"Nobody would be foolish enough to become a multimillionaire, if it were not for the desire to prove himself irresistible."
|
|
P.G. Wodehouse, "Something Fresh"
|
Audio clip |
|
Pinky and the Brain, "The street performer song" |
"I never,
ever thought that my idea of an interesting evening in bed with my girlfriend
would be watching a video of Bill Gates." |
|
Charles H. Ferguson, "High St@kes,
No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars" |
"Life is returning." |
|
Charles H. Ferguson [3 years after
his startup was acquired] in "High St@kes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale
of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars" |
"Love, to be pure, must be absolutely unselfish, and there can be nothing
unselfish in loving so perfect a being as you have now become!" |
|
Gilbert & Sullivan, "Patience" |
"She could not, though only eighteen, suppose Mr. Crawford's attachment
would hold out for ever; she could not but imagine that steady, unceasing
discouragement from herself would put an end to it in time. How much time
she might, in her own fancy, allot for its dominion, is another concern.
It would not be fair to inquire into a young lady's exact estimate of her
own perfections." |
|
Jane Austin, "Mansfield Park" |
"Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no
hope of a cure." |
|
Jane Austin, "Mansfield Park" |
"The generation that you choose to abort is now choosing to abort you." |
|
Anonymous anti-abortion flyer (or
was it a prank?), Palo Alto, 11/26/99 |
"Since the 1977 public disclosure that King Hussein of Jordan had been
a CIA paid agent for twenty years, the agency had been reluctant to keep
heads of state on the payroll." |
|
Bob Woodward, "Veil: The Secret
Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987" |
"A new and in my opinion appalling tribalism is fracturing societies,
separating peoples, promoting greed, bloody conflict, and uninteresting
assertions of minor ethnic or group particularity." |
|
Edward W. Said, "Culture and Imperialism" |
"You know how alien another [news]paper's typeface seems.." |
|
Anne Tyler, "The Accidental Tourist" |
"These causes [of saving] have in England been greatly aided by that
extreme incapacity of the people for personal enjoyment, which is a characteristic
of countries over which Puritanism has passed." |
|
John Stuart Mill, "Principles of
Political Economy" |
"Oh, you old fox, you're right. We've been tricked like ... like shareholders!
All women of her sort are limited liability companies." |
|
Honoré de Balzac, "Cousin
Bette" |
"it was interesting to discover President Niwa's ideas on reviewing
work ways, alluding to a softer office environment by adding fragrance
to the copying process" |
|
Japanese executive |
"REPTILE RITERS PENCILZ are the world's first interactive
writing instruments created with the beauty and texture of one of nature's
most coveted and unique coverings- snake skin." |
|
Reptile "Color
Change Pencilz" |
"If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as
a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and
plant them ev'rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental
kind." |
|
Gilbert & Sullivan, "Patience" |
"I believe that optimism, not religion, is the opiate of the people.
Religion is only one expression of the optimistic impulse. As well, exploitation
based on optimism occurs in a wealth of places, not only religious ones;
it occurs as much in betting shops as cathedrals and stock exchanges as
confessionals." |
|
L. Tiger, "Optimism: The Biology
of Hope" |
"If you don't like it, it's wrong" |
|
Jeremy Bentham's principle of antipathy |
"as long as every man holdeth his right of doing anything he liketh,
so long are all men in the condition of war" |
|
Hobbes, "Leviathan" |
"No [TV] show challenges the assumption that the unexamined life is
the only life worth living." |
|
Ben Stein, "The View From Sunset
Boulevard" |
"...while theories come and theories go, the world of common sense
remains very little changed." |
|
source unknown |
VIII |
"A receipt to regain the lost affections of a wife, which hath never
been known to fail in the most desperate cases |
IX |
A proof of the infallibility of the foregoing
receipt, in the lamentations of the widow, with other suitable decorations
of death, such as physicians, etc., and an epitaph in the true style" |
|
From the table of contents
of "The History of TOM JONES, A Foundling," by Henry Fielding |
"Computers are terse and unfriendly; humans are scattered and have
ego problems." |
|
A tech support engineer, quoted
in Paepcke, A. (1996) "Information Needs in Technical Work Settings and
Their Implications for the Design of Computer Tools." CSCW 5: 63-92. |
"The believer always hears what he wants to hear, no matter what the
prophet actually says." |
|
Joseph
Schumpeter |
"... Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than
they want to get to it." |
|
Edith Wharton,
"The Age of Innocence" |
"Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives; asking people to define
their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know!" |
|
A generalissima
of suffrage, in Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" |
"Power in speech is rooted in the silence from which it grows." |
|
Peter Elbow,
"Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process" |
"Silence is power." |
|
Carol Tavris,
"The Mismeasure of Woman" |
"Cybertherapy is apparently booming, with many Internet addicts ironically
turning to Internet counseling sites." |
|
Peter G.
Neumann, Risks 3/98 |
"Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable." |
|
Peter Drucker |
"He [E.D. Cope] detected the beginnings of such anarchy... in the misguided
men who supported female suffrage: 'some of these men are effeminate and
long-haired.'" |
|
Stephen
Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man" |
"Love and Truth -- their warfare seems eternal." |
|
E.M. Forster |
"A baby is not really a child; a baby is a BABY, a cuddleball, representative
of virility, wombrismo, and humankind's unquenchable wish to outfox Death." |
|
Joy Williams,
"The
Case Against Babies" |
"The gist of a hypertext should be in the text, not in the hype." |
|
Gene Golovchinsky
and me |
"A hobby is the golden mean between a passion and a monomania." |
|
Honoré
de Balzac, "La Grande Bretèche" |
"Am I the first person to predict the year 10,000 problem?" |
|
apparently
I was not: see this rant |
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." |
|
Jane Austen,
"Emma" |
"... I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I
see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence
of managing the public only pursue their own private ends ..." |
|
Sir Thomas
More, "Utopia" |
"And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul." |
|
anonymous |
"Snobs made a point of not having a [TV] set and bigger snobs added
that they kept one for their servants." |
|
Peter Lewis,
"The Fifties" |
"Sincerity is the thing that comes through on television." |
|
Richard
Nixon |
"... when silence is kept about a great pleasure, that pleasure is
not complete" |
|
Niccolo
Machiavelli, "The Golden Ass" |
"And it is and always has been and always will be, that evil follows
after good, good after evil." |
|
Niccolo
Machiavelli, "The Golden Ass" |
"Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers and put in
a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love." |
|
Samuel
Clemens |
"Murder is not morally justifiable. Assassination can seldom be employed
with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt
it." |
|
CIA training
manual, 1954, "A Study in Assassination" |
"As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, to hell with
it." |
|
Ad Reinhardt |
"It all resembles too many computer displays, where a cramped window
showing the user's work is framed by a bureaucratic debris of scroll bars,
buttons, titles, icons, and over-produced drawings." |
|
Edward
T. Tufte, "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative" |
"You think one more divorce won't hurt you, and after that you say
to yourself you'll quit. But the craving still grips you. You have to have
another and another and another. You become an addict. Very sad." |
|
P.G. Wodehouse,
"French Leave" |
"We at PARC live in a communist society. To each according to his needs,
and I HAVE NEEDS." |
|
Ken Fishkin |
"From now on, let my motto be
'Less honor, and more peace and quiet.'" |
|
Molière,
"Amphitryon" |
"I want to destroy the power of authority, of the law, and of property." |
|
Richard
Wagner |
"I had before seen with mine own eyes how men could be more swinish
than pigs, more savage than lions, more lustful than goats, more envious
than dogs, more unruly than horses, more stupid than asses, more mad for
drink than the brutes, craftier than foxes, greedier than wolves, sillier
than apes, and more poisonous than asps and toads." |
|
Hans Jacob
Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, "The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus" |
"come rain, come shine, Dead men tell no tales, and I no longer need
to rely on the living." |
|
A rich
doctor in "Love's the Best Doctor" by Molière |
"no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized
until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks
the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion." |
|
Booker
T. Washington, "Up from Slavery" |
"The public has very low taste perception, anyway." |
|
Florida
orange researcher |
"And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has
sown its martyrs, it should reaps its saints, and praise God daily for
having hidden Himself from man." |
|
Oscar Wilde,
"De Profundis" |
"But while I see there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see there
is something wrong in what one becomes" |
|
Oscar Wilde,
"De Profundis" |
"He slept deeply, wonderfully, as only the fortunate can sleep, who
know nothing about hemorrhoids, lice, or overdeveloped mental faculties." |
|
Nikolai
Gogol, "Dead Souls" |
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." |
|
Douglas
Adams, "Mostly Harmless" |
"When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm." |
|
Alexander
Soltzhenitsyn, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" |
"Your ideas will be stolen whether they are yours or not." |
|
Gene Golovchinsky |
"Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow." |
|
Alkes Price |
"Never postpone today what you can postpone tomorrow." |
|
Bernard
Mont-Reynaud |
"It [the railway] gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol:
the lawnmower." |
|
Marshall
McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage" |
"We cannot tolerate the proliferation of this paperwork any longer.
It is useless to fight the forms. We must kill the people producing them." |
|
The Director
of the Ivanovo Machine Works, Communist Party Congress, 1936. |
"Liberty lies in the rights of that person whose views you find most
odious." |
|
John Stuart
Mill |
"Do Australia a favor: kill a cat. What do you want? Do you want cats
or do you want koalas?" |
|
An Australian
journalist, explaining his country's anti-cat sentiment |
"When will people learn from Barbra Streisand, the classic Nose of
Power?" |
|
Camille
Paglia dissing WASP-conformant nose jobs (in "Ask Camille", 1/27/97) |
"We invent ourselves to wipe out what we know." |
|
Eugene
O'Neill, "The Price" |
"Home is a platform for various telecommunications devices." |
|
Jan English-Lueck,
Silicon Valley anthropologist |
"Restaurants have mission statements." |
|
Jan English-Lueck,
Silicon Valley anthropologist |
"Given beauty and sense, what matters grammar?" |
|
me |
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe" |
|
Lewis Carroll,
"Jabberwocky" |
Crypto-Fascist Seeks Ethereal Beauty
I seek SWF, 23-25, no redheads, into simple yet elegant hair braids,
starched blouses, no make up, under 140 pounds. Want to hang out in computer-infested
sunless smoke-filled poured concrete bunkers and get pale and surly. No
philosophers or writers. I like whiskey. Interested in sexually tense overburdening
relationship, false promises and ludicrous future plans. |
|
Paul Hong-Barco |
"A survey of 10K households found that home PCs are used for Internet
surfing for 12% of the time they were in use, word processing about 16%,
and 'futzing' with the operating system or graphic displays for 20%. (They
were also sitting idle for 54% of the time they were turned on.)" |
|
NPD group,
in the Wall Street Journal, 2/28/97 |