility,

and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

-Edsger Dijkstra


Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling

- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers

an aura of power on the user.

-Niklaus Wirth


Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

-Larry McMurtry


PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs,

whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

-Jon Ribbens


The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!

-Richard Feynman


-If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

attributed to Norm Schryer


The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion.

Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to

have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to.

This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends.

The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on

are also the most interesting to know.

-Paul Graham


“The state is made for man, not man for the state.

I regard the chief duty of the state to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to

develop into a creative personality.”

-Einstein



"Perl is sort of the Swiss Army Chainsaw..."

-Guido Von Rossum


One does evil enough when one does nothing good.

-German Proverb


Atheist

-noun

A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence,

and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others.

—Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary


Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is

not a christian.

-Lenny Bruce


Genius learns from nature.

-Oscar Wilde


Live your life so that whenever you lose, you're ahead.

-Will Rogers


If you live life right, death is a joke as far as fear is concerned.

-Will Rogers


Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

-Edsger W.Dijkstra


Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the

most vital asset of a competent programmer.

-Edsger W.Dijkstra


Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

-Edsger W.Dijkstra


Infinite patience yields immediate results.

–Wayne Dyer


A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry

Ecclesiastes 8:15


What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

-Bertand Russell


For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,

for Nature cannot be fooled

-Richard Feynman


Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

-Richard Feynman


I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring

-Richard Feynman


Their are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users" -- drugs and computers.

-Edward R. Tufte


If you're not failing every so often, then you're not trying hard enough.

-Woody Allen


Dear Lord: The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life,

everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: You

freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that

is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. OK, deal. In gratitude, I present

you this offering of cookies and milk. If you want me to eat them for you,

give me no sign. Thy will be done.

- Homer Simpson


The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks

into small manageable tasks, and then starting with the first one.

-Mark Twain


Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more.

-Oscar Wilde


It is a damned poor mind indeed that can't think of at least two ways of

spelling any word.

-Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) Seventh U.S. President


I am an old man and have known a great many troubles,

but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain


Talk does not cook rice.

-Chinese proverb


People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.

I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the

people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t

find them, they make them.

-George Bernard Shaw


Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

- Will Rogers


On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that

has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

-Will Rogers


There ought to be one day-- just one-- when there is open season on senators.

-Will Rogers


There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

-Will Rogers


We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can.

-Will Rogers


The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

The one that's out always looks the best.

-Will Rogers


Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else.

-Will Rogers


You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

-Will Rogers


Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

-Will Rogers


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

-Will Rogers


I bet you if I had met him [Trotsky] and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and

human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn't like.

-Will Rogers


Communism is like prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work.

-Will Rogers


One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing;

that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one

-Agatha Christie


I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,

but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

-Albert Einstein


You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

-Albert Einstein


War may sometimes be a necessary evil.

But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

-Jimmy Carter


What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,

whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism

or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

-Mahatma Gandhi


The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

-Solomon Short


A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband,

but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh


I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil,

which one contains tighter knots to undo,

and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain,

and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

-Edith Wharton


My toughest fight was with my first wife.

-Muhammad Ali


I love being married.

It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

-Rita Rudner


When I meet a man I ask myself, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'

-Rita Rudner


The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly

on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

-P. G. Wodehouse


It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

-John Andrew Holmes


We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

-Hellen Keller


After watching the scenes on television in the past few days, it occurred to me that if

any place in the world could survive this catastrophe, it would be New Orleans.

Significantly, in the most deprived parts of the city, there are

churches and Gospel halls. Faith has to be strong because often

it is all most of the people have.

-Ray Davies on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina


f 2/27/12 If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done.

-Ray Davies


Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

-Ernest Hemingway


All programmers are optimists

- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.


Always program as if the person who will be maintaining your program is a violent psychopath

that knows where you live.

-Martin Golding


Once you're done writing the code, never open it again unless you want to see how

uncomprehensible and utterly ridiculous it really is."

-Raphael Sazonov


Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

-Mark Twain


There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

-Mark Twain


"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?"

-Martin Luther King


Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions.

It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

-William O. Douglas


Of all the delights of this world man cares most for s. i. He will go any length for it-risk fortune,

character, reputation, life itself. and what do you think he has done? He has left it

out of his heaven! Prayer takes its place.

-Mark Twain


"When we cannot find contentment in ourselves it is useless to seek it elsewhere."

-François de la Rochefoucauld


"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal."

-Albert Pine


There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that

society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose.

People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it,

they unconsciously want to destroy it.

-Martin Luther King


"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well kept body,

but to skid in sideways, Margaritas in one hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming

WOO HOO - What a Ride!"

-Matt Kruse (www.mattkruse.com)


The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man,

which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics

as surely as poetry.

- Bertrand Russell


The cardinal rule of writing unmaintainable code is to specify each fact in as many places as

possible and in as many ways as possible.

- Roedy Green


It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me,

and I think that's pretty important.

-Martin Luther King


Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-Martin Luther King


We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

-Martin Luther King


The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are

dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

-Martin Luther King


"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he

does what he wants to do." -Bob Dylan


The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience,

but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

-Martin Luther King


A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own

spiritual death on an installment plan.

-Martin Luther King


In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

-Martin Luther King


Hope springs eternal in the human breast

-Alexander Pope


Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

-Napoleon


Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

- Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.


They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety

deserve neither liberty nor safety.

-Benjamin Franklin


If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't

believe in it at all.

-Noam Chomsky


"As doomed as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs"

-Joel Spolsky


If there is a bedrock principle underlying the first amendment, it is that the government

may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive

or disagreeable.

-william J. Brennan, Jr.


"From the black depths of the primordial soup, rose a single crouton."

-Bungie web site


Finish each day and be done with it.

You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in;

forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day;

you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

-R.W.Emerson


Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

-R.W.Emerson


Never underestimate corporate greed.


Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates,

and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo,

and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

-R.W.Emerson


A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered

a mind that startled us.

-R.W.Emerson


The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal,

of the crusaders a crusader,

and of the merchants a merchant.

-R.W.Emerson


All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

-R.W.Emerson


Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.

-R.W.Emerson


What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.

-R.W.Emerson


Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real.

Perhaps they are.

-R.W.Emerson


Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

-R.W.Emerson


The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

-R.W.Emerson


Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquesting faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Struggle


We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Humanity


Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Drugs/Alchohol


If you really want to upset your parents, and you are not brave enough to be gay, go into the arts!

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Art


I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Drugs/Alchohol


What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously.

But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of

loneliness can be cured.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Loneliness


We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Education


History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In History


The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.

The people don't acknowledge this.

They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Politics


The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily,

which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

- Kurt Vonnegut, In Drugs/Tobacco


I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other,

when they fight, 'Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.'"

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Slapstick" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Love


Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,"

Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by

their ignorance the hard way.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Education


Anyone who cannot understand how a useful religion can be based on lies will not understand this

book either.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Religion


Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave, and kind, and healthy, and happy.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Happiness


One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died

in vain. You will have entertained us.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cold Turkey" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Death


And the people would eat up all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become

excrement and memories. What then for little Ecuador?

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Galapagos" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Weird


Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five" ( $ ) ( ? ), In Hate


"Alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems."

-Homer Simpson


In 1999, then-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura became a hero for the movement when he refused to endorse the

National Day of Prayer and told Playboy magazine that organized religion was "a sham and a crutch for

weak-minded people who need strength in numbers."


"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

-African proverb


"The early bird gets the worm - but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese."


Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once.

-John Wheeler


Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in [an] unsatisfying society will

usually be a good letter-writer.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Art is the proper task of life.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest

enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological

precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large

kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

-Friedrich Nietzsche


It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


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

invent laughter.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


The doer alone learneth.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think

alike than those who think differently.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

-Friedrich Nietzsche


Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

-- Albert Einstein


There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a

miracle The other is as though everything is a miracle.

--Albert Einstein


Stephen Roberts

-I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.


Doug McLeod

-I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.


Unknown Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. 2 votes against Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.. Click here if you dislike this quote.13%13 votes for Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.. Click here if you like this quote.87%

Richard Feynman But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me 0 votes against But I dont have to know an answer. I dont feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesnt frighten me. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%5 votes for But I dont have to know an answer. I dont feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesnt frighten me. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Emo Philips When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. one vote against When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesnt work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.. Click here if you dislike this quote.13%7 votes for When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesnt work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.. Click here if you like this quote.88%

Gustaf Lindborg The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail 4 votes against The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail. Click here if you dislike this quote.25%12 votes for The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail. Click here if you like this quote.75%

Richard Lederer (Anguished English) There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages. 6 votes against There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.. Click here if you dislike this quote.29%15 votes for There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.. Click here if you like this quote.71%


Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

-Epicurus


Annie Wood Besant No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism 2 votes against No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. Click here if you dislike this quote.29%5 votes for No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism. Click here if you like this quote.71%

Unknown Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. one vote against Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence.. Click here if you dislike this quote.25%3 votes for Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence.. Click here if you like this quote.75%

Carl Sagan You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep-seated need to believe. 0 votes against You cant convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, its based on a deep-seated need to believe.. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for You cant convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, its based on a deep-seated need to believe.. Click here if you like this quote.100%

doesnt matter "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand" -Mark Twain 0 votes against "It aint the parts of the Bible that I cant understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand" -Mark Twain. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for "It aint the parts of the Bible that I cant understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand" -Mark Twain. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Ned Flanders Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things! 0 votes against Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we dont want to know! Important things!. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends! Well I say there are some things we dont want to know! Important things!. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Blaise Pascal Men never commit evil so fully and joyfuly as when they do it for religious convictions one vote against Men never commit evil so fully and joyfuly as when they do it for religious convictions. Click here if you dislike this quote.25%3 votes for Men never commit evil so fully and joyfuly as when they do it for religious convictions. Click here if you like this quote.75%

Bertrand Russell So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence 0 votes against So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Woody Allen I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear 0 votes against I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Friedrich Nietzsche In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point 0 votes against In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Chapman Cohen Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense 0 votes against Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Ferdinand Magellan The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church one vote against The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. Click here if you dislike this quote.25%3 votes for The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. Click here if you like this quote.75%

Stephen Jay Gould Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?... [more] 0 votes against Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?. Click here if you dislike this quote.0%one vote for Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?. Click here if you like this quote.100%

Gypsy Rose Lee Praying is like a rocking chair-- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere one vote against Praying is like a rocking chair-- itll give you something to do, but it wont get you anywhere. Click here if you dislike this quote.25%3 votes for Praying is like a rocking chair-- itll give you something to do, but it wont get you anywhere. Click here if you like this quote.75%

Clark Adams If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease! 3 votes against If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%6 votes for If Atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Justin Brown An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated... [more] 4 votes against An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. Click here if you dislike this quote.36%7 votes for An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated. Click here if you like this quote.64%

Steve It's not lying, I've really convinced myself of it 4 votes against Its not lying, Ive really convinced myself of it. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%6 votes for Its not lying, Ive really convinced myself of it. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Seneca the Younger 4 b.c.- 65 a.d. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. one vote against Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Bumper sticker You keep believing, I'll keep evolving one vote against You keep believing, Ill keep evolving. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for You keep believing, Ill keep evolving. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Carl Sagan Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. one vote against Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Robert G. Ingersoll God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine a divine perfume... [more] one vote against God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine a divine perfume. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for God has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Most of the gods were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine a divine perfume. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Robert G. Ingersoll Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter one vote against Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Friedrich Nietzsche Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's? one vote against Which is it, is man one of Gods blunders or is God one of mans?. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Which is it, is man one of Gods blunders or is God one of mans?. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Robert G. Ingersoll Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own? one vote against Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?. Click here if you like this quote.67%

George Bernard Shaw The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one one vote against The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. Click here if you like this quote.67%

H. L. Mencken We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart one vote against We must respect the other fellows religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for We must respect the other fellows religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Karl Marx Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people one vote against Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Taslima Nasrin Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that? one vote against Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Isaac Asimov Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition one vote against Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Gene Roddenberry They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldn't agree with one vote against They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldnt agree with. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for They said God was on high and he controlled the world and therefore we must pray against Satan. Well, if God controls the world, he controls Satan. For me, religion was full of misstatements and reaches of logic that I just couldnt agree with. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Mark Twain It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand one vote against It aint the parts of the Bible that I cant understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. Click here if you dislike this quote.33%2 votes for It aint the parts of the Bible that I cant understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. Click here if you like this quote.67%

Lenny Bruce If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses 2 votes against If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%3 votes for If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Robert G. Ingersoll (Ingersoll's Works) Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains 2 votes against Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%3 votes for Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Albert Einstein A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death 2 votes against A mans ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%3 votes for A mans ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Sir Julian Huxley ...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious.... [more] 2 votes against ...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious.. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%3 votes for ...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious.. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Delos B. McKown The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike 2 votes against The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Click here if you dislike this quote.40%3 votes for The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Click here if you like this quote.60%

Carl Sagon Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence 3 votes against Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Click here if you dislike this quote.43%4 votes for Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Click here if you like this quote.57%

Gene Roddenberry We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes 3 votes against We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. Click here if you dislike this quote.43%4 votes for We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. Click here if you like this quote.57%


Albert Einstein

-Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions,

the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.


David Brooks (The Necessity of Atheism)

-To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure;

to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.


unknown

-Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church.


Sam Harris

-Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition,

without evidence - that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants - he becomes

capable of anything.


unknown

-People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs.


unknown

-Blasphemy is a victimless crime


Richard Dawkins

-Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.


Robert G. Ingersoll

-The inspiration of the bible depends on the ignorance of the person who reads it.


Mark Twain

-The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.


Jonathon Green

-If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.


Stephen King

-The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything.

Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world,

nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.


Galileo Galilei

-I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses,

reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use,

giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.


Robert G. Ingersoll

-As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.


Bertrand Russell

-And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to

be offended by those who doubt His existence


Benjamin Franklin

-The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason


W.C.Fields

-Prayers never bring anything.

They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal,

and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas


Stephen Hawking

-The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their

locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence.

It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.


Peter O'Toole (The Ruling Class)

-Everything is more or less organized matter.

To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same.

When did I realize I was God?

Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.


Carl Sagan

-Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist,

and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud.

Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly,

always trying to understand all things as a part of nature...


Shakti Gawain

-We always attract into our life whatever we think about the most,

believe the most strongly, expect on the deepest level, and imagine most vividly


Napoleon Bonaparte

-Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet


Thomas Jefferson

-Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices,

under which weak minds are servilely crouched.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact,

every opinion.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one,

he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear...


Albert Einstein

-The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation (...)

The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise;

but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it


Justin Brown

-If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?


Donald Morgan

-Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way.

It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here.




"THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT"


The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat;

They took some honey, and plenty of money

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the moon above,

And sang to a small guitar:

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"


Pussy said to the Owl: "You elegant fowl,

How charmingly sweet you sing!

Oh, let us be married-too long we have tarried—

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away for a year and a day

To the land where the bong tree grows;

And there in a wood, a piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose.

With a ring at the end of his nose


"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?" Said the piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined upon mince and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon,

And hand in hand on the edge of the sand

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon.

They danced by the light of the moon.


By Edward Lear (1812-88).

(Lear throughout his life had a passion, as an artist, for painting.

He is best remembered, however, for his Book of Nonsense, 1846,

written for the Earl of Derby's grandchildren.)


I've got enough money to last me the rest of my life. Assuming I die next Thursday.

Father of John Simpson, BBC war correspondent


YAGNI - Ya Ain't Gonna Need It

An Extreme Programming practice which states:

"Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you

just foresee that you need them."


A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

In the long run every program becomes rococo - then rubble.

Optimization hinders evolution.

Programming is an unnatural act.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.

When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't.

Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be

discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as soap bubble?

One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic.

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

The proof of a system's value is its existence.

--Alan Perlis


"An app in the hand is worth two on the whiteboard"

-?


Love is unreasonable forgiveness.

-Louis Keeble


Embrace visible signs of aging, they make death less of a shock.

-Louis Keeble


A rising tide does not raise ships already sunk.

-Louis Keeble


Before accepting a job offer, ask yourself, "would I set sail with these people?"

-Louis Keeble


No matter how good or bad something is, there will always be strong proponents and detractors.

-Louis Keeble


Many rulers are worse than Donald Trump, they just don't have the resources to get noticed.

-Louis Keeble


On software development: fast, good, cheap. Pick one.

-Louis Keeble


Eat shit. A million flies can't be wrong.

-Shane Ahmet


Never look a gift horse in the mouth until the giver has left.

-Louis Keeble


Don't try to be cleverer than yourself.

-Louis Keeble


I could say something funny or witty, but since I am not rich or famous, nobody will take any notice.

-Louis Keeble