"You cannot inherit culture. Ancestral traditions disappear rapidly unless each generation re-conquers them for itself." ---Zoltan Kodaly "I don't gamble, because winning a hundred dollars doesn't give me great pleasure. But losing a hundred dollars pisses me off." "Your socks are not mismatched. They're diverse!" ---Randi Rhodes, Air America Radio "I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." ---Clarance Darrow "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." ---Mark Twain "You can observe a lot just by watching."--Yogi Berra "If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." ---The Dalai Lama "We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe's-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we've done our job, five years from now you're not going to call us a bank." --Kerry K. Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual, 2003 "The piano: 88 little mistakes waiting to happen"---Peter Barnes He [Tom Lehrer] takes a fierce pride in "caring about such things as nuance and the challenge of finding a rhyme. 'How about orange', I hear someone challenge. Let's see now ... Ah, I have it: Eating an orange/While making love/Makes for bizarre enj-/Oyment thereof. Sorry, just flexing." [Originally from Lehrer, Tom. "In His Own Words: On Life, Lyrics and Liberals." Washington Post, Jan 3 1982: E1] "The problem with wrong proofs to correct statements is that it is difficult to give counterexamples." ---H. Lenstra "It is an equally awful truth that four and four makes eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or eight angels, eight bricks or eight bishops, eight minor poets or eight pigs." ---G.K. Chesterton "The purpose of money is to make things convenient." --Harold Dunkel "Teaching is the best way to learn, I'm still convinced of that; by passing on our knowledge we continue to discover and learn. Moreover, this activity forces us each time to a new formulation of what we want to express, forces us to new [attempts], [a] constant search of new methods. The constant links with youth helps us to always have a youthful outlook, make us able to surprise ourselves constantly.." ---Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik's Cube, London speech, 1/31/81. http://cubeland.free.fr/infos/ernorubik.htm "I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it." --- George W. Bush "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." --Ecclesiastes 9:11 "The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those who have not got it." --George Bernard Shaw From *Buffy, the Vampire Killer* (the movie). Buffy and her friends are walking through the mall, and a friend asks an inane question, which gives Buffy the opening to ask: Do you know the meaning of the word, "Duh"? "He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." ---Francis Bacon (1561-1626) *Of Marriage and Single Life* "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." ---Hunter S. Thompson "Write a wise saying and your name will live forever." --- Anonymous My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. -- Ashleigh Brilliant I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, `Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.' ---Richard Jeni "War does not decide who is right, only who is left." ---Bertrand Russell "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." ---William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" ---Ernest Hemingway, on William Faulkner, in reply "I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can." --- Ernest Hemingway "The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company." ---Pope John XXIII "If George Gershwin were alive, he'd turn over in his grave!" ---Seth Godin "There are many, many good people who have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela." -- Martha Stewart "The Mathematicks, though not absolutely necessary to a Devine in the way of his Profession, yet has a great Influence upon his Studies; it gives him a Habit of Thinking abstractedly upon every Subject; enduces him with with Patience to investigate the most knotty Problems, for the sole Pleasure of finding out the Truth; and is useful in explaining most other Sciences." ---The London Tradesman, published in 1747, "for the Information of PARENTS, and Instruction of YOUTH in their Choice of Business." It has to do with preparation for, "the first learned science, divinity." "The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent, the necessity of solving an existing one" --Albert Einstein "Creationism never goes away, it just evolves." -- Molleen Matsumura "How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe." ---W. H. Auden 1907-1973 "I would wish to return as a killer virus to lower human population levels." - Prince Philip of England, speaking before the UN, 3/30/90 "When I was a student, abelian functions were, as an effect of the Jacobian tradition, considered the uncontested summit of mathematics and each of us was ambitious to make progress in this field. And now? The younger generation hardly knows abelian functions. How did this happen? In mathematics, as in other sciences, the same process can be observed again and again. First new questions arise, for internal or external reasons, and draw researchers away from the old questions. And the old questions, just because they have been worked on so much, need ever more comprehensive study for their mastery. This is unpleasant, and so one is glad to turn to problems that have been less developed and there fore require less foreknowledge - even if it only a matter of axiomatics, or set theory, or some such thing." ---Felix Klein (1849-1925) "If I explained my investigations as broadly as Fourier's book is written it would take me just a quarter of the time and several huge volumes." -- K. F. Gauss (1777-1855) You could shoot Microsoft Office off the planet and this country would run better. You would see everyone standing around saying, `I've got so much time now.' -- Scott McNealy "Write a wise saying and your name will live forever." ---Anonymous "I've been reading this great book called *Time Management from the Inside Out*. I'll tell you about it later." ---Tom Roby The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. ---Linus Pauling "C students run the world" --Harry Truman Just about any animal skin can be stretched over a frame to make a pleasant sound once the animal is removed. -- Student answer from a music test in the state of Missouri, 1989 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 (1918-1988) Love is to stay awake all the night with a sick child. Or with a very healthy adult. ---David Frost The education sargeant (commissar in the Soviet version) gives a lecture in the course of which he says that water boils at 90 degrees. One of the soldiers corrects him, "100 degrees" "No, 90, sit down." A month later the sargeant gives another lecture. An honest fellow, he starts by saying "Your comrade was right last month. Water does boil at 100 degrees. What confused me was that the right angle boils at 90 degrees." For my son, Robert, this is proving to be the high-point of his entire life to date. He has had his pajamas on for two, maybe three days now. He has the sense of joyful independence a 5-year-old child gets when he suddenly realizes that he could be operating an acetylene torch in the coat closet and neither parent [because of the flu] would have the strength to object. He has been foraging for his own food, which means his diet consists entirely of "food" substances which are advertised only on Saturday-morning cartoon shows; substances that are the color of jukebox lights and that, for legal reasons, have their names spelled wrong, as in New Creemy Chok-'n'-Cheez Lumps o' Froot ("part of this complete breakfast"). --- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide" Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. --Anonymous One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. --- A. A. Milne A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. -- Douglas Adams, *Mostly Harmless* "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." --Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963. "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." --James Bovard (1994) "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."-- A.N. Whitehead ``The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate any need for intelligent thought.'' --A. N. Whitehead "The direct use of force is so poor a solution to the problems of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations." ---David Friedman "[In regard to the varying effectiveness of different kinds of placebos], capsules containing colored beads are more effective than colored tablets, which are superior to white tablets with corners, which are better than round white tablets. Beyond this, intramuscular saline injections are superior to any tablet but inferior to intravenous injections. Tablets taken from a bottle labeled with a well-known brand name are superior to the same tablets taken from a bottle with a typed label. My favorite is a doctor who always handled placebo tablets with forceps, assuring the patient that they were too powerful to be touched by hand." --Patrick Wall (leading expert on placebo use in "The Science of Consciousness", edited by Max Velmans, p. 168.) Most of the difficulties students have learning calculus can be traced to weak algebra skills. -- Leonhard Euler you must sit at the table yet awhile because the food that you have taken in is tough and takes time to assimilate. Open your mind to what I shall reveal and seal it in, for to have understood and not retained, as knowledge does not count. --Dante "Paradise" (Canto V, 37-42) "Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity." ---Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680) 'The richness of Eastern European folk music also serves as evidence of the centuries-long friendly co-habitation of the peoples in the region rather than their animosity for each other.' --Pál Havasréti (of Teka Ensemble) "Mathematicians can never leave well enough alone -- what if this, what if that? .. You never get to the end of anything." ---Sarah Flannery's Mom in the book "In Code, A Mathematical Journey" "Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." --W.H.Auden Frank Rizzo upon being questioned while he was Mayor of Philadelphia, after appointed his brother as Fire Commisioner: "Nepotism, smetpotism; if you can't trust your family, who can you trust?" "Education is one of the only enterprises where the customer demands less." 1. A Guide to Arab Democracies [...] 7. Different Ways to Spell `Bob'. [...] 8. Easy UNIX [...] 11. Everything Men Know About Women [...] 14. How to Sustain a Musical Career, by Art Garfunkel [...] 21. The Amish Phone Book --- `Very Short Books' There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. I graduated from Douglass College without distinction. I was in the top 98% of my class and damn glad to be there. I slept in the library and daydreamed my way through history lecture. I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you're bent over about the color, don't leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want. ---*Hard Eight*, p. 218. (A Stephanie Plum novel) "I once saw a very young foal trying to eat some most objectionable refuse, and unable to make up its mind whether it was good or no. Clearly it wanted to be told. If its mother had seen what it was doing she would have set it right in a moment, and as soon as ever it had been told that what it was eating was filth, the foal would have recognised it and never have wanted to be told again; but the foal cold not settle the matter for itself, or make up its mind whether it liked what it was trying to eat or no, without assistance from without. I suppose it would have come to do so by-and-by, but it was wasting time and trouble, which a single look from its mother would have saved, just as wort will in time ferment of itself, but will ferment much more quickly if a little yeast be added to it... from Chapter LVI of *The Way of All Flesh*, by Samuel Butler. "When aiming for the common denominator, be prepared for the occasional division by zero." "The insidious thing about wind instruments", said Bernard Shaw in a music review, "is the fact that they strengthen the lungs and thus prolong the musician's lives." The American jazz musician Bobby Hackett was once addressed by a customs' official, whose skeptical eye had espied his trumpet case; "Is that a musical instrument?" he asked, "Sometimes," replied Hackett. In a course for preservice elementary teachers: Professor: Give me a simple word problem that illustrates 3 x 5 = 15. Student: Mary had 3 apples. John had 5 apples. They multiplied them and had 15 apples in all. "The tough problem is not in identifying winners; it is in making winners out of ordinary people. That, after all, is the overwhelming purpose of education. Yet historically, in most of the periods emphasizing excellence, education has reverted to selecting winners rather than creating them." --K. Patricia Cross "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." "He was an arithmetician, not a mathematician. None of the music, humor, or mysticism of higher mathematics ever entered his head." --John Steinbeck (*The Moon is Down*) "Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos." ---John Forbes Nash, mathematician Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. -- Gene Spafford Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -- Victor Hugo Any girl can be glamourous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. ---Hedy Lamarr "An undetected error in a logarithmic table is like a sunken rock at sea yet undiscovered, upon which it is impossible to say what wrecks may have taken place." ---John Herschel, Astronomer, to Henry Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1842 [*The Difference Engine - Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer* p 13 Doron Swade, Viking Press, 2000] "What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?" ---Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister, 1842 "If those are your views, I wish you good morning." ---Charles Babbage to Robert Peel, 1842 If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut. -- Albert Einstein "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." -- Sir Winston Churchill "I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." -- Harry S. Truman Writing science fiction for about a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion. -- L. Ron Hubbard, SF author and founder of Scientology Human attention may be the ultimate scarce resource. -- Andrew M. Odlyzko, *Internet pricing and the history of communications* Hmmm, it's all the same to me. As a former mid-westerner (who relocated to California) once told me, there is really only the Best Coast, the Least coast, and the flyover states. ;^) -- Jeffrey Hobbs, on US geography When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. -- R. Buckminster Fuller Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- E. Dijkstra In answer to the question "are you a geek" one guy replied: "I carry a differential-equations problem-solver and a periodic table in my wallet. What do you think?" ---The Economist (3/29/97) "For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours." ---Henri Poincare "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." --- J. S. Bach "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --- Woody Allen "Until 1964 (Vatican II) it was a mortal sin (you go to hell for committing one of these) to eat meat on Friday. My dear, brilliant, hair-splitting Jesuit friend lived in the state of Washington, very near the Canadian border. On Fridays he would go over the border to Canada for breakfast, to dine on bacon & eggs, his favourite morning menu. His logic (and he had an abundance of that!) was this, straight-faced: "Only in a country that is not a mission country is eating meat a mortal sin; Canada is still mission territory, so no sin is involved." THAT's how they split hairs!" "Buying more books than you have time to read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity." One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. -- A. A. Milne The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation. -- George Bernard Shaw Bob Witte's First Law of Educational Productivity: "If you work on the wrong problem, no matter how hard you work, you will never be successful." Corollary: If everyone who works on the problem is ill-informed, you will get a stupid answer." "If things are bad enough, you don't need to be very good to be a lot better." ---Bob Witte "Don't fight the problem." George C. Marshall A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river; when you're teaching you must make judgements instantly. --Japanese Teacher An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. -- Niels Bohr This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar. -- From a church bulletin Love is to stay awake all the night with a sick child. Or with a very healthy adult. -- David Frost My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. -- Ashleigh Brilliant The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe. -- Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and mayor of Philadelphia I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night. -- Marie Corelli "If you want something done, ask a busy person." -- Benjamin Franklin "I suppose that if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life." --- Hobbes "The winner is the first player to get the most points." --Card game rules Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench. -- Gene Spafford, quoted by Freedman/Mann Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. -- Aldous Huxley Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. -- George Santayana Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. ---W.R. Inge If you describe exactly how you intend to produce concrete life-jackets, adhere to that description, and employ quality management techniques [...] to improve your processes, you will become ISO-9001 certified. ---Guido Hennecke There are two kinds of fool. One says `This is old, and therefore good.' And one says, `This is new, and therefore better'. ---John Brunner, _The Shockwave Rider_ It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all. ---William Makepeace Thackeray We were frustrated with computers a decade ago, we are frustrated with them now, and will continue to be frustrated in the future. As long as technology offers enticing new products and services, we will continue to live on the edge of intolerable frustration. -- Andrew M. Odlyzko The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one? ---Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft group VP, ACM97) If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde, *An Ideal Husband* I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think they make really crappy operating systems. -- Linus Torvalds I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. ---John Cage Finally, I will ask young readers who may get hold of this book not to try to get through it strenuously; don't try to get through it in a few weeks or even months. Take a year or more over it. There is a lot in this book; and I don't think it is any exaggeration to say that its contents would make a generous slice in anyone's mathematical education. One cannot expect to cram this amount of knowledge into one's brain in a few weeks or months without detriment to it. What I have learnt over 52 years cannot hurt my young readers to spend 52 weeks in learning! ---Albert Eagle *The Elliptic Functions as They Should Be* (Cambridge, Gateway & Porter Ltd., 1958) Since I've been working in end-user support, I have stopped reading mystery novels, because I always guess the solution when I'm on page 3.--- Peter Berlich I want smart software, but if I can't have that, I want dumb software that knows it is dumb and comes to me for help, not dumb software that thinks it is smart and tells me lies it believes to be true. --J. Fieber "You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it...." ---Duke Ellington "These sort ... think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's wife." ---R.S. Surtees (1803 - 1864) "Because the idea of hereditary legislators is inconsistent as that of heridetary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hededitary mathematician, or an hereditary wiseman; and as ridiculous as an heridetary poet laureate." ---Thomas Payne 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 "There's no use in trying," [Alice] said. "One Can't be- lieve impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. ---Lewis Carroll "You can't teach what you don't know any more than you can come back from where you ain't been." ---Will Rogers "He that takes up conclusions on the trust of authors, and doth not fetch them from the first items of every reckoning, which are the significations of names settled by definitions, loses his labour and doth not know anything, but only believeth." --Hobbes: *Leviathan* "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." --- Popular Mechanics, 1949 TODAY'S TIP FOR WRITERS: When writing a business report, avoid big words and jargon; try to use everyday language. WRONG: "We will prioritize the infrastructure paradigm matrices." RIGHT: "We are fixin' to prioritize the infrastructure paradigm matrices." -- Dave Barry "And there, in the festival's own "communities," fleeting as they are, but often unforgettable, whether it is an audience under canvas, or the community of participants that in its two weeks together works out its own set of codes and forms its own alliances, or in the community of volunteers that gathers around the festival and returns to it year after year, or of the staff with its ideas, its projects, its responsibilities and its inevitable office politics, or in the many combinations and permutations of all of these, that the purposes of the Festival of American Folklife are best achieved, when they are achieved-where the cultural recovery or recontextualization of the folk performance is, if temporary, more than didactic, theoretical, or imaginary. " --Robert Cantwell (*Feasts of Unnaming: Folk Festivals and the Representation of Folklife*) "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles (1962) The road to wisdom/Well, it's plain/And simple to express: Err/And err/And err again/But less/and less/and less. -- Piet Hein There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators. -- Stephen Wright Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember. -- Oscar Levant I truly think that the ordinary laws of logic, of human intelligence, somehow fail to apply in the Pacific Northwest, and am starting to facetiously wonder if David Lynch wasn't onto something after all. -- Rick Downes, on Windows NT TODAY'S TIP FOR WRITERS: When writing a business report, avoid big words and jargon; try to use everyday language. WRONG: "We will prioritize the infrastructure paradigm matrices." RIGHT: "We are fixin' to prioritize the infrastructure paradigm matrices." -- Dave Barry As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. -- M. Cartmill "Do not attempt to stop the blade with your hand." -- In the manual for a Swedish chainsaw. I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, `Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.' ---Richard Jeni Citing the bible to prove the existence of Jesus Christ is like citing *Looney Tunes* to prove the existence of Bugs Bunny.---Perry B. Friedman Anything a faculty member can learn, a student can learn easily. ---Richard Hamming I want my tools to _enable_ me to work better, not _keep_ me from working better due to some marketing researcher's idea of what is `easier' for someone who's never used a computer before in their life. -- Paul D. Smith, on Windows A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. ---Henry Louis Mencken Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow. ---Arthur Stringer, *The Silver Poppy* "An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger." --- Dan Rather We can observe what happens [at midnight 1999] in Western Samoa, New Zealand and Australia and still have 6 hours to make plans. -- Y2K preparedness in the national Indonesian electricity board Quoted from an Indonesian newspaper by Fraser McHarg (RISKS Digest 20.58) The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. ---Bertrand Russell Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read. ---Joshua Geller "Much of mathematics means translating problems into abstract representations and converting numerical solutions into understanding. It's something that neither calculator nor computer program can do. It's what each of us struggles with whenever we enter the world of numbers...It's why we'll forever need arithmetic, algebra, and calculus. And it's why computers don't belong in math class." ---Clifford Stoll Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. -- Frank Zappa George Bernard Shaw to the London Times: "There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives... I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go or quickly to go. The important thing is that he should go at once." The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it. --- Mark Twain I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. --- Stephen Hawking If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. -- Frank Lloyd Wright One physicist said of mathematics that if mathematics hadn't been invented "physics as a science would have been set back maybe a week." Upon which the mathematician to whom he was speaking said, "You mean the week when the Lord created the heavens and the earth?" Bitte vergiss alles, was Du auf der Schule gelernt hast; denn Du hast es nicht gelernt. ---Edmund Landau Don't let schooling get in the way of your education. ---Mark Twain "On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away." --Tom Lehrer, 4/4/90 A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier. -- Gustave Flaubert Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know. -- Henry Louis Mencken Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember. -- Oscar Levant If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Go"del taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. ---John Barrow "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." ---Sir Isaac Newton, 1720, upon hearing that he had lost L20,000 in the Great South Sea Bubble English is the de facto lingua franca. What is the difference between Jurassic Park and Microsoft? One is a high-tech theme park dominated by dinosaurs, and the other is a Steven Spielberg movie. --- Mike Hammond Some people think the glass is half full. Others think it is half empty. I think the glass is too big. -- George Carlin "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model." ---Tanenbaum "His book is a marvel of laboured detail. No expositor could take more pains with his reader, space being held of no moment if clearness had to be secured. As might be expected, therefore, all that is really worth preserving of his work is but a small fraction of the 264 pages which he occupies in exposition." --Muir on Desnanot's work on determinants It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up. -- Vince Lombardi Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- E. Dijkstra Your buggestions are welcome. -- Richard Stallman, *GNU Emacs Manual* "Sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago." - Dionysius Cato. The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment. -- Celia Green We are lucky we don't have as much government as we pay for! -- Will Rodgers The wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea; I've learned to worry more about the soundness of ideas that were invented only once. -- David L. Parnas, *Why Software Jewels Are Rare* The obvious mathematical breakthrough [for breaking modern encryption] would be the development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers. -- Bill Gates, *The Road Ahead* One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. ---Will Durant "The impression is that, through some bad old custom or some bad new pressure, professors have acquired a special privilege which they do not need and should not have. On the contrary, academic freedom is indispensable to the central function of the university. The main task of the university is candid and courageous thinking about important issues." --- Robert Hutchins, "Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them - work, family, health, friends and spirit - and you're keeping all of these in the air at the same time. 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 balance in your life." --Brian Dyson, CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises, at a graduation ceremony Mathematics is like a video game; if you just sit and watch, you're wasting your quarter. Hundreds of people are telling me that an object-oriented language must be used to get clean software. I no longer believe any such claims. The issue is design, not programming language. -- D.L.Parnas, *Why Software Jewels Are Rare* "If we must disagree, let's disagree without being disagreeable."--L.B. Johnson We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. --Robert Wilensky, University of California A distributed system is one that stops you from getting any work done when a machine you've never even heard of crashes. --- Leslie Lamport (Attributed) Percent of parents who would like to limit their kids' TV watching: 73 Percent of American kids who have a TV in their bedroom: 54 Data compiled by TV-free America [Sendmail] can do just about anything. Its main problem is that it can do just about anything. --- Chris Lewis, *UNIX Email Software Survey FAQ* The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. --- Edsger W. Dijkstra Experience is a hard teacher because s/he gives the test first, the lesson afterward. The purpose of a university is to provide sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the professors. --- Clark Kerr (attr.) If the automobile industry had developed like the computer industry over the past 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would now cost $5.00, would get 3000 miles to the gallon, and at random times would explode, killing all its passengers. People don't need faster computers. They just need to learn patience. It's much cheaper, and it works for things besides computers. --- Travis C. Hayes An experienced pickup truck driver is a person who's wrecked one. An inexperienced pickup truck driver is a person who's about to wreck one. --- P. J. O'Rourke, *High Speed Performance Characteristics of Pickup Trucks* Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. --- Stephen Wright Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity. --- Albert Einstein Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. --- A. H. Weiler "time is fun when you're having flies" - Kermit the Frog If there are any more ways I can make this more confusing, please let me know. --- Robert Dorsett Parameter: what you get when you cross a paramedic and meter maid. See also `Argument', which is what you get when you just cross a meter maid. --- Larry Wall & Randal Schwartz, *Programming Perl* But what are all these mysteries to me, Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds. 2 X + 7 X + 53 = 11 / 3. -- Lewis Carrol "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know her strength until you drop her in hot water." "To remove ignorance is the sole duty of the school. To fail in that battle when the enemy is by nature inactive, when your troops are numbered in the ten thousands, and when you have spent billions on equipment is to suffer a stupid defeat." -- Jacques Barzun. "Inspiration is a cat. It never comes when you call it, but just try to get something else done when it wants your attention." His book is a marvel of laboured detail. No expositor could take more pains with his reader, space being held of no moment if clearness had to be secured. As might be expected, therefore, all that is really worth preserving of his work is but a small fraction of the 264 pages which he occupies in exposition. ---Muir, writing on Desnanot's work on determinants. Friedrich Engels, writing to Karl Marx, 18 August 1881: ....Yesterday I found the courage at last to study your mathematical manuscripts even without reference books, and was pleased to find that I did not need them. I complement you on your work. The thing is as clear as daylight, so that we cannot wonder enough at the way the mathematicians insist on mystifying it. But this comes with the one-sided way these gentlemen think. To put dy/dx = 0/0, firmly and point-blank, does not enter their skulls. . . You need not fear that any mathematician has preceded you here... IMMUNITY CAN ALSO BE CONCEIVED in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage with other (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite consequences; of situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial fusions and dangers. The problematic multiplicities of postmodern selves, so potently figured AND repressed in the lumpy discourses of immunology, must be brought into other emerging Western and multi-cultural discourses on health, sickness, individuality, humanity, and death. --from Donna J. Haraway, "Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies," SIMIANS, CYBORGS, AND WOMEN: THE REINVENTION (New York: Routledge, 1991), 225. ---------------------------------------- "WALK A FEW STEPS AWAY FROM THE FACULTIES OF SCIENCE, engineering, and medicine. Walk towards the faculty of arts. Here, you will meet another world, one where falsities and lies are manufactured in industrial quantities. Here, some professors are hired, promoted, or given power for teaching that reason is worthless, empirical evidence unnecessary, objective truth nonexistent, basic science a tool of either capitalists or male domination, and the like. Here, we find people who reject all the knowledge painstakingly acquired over the past 5 million years. . . . This fraud has got to be stopped, in the name of intellectual honesty. Let them do whatever they please, but not in schools, because schools are supposed to be places of learning. "We should expel these charlatans from the university." --Mario Bunge, a professor of philosophy and head of the Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit at McGill University in Montreal. This quotation is taken from his lecture at the conference "The Flight from Science and Reason" sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences on 31 May - 2 June 1995. I've said that the passing grade in mathematics should be 100 percent. Suppose it's 70 percent; then you go on to the next year, and again you only understand 70 percent of the 70 percent that you did understand, or 49 percent. The following year, you understand 70 percent of that, or 35 percent, and so on. So the student gives up and says, "I'm just incapable of understanding!-- Linus Pauling There is a very thin line between ignorance and arrogance and I have totally obliterated that line. ---Dr. Science When a man is wrapped up in himself he makes a pretty small package. ---John Ruskin "I've learned that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it." ---Anonymous C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg --- Bjarne Stroustrup Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen. --- Bob Edwards "If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics; thus, mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." ---Bertrand Russell "All of science is mathematics: Physics is the noisy part of mathematics, Chemistry is the smelly part of mathematics, Biology is the slimy part of mathematics." ---Charles S. Slichter (U.Wisc. Appl. math) The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. --- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, *Computer Networks* Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O. --- Anon. It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that. ---G. H. Hardy The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. --- Richard Hamming Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. --- Elbert Hubbard There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. --- Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977 Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. --- George Bernard Shaw Mr. Francis Curle told me how one Dr. Bullein, the Queen's kinsman, had a dog which he doted on, so much that the Queen, understanding of it, requested he would grant her one desire, and he should have whatsoever he would ask. She demanded his dog; he gave it, and "Now, Madam," quoth he, "you promised to give me my desire." "I will," quoth she. "Then I pray you, give me my dog again." John Manningham's DIARY, March 26, 1603 (John Bruce, ed.) (reprinted as a note in the Yale Edition of Shakespeare's TWELFTH NIGHT) (Spelling, punctuation and capitalization modernized. SBJ) Information is not knowledge Knowledge is not wisdom Wisdom is not truth Truth is not beauty Beauty is not love Love is not music (Music is the best). -Frank Zappa (1940-1993) "As one developer explained to me, "Every programmer here is convinced that he or she is the ONLY competent programmer in the whole organization; everyone else is an idiot. As a result, every programmer is perfectly happy to allow his code to be reused---but why would anyone consider reusing code written by an idiot?" [from Ed Yourdon's Feb 97 "Application Development Strategies", recounting his 1994 visit to "a major software product company"...] Life is complex, has both real and imaginary parts. Emacs can do anything... just ask it. --- Rob Pike "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." ---Seneca "There is, strictly, no such thing as mathematical proof: we can, in the lasty analysis, do nothing but point; proofs are what Littlewood and I call 'gas'; rhetorical flourishes designed to affect psychology, pictures on board in the lecture, devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils." ---G. H. Hardy, Mathematical Proof. Mind 38, 1929, pp. 1-25. Becoming sufficiently familiar with something is a substitute for understanding it. --- John H. Conway An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. --- Niels Bohr "If you were my husband, Winston, I should flavour your coffee with poison." - Lady Astor "If I were your husband, madam, I should drink it." - Winston Churchill, in reply. "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian." ---Dennis Wholey "Of course someone who knows more about this subject than me, will correct me if I am wrong, while those who know less will correct me if I am right." --- Unknown "Object Oriented Programming? We've been doing that for years ... when the customer objects to the way it works, we go program some more!" ---Al Folsom "All of the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders, have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing." ---Moliere (1622-1673) Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise. ---Lord Chesterfield It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. -Gertrude Stein "I don't believe in astrology. But then I'm an Aquarius, and Aquarians don't believe in astrology." ---James R. F. Quirk "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies.The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell. " ---St. Augustine (354-430) DeGenesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37 "Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist. The City of God." ---St. Augustine (354-430) "I am a carnivorous fish swimming in two waters, the cold water of art and the hot water of science." ---Salvador Dali. I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people. --US Vice President J. Danforth Quayle "All I want to do, ever, is play chess," --Bobby Fischer "I have a wife and child. I read Tolstoy. I cannot play with Fischer." --Boris Spassky "Remember that no statue has ever been erected in honour of a critic. --- Jean Sibelius "Not every tradition, however entrenched, is attractive. Some should be closed down immediately." -- Miss Manners ``Batch #37 _ There is a point where pleasure and pain intersect. A doorway to a new dimension of sensual euphoria where fire both burns and soothes, where heat engulfs every neuron within you. Once the line is crossed, once the bottle is opened, once it touches your lips, there is no going back. '' --- label on a bottle of hot sauce called Pain Is Good "Dancing is music made visible" ---Imogen Holst "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution" ---Emma Goldman Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. -- Havelock Ellis _The Dance of Life_ [1923], ch. 2 [Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. -- George Bernard Shaw _New Statesman_ 23 Mar. 1962 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. -- Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900) * _Also Sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spake Zarathustra]_ (1883-1891) 3 'On Old and New Tablets' Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? -- Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] [1832-1898] _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_, The Lobster-Quadrille, st. 1 The further off from England the nearer is to France -- Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance. -- Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] [1832-1898] _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_, The Lobster-Quadrille, st. 3 Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? -- William Butler Yeats [1865-1939] _The Tower_. Among School Children, st. 8 True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. `Tis not enough no harshness gives offense; The sound must seem an echo to the sense. -- Alexander Pope [1688-1744] _The Temple of Fame_ [1711]. l. 162 It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But is it not sweet with nible feet /To dance upon the air! -- Oscar Wilde [1854-1900] _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ [1898], pt. II, st. 9 Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. -- Thomas Stearns Eliot [1888-1965] _Four Quartets. Burnt Norton_ [1935], II When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that. -- William Shakespeare [1564-1616] _The Winter's Tale_ [1610-1611], act IV, iii, 140 Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances. -- Studio official's coment on Fred Astair Bob Thomas _Astaire_ (1985) ch. 3 It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; -Jane Austen (Emma) He who can not dance puts the blame on the floor. Life may not be the party we expected, but while we're here lets dance. These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's wife. -R.S. Surtees I know about dancing, it is choreographed canoodling. Tim Brooke-Taylor Some will not dance because they canna Others, for different reasons, manna But why not try it, all thats willing? Since there is no sin in spilling. -[The Darling Diversion] Will you be pleased to dance a Country Dance or two, for 'tis that which makes you truly sociable - being like the chorus of a song where all parts sing together. -Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love and Elegance [a play] Dancing is a thing of the soul - the communion between the ear and the feet. Warlocks and witches in a dance: Nae Cotillion, brent new frae France, But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels, Put life and mettle in their heels. -Robert Burns, Tam o'Shanter There's threesome reels, there's foursome reels, There's hornpipes and strathspeys, man. But the ae best dance e'er cam to the land Was the Deil's awa wi th' Exciseman. -Robert Burns, The Deil's awa wi the Exciseman Freeman Dyson, upon being told by senior physicists after the market collapse of the 1970's that "economic factors were not relevant to the decision to enter physics." responded by saying something like "Terrific, If that's true, a 5% voluntary pay cut by senior scientists should be enough to prop up the market for entering physicists." You can't direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails. Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything. --Fred Allen Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it - badly. --- Henry Spencer Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. ---David Lloyd George The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell. -- Saint Augustine It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. -Albert Einstein The only thing one can do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. -Oscar Wilde ``Counting pairs is the oldest trick in combinatorics... Every time we count pairs, we learn something from it''-- Gil Kalai (``Combinatorics and Convexity'', lecture) "There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. So Everybody blamed Somebody, when Nobody did what Anybody could have done!" These conjectures are of such compelling simplicty that it is hard to understand how any mathematician can bear the pain of living without understanding why they are true." ---David Robbins on the many conjectures related to alternating sign matrices. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways . . . . Which of us takes the better course is not known to anyone except God. ---Socrates, from Plato's _Apology_ 42a Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit. ---Cicero, _In_Catilinam_ II.1 I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Bilbo Baggins, _Lord_of_the_Rings_ I:54 Must you dance every dance With the same fortunate man? You have danced with him since the music began. Won't you change partners and dance with me? ---Irving Berlin, "Carefree" "...today's top mathematicians are in fact a group of exciting, dynamic, and glamorous individuals." -- Dave Barry After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. --- Italian proverb When Morihei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido, was asked if he ever lost his balance, he replied, "Yes, all the time, but I regain it so fast that you do not see me lose it." Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate. --- Bruce Sterling, *The Hacker Crackdown* No craftsman, if he aspires to the highest work in his profession, will accept [inferior] tools; and no employer, if he appreciates the quality of work, will ask a craftsman to accept them. --- Gerald Weinberg Many people don't know that Hell Is actually located on a small two-lane road in Michigan. Because we have some of the finest potholes anywhere, we know for a fact that the road to Hell is paved with good indentations. ---A Midwest Morris Ale organizer A man about to speak the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup. --- Old Mongolian Saying A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. --- Thomas Jefferson Interviewer: "What do you think of Western civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea." There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators. --- Stephen Wright Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. ---Mullah Nasrudin ... Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. --- Plato, *Phaedrus* Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. --Ambrose Redmoon Host: What a parasite lives in or on. Your programs have this relationship to the computer. --- Larry Wall & Randal Schwartz, *Programming Perl* VMS is great. We run VMS on all of our workstations. The great thing about it is that no one else in the department ever wants to use them. --- Ryan Reed "FORTRAN... Then, as now, the language used by scientists with real problems." --- Anon ``Eeyore was saying to himself, `This writing business. Pencils and what- not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.' '' --AA Milne "He is weary of analysis, the small, predictable truths" --Rita Dove "Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others that which it personally does not understand." --Lord Northcliffe "If you want to be happy, be" --Leo Tolstoy "Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach." --Tom Senior "You have to remember that not everyone comes into this class with the same prior knowledge, but that everyone understands chocolate." --Rebecca Goldwater "If one were to pick a faculty or staff member at random (the way one does in a course on statistics), there is every likelihood that the individual would note that his or her computer is too old or sadly underpowered or both; I don't go picking people at random, and I still hear such things almost every day. " --Ed Meyers, Director of Computing at Macalester "familiarity does not breed contempt, it breeds CONTENT." --Bob Witte ``If you're so good that you can figure out what I'm doing wrong, I'm sure you find a way to compensate for it.'' --Victor Eijkhout An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. --- Niels Bohr Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow. --- Arthur Stringer, *The Silver Poppy* "The newly discovered prime number is four times as large as the previous largest known prime number." -- CNN "Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me." -- Anatole France (1844-1924) Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. --- Rich Cook Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read. --- Joshua Geller "The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years...If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for 1,000 years, we will become taller, our skin becomes white and our hair blonde." -- Den Fujita, president of Japanese McDonald's, in his book "Behind The Arches," published in Japan. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. -Robert Frost "if I had known it was going to be history, I would have paid more attention."---Nick Hawkes mother, after being interviewed by yet another Woody Guthrie biographer. You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. --- Jeannette Rankin "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." - Paul Dirac (1902-84) I consider myself, and still consider myself, the hippest man on the planet. But I think that if you have to say that, you probably aren't, so I've never really said that. --Barry Manilow Man, n.: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Documentation is like sex; when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's better than nothing. --- Dick Brandon The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. -- William Arthur Ward "When students graduate from universities they should be issued learners' permits instead of diplomas." - W.Edwards Deming. "_The Underground Grammarian_ does not seek to educate anyone. We intend rather to ridicule, humiliate, and infuriate those who abuse our language not so that they will do better but so that they will stop using language entirely, or at least go away." --Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian. "I prefer the phrase old-time music to old-timey music which sounds perilously close to old-tiny music." --Mark Graham "... newspapers, magazines and other publications have the constitutional right to be offensive, even disgusting. As evidence of that, just watch this space regularly." -Mike Royko (THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE) 3/11/93 "There is no "r" in Washington." - Sandy Bradley - "BUGS (From the spell manpage): British spelling was done by an American." Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age. --- Ambrose Bierce "The goal of teaching is learning, not teaching."--Hugo Rossi There are three ways to get something done: (1) Do it yourself. (2) Hire someone to do it for you. (3) Forbid your kids to do it. There are two ways of teaching people: You can teach them how to think, or you can teach them what to think. Socrates taught people how to think, Jesus taught people what to think.... The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw There is a saying among trial lawyers: "Never ask a question unless you are already SURE of the answer." For Dungeon Masters/Game Masters that should be Never roll the dice unless you're sure the outcome is acceptable." For computer scientists, it reads: "Unless you know what to do with a error condition, never test for it." -- Eric Holtman, info-unix mail There is no limit to the amount of good that people can accomplish, if they don't care who gets the credit. -- Anonymous There once was a king who ruled his country long, wisely, and well. The king had a son whom he hoped would someday rule the land. He also wished in his heart that the son ould be wise and compassionate. One day he said to the prince: "If you promised that you would give a certain women anything, even half of your kingdom, and then she demanded the life of your best friend, what would your decision be, my son?" The young prince thought for a moment and then said, "I would tell her that the life of my best friend did not lie in the half of the kingdom that I had promised." The king knew that his son would be a great king. There once was an old man from Esser, Who's knowledge grew lesser and lesser. It at last grew so small, He knew nothing at all, And now he's a College Professor. There's a fine line between courage and foolishness. Too bad it's not a fence. There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. -- Will Rodgers This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force. -- Dorothy Parker Time was invented so that you don't have to do everything all at once. Space was invented so you don't have to do everything all in the same place. To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of them absent. To the best of my recollection, Senator, I can't recall. TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing. -- Walt Kelly Two men came before Nasrudin when he was magistrate. The first man said, "This man has bitten my ear -- I demand compensation." The second man said, "He bit it himself." Nasrudin withdrew to his chambers, and spent an hour trying to bite his own ear. He succeeded only in falling over and bruising his forehead. Returning to the courtroom, Nasrudin pronounced, "Examine the man whose ear was bitten. If his forehead is bruised, he did it himself and the case is dismissed. If his forehead is not bruised, the other man did it and must pay three silver pieces." Two penguins walk into a bar, which is really stupid, 'cause the second one should have seen it. Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do. University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ... Virginia law forbids bathtubs in the house; tubs must be kept in the yard. Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain Waiter: "Tea or coffee, gentlemen?" 1st customer: "I'll have tea." 2nd customer: "Me, too -- and be sure the glass is clean!" (Waiter exits, returns) Waiter: "Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?" Warning: Listening to WXRT on April Fools' Day is not recommended for those who are slightly disoriented the first few hours after waking up. -- Chicago Reader 4/22/83 Wasting time is an important part of living. We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. -- Niels Bohr We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. -- Walt Kelly, "Pogo" We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its ... Did I say socialism? -- Fidel Castro We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead. -- James E. Day, Postmaster General We have only 2 things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have. We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, but others judge us by what we have already done. -- Longfellow Well now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?" -- Lewis Carroll We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect their good judgement. Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. What does "it" mean in the sentence "What time is it?"? What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists? -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" What is the difficulty with writing a PDP-8 program to emulate Jerry Ford? Figuring out what to do with the other 3K. What I want is all of the power and none of the responsibility. What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with. "Whatever you do, don't cross the streams." "Why?" "It would be bad." "Wait a minute, I'm a little fuzzy on this whole good/bad issue." "Imagine life as you know it ending and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." "Okay" "That's bad." "Thanks, Egon. Important safety tip." --- Ghost Busters When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him -- that's where the money is. -- Robespierre Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. -- A. Lincoln Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain When I grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that can't happen. -- Richard Nixon as a boy (on the Teapot Dome scandal) When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. -- Woody Allen When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. -- Mark Twain When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years -- and I find I mind it less and less." -- Louise Andrews Kent When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done. -- Daniel B. Luten When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. -- Winston Curchill, On formal declarations of war When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't know the answer either. -- Edgar R. Fiedler When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. -- The Wall Street Journal When you reach what you have been striving for, you may find that having is not such a great thing as wanting. Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise. While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does. Why my thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out they are another's. --- Susanna Martin, executed for witchcraft, 1681. With a gentleman I try to be a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half. -- Otto von Bismark Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them. -- Dumas Worst Response To A Crisis, 1985: From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?" "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat -- Lewis Carrol "Wrong," said Renner. "The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, `That turns out not to be the case.'" "You boys lookin' for trouble?" "Sure. Whaddya got?" -- Marlon Brando, "The Wild Ones" You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. -- Booker T. Washington You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now. -- Lauren Bacall You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or they don't. -- Dagwood Bumstead You couldn't even prove the White House staff sane beyond a reasonable doubt. -- Ed Meese, on the Hinckley verdict You'd better beat it. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. -- Groucho Marx You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do. You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1. -- Ernest Rutherford You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. -- Henrick Ibson "When students graduate from universities they should be issued learners' permits instead of diplomas." - W.Edwards Deming. "You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking 5 miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is." --Ellen DeGeneres "If you ever see me getting beaten by the police, put down the video camera and come help me." --Bobcat Goldthwait "Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait." --A. Whitney Brown "I'm a psychic amnesiac. I know in advance what I'll forget." --Michael McShane "Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating sandwiches." --Jim Carrey "My mom said she learned how to swim. Someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. That's how she learned how to swim. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'" --Paula Poundstone "In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?" --Warren Hutcherson "Ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?" --John Mendoza "Relationships are hard. It's like a full-time job, and we should treat it like one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you,they should give you two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay,and before they leave you, they should have to find you a temp." --Bob Ettinger "A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: Duh." --Conan O'Brien "I don't know what's wrong with my television set. I was getting C-Span and the Home Shopping Network on the same station. I actually bought a congressman." --Bruce Baum "I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners." --Jeff Stilson "Did you ever walk in a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives." --Sue Murphy "The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you." --Rita Mae Brown "My grandfather's a little forgetful, but he likes to give me advice. One day, he took me aside and left me there." --Ron Richards "I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else." --Lily Tomlin "Some women hold up dresses that are so ugly and they always say the same thing: 'This looks much better on.' On what? On fire?" --Rita Rudner "The ad in the paper said 'Big Sale. Last Week.' Why advertise? I already missed it. They're just rubbing it in." --Yakov Smirnoff "Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease." --Bill Maher "You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over?? Movie Day." --Jay Mohr "I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her." --Ellen DeGeneres "USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population." --David Letterman "I was in a supermarket and I saw Paul Newman's face on salad dressing and spaghetti sauce....I thought he was missing." --Bob Saget "I just broke up with someone and the last thing she said to me was, 'You'll never find anyone like me again!' I'm thinking, 'I should hope not! If I don't want you, why would I want someone like you?' " --Larry Miller "A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket.'You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?' she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, 'I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too." --Jake Johansen "I have such poor vision I can date anybody." --Garry Shandling "I was a vegetarian until I started leaning towards sunlight." --Rita Rudner "I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." --Lily Tomlin "The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Pretty impressive. Also pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? Not much of a weapon there. Corkscrews. Bottle openers. 'Come on, buddy, let's go. You get past e, the guy in back of me, he's got a spoon. Back off. I've got the toe clippers right here.' " --Jerry Seinfeld "Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God....I could be eating a slow learner." --Lynda Montgomery "Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." --Paul Rodriguez "Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?" --Lily Tomlin "I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.' " --Richard Jeni