Favorite Qoutes

In My Humble Opinion
81

“When friends and colleagues complain that someone is not treating them the way they would like, or the way they expected, or that some deal fell through, or that somebody failed to keep up his end of an agreement, or that someone broke her heart, or that someone did something absolutely bizarre and unexpected to them, or wantonly harmed them, or made an unreasonable demand, or insulted them, or misjudged them, or did anything that implies the collision of two independent human wills, I try to remind them, as untendentiously as possible, that human character is unfathomably mysterious and perverse. This ought to be the first law of politics, which is the art of managing human will in the aggregate by force of character.”

– James Howard Kunstler, in The City in Mind, chapter on Boston.

82

“Never eat barbeque in a place where the chairs all match.” - Roy Blount

83

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then … we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people – their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties – someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.” [September 14, 1960] by John F. Kennedy

84

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

85

I’m rather fond of Carl Sagan:

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”
“If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”
"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? "
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. "
“In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

86

Isaac Asimov:

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’ "

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”

“Creationists make it sound as though a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”

“A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.”

“John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.”

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.”

“Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up. Well, maybe once.”

“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”

“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.”

“When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”

87

Correct. The full text is

Memory full of wormholes is, yes.

:smiley:

88

Robert Anton Wilson:

“If you think you know what the hell is going on, you’re probably full of shit.”

“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”

“All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: ‘Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.’”

“I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.).”

“Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt. . . . Idealists regarded everybody equally corrupt, except themselves.”

“The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you’ve lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.”

“People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians – meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.”

“The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statistician, psychologist, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.”

“. . . there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.”

“Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and “progress,” everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.’”

“I didn’t know what I saw – swamp gas, space ship, sundog, weather balloon. What impressed me was my parents’ fear of reporting the sighting. I realized that even in our allegedly rational age many things remain unspeakable – damned, blasphemous. George Carlin can’t do his comedy on networks because the comedy depends on taboo words. We remain governed by taboo to an astounding extent.”

89

I just saw (on YouTube), Rachel Maddow’s graduation speech at Smith College,

"When forced to choose between fame and glory, go for glory every time."

90

“My grandmother is over 80 and still doesn’t need glasses. She drinks right out of the bottle.” - Henny Youngman

91

Come now. Surely great men are excused both a failure to read what they criticize, and Argument From Ignorance. Petty adherence to procedure is for small minds like yours and mine.

“Never criticize a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you’re a mile away and you’ve got his shoes.”

92

I’ve been saving quotes for awhile. This evening was a good time to organize my favorites. Sorry for the length.

“A printing press is worth 10,000 rifles.”
– Ho Chi Minh

“When an old man dies, a library burns down.”
– African proverb

“Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal.”
– Robert Anson Heinlein

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
– Niels Bohr

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
– Aristotle

“The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”
– Carlin

“Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.”
– Carlin

“Symbols are for the symbol minded.”
– Carlin

“Talent hits a target no-one else can hit. Genius hits a target no-one else can see.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

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

“You must be the change you seek in the world.”
– Gandhi

“Whole generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in a single hour.”
– Edward Gibbon

“Even the greatest of whales is helpless in the middle of a desert.”
– Chinese proverb

Bart: Well, Jim, since you are my guest and I am your host, what’s your pleasure? What do you like to do?
Jim: Oh, I don’t know. Play chess… screw…
Bart: [quickly] Well, let’s play chess.

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
– Henry David Thoreau

"He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.”
– Johann Lavater

“The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren’t dangerous enough already.”
– Edward Abbey

“Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
– Alan W. Watts

“When the power of Love overcomes the Love of power, then the world will know Peace.”
– Jimi Hendrix

“Don’t mistake personality for character.”
– Wilma Askinas

“There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.”
– Josh Billings

“A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.”
– Max Gluckman

Richard Feynman once defined “science” as belief in the ignorance of experts.

“I’ve worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”
– Groucho Marx

“I’m so unlucky that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.”
—- Rodney Dangerfield

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
– Edward Abbey

“Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”
– Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

“I used to think it was a terrible thing that life was so unfair. Then I thought, ‘what if life were fair, and all of the terrible things that happen to us came because we really deserved them?’ Now I take great comfort in the general unfairness and hostility of the universe.”
– Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

“We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy?”
– War Nerd

“Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”
– Devil’s Dictionary

“If you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem.”
– George Carlin

“History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.”
– Philip Roth

“Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.”
– Warhammer 40000

“Paranoia is a very comforting state of mind. If you think they’re out to get you, it means you think you matter.”

  • Gilbran Quail, Collected Essays

“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”
– Woody Allen

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force.”
– Dorothy Parker

“All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
– I.F. Stone

“Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he’ll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.”
– Charles Haas

“One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful.”
– Sun Tzu, Art of War

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
– Mencken

“The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.”
– Genghis Khan

“The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth–that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.”
– Mencken

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, first paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

“The eye is the groin of the face.”
– Dwight Schrute.

“In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Now we’re being led to believe that the Marines are on a feminist mission.”
– Arundhati Roy

"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless –- like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
– Bruce Lee

“When god gives you AIDS, make lemonaids.”
– Sarah Silverman

“Cocaine isn’t habit forming. I should know. I’ve been using it for years.”
– Tallulah Bankhead

“I’m as pure as the driven slush.”
– Tallulah

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
– Will Rogers

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it. "
– Jack Handey

“As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable – until I realized it wasn’t a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!”
– Jack Handey

My young son asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth - that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally - but I didn’t want to upset him.”
– Jack Handey

“I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex.”
– Jack Handey

“We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.”
– Jack Handey

“Of all the tall tales, I think my favorite is the one about Eli Whitney and the interchangeable parts.”
– Jack Handey
Unsourced / too lazy to look up:

In democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.

Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

On Airplanes:

Sometimes I try and comprehend all the moving parts going past; there must be millions of gears, hundreds of thousands of pistons, mega litres of coolant pumped and millions upon millions of cubic feet of air exhausted. All to carry a few bags of salty water draped over calcium sticks.

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Being mature is knowing when to be immature.

Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away.

It’s hard to leave seminary school believing in God.

The Old Testament is not very nice in general, what with children being shredded by she-bears and cities being smoten and most of humanity getting unexpected scuba lessons.

Anecdotal data is worse than no data at all.

I believe that in India “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth ain’t.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

They’re called the ruling class because they rule.

A rising yacht lifts all tides.

Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.

The United States is losing the Cold War more slowly than the USSR did.

I pretend to work because the Soviet government pretends to pay me.

It is not sufficient that I succeed–all others must fail. (Genghis?)

I just have too much blood in my caffeine system.
On sex / love / the sexes / general perversion:

If you want justice, visit a whorehouse.
If you want to get fucked, go to a courthouse.

“If you fall asleep on the couch in a house where a woman is present there will be a blanket or a coat covering you when you awaken.”
– Carlin

On Orgies:
I find it tough enough on my self esteem to disappoint one woman at a time; three at once would be too depressing.

“You see how picky I am about my shoes – and they only go on my feet.”
– Cher Horowitz, Clueless

Robot: And perhaps you can teach us how to feel emotions, such as love?
Bart Simpson: I said I was human. I didn’t say I was a girl.

“I spent 90% of my money on women and drink. The rest I wasted.”
– George Best

Chasing women you’ll run out of money but you’ll never run out of women chasing money.

“The total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.”
– Bertrand Russell

“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”
– Gloria Leonard

“A hard man is good to find.”
– Mae West

“Sex with love is the greatest thing in life. But sex without love – that’s not so bad either.”
– Mae West

“Women can never go backwards financially; men can never go backwards sexually.”
– Chris Rock

Lovemaking is what a woman does while a man is fucking her.

My sister caught me jerking off the other week and calls me a pervert. Then the other day I walked into the living room and caught my sister masturbating on the sofa, so she calls me a pervert again.

Hitler had Eva Braun
Manson had Squeaky Fromme
Ted Bundy got lots of dates
I wonder what I’m doing wrong…
– Bill Hicks, “Chicks Dig Jerks”

“You know ‘that look’ women get when they want sex? Me neither.”
– Steve Martin

“A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.”
– Barbara Bush

“At core men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”
– Gavin de Becker

Men try to win the argument in order to win over the group; women try to win over the group in order to win the argument.

“A nymphomaniac is a women as obsessed with sex as the average man.”
– Mignon McLaughlin

“Tell him I’ve been too fucking busy – or vice versa.”
– Dorothy Parker

“Having sex is like playing bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”
– Woody Allen

“Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.”
– Sharon Stone

Sex on television can’t hurt you unless you fall off.

“I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.”
– Jay McInerney

“My girlfiend said to me in bed last night, ‘you’re a pervert.’ I said, ‘that’s a big word for a girl of nine.’”
– Emo Philips

“My mother was like a sister to me, only we didn’t have sex quite so often.”
– Emo Philips

In fundamentalist’s eyes we were all innocent before we were born. It’s nice that you get those nine months of sin free bliss and then once you pass the dirty threshold that is the vagina, you’ve got some repenting to do.

93

“That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”
–Kirien, Seeker’s Mask
by P.C. Hodgell

“Even a bad idea is better than none. Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness, or a career in politics.”
–Master Li, Bridge of Birds
by Barry Hughart

94

While looking for this one from James Madison,

I found this one which is pretty good.

95

Never pass up an opportunity to pee. ~Unknown.

96

“I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time. . . . It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change oraccidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.”

– Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

97

Idiocy is counting trees while the forest is burning. Again, I suggest individual moves toward local sustainability in a post-oil world.

98

Charles Bukowski:

“We got cable TV here, and the first thing we switched on happened to be Eraserhead. I said, ‘What’s this?’ I didn’t know what it was. It was so great. I said, ‘Oh, this cable TV has opened up a whole new world. We’re gonna be sitting in front of this thing for centuries. What next?’ So starting with Eraserhead we sit here, click, click, click — nothing.”

99

“Son, fat, drunk and stupid are no way to go through life”
-Dean Vernon Wormer, Faber College (“Knowledge is Good”)