Quotation in lemonbeat - gardena-smart-reverse-engineering/gateway-19000 GitHub Wiki
I have found several quotations in the lemonbeat fat binary. Source seems to be that list https://github.com/ZeroEpoch1969/RubyRoseBot/blob/master/utils/fun/fortunes.py
Quotations
'... the educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers.' β Theodore Schick Jr., in The_Skeptical_Inquirer, March/April, 1997
'A little fire, Scarecrow?'
'A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.' β IEEE Grid newsmagazine
'Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.'
'Anchovies? You've got the wrong man! I spell my name DANGER! (click)'
'Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence.' β Time Bandits
'Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,' Bokonon tells us. 'He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.' β Kurt Vonnegut, 'Cat's Cradle'
'But I don't like Spam!'
'But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge. Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge? What is a kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs, poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around? Have I explained yet about the bytes?'
'Calvin Coolidge looks as if he had been weaned on a pickle.' β Alice Roosevelt Longworth
'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!' β Lewis Carroll, 'Through the Looking Glass'
'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage β good teaching β than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise? β Stephen Jay Gould, 'The Skeptical Inquirer', Vol. 12, page 186
'Deep' is a word like 'theory' or 'semantic' β it implies all sorts of marvelous things. It's one thing to be able to say 'I've got a theory', quite another to say 'I've got a semantic theory', but, ah, those who can claim 'I've got a deep semantic theory', they are truly blessed. β Randy Davis
'Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.'
'Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.' β John Barrymore's dying words
'Do not stop to ask what is it;
Let us go and make our visit.' β T. S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
'Do you have blacks, too?' β George W. Bush, to Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso;
Washington, D.C., November 8, 2001
'Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.' β Bo Diddley
'Don't say yes until I finish talking.' β Darryl F. Zanuck
'Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.'
'Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun.' β Jeff Berner
'Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral.' β Kehlog Albran, 'The Profit'
'Every time I think I know where it's at, they move it.'
'Grub first, then ethics.' β Bertolt Brecht
'He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.' β Richard Darman, director of OMB, explaining why President Bush
wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be
no loss of wetlands
'He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both eyes...'
'He's the kind of man for the times that need the kind of man he is ...'
'His mind is like a steel trap β full of mice.' β Foghorn Leghorn
'Humor is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse.' β William Gilbert
'I am not an Economist. I am an honest man!' β Paul McCracken
'I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it.' β English Professor
'I didn't accept it. I received it.' β Richard Allen, National Security Advisor to President Reagan,
explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given by
two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange a private
interview for them with First Lady Nancy Reagan.
'I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.' β Boss Tweed
'I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.' β Ashleigh Brilliant
'I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.' β Paul Anderson
'I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.' β Bill Hoest
'I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.' β Ashleigh Brilliant
'I support efforts to limit the terms of members of Congress, especially members of the House and members of the Senate.' β former Vice-President Dan Quayle
'I was under medication when I made the decision not to burn the tapes.' β President Richard Nixon
'I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.'
'If dolphins are so smart, why did Flipper work for television?'
'If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!' β 'Ma' Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
'If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.' β J. Paul Getty
'If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.' β Winston Churchill
'In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.' β Winston Churchill, of Montgomery
'It depends on your definition of asleep. They were not stretched out. They had their eyes closed. They were seated at their desks with their heads in a nodding position.' β John Hogan, Commonwealth Edison Supervisor of News Information,
responding to a charge by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission
inspector that two Dresden Nuclear Plant operators were
sleeping on the job.
'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.' β Kehlog Albran, 'The Profit'
'It was hell,' recalls former child. β caption to a B. Kliban cartoon
'It's bad luck to be superstitious.' β Andrew W. Mathis
'It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either.' β Kevin White, mayor of Boston
'Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't immune
to bullets' β The Brigader, 'Dr. Who'
'Laughter is the closest distance between two people.' β Victor Borge
'MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.' β Winston Churchill
'Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.' β Lily Tomlin
'Mate, this parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it!'
'Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles.'
'Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.'
'Of COURSE it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?'
'One planet is all you get.'
'She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to.' β Gypsy Rose Lee
'Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.' β Samuel Johnson
'Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.'
'Sure, it's going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway.' β Othal Brand, member of a Texas pesticide review board, on chlordane
'Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds.' β J. Finnegan, USC.
'That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all.'
'The C Programming Language: A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language.'
'The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.' β Joseph Heller, 'Catch-22'
The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch.
'The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity.' β Benjamin Disraeli
The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years β and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.
Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing. β Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University,
in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times; 6 July, 2006
'The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.' β Henry Kissinger
'The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.'
'The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up!'
'The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people who make them unsafe.' β the late Frank Rizzo, ex-police chief and ex- mayor of
Philadelphia
The voters have spoken, the bastards...
'The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.' β Alexander Haig
The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market is to start with a large fortune.
'There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor.'
'There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.' β Oscar Wilde
'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.' β C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
'They gave me a book of checks. They didn't ask for any deposits.' β Congressman Joe Early (D-Mass) at a press conference to answer
questions about the House Bank scandal.
This is a country where people are free to practice their religion, regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling keys...
'To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.' β Woody Allen
To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?
'Tom Hayden is the kind of politician who gives opportunism a bad name.' β Gore Vidal
'Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it's just the opposite.' β John Kenneth Galbraith
'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.'
'We don't have to protect the environment β the Second Coming is at hand.' β James Watt
'We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.' β Lily Tomlin
'We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later.'
'Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what CAN you believe?!' β Bullwinkle J. Moose [Jay Ward]
'What is the robbing of a bank compared to the FOUNDING of a bank?' β Bertold Brecht
'When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.' β Jon Carroll
'When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.' β Winston Churchill, on formal declarations of war
'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.' β Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
'Why be a man, when you can be a success?' β Bertold Brecht
'Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?' β Lily Tomlin
'Why was I born with such contemporaries?' β Oscar Wilde
'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. β Lewis Carrol
'Yacc' owes much to a most stimulating collection of users, who have goaded me beyond my inclination, and frequently beyond my ability in their endless search for 'one more feature'. Their irritating unwillingness to learn how to do things my way has usually led to my doing things their way; most of the time, they have been right. β S. C. Johnson, 'Yacc guide acknowledgements'
'Yes, that was Richard Nixon. He used to be President. When he left the White House, the Secret Service would count the silverware.' β Woody Allen, 'Sleeper'
'Yes, well, that's just the sort of blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist, you excrement! You whining, hypocritical toadies with your Tony Jacklin golf clubs, your colour TVs and your bleedin' Masonic handshakes! You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards?! WELL I WOULDN'T BECOME A FREEMASON NOW IF YOU GOT DOWN ON YOUR LOUSY STINKING KNEES AND BEGGED ME!'
'You can't teach people to be lazy - either they have it, or they don't.' β Dagwood Bumstead
'You'll never be the man your mother was!'
$100 invested at 7 interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which time it will be worth absolutely nothing. β Lazarus Long, 'Time Enough for Love'
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability. β George Bernard Shaw
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. β Alfred, Lord Tennyson
[Humanity] is the measure of all things. β Protagoras
... And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man β A. E. Housman
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says 'You're all idiots', and pours two beers.
Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else. β Eagleson's Law
Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic.
... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense β the debate about angels on pinheads β makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number. β S. J. Gould, 'Wide Hats and Narrow Minds'
... Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. ... β Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215
... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
... The book is worth attention for only two reasons: (1) it attacks attempts to expose sham paranormal studies; and (2) it is very well and plausibly written and so rather harder to dismiss or refute by simple jeering. β Harry Eagar, reviewing 'Beyond the Quantum' by Michael Talbot,
The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 200-201
The first principle is that you must not fool yourselfβand you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. β R. P. Feynman, 'Cargo Cult Science'
... at least I thought I was dancing, 'til somebody stepped on my hand. β J. B. White
... if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world. β Garrison Keillor, 'Lake Wobegon Days'
... the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost would never throw the Devil out of Heaven as long as they still need him as a fourth for bridge. β Letter in NEW LIBERTARIAN NOTES #19
... they [the Indians] are not running but are coming on. β note sent from Lt. Col Custer to other officers
of the 7th Regiment at the Little Bighorn
...I would go so far as to suggest that, were it not for our ego and concern to be different, the African apes would be included in our family, the Hominidae. β Richard Leakey
... It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan. β Martin Gardner, 'Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life',
The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 128-131
...computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price gain in 30 years. β Fred Brooks, Jr.
...difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. β Thomas Jefferson, 'Notes on Virginia'
...it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs about the existence of God in any recognizable sense continuous with the great systems of the past, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. β Sidney Hook
...skill such as yours is evidence of a misspent youth. β Herbert Spencer
...the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality tools is essential to meet ever increasing demands for software. β M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson and B. A. Tague
...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. β George Jacob Holyoake
...this is an awesome sight. The entire rebel resistance buried under six million hardbound copies of 'The Naked Lunch.' β The Firesign Theater
...though his invention worked superbly β his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. β Vernor Vinge, 'The Peace War'
...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. β Fred Brooks, Jr.
/earth is 98 full ... please delete anyone you can.
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
36 percent of the American public believes that boiling radioactive milk makes it safe to drink. β results of a survey by Jon Miller at Northern Illinois University
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr fortune: Segmentation fault β core dumped
80 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot, including this one.
99 of all guys are within one standard deviation of your mom.
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
A bore is a man you deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. β Gian Vincenzo Gravina
A Nixon [is preferable to] a Dean Rusk β who will be passionately wrong with a high sense of consistency. β J. K. Galbraith
A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone somewhere is having fun.
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce. β Don Quinn
A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money. β Everett Dirksen
A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.
A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he is born. β Oliver Wendell Holmes
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. β Herbert Prochnow
A clash of doctrine is not a disaster β it is an opportunity.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. β Fred Allen
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. β Alfred E. Wiggam
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. β Franklin D. Roosevelt
A conservative is one who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. β Ben Franklin
A critic is a legless man who teaches running. β Channing Pollock
A day without sunshine is like night.
A decision occurs when one abandons the obvious for the possible. β P. Taylor
A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a fur coat.
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip. β Caskie Stinnett
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never her age. β Robert Frost
A diva who specializes in risque arias is an off-coloratura soprano ...
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. β Ogden Nash
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked 'what do you see?' Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied 'I see a cursor.' The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
A fanatic is a person who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. β Winston Churchill
A fool must now and then be right by chance.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. β G. B. Shaw
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. β Samuel Johnson
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. β D. Gries
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something. β Wilson Mizner
A good memory does not equal pale ink.
A good workman is known by his tools.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. β William James
A handful of friends is worth more than a wagon of gold.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his weight in other people's patience. β John Updike
A hermit is a deserter from the army of humanity.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.
A king's castle is his home.
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. β Dennis M. Ritchie
A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work. β Anatol Holt
A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' β attributed to Douglas Adams
A little caution outflanks a large cavalry. β Bismarck
A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS. β Fred Brooks, Jr.
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks. β Lew Col
A man forgives only when he is in the wrong.
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. β John Barrymore
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
A man said to the Universe: 'Sir, I exist!'
'However,' replied the Universe, 'the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.' β Stephen Crane
A man shall never be enriched by envy. β Thomas Draxe
A man who fishes for marlin in ponds will put his money in Etruscan bonds.
A man who turns green has eschewed protein.
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
A manager would rather live with a problem that he cannot solve than accept a solution that he does not understand. β G. Woolsey
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
A mathematician named Hall Has a hexahedronical ball, And the cube of its weight Times his pecker's, plus eight Is his phone number β give him a call.
A model is an artifice for helping you convince yourself that you understand more about a system than you do.
A moose once bit my sister.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. β Thomas Jefferson
A nuclear war can ruin your whole day.
A nymph hits you and steals your virginity.
A penny saved is ridiculous.
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
A person who knows only one side of a question knows little of that.
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure.
Proverb
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms. β George Wald
A plucked goose doesn't lay golden eggs.
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free.
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. β Seneca
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
A real person has two reasons for doing anything ... a good reason and the real reason.
A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed to 'make sense' of such unnatural three dimensional objects ...
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you. β Ramsey Clark
A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid. - Jack Benny
A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. β Samuel Johnson
A sine curve goes off into infinity or at least to the end of the blackboard.
A smile is the shortest distance between two people. β Victor Borge
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. β O'Henry
A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. β S. C. Johnson
A thing is worth precisely what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it. β John Ruskin
A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. β John Ciardi
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. β Tenessee Williams
A visit to a fresh place will bring strange work.
A visit to a strange place will bring fresh work.
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
A well-known friend is a treasure.
A witty saying proves nothing. β Voltaire
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Ada, n.: Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in computing. Useful in sentences like, 'We had better develop an Ada awareness.'
Abandon hope, all ye who press 'ENTER' here.
Ability is useless unless it is used. β Robert Half
About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard.
About the only thing on a farm that has an easy time is the dog.
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends. β Herbert Hoover
Above all things, reverence yourself.
Abstention makes the heart grow fonder.
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better.
According to my best recollection, I don't remember. β Vincent 'Jimmy Blue Eyes' Alo
According to the latest official figures, 43 of all statistics are totally worthless.
According to my scuba instructor, if a shark attacks, you're supposed to poke it in the eye with your finger. After that, I suppose you should hit it in the face with a cream pie, or maybe hose it down with a seltzer bottle. β Jerry L. Embry
Accordion: A bagpipe with pleats.
Accuracy: The vice of being right.
Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
Activity makes more men's fortunes than cautiousness. β Marquis de Vauvenargues
Actors will happen in the best-regulated families.
Ada is the work of an architect, not a computer scientist. β Jean Ichbiah, inventor of Ada, weenie
Adapt. Enjoy. Survive.
Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile.] β Ovid
Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Adolescence: The stage between puberty and adultery.
Adore, v.: To venerate expectantly. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Adult: One old enough to know better.
Adversity makes men, prosperity monsters. β French Proverb
Advertisement: The most truthful part of a newspaper. β Thomas Jefferson
Advertising: The science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. β Stephen Leacock
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. β Freeman Dyson
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
After all is said and done, a lot more has been said than done.
After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. β P. J. O'Rourke
After any machine or unit has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench. β 'Industry at Work,' Oilways, n2., 1972, pp. 16-17. Humble Oil
& Refining Company., Houston, TX
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
After winning the pennant one year, Casey Stengel commented, 'I couldn'ta done it without my players.'
Air is water with holes in it.
Alas, I am dying beyond my means. β Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: 'You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.'
Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting for a dial tone.
Alimony and bribes will engage a large share of your wealth.
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it. β Peggy Joyce
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance.
All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas. β Kingfish
All a hacker needs is a tight PUSHJ, a loose pair of UUOs, and a warm place to shift.
All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy in its own way. β Tolstoy
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. β Jane Wagner
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: 'This time it will surely run,' or 'I just found the last bug.' β Frederick Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. β Samuel Butler
All science is either physics or stamp collecting. β E. Rutherford
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. β Sean O'Casey
All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.
All through human history, tyrannies have tried to enforce obedience by prohibiting disrespect for the symbols of their power. The swastika is only one example of many in recent history. β American Bar Association task force on flag burning
All true wisdom is found on T-shirts.
All wise men share one trait in common: the ability to listen.
Allen's Axiom: When all else fails, read the instructions.
Alliance, n.: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Although every American has a sense of humorβit is his birthright and encoded somewhere in the Constitutionβfew Americans have never been able to cope with wit or irony, and even the simplest jokes often cause unease, especially today when every phrase must be examined for covert sexism, racism, ageism. β Gore Vidal, 'The Essential Mencken,' The Nation,
August 26/September 2, 1991.
Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back.
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. β Alfred Hitchcock
Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. β Charlie McCarthy
America had often been discovered before Columbus; it had just been hushed up. β Oscar Wilde
America's best buy for a quarter is a telephone call to the right man.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? β Allen Ginsberg
American Non Sequitur Society: We don't make sense. We like pizza.
Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it.
Among the chosen, you are the lucky one.
Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.
An American's a person who isn't afraid to criticize the President but is always polite to traffic cops.
An Army travels on its stomach.
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose. β A. P. Herbert
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible. β Alfred A. Knopf
An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
An idle mind is worth two in the bush.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. β Albert Camus
An NT server can be run by an idiot, and usually is. - Tom Holub [email protected]
(Posted to comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix on 03 Sep 1997)
An object never serves the same function as its imageβor its name. β Rene Magritte
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. β Benjamin Franklin
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all.
Anarchy: It's not the law, it's just a good idea.
And I alone am returned to wag the tail.
And now for something completely different.
And now that the legislators and the do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they end up where they should have begun: may they reject all systems, and try liberty... β Frederic Bastiat
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
And the Lord God said unto Moses β and correctly, I believe ... β Field Marshal Montgomery, opening a chapel service
And the crowd was stilled. One elderly man, wondering at the sudden silence, turned to the Child and asked him to repeat what he had said. Wide-eyed, the Child raised his voice and said once again, 'Why, the Emperor has no clothes! He is naked!' β 'The Emperor's New Clothes'
And there's hamburger all over the highway in Mystic, Connecticut.
And they told us, what they wanted... Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance. β Kate Bush
And this is a table ma'am. What in essence it consists of is a horizontal rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports, which we call legs. The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced in design as one will find anywhere in the world. β Michael Frayn, 'The Tin Men'
And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight...Then he [the Lord!] said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith. [Ezek. 4:12-15 (KJV)]
Anger is a prelude to courage. β Eric Hoffer
Angular momentum makes the world go round.
Ankh if you love Isis.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Another good night not to sleep in a eucalyptus tree.
Another one bites the dust.
Anthony's Law of Force: Do not force it; get a larger hammer.
Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the
least accessible corner of the workshop. Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike
your toes.
Antimatter doesn't matter as a matter of fact. β Piggins
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem. (In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags.)
Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you're trying to think of.
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art. β Charles McCabe
Any excuse will serve a tyrant. β Aesop
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it.
Any given program, when running correctly, is obsolete.
Any job worth quitting is worth sticking around long enough until they fire you. β Tim Wirth
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy. β Alan Kay, 'Computer Software', Scientific American, September 1984
Any shrine is better than self-worship.
Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a larger object.
Any small object when dropped will hide under a larger object.
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic. β Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. β Paul Chvostek by way of Arthur C. Clarke (via John Ripley)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. β Andy Finkel, computer guy
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. β Arthur C. Clarke
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. β Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire.
Anyone can hate. It costs to love. β John Williamson
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. β Publilius Syrus
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. β Lazarus Long, 'Time Enough for Love'
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. β Eleanor Roosevelt
Anyone who wants to be paid for writing software is a fascist asshole. β Richard M. Stallman, founder, Free Software Foundation
Anything anybody can say about America is true. β Emmett Grogan
Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Anything labeled 'NEW' and/or 'IMPROVED' isn't. The label means the price went up. The label 'ALL NEW', 'COMPLETELY NEW', or 'GREAT NEW' means the price went way up.
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing
Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Arbolist . . . Look up the word. I don't know, maybe I made it up. Anyway, it's an arbo-tree-ist, somebody who knows about trees. β George W. Bush, quoted in USA Today; August 21, 2001
Are we not men?
Are you a turtle?
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. β Mickey Mouse
Armadillo: To provide weapons to a Spanish pickle
army, n.: A body of men assembled to rectify the mistakes of the diplomats. β Josephus Daniels
Army Axiom: An order that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood.
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.
Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art. β Harry S Truman (one of his more ridiculous comments)
As Will Rogers would have said, 'There is no such things as a free variable.'
As Zeus said to Narcissus, 'Watch yourself.'
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. β Weisert
As goatherd learns his trade by goat, so writer learns his trade by wrote.
As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. β Oscar Wilde
As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power. β Thomas Aquinas, prominent historical misogynist
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. β Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree' β probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. β Woody Allen
As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear, bearing hot new versions of their pieces β faster, smaller, more complete, or putatively less buggy. The replacement of a working component by a new version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and efficient test cases will usually be available. β Frederick Brooks Jr., 'The Mythical Man Month'
As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance. β National Lampoon, 'Deteriorada'
As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. β Benjamin Franklin
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate. β Sandra Boynton, 'Chocolate: The Consuming Passion'
As you read the scroll it vanishes, and you hear maniacal laughter in the distance.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, If God won't have you, the devil must.
Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls ... if thou art in the bathtub, it tolls for thee.
Ask your boss to reconsider β it's so difficult to take 'Go to hell' for an answer.
Assuming that either the left wing or the right wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles. β Pat Paulsen
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. β The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985
At a recent meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, a participant from Los Angeles fainted from hyperoxygenation, and we had to hold his head under the exhaust of a bus until he revived.
At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it. β G. L. Glegg, The Design of Design
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes β an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track. β Carl Sagan, 'The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,' Parade,
February 1, 1987
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth. β Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Laureate in chemistry
Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. β Winston Churchill
Auribus teneo lupum. (I hold a wolf by the ears.)
Automobile, n.: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians.
Automobile: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians.
Average managers are concerned with methods, opinions, precedents. Good managers are concerned with solving problems.
Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep. β National Lampoon, 'Deteriorada'
Avoid letting temper block progress; keep cool. β William Feather
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
Badges? We don't need no stinking badges.
Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukelele.
Bad sneakers and a piΓ±a colada, my friend Stompin' down the avenue by Radio City With a transistor and a large sum of money to spend. β Steely Dan
Baker's First Law of Federal Geometry: A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors.
Barth's Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't.
Basic, n.: A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in
that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely get your Feet wet. Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face. β National Lampoon, 'Deteriorada'
Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom.
Be different: conform.
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. β Gustave Flaubert
Be seeing you.
Beauty and harmony are as necessary to you as the very breath of life.
Beauty is only skin deep, but Ugly goes straight to the bone.
Bees are not as busy as we think they are; they just cannot buzz any slower. β Abe Martin
Behind every argument is someone's ignorance. β Louis Brandeis
Behold the warranty: The bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.
Beifeld's Principle: The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when he is already in the company of: (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3) a better looking and richer male friend.
Being stoned on marijuana isn't very different from being stoned on gin. β Ralph Nader
Berkeley's First Law of Mistakes: The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking itβit probably isn't right.
Corollary 1 to Berkeley's First Law of Mistakes: Always let an answer cool off for awhileβit should not be used while hot.
Corollary 2 to Berkeley's First Law of Mistakes: Check the answer you have worked out once moreβbefore you tell it to anybody.
Berkeley's Second Law of Mistakes: If there is an opportunity to make a mistake, sooner or later, the mistake will be made.
Better living a beggar than buried an emperor.
Between the choice of two evils, I always pick the one I've never tried before. β Mae West
Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. β Ivan Chtcheglov
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. β Donald Knuth
Beware of Geeks bearing grifts.
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. β Leonard Brandwein
Beware of a dark-haired man with a loud tie.
Beware of a tall dark man with a spoon up his nose.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Beware of friends who are false and deceitful.
Beware of low-flying butterflies.
Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Beware the new TTY code!
Biggest security gap - an open mouth.
Bingo, gas station, hamburger with a side order of airplane noise, and you'll be Gary, Indiana. - Jessie in the movie 'Greaser's Palace'
Biography is the fallacy of intention. β Peter Taylor
Biology ... it grows on you.
Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic
Black holes are where God is dividing by zero.
Blah.
Bleeding into a new computer is always a good thing; it's an ancient geek voodoo magic to ensure its long life and reliability. β from Mike Taht's blog, http://the-edge.blogspot.com/
Blessed are the meek for they shall inhibit the earth.
Blessed are they who Go Around in Circles, for they Shall be Known as Wheels.
Blessed is the man who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night. β Leo Aikman
Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier.
Board the windows, up your car insurance, and don't leave any booze in plain sight. It's St. Patrick's day in Chicago again. The legend has it that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. In fact, he was arrested for drunk driving. The snakes left because people kept throwing up on them.
Boling's postulate: If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it.
Bolub's Fourth Law of Computerdom: Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
Bombeck's Rule of Medicine: Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas. β Ian Fleming, 'Casino Royale'
Boob's Law: You always find something in the last place you look.
Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Boren's Laws: (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble.
Boss, n.: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words 'boss' and 'botch' were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning 'a supervisor of workers' also meant 'an ornamental stud.'
Boston, n.: Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition.
Boy, n.: A noise with dirt on it.
Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. that will do them in.
Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. That will do them in.
Brady's First Law of Problem Solving: When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, 'How would the Lone Ranger have handled this?'
Brain fried β core dumped
Brain, n.: The apparatus with which we think that we think. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Brain, v. [as in 'to brain']: To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to dispel a source of error in an opponent. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Bride, n.: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Bringing computers into the home won't change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.
Broad-mindedness: The result of flattening high-mindedness out.
Brook's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Brooke's Law: Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
Bubble Memory, n.: A derogatory term, usually referring to a person's intelligence. See also 'vacuum tube'.
Bucy's Law: Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
Bug: Small living things that small living boys throw on small living girls.
Bumper Sticker: Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
Bumper sticker on nuclear war: if you have seen one, you have seen them all.
Bunk Carter's Law: At any given moment there are more important people in the world than important jobs to contain them.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. β Balzac
Bureaucrat, n.: A politician who has tenure.
Bureaucrats cut read tape β length-wise.
Burnt Sienna: That's the best thing that ever happened to Crayolas. β Ken Weaver
Business will be either better or worse. β Calvin Coolidge
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses. β Bruce Leverett, 'Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers'
By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me. β Ashleigh Brilliant
By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task completely overwhelm you.
By long-standing tradition, I take this opportunity to savage other designers in the thin disguise of good, clean fun. β P. J. Plauger, from his April Fool's column in the April 1988
issue of 'Computer Language'
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared 'abruptly.' β Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23
C, n.: A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't. β Ray Simard
C++ : Where friends have access to your private members. β Gavin Russell Baker
CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh.. β Randall Garrett
Cabbage, n.: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
Caeca invidia est. (Envy is blind.) β Livy
Cahn's Axiom: When all else fails, read the instructions.
California is a fine place to live β if you happen to be an orange. β Fred Allen
California is the ghost of Christmas future for the rest of America. β anonymous post to an Internet forum
California is the land of perpetual pubescence, where cultural lag is mistaken for renaissance. β Ashley Montagu
Call on God, but row away from the rocks. β Indian proverb
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Cannot fork β try again.
Cannot fortune open database.
Captain Penny's Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool Mom.
Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than expected. Carefully planned projects take four times longer to complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their planning to reduce the time it takes.
Carperpetuation (kar' pur pet u a shun), n.: The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance. β Rich Hall, 'Sniglets'
Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world.
Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Change is what people fear most. β Dostoevski
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Character Density: the number of very weird people in the office.
Character is the ligament holding together all other qualities. β Arnold Glasow
Chemicals, n.: Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.
Chicken Little was right.
Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
Children aren't happy without something to ignore, And that's what parents were created for. β Ogden Nash
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. β Oscar Wilde
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
Chism's Law of Completion: The amount of time required to complete a government project is precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law: When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
Civilisation is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else. β Julian Jaynes
Civilization Law #1: Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations one can do without thinking about them.
Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor. β Toynbee
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. β Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
[Classical music] would be a lot more popular if they gave the pieces titles like 'Kill the Wabbit.' β Mark Fetherolf.
Classified material requires proper storage.
Cleanliness is next to impossible.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum β 'I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.' β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Cogito ergo doleo. (I think, therefore I am depressed.)
Cogito ergo sum.
Cohen's Law: Everyone knows that the name of the game is what label you succeed in imposing on the facts.
Collaboration, n.: A literary partnership based on the false assumption that the other fellow can spell.
College isn't the place to go for ideas. β Hellen Keller
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare. β Blair Houghton
Commitment, n.: Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. β Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Complacency is the enemy of progress. β Dave Stutman
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems theory.
Computer Science: the boring art of coping with a large number of trivialities (The Devil's DP Dictionary)
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives? β Alan Kay, 'Computer Software', Scientific American, September 1984
Conceit causes more conversation than wit. β LaRouchefoucauld
Concept, n.: Any 'idea' for which an outside consultant billed you more than $25,000.
Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds. β Frederick Brooks Jr., 'The Mythical Man Month'
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff. β Peter de Vries
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas! β Ben Jonson
Confusticate and bebother these dwarves!
Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
Conservative, n.: One who admires radicals centuries after they're dead. β Leo C. Rosten
Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then give it back to them.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. β Brian W. Kernighan
Conversation, n.: A vocal competition in which the one who is catching his breath is called the listener.
Conway's Law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Coronation, n.: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown sky-high with a dynamite bomb. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Corripe Cervisiam!
Corrupt, adj.: In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.
Corruption is not the #1 priority of the Police Commissioner. His job is to enforce the law and fight crime. β P.B.A. President E. J. Kiernan
Courage is grace under pressure.
Coward, n.: One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month. β Wernher von Braun
Creativity cannot be diminished by the medium of expression. β Mitch Allen
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. β Isaac Asimov
Creditors have better memories than debtors. β Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1758)
Crime does not pay ... as well as politics. β A. E. Newman
Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. β Howard Scott
Critic, n.: A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating. β Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Cynic, n.: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
Cynic, n.: One who looks through rose-colored glasses with a jaundiced eye.
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward, they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. β J. W. von Goethe
Dawn, n.: The time when men of reason go to bed. β Ambrose Bierce, 'The Devil's Dictionary'
De Borglie rules the wave, but Heisenberg waived the rules. β Piggins
Dealing with failure is easy: work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
Death is Nature's way of saying, 'slow down'.
Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired. β R. Geis