Dave's Favorite Quotations:

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Crime and Government

We the People of the United States,
 are still in charge of making it work
  -- Jim Borgman (in political comic for the Cinncinatti Enquirer 1987)

The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to
vote.
  -- the character `Kosh'

'Eternal Vigilance Is The Price of Liberty' used to mean we watched
the government - not the other way around.
  -- Bill Stewart

We decided it would be nicer to do that than to have them dump three
tons of tomatoes and manure in the restaurant
  -- Eric Arnaux, manager of a McDonalds in France who substituted
  locally produced duck breast in its Big Macs and swapped blue-veined
  Roquefort cheese and plums for processed cheddar in its cheeseburgers
  in response to a request from the local farm union protesting US
  import sanctions

Criminals today have guns. Soon they will have computers and other
weapons of mass destruction.
  -- Janet Reno, US Attorney General 3/98

The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go
to erase it.
  -- Glaser and Way

Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and
demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of
justice and mercy.
  -- Wendell Berry

'YEEE-HAAAA' is not a foreign policy.
  -- Lynne Benson-Colbert 6/04

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Climbing and Mountaineering

Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give the signal.
  -- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Am I good enough?"  "Isn't this faintly ridiculous?".  Stupid questions,
both of them.  Unless, of course, you're jumping from one 10-story building
to another.
  -- George ``Guts 'n Glory'' Gusciora

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
  -- unknown

Climbers have been immortalized as adventurers and described with
time-worn phrases.  They have been neatly catagorized as "masochists"
and said to be "possessors of a death wish."  While these descriptives
may in fact be accurate, they miss the point entirely.  
  -- Mead Hargis

I will not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death
that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit
it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will
turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has
gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain...
  -- from the book `Dune' by Frank Herbert

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
  -- unknown

It's at times like this that I'm glad I'm a climber.  I have seen
Oblivion --- been almost inside the maw.  I want no part of it.  I
choose to Live.
  -- Dave Maltz

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I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. 
  -- Thomas Edison 

There's More Than One Way To Do It, But Most Of Them Suck
  -- Scott Davies

As you see, my schedule is complex.  Free time is the imaginary part.
  -- net.humor

I think I tried sleep, and that failed too.
  -- Matt Zekauskas

I had to fax them back and say, 'I regret that I shall not be taking up your
offer, since unfortunately I have become an international rock star'. 
  -- 19-year old ASH frontman Tim Wheeler describing how he turned
     down his offer of admission to Glasgow University.

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new 
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny ..." 
  -- Isaac Asimov

If FrameMaker does not annoy you, you are not using it correctly.
  -- Robert Patrick

The compiler understands it.
  -- Robert O'Callahan, responding to complaints about opaque Transcript code.

An incorrect program can be made arbitrarily fast.
  -- Industry wisdom

Any program that warns you to make frequent backups because it's fighting
some sort of high-casualty guerilla war with the OS is _not_ serious
software, no matter who you are.
  -- Jim Aspnes

Our software is fault-tolerant. When there's a fault, it'll come over,
pat the fault on the back, and say, "There, there. It's a cruel world
out there, but I promise to accept you as an individual."
  -- unknown

I remember the squeal of brakes, a crashing sound that cut off
suddenly, and then only blackness, but I remember them being there.
Four words floating in front of my eyes: Abort, Retry or Cancel?
  -- a near death experience

If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard, the first thing typed
would be a UNIX command.
 -- Bill Lye

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to 
use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.
  -- Mark Anderson

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories:
those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost.
  -- Russell Baker

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by
accident.  That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause
accidents.
  -- Nathaniel Borenstein

If the automobile had followed the same development 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 Cringely, InfoWorld

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.  
  -- Alan Turing 


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They laughed at Copernicus.  They laughed at Einstein.  They laughed at
Krusty the Clown.  Therefore Krusty the Clown is a great scientist.
  -- from the sci.skeptic FQA

In the beginning was the Word, and the word was without punctuation,
and prose was without form and void, and commas were plentiful; and the
comma begat the semicolon; and the semicolon begat the run-on
sentence.
  -- Bridget Spitznagel

Thank you for your incoherent screaming.
  -- Leonard Cohen to a member of his audience at a recent performance
     in New York City. [pre 1995]

The possibilities are endless.  I plan to hide in the woods.
  -- Gordon Fitch

One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong
thing.
  -- Frank Sheed

Once more, all is right with the world. Sanity has returned. The voices
of unreason have been silenced. The dark clouds of fear and doubt have
vanished over the horizon. Auckland are again the holders of the 
Ranfurly shield.
  -- Andrew J Willmott [the Ranfurly shield is a rugby trophy]

It's like the old pie-in-the-face routine:  it stops being funny when it
starts being you.
  -- Stephen King, _The Stand_ (uncut)

Don't throw away the old bucket until
you know whether the new one holds water.
 -- Swedish proverb

Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.
 -- Michael Iapoce

Naturally, we feel that mentally ill people are not what we are
looking for when we hire programmers - although there are no empirical
data to support or contradict that view.
  --Gerald M. Weinberg ("The Psychology of Computer Programming").

A singer can break a glass with just the right note, but the simpler way is to
drop it on the floor.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
  -- Kin Hubbard

Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
  -- netdrek

There are terrible temptations that it required strength, strength and 
courage, to yield to.
  -- Oscar Wilde      

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Activism and Organizations

You can love an organization, but it won't love you back.
 -- Larry Wilson <K085LW@tamvm1.tamu.edu>

Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics,
because the stakes are so low.
 -- Wallace Sayre

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He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog.  You are his
life, his love, his leader.  He will be yours, faithful and true, to
the last beat of his heart.  You owe it to him to be worthy of such
devotion.
  -- unknown

We who surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own,
live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Yet we would
live no other way, and we cherish memory as the only certain
immortality. 
  -- Irving Townsend

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My computer beat me at chess.  
But it's no match for me at kickboxing.
 -- filfeit@rael.Tymnet.COM (Fil Feit)

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as
men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.
  -- Bernard Avishai

Our greatest fear is that the Internet will become a vehicle of free
distribution of information.
  -- Software Publishers Association,  [WSJ 9/6/95]

I am doomed.  I will go look for naughty pictures on the Internet instead.
  -- Dilbert, as channeled by Scott Adams

Blessed are the pessimists, they make backups!
  -- Conventional Wisdow

Spafford's 2nd Axiom of Usenet:
            "Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity,
            intelligence, or common sense."
        Corollary #3:  
             "An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards
             could produce something like Usenet."
        Corollary #4:
             "They could do a better job of it."
  -- Gene Spafford

Do not become archivists of facts.  Try to penetrate to the secret of their
occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
  -- Ivan Pavlov

It is the ultimate goal of life to reduce itself to biology.  It is
the goal of biology to reduce itself to chemistry. It is the goal of
chemistry to reduce itself to physics.  It is the goal of physics to
reduce itself to math - and it is the goal of math to find embodiment
in Computer Science.  Thus are all things connected.
  -- me

I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on tape somewhere
  -- unknown

This system runs like it's paging out to audio tape.
  -- me

Microsoft Word was at 27,000 lines of code in the first version. It's
now about 2 million. 
  -- Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft Research [pre 1/96]

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Computers, what for???

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

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

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country
and talked with the best people, and I can assure you
that data processings is a fad that won't last out the year."
  -- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice-Hall, 1957.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
  -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC.

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EMS

``We don't really do it for them.  We do it for us.... Look, people
are going to get shot whether we're there or not.  They're going to
get hit by cars or run over by subways or whatever.  You can't change
that.  And, what the hell, we might as well be there to pick up the
pieces. Someone has to be.  This is a great job.  Where else can you
jump into the middle of mayhem and try to sort it out?  In the middle
of the most crazy, bizzare, violent, scary, disgusting situations,
everyone looks to you to help them out... and then, no matter what, at
the end of the call, you can just walk away.  Good, bad, right, wrong,
whatever.  You just walk away and get ready for another call.''
 -- Paul D. Shapiro on being a NYC Paramedic (from _Paramedic_)
[I think this is the perfect statement of the ``adrenaline junkie.''
I don't agree with everything in here, but the insight rings
true.  It's certainly something that gets you over the bad calls.]