Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net
Interesting things that wound up stuck in my wetware...
Creativity
There is no such thing as creativity. What there is, is editing -- the ability
to pick something meaningful out of a fast-running stream of freely
associated, highly random thoughts. Great books are not written. They're
rewritten.
-- David Gerrold
Education
Too much of what passes for education is nothing more than data-bulimia --
gorging on data, but taking no nourishment, and eventually vomiting out half-
digested facts without any understanding.
-- David Gerrold
Aliens
Yes, I'd like to assume that any species intelligent enough to get from one
planet to another will have a highly developed moral system, but that's an
assumption. HG Wells pointed out (in War of the Worlds) that maybe they're
just hungry.
-- David Gerrold
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
-- unknown
"In the future, cities will become deserts,
roads will become battlefields,
and the hope of mankind
will appear as a stranger"
-- The Road Warrior
Max: What do men do when women are distressed?
Theora Jones: Run away or boast, normally.
-- Max Headroom
"Ah - love - the walks over soft grass, the smiles over candlelight, the
fights over just about everything else..."
-- Max Headroom
"Now, I'm no librarian, in fact, I don't know what star sign I am. But, as a
famous person once said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time,
but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And as I - another more
famous person - once said, 'If you don't teach them to read, you can fool them
whenever you like.'"
-- Max Headroom
"Have you any idea how successful censorship is on TV? Don't know the answer?
Hmm. Successful, isn't it?"
-- Max Headroom
"Here. It drives like a truck."
"Good! ... What is a 'truck'?"
-- Buckaroo Banzai to John Parker
During my last hospital visit, I found out it's the various veteran groups
that pay for TVs in the VA hospitals. Odd, that criminals get TV at citizen
expense, but vets don't. It's scary how criminal behavior is rewarded in
our society.
-- Bruce Plecan
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by
the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the
government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be
enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in
this country is closely connected with this.
-- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
Everything you know is wrong. But some of it is a useful first
approximation.
-- Eric S. Raymond
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
-- Steve Hoflich on compl.lang.c++
Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are
impotent in the face of hope and joy.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
"There is no knowledge that is not power."
-- from Mortal Kombat, via the Navaho Gunleg
Charlie Chan: "Perfect case, like perfect doughnut, has hole."
Inspector Renard: "Ha, I see. Same old pessimist, aren't you?"
Charlie Chan: "Optimist only sees doughnut. Pessimist sees hole."
-- "Charlie Chan in Paris", 1935
"Only three things give you that kind of confidence: a machine gun, stupidity,
or being a vampire."
-- Anita Blake, vampire hunter
"Paranoia or caution; hard to tell the difference sometimes."
-- Anita Blake, vampire hunter
"Worry about the things you can control; the rest will either work themselves
out, or they'll kill you. Either way, no more worries."
-- Anita Blake, vampire hunter
"Never trust people who smile constantly. They're either selling something or
not very bright."
-- Anita Blake, vampire hunter
"A piece of paper is merely the promise of wealth. Gold is accepted as hard
currency in every nation."
-- Chiun, Master of Sinanju
"Practicality takes precedence over theory,"
-- jimivice, on speedtalk.com
"Without data, you're just another guy with an opinion."
-- madbill, on speedtalk.com
"I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For the twenty
terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I
use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for
five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for
one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."
-- 'The Dying Earth', by Jack Vance
"Now, I owe it to myself to tell you, Mr. Griswold, that if you are thinking
of taking the tribe cross country, this is your automobile. The Wagon Queen
Family Truckster. You think you hate it now, but wait till you drive it."
-- car salesman, "National Lampoon's Family Vacation"
Inga: "Werewolf!"
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: "Werewolf?"
Igor: "There wolf; there castle!"
-- Young Frankenstein
Igor: "It's times like this that I remember what my old dad used to say."
Dr. Friedrich von Frankenstein: "What was that?"
Igor: "What the hell are you doing in the bathroom all day and night? Why
don't you get out of there and give someone else a chance?"
-- Young Frankenstein
"No aimed round is ever wasted."
-- H. Beam Piper, "Little Fuzzy"
"Nothing quite says 'yesterday' like yesterday's 'tomorrow'."
-- James Lileks
"Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently sophisticated magic would be indistinguishable from
science."
-- Rick Cook
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
-- Dave Williams
Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts
avoiding you.
-- The Old Farmer's Almanac
"655,360 bytes is more than enough for any application we
could ever develop."
-- Bill Gates in PC Monthly, Aug. 1983
"I say we lift and nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
-- Ripley, in "Aliens"
Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some
people have mediocrity thrust upon them.
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
"Conquest is easy. Control is not."
-- Kirk, "Mirror, Mirror", stardate unknown
"What's-a behind me is not important!"
-- Franco, in "Gumball Rally"
I'm not an intellectual, I can think for myself."
-- Steve Matuchek, "Operation Chaos", Poul Anderson, 1971
"Retreat, regroup, reconsider, retaliate."
"A city the size of Ethshar mostly ran by itself. Lady Sarai thought of it as
a spinning top, and the government's job was to keep it balanced - a touch
here, a touch there."
-- Lawrence Watt-Evans, "The Spell of the Black Dagger"
"How often does that train go by?"
"So often you'll never notice."
-- Elwood Blues, in "The Blues Brothers"
"It's just a jump to the left.
And then a step to the right.
With your hands on your hips.
You bring your knees in tight.
But it's the pelvic thrust
That really drives you insane!
Let's do the time-warp again!
Let's do the time-warp again!
-- cast, in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
"So, what's it to be then, oh my droogies?"
-- Alex, in "A Clockwork Orange"
"Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale?"
-- Kirk, in "The Trouble With Tribbles"
"Now go away or I will taunt you a second time!"
-- French knight, in "Monty Python's Holy Grail"
"Ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a blaster at your side,
kid."
-- Han Solo, in "Star Wars"
"You close the door when you go to the bathroom not because you're doing
something bad in there but because others might not care to share the
experience."
-- Miss Manners
"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging
for rule by brute force, where the biggest, strongest animals among men were
always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a
hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
-- L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
"Good... bad... I'm the guy with the gun."
-- Ashe, in "Army of Darkness"
"There is no problem enough explosives won't cure."
-- Robert Harris
"Bureaucrats in a working system don't need to conspire. They're like spiders
sitting at points on a community web. If one of them starts doing something
for the good of the web, it's because conditions seem to call for it - and
those same conditions will also move other bureaucrats, whether they know the
whole story or not. It's as if the vibrations travel along the strands of the
web, and the rest of them, following their nature, start doing what most be
done - all without any direct spider-to-spider communication whatsoever."
-- Gordon R. Dickson, "The Last Master"
"Don't fight the problem. Decide it!"
-- General George Marshall
The great proponent of preserverance, William The Silent, Prince of
Orange, never wavered in the face of every hardship and disaster from
striving for the unity and independence of the Netherlands. The
immortal sentence in which he epitomized his life cannot be repeated
too often:
"It is not necessary to hope in order to act, or to succeed
in order to preservere."
-- from "Present at the Creation" by Dean Acheson (former US Secretary of
State under Truman), 1969
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon
the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
-- "An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth" by Gandhi
(Mahatma), Mahadev Haribhai Desai
"It's our world and we just let them live in it. The world is our drop
zone."
-- Kevin Williams, USAF Special Ops
"Peace through superior firepower!"
-- unofficial motto of the USAF Strategic Air Command
"Ever since I saw my first quadratic equation I knew mathematicians were up
to no good..."
-- Terry Pratchett
"Religion is man's attempt to communicate with the weather."
-- Robert Humphris
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhauser
Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to
die."
-- Roy Batty, "Bladerunner"
"I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years
ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would
eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they all going to
go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!" Years later, I went
back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by
electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors. There was a computer in
every doorknob."
-- Danny Hillis
"Some learn by experience. Some learn from books. And some just have to
piss on the electric fence."
-- Will Rodgers (1879 -1935)
"Programming: the only art form that fights back... =)"
-- Larry Smith
"A company is selling liquid with a unique identifier. The idea is for
me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership. I think
a better idea would be for me to paint it on *your* valuables, and
then call the police."
-- Bruce Schneier, pointing out a small flaw
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
--Ed Howdershelt (Author)