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Quotes

Most of these are from my reading.
Farther down see wacky bible quotes on ethnic cleansing and sex (pro and con)
"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
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Wacky Bible Quotes

Ethnic cleansing

 7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males. ... 11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts. ... 15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? 16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. 17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. 18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Numbers 31

 50 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying, 51 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; 52 Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: 53 And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. ... 55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.
Numbers 33

Sex (pro)

 31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: 32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. 33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. 34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. 35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. 36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
Genesis 19

 7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him. 8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's [Er's] wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. 9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. 10 And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.
Genesis 38

Sex (con)

17 And if a man shall take his sister, his father's daughter, or his mother's daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister's nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity. And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.
Leviticus 20:17-18

 32 But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: 33 But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. 34 There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. 35 And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.
I Corinthians 7:32

 Shall we then hearken unto you to do all this great evil, to transgress against our God in marrying strange wives?
Nehemia 13:27

Why do cats paint?