Collected Favorite Quotations

For quite some time, I've been keeping a file on my computer system to which I add interesting, insightful, or particularly amusing quotations as I find them. Since this file has probably become worthy of sharing (and since it gives insight into the people and kinds of thinking I have found worthwhile, admire, or otherwise feel worthy of note), I've decided to put it online here on my Web site. These are in no particular order (actually, they are in chronological order based on the order I found and collected them...). I hope you enjoy these as much as I have.

Then when all else fails, I remember the old Polish proverb: "In times of famine, a fat man gets skinny, but a skinny man dies."
---David Kerlick (BML member)

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it.
---Pierre Gallois, quoted by Matthias Urlichs

"Why not just make the damn thing properly and eat less of it?"
---Julia Child, in a discussion of low-fat alternatives to traditional dishes

"Spare the duct tape, spoil the job"
---Bill Pulliam, BML

"I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity."
---Oscar Wilde

"Your mission in life is to discover what kind of person you were created to be and to be that person. And if you don't screw things up to badly or waste too much time, you'll find there's just enough time to do that".
---somebody (probably a bear), quoted by Bryan Gloyd

"If you're going to follow the herd, you'd better watch your step."
---Garrison Keillor

"I used to think the brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I said, look what's telling me that."
---Dr. Katz, quoted by Dave Kushal

"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and three hundred sixty two admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision."
---Lynne Lavner, quoted by Cameron Aishton

"Don't tax me, don't tax thee, tax that guy behind the tree."
---Everett Dirksen, quoted by Catie Burke

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
---Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
---Popular Mechanics, forecasting the future of computers, 1949

"But what ... is it good for?"
---Engineer, Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs."
---Yossie Silverman

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

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity."
---Dr. Edwin H. Land

"Truth is truth. You can't have opinions about truth."
---Professor Peter Schickele

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
---Albert Einstein

"I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my Grandfather. Not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car."
---"LURCH"

"There is no doubt about it that this medium is far and away the most controversial medium in our business today. It is also the most frightening, time and personnel consuming, and the most expensive. As a result of this combination of impediments, many of us are prone to look solely at the problems of the medium and thus to overlook its values."
---From a meeting in the 1930's regarding the use of television as a new advertising medium

"The real differences in our world are not between Catholics and Protestants, Arabs and Jews, Muslims, Croats and Serbs, they are between those who embrace peace and those who reject it, those who look to the future and those who are blinded by the hatreds of the past, those who open their arms and those who are determined to keep clenching their fists."
---President Bill Clinton, in a speech on Feb. 10, 1996, following the resumption of IRA bombings in England

"If Michaelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white; with a roller."
---Rita Mae Brown

"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."
---Edwin H. Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land camera

"The really nasty criminals don't break laws -- they make them."
---Kevin S. Van Horn

"We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
---Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), U.S. statesman, writer. Comment at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, in reply to John Hancock's remark that the revolutionaries should be unanimous in their action.

"People would worry a lot less about what other people thought of them, if they knew how seldom they do."
---Mark Twain

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
---Albert Einstein

"If people knew how hard I have had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem masterful at all."
---Michelangelo

"Advising people to believe without reason or contrary to reason is advising them, in effect, to make themselves incapable of telling what's true from what isn't -- an ideal state of mind for someone one wants to enslave."
---John Erickson, intactivist

"'Tis better to have loved and lost than have to live with the bitch the rest of my life."
--- anonymous

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."
--- from "The Sutra of Forty-Two Parts", quoted by Bill Wilson

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
--- Albert Einstein

"It's very pointless to worry about the future, about what MAY happen. Unless you're a psychic, you have no idea what will happen. The only thing it makes sense to fear is not knowing, because that's something you're certain of."
--- Rachel Hamilton, in a personal E-mail to me

"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for lunch."
--- anonymous

"Politicians and diapers have one thing in common. They should both be changed regularly, and for the same reason."
--- Anonymous

"I view the Apple tragicomedy not as a war of operating systems but as a fascinating case study in the potentially fatal alchemy of arrogance, bad marketing, ingenious product development, loyal customers and abysmal public relations."
--- Paul Furiga, editor, Pittsburgh Business Times

"...the last thing I would want anyone I truly loved to do, is deprive himself of a harmless and desired hour or so of pleasure, out of some mistaken belief that depriving himself would somehow please me."
--- Ted Snyder, in a personal E-mail to me

"...what are we supposed to do? Lock ourselves away and hope that some knight in shining armour comes along? Bah, humbug. I spent far too many years locked away, afraid of people, afraid to love and be loved. Now I just wish I could show people how much better it is to just be who you are. To just....I don't know. BE, for christ's sake. Don't try so hard to be loved, don't be so desperate for affection, don't look at people as "What can they do for me?", and just be."
--- Alexander Darke, on his Web page

"The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was."
--- Wesley A Younger, in a mailing list post

"If you have a job that depends on using perl, get another job. "
--- Jules Gilbert, in a SNOBOL4 mailing list post

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
--- Charles Babbage, computing pioneer and inventor of the "Difference Engine" mechanical computing device

"We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation."
--- Lily Tomlin

"In general, it pays to remember that relationships are not "magic". They are contracts - specific arrangements about what you give, receive, and sacrifice in order to make both of your lives better than they would have been otherwise. Romantic love is all very well, but the daily give-and-take of living together will win over mushy emotionalism every time. If both of you aren't better off for being in a relationship, the relationship *will* fall apart, whether it's open, closed, polyamorous, incestuous, or strictly an affair of convenience. You can build any kind of relationship you want, with any kinds of rules that you want, so long as you are *both* better off with each other than you would be without. Whether it's open or closed makes little difference in what you have to do to make it work."
--- Anthony Berno

"It is ironic that so many gun owners claim to be Christians - I can imagine nothing more absurd or contradictory, and no case where followers of any faith are in greater denial over their own prophet's message."
--- Anthony Berno

"By temperament, which is the real law of God, many men are goats and can't help committing adultery when they get a chance; whereas there are numbers of men who, by temperament, can keep their purity and let an opportunity go by if the woman lacks in attractiveness."
--- Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain

"Bigotry is the drug that most people use to dull the pain of their own lives."
--- Doug Brown, in a mailing list posting

"Stick to making friends one at a time and you will find that either you will meet your soul mate, or you won't miss having one because you have a small group of intimate friends who keep you busy, happy and satisfied."
--- Joel Weeks, in a mailing list posting

"Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away..."
--- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

"In my experience, the further away from ourselves we look for truth, the less likely we are to find it."
--- Joel Weeks, in a mailing list posting

"All any of us really wants is just someone to hug, who will hug us back, and means it."
--- "Rusty", a friend of mine from San Antonio

"...But I figure, get the ulterior motives out of the way immediately - do the nasty, and if it's a really valuable relationship, it will continue the next day. If not, I'd rather have one good lay and a "goodbye" than months of games centered around an artificially sustained sexual desire. ... Real respect isn't going to be altered by sex. Anyone who respects you less for doing what you BOTH want is a games-playing asshole who doesn't belong in your life."
--- Anthony Berno, in a mailing list posting

"The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'"
--- Admiral Grace Hopper, USN

"Go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than to get permission."
--- Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, discussing how to survive in a bureaucracy

"...Doing crap jobs such as postroom and temp work in the past (and being on the dole) has taught me that sometimes you have to hold out for what you think you're worth... only THEN will people treat you like you are worth that. If you accept less, people treat you as less."
--- Tim Baker, in a mailing list posting

"America does not have a class system because it is not possible to define meaningful classes in a country dominated by the individuality of experience. Insofar as there is class division, it seems more like the division of individuals through lack of common experience than a systematic, prior compartmentalization of society. ...when you get down to it, what would a steelworker who pours molten iron all day and a golf-playing executive actually *talk* about? The alienation expressed here has nothing to do with an externally imposed system of exclusion, and everything to do with the atomization of society created by television, the automobile, and the disappearance of civic life. I would argue that there does not exist a country that has *less* of a class system than the United States; class simply a matter of circumstance."
--- Anthony Berno, in a mailing list posting

"My basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are easy; you don't make them because they are cheap; you don't make them because they are popular; you make them because they are right."
--- Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame

"Jealousy doesn't say 'I love you,' except maybe to trailer-park girls raised to think staying barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen is what love's all about. Jealousy says 'I OWN you.' Always, without exception, and with no redeeming qualities. Jealousy is about possession. The fear of the insecure that someone might take away 'my' lover. The fear of the dependent that someone will take away 'my' meal-ticket/decision-maker/problem-solver. The fear of the complacent horndog that someone will take away 'my' ever-handy hole."
--- Ted Snyder, in a mailing list posting

"Gotta name the computer Glenda. A positive force for self-improvement and self-knowledge. The quote from Glenda to Dorothy is, 'You've always had the power...' and then to the three companions, 'She had to learn it for herself.'"
--- George Dawson, commenting on a good name for a new computer

"'If you loved me, we'd fuck without a condom' strikes me as an attitude more appropriate to grand opera than to real life, anyway. Puccini may make dying for love sound beautiful, but the fact is, it just isn't very pretty."
--- John Corcoran, in a mailing list posting

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
--- Bill Cosby

"The race may not be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that's how you bet."
--- Damon Runyon

"My darling girl, when are you going to understand that being normal isn't necessarily a virtue. It rather denotes a lack of courage!"
--- "Aunt Frances", in "Practical Magic"

"There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice."
--- Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
--- Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
--- James Baldwin

"If a slut is someone who enjoys sex without the pointless guilt prescribed by puritanical finger-wagging, then you bet your ass I'm a slut."
--- Ted Snyder (BuckcuB), in a mailing list posting

"Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work."
--- Brandon Long

"That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."
--- John Stuart Mill

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives."
--- John Stuart Mill (noted British philosopher)

"A conciliator is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."
--- Winston Churchill

"I realize that this is a big commitment, and that much of the meaning of long hair derives from the fact that it *is* a serious commitment, not just a passing fad that can be picked up or abandoned on a whim. I don't know for sure whether I'll have the fortitude to stick it out for that long, but it certainly makes me realize that it takes a certain kind of person to have long hair, and that this is a special test of character, which I may pass or fail. Neither outcome would be bad or unwelcome, but it will certainly tell me something about myself."
--- Anthony Berno, in a mailing list posting, on the decision to let his hair grow long

"The fact is that virtually all men in the world DO have beards -- but most shave them off! I'm on my own little crusade to convince men not to grow or "wear" a beard, but to STOP SHAVING. Why would any man want to look more like a woman and less like a man? ... Having long hair and a full beard is biologically "natural." It's the men who cut their hair short and trim or shave off their beards who have to "justify" their behavior."
--- William Sommerwerck, in a mailing list posting

"Bush cannot claim to have been elected by all the people when he is only president because the wishes of 50 million voters were rendered moot by thievery on the part of the Supreme Court. Vincent Bugliosi has spoken the truth. It will not, for the next three-and-a-half years, set us free. But we should at least make good use of the chains the Supreme Court has left us in, rattling them loud enough to remind the bastards that we're not going anywhere."
--- Charles Taylor, reviewing Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Betrayal of America" in Salon Magazine

"Everyone seems normal until you get to know them; some people you get to know much faster than others."
--- Rose Radow, mentioned in a mailing list posting by grandson Mike Radow

"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family."
--- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers

"To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon -- to be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree."
--- Peter Gay, historian and author

"Love doesn't follow a textbook or a script. It's rarely where you look. I've had several relationships that didn't work out. I don't think any failed, though I wouldn't repeat any of them. I learned from each one of them. That's life. And it sometimes doesn't go as planned. Most of us learn the hard way."
--- Steve Kluth, in a mailing list posting

"If you have a relationship that is worth keeping, and one of you slips up... Does that mean you give up on the relationship, just because one of you screws up? That seems tragic. If you do, then you have one more short term monogamous relationship that bit the dust. If you don't, then you really don't have a monogamous relationship anymore."
--- Doug "FoothillBear", in a mailing list posting

"But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me."
--- Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
--- Theodore Roosevelt, in 1918

"In a speech earlier today President Bush said if Iraq gets rid of Saddam Hussein, he will help the Iraqi people with food, medicine, supplies, housing, education -- anything that's needed. Isn't that amazing? He finally comes up with a domestic agenda -- and it's for Iraq... Maybe we could bring that here if it works out."
--- Jay Leno

"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. It is the same in any country."
--- Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and President of the Reichstag in the Hitler regime

"The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad."
--- James Madison, 4th US president (1751-1836)

"People who think they're too smart to get involved in politics are destined to be governed by people stupider than they are."
--- Unknown

"No matter how cynical I get... I just can't keep up!"
--- Lily Tomlin

"Nothing says loving like a Cock down your throat."
--- Tagline on the label of Red Cock Lager Beer, a prop bottled beer used during the filming of the movie "A Tribute to Big Rick"

"Democracy is not a spectator sport."
--- Anonymous

If you've enjoyed my quotations page, you might also enjoy another worthwhile quotations page belonging to Brandon Long, whose taste in quotes is rather similar it seems to mine, and even includes several of the favorites I've listed above.

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