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-- Nora Dunn (who plays a lesbian on NBC's "Sisters") to Los Angeles' Lesbian News.

"... We are men of groans and howls,
Mystic men who eat boiled owls,
Tell us what you wish, oh King,
Our magic can do anything."

-- From Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr Seuss. Part of a chant by the royal magicians, but it might as easily have been by the royal software engineers.

"A spokesman for the Lyon Group, producers of Barney and Friends, denied that Barney is an instrument of Satan." -- The Advocate, spring 1994

"I don't mind straight people as long as they act gay in public."

-- T-shirt worn by Chicago Bulls transvestite Dennis Rodman during a network-TV interview.

History has proven that nobody pays any attention to history. -- Claude Cuervo

We ought to live each day as though
It were our last day here below.
But, if I did, alas, I know
It would have killed me long ago

-- Piet Hein - "More Grooks"

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you? -- Garrison Keillor

I think that a lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one's sexual preference. -- Quentin Crisp

Quotes from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

Iconoclast

n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."

Connoísseur

n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.

An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was pouted on his lips to revive him. "Pauillac, 1873," he murmured and died.

Logic

n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Being asked whether it was better to marry or not, he replied, "Whichever you do, you will repent it."

-- Attributed to Socrates in Socrates by Diogenes Laertius.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher ... and that is a good thing for any man.

-- Socrates

"He [...] lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. If he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence who made it the only object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect" -- Nikola Tesla commenting on Thomas Edison.

A bachelor is a man who never made the same mistake once.

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly -- but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

-- Samuel Johnson

"Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and the seed of an homer shall yield an ephah." - Isaiah 5:10. And you can't argue with that.

"I'm just a poor old man. ... My legs are grey. My ears are gnarled. My eyes are old and bent."

-- Matthias, from Monty Python's Life of Brian

For non-deterministic read "Inhabited by pixies."

-- Anonymous - stolen from A.M. Kuchling's Quotes Page

• English Law prohibits a man from marrying his mother-in-law. This is our idea of useless legislation.
• Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler
• The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.
• He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. -- Old Chinese saying
• Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. -- George Burns

"At my age I do what Mark Twain did," said British astronomer Patrick Moore, on the occasion of his 76th birthday. "I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and if I'm not there, I carry on as usual."

What I believe ...
... I believe that robots are stealing my luggage.
... I believe that Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was...an arctic wasteland, covered with ice...

-- From What I Believe, a monologue read out by Steve Martin

"Defense of Marriage? It's like the old V-8 commercial. As if this act didn't pass, heterosexual men all over the country would say, [smacking head] 'I could've married a guy!'"

-- Gay U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, in an April 2 speech at the University of Texas Law School.

East is East and West is West,
Though this may not seem relevant.
We all know how to milk a cow,
But you can't muck about with an elephant.

-- A sign in a Ceylon Zoo

University President: "Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers... and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers."

-- Told by Isaac Asimov - quote stolen from http://www.amk.ca/quotations/quotations.txt

"I suppose that the form my bereavement took after my mother died was fairly conventional. Initially I was shocked. Her final illness was mercifully quick, but harrowing. Cancer tore through her body as if it were late for an important meeting with a lot of other successful diseases."

"... Meanwhile, the dreams continued. And Mother managed to be as embarrassing in them as she had been alive, but for entirely different reasons. With death she had taken on a mantle of candour and social sharpness that I tended to attribute to myself rather than her. At the dream dinner parties she would make asides to me the whole time about how pretentious people were and what bad taste they displayed, talking all the while in a loud and affected voice which, needless to say, remained inaudible to her subjects. After a while I ceased trying to defeat her with the logic of her own extinction; it was pointless. Mother had long since ceased to be susceptible to reasoning. I think it was something to do with my father, a man who uses dialectics the way the Japanese used bamboo slivers during the war."

"... There are a million questions I'd like the answers to. You always hated groups and here you are submitting to indoctrination in a religion ostensibly run by dead employees of British Telecom. Why? ..."

-- Will Self, The North London Book of the Dead

"Well, of course I would never use a preposition to end a sentence up with, because it might be difficult to make sense out of, and, after all, what would I want to use a preposition to finish a sentence that you cannot make any sense out of up with for?"

-- From It was a Dark & Stormy Night: The Final Conflict (Penguin books), a collection from the annual Bulwer-Lytton competition.

"The wicked oppressor's name was Anzaruni, which shows that he was a servant of Satan."

-- A cryptic remark from The Amulet of Anzaruni, in Myths and Legends of the Swahili by Jan Kanppert. I've been unable to track down the meaning of the name.

Quotes from The World of S. J. Perelman:

• "She [the woman of the future] will take the miracles of science for granted and will not make a fetish of functional forms, or of design-for-function." I breathed a little easier when I read that. Every time you ask your hostess at a party these days "Who is that tall girl in the corner with the enchanting bosom?" you invariably get the careless reply, "Oh that's Liane. She makes a fetish of functional forms and design-for-function." And as if this weren't bad enough, it always turns out Liane has a manic-depressive husband who makes a fetish of hitting people who tickle his wife. -- from Slow - Dangerous Foibles Ahead!
• [The Estes Back to Nature Magazine] editor is Dr. St. Louis Estes, who modestly styles himself "Discoverer of Brain Breathing and Dynamic Breath Controls for Disease Prevention and Life Extension, Father and Founder of the Raw Food Movement, and International Authority on Old Age and Raw Foods." (There is something to write on a library card when they ask you for your occupation.) Cooked vegetables, spices and hair tonic are poison, says Dr. Estes, and although I have never tried the combination, I can readily believe it. -- from The Body Beautiful

• I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
  -- from Captain Future, Block That Kick!

From www.oconnor.cx/quotes.shtml:

• Me: Would anyone like the last cookie?
  Nathan: I can't take the last cookie on principle.
  Dave (reaching for cookie): I was raised by wolves!

• Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. -- Satchel Paige

• I'm 93% certain and 25% kung fu. -- Kate Brick
• Or, to put it another way, if you see a long line of rats streaming off of a ship, the correct assumption is *not* gosh, I bet that's a real nice boat now that those rats are gone". -- Mike Sphar
• The general populace should not be given access to things that beep. -- Curtis
• You see a warning sign. Translated, it says "In case of fire, do not use difficult-to-escape-from sealed metal box reminiscent of an oven, only with a flammable interior. Use the stairs instead." -- The Cube SOMAD, Forum 2000
• The State is the coldest of all cold monsters that bites with stolen teeth. -- Nietzsche
• I have this horrible feeling that some of the less-readable works of James Joyce might just turn out to be early-release Windows/NT code. -- Tanuki
• Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice. -- Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
• Graphics tend to corrupt. Animated graphics corrupt absolutely.
• Dan: But you're not allowed to compile the classloader without the proper chant, lest your bytecodes be cursed!
  Me: And what praytell is the proper chant?
  Dan: Damned if i know. I just deal with cursed bytecodes.
• Sugar makes the world go 'round. Caffeine makes it spin faster.
• How many of Group X does it take to change a light bulb?
  N. 1 to change the light bulb, and N-1 to do something characteristic of group X.
• If the teaching of evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
• Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. -- Matt Groening
• I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that Nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend its magnitude. -- Calvin
• On the other hand, the Linux philosophy is 'laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong one. 'Do it yourself'. That's it. -- Linus Torvalds
• Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it.
• Those silly RFCs are all that separate us from the animals! -- Kevin Rodgers on newsgroup alt.religion.emacs

Some definitions pilfered from http://luc.aleaume.free.fr/new_site/site_fortune/html/definitions.html:

• accordion, n.: A bagpipe with pleats.
• Adler's Distinction: Language is all that separates us from the lower animals, and from the bureaucrats.
• ambiguity: Telling the truth when you don't mean to.
• amoebit: Amoeba/rabbit cross; it can multiply and divide at the same time.
• aquadextrous, adj.: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• Banacek's Eighteenth Polish Proverb: The hippo has no sting, but the wise man would rather be sat upon by the bee.
• boy, n.: A noise with dirt on it.
• carperpetuation, 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. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• chef, n.: Any cook who swears in French.
• clone, n.: 1. An exact duplicate, as in "our product is a clone of their product." 2. A shoddy, spurious copy, as in "their product is a clone of our product."
• cold, adj.: When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own pockets.
• commitment, n.: [The difference between involvement and] Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
• consultation, n.: Medical term meaning "to share the wealth."
• creditor, n.: A man who has a better memory than a debtor.
• die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly. -- Elbert Hubbard
• drug, n: A substance that, injected into a rat, produces a scientific paper.
• experience, n.: Something you don't get until just after you need it. -- Olivier
• fairy tale, n.: A horror story to prepare children for the newspapers.
• Fifth Law of Applied Terror: If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book. Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.
• First Law of Bicycling: No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
• friends, n.: People who know you well, but like you anyway.
• furbling, v.: Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you are the only person in line. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• Goda's Truism: By the time you get to the point where you can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
• gyroscope, n.: A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin. -- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
• Hacker's Law: The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
• Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• Harrison's Postulate: For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
• Horngren's Observation: Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
• ignisecond, n.: The overlapping moment of time when the hand is locking the car door even as the brain is saying, "my keys are in there!" -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• ignorance, n.: When you don't know anything, and someone else finds out.
• inbox, n.: A catch basin for everything you don't want to deal with, but are afraid to throw away.
• ingrate, n.: A man who bites the hand that feeds him, and then complains of indigestion.
• insecurity, n.: Finding out that you've mispronounced for years one of your favorite words. Realizing halfway through a joke that you're telling it to the person who told it to you.
• interest, n.: What borrowers pay, lenders receive, stockholders own, and burned out employees must feign.
• intoxicated, adj.: When you feel sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
• job interview, n.: The excruciating process during which personnel officers separate the wheat from the chaff -- then hire the chaff.
• Jones' Motto: Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
• kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.
• lactomangulation, n.: Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• laser, n.: Failed death ray.
• Law of the Jungle: He who hesitates is lunch.
• Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever.
• lie, n.: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date.
• majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
• manual, n.: A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need in in the others. -- Ray Simard
• Matz's Law: A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
• meetings, n.: A place where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
• menu, n.: A list of dishes which the restaurant has just run out of.
• meteorologist, n.: One who doubts the established fact that it is bound to rain if you forget your umbrella.
• Miksch's Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end.
• Mix's Law: There is nothing more permanent than a temporary building. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary tax.
• new, adj.: Different color from previous model.
• Ogden's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
• old Japanese proverb: There are two kinds of fools -- those who never climb Mt. Fuji, and those who climb it twice.
• oregano, n.: The ancient Italian art of pizza folding.
• paranoia, n.: A healthy understanding of the way the universe works.
• Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
  Arnold's Addendum: Everything else causes cancer in rats.
• Pecor's Health-Food Principle: Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in it.
• pedaeration, n.: The perfect body heat achieved by having one leg under the sheet and one hanging off the edge of the bed. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• pessimist: A man who spends all his time worrying about how he can keep the wolf from the door. optimist: A man who refuses to see the wolf until it seizes the seat of his pants. opportunist: A man who invites the wolf in and appears the next day in a fur coat.
• philosophy: The ability to bear with calmness the misfortunes of our friends.
• philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
• Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.
• priority: A statement of the importance of a user or a program. Often expressed as a relative priority, indicating that the user doesn't care when the work is completed so long as he is treated less badly than someone else.
• quality control, n.: Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out of hand and add to the cost of its manufacture or design.
• reappraisal, n.: An abrupt change of mind after being found out.
• revolutionary, adj.: Repackaged.
• rugged, adj.: Too heavy to lift.
• Seleznick's Theory of Holistic Medicine: Ice Cream cures all ills. Temporarily.
• Self Test for Paranoia: You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's your own fault.
• Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.
• Slick's Third Law of the Universe: There are two types of dirt: the dark kind, which is attracted to light objects, and the light kind, which is attracted to dark objects.
• snacktrek, n.: The peculiar habit, when searching for a snack, of constantly returning to the refrigerator in hopes that something new will have materialized. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
• spouse, n.: Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.
• Stenderup's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.
• sushi, n.: When that-which-may-still-be-alive is put on top of rice and strapped on with electrical tape.
• sushido, n.: The way of the tuna
• sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly.
• tact, n.: The unsaid part of what you're thinking.
• Udall's Fourth Law: Any change or reform you make is going to have consequences you don't like.
• understand, v.: To reach a point, in your investigation of some subject, at which you cease to examine what is really present, and operate on the basis of your own internal model instead.
• universe, n.: The problem.
• university, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ...
• Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
• Weed's Axiom: Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one in which you are least interested and say nothing about the other.
• Whistler's Law: You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge.

Some quotes from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

• Age, n.: That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit.
• 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.
• Cabbage, n.: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
• Impartial, adj.: Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions.
• Interpreter, n.: One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
• Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism. Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet. The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.
• Misfortune, n.: The kind of fortune that never misses.
• Molecule, n.: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion ...
• November, n.: The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
• Once, adv.: Enough.
• Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
• Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
• Revolution, n.: In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
• Technicality, n.: In an English court a man named Home was tried for slander in having accused a neighbor of murder. His exact words were: "Sir Thomas Holt hath taken a cleaver and stricken his cook upon the head, so that one side of his head fell on one shoulder and the other side upon the other shoulder." The defendant was acquitted by instruction of the court, the learned judges holding that the words did not charge murder, for they did not affirm the death of the cook, that being only an inference.

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc., 1989

From www.thirdstoned.com/quotefile.html:

• "Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar!" -- Pablo Picasso
• "God is a practical joker with unlimited resources." -- Wanda Simpson
• "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." -- Jalal Ud-Din Rumi
• "The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzbyski
• "An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure." -- Shelda Parsnip
• "No man who obsesses about originality will ever be original; whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence about how often it has been told before) you will likely become original without ever having noticed." -- C.S. Lewis
• "Nothing's more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have..." -- Emile Chartier
• "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." -- Pablo Picasso
• "A painting is never finished- it simply stops in interesting places." -- Paul Gardner
• "My dear Mr. Heifitz, I was overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young! No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods! I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed!" -- George Bernard Shaw to Yasha Heifitz
• "Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire." -- Bruce Sterling
• "It all comes back to you-it's just like sewing a bicycle." -- Marvella
• "Rats is like sausages only they got fur an' stuff". -- Tolo Borko
• "Humans aren't much more than monkeys with car keys." -- Leena Tolo
• "The wind calls your name as I pass it." -- Mr Bean
• "God put me on this Earth to do a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die." -- Johnny Strumba
• "Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge." -- Cicero
• "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." -- Winston Churchill
• "Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" -- George Bernard Shaw
• "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd ." Voltaire
• "Great minds..discuss ideas. Average minds... discuss events. Small minds... discuss people ." -- Solly Ensczekroe
• "How come dumb stuff seems so smart while you're doing it?" -- Dennis the Menace
• "Truth is stranger than fiction, but that may well be because we have made fiction to suit ourselves." -- G. K. Chesterton
• "A pot put on the back burner for too long may forget how to simmer" -- Ancient Chinese Proverb

From George Mikes, How To Be An Alien:

• In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut off without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: "We are not amused"; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was. -- How To Be Rude
• A fishmonger is the man who mongs fish; the ironmonger and the warmonger do the same with iron and war. They just mong them. -- Three Small Points
• Street names should be painted clearly and distinctly on large boards. Then hide these boards carefully. Place them too high or too low, in shadow and darkness, upside down and inside out, or, even better, lock them up in a safe place in your bank, otherwise they may give people some indication about the names of the streets. -- How To Plan A Town

From the shareware game Exile - Escape From The Pit:

• Name?
  "I'm Zed. The assistant librarian."
  Job?
  "Oh, learning things man was not meant to know. Plumbing the forbidden secrets of the unknown. Sweeping."
  Sweeping?
  "Yes. Mainly sweeping. I'm apprenticed to Miles. He does most of the work. Most of the people who come here are mages, you see. If you have any real business, talk to him. Now if you'll excuse me, I have forbidden secrets to plumb." He starts sweeping.

  Fort Dranlon:
  Name?
  "Marlon."
  Job?
  "I guard unceasingly against the slith menace. I also steadfastly maintain my lack of individuality in order to be a more efficient killing machine."

  Spider shrine:
  "You read the runes. Most of the things they describe are utterly alien to you. The spells for summoning flies aren't interesting."

  Dharmon:
  "The scimitar's blade is sharp. And its eyes see far. Oh, excuse me for a moment." She burps the baby. "Where was I? Oh, yes. If you wish to strike a mighty blow for Exile, go see our contact."

  Final Gauntlet:
  As you step forward, the voice calls out again. "Perform the Ritual of Safety, so the defences may be neutralized."

  You really wish you knew the Ritual of Safety.

From [link defunct 9 Feb 2002: www.tnibooks.com/susannahfelts/]:

• A sample sentence from a paper I graded today:

  "The misinformation of society conveys a generalized bourgeoisie whose preconceived notions of restaurants are unsound."

  Oh, they try and try.

From the 1971 movie The Abominable Doctor Phibes:

• "A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon! Words fail me, gentlemen."
  MP3 audio of quote (114 Kbyte)

From Phantom Quest Corp, Incident File 04: Lover Come Back to Me:

• "Rampant parasitic business competition! Bald-headed creep who tortures my income! You know you're up to no good! And now you're the one who's going to pay! Want to know why? Phantom Quest is back in town! Prepare to meet your doom!" - Ayaka.

In present-day England, the progressive Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor told the BBC that 'At a stroke we could disarm a good deal of public misunderstanding of the legal profession if we stopped wearing wigs and gowns in court'. This view is all the more pertinent when it is pointed out that children, on seeing judges in their red and white furred gowns and wigs, have been known to hand them their list of requests for Christmas toys.

-- Justin Fleming, from his book Barbarism to Verdict - A History of the Common Law, Chapter 4.

From The New Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman & John S. Major:

• The main influence on Wordsworth was Wordsworth. I know of no major literary figure who was so continuously and so favourably impressed by himself. This highly successful love affair dried up in him the springs of self-criticism; and as he had no humour to start with, four-fifths of his work turned out to be a crashing bore.

"We will be playing the kind of music that'll make you think your life would have been better if you'd had a bigger intake of beer" -- Lucky Oceans on ABC Radio National (Australia) 15 May 2002

"For me, a cruise ship is a prison with the option of drowning." -- Billy Conolly

"Let's dispense with the pleasantries, you twisted space crustacean. What is it you want from me?" -- From the Calvin & Hobbes "Lazy Sunday" Book, p. 35

"The Corrections, though, is a book full of empathy, cruel humour, truth, information, analysis and depth, and despite being a best-seller in the United States, it's a really wonderful novel" -- Ramona Koval, talking about "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen, "Australia Talks Books" program on ABC Radio National 2002-10-25 6.12pm
MP3 audio of quote (99 Kbyte)

From the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, The Sorcerer:

• You or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the company. -- J. Wellington Wells

Also under cover of the war [in Iraq], the Victorian pollies [politicians] in a rare but not unexpected show of unanimity, voted to help themselves to 46.5 million dollars of taxpayers' money to top up their super [superannuation] fund. Like everyone else, the pollies have seen their super funds diminishing due to wonky investments but, unlike everyone else, if you're a politician you don't have to put up with it. And the best time to pull the wool over the electors' eyes is day one of a brand new war when nobody will notice. And they wonder why we hold them in low regard.

-- Terry Lane, "The National Interest" program on ABC Radio National 2003-03-30 12:00noon.
MP3 audio of quote (543 Kbyte)

"This is a very serious offence. [...] It could be punishable by up to 10 years in Britain ... in prison"

-Freudian slip by Rob Watson, commenting on the USA Dept. of Justice investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent's name, ABC Radio National, 1 Oct 2003, 6:05am

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

-- Jim Horning

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, "Louder and Funnier"

Would James Joyce have been happier if he'd been able to scat out loud as well as on the page? Anyone around him wouldn't have been, obviously, since scatting was pretty much invented for the sole enjoyment of the scatter. Everyone hanging around Joyce - the Parisians, the Dubliners, would be cringing and blocking their ears the whole time, begging him to stop, but he'd keep on scatting, impervious to their discomfort and pain, snapping his fingers and making those jazzy faces with his eyes closed. Skeedley bop! Skeedley boo! Skeedley eedley eddley bee... In an Irish accent, for God's sake!! Man, scatting's horrible. They should ban it. It's probably banned in Iran. Banned in Iran diddi ban ban ban!

-- From Sean Condon's column "Don't Get Me Started", Sydney Morning Herald - Good Weekend Magazine, 31 July 2004, p. 62.

• Now that the Japanese are making all the great leaps in robotics, do you think they are building a Japanese world view into their robots?

  What moral assumptions might a Japanese robot make, and how might these differ from those of a US-made robot?

Born and raised in the town of Hawera [New Zealand], [Alan] Brough took to the stage at the age of 4, encouraged by his father, an actor. His first performance was not a success. "I was the little drummer boy in a Christmas pageant," he says. "I was just about to play when Mum and Dad walked in and I went, 'Hello!' and waved and walked up to them. My father was absolutely mortified."

Soon after, Brough was expelled from kindergarten. He still doesn't know why. "There was a little note in my lunchbox that said, 'Mrs Brough, we'd like Alan not to come back.' No one could work out why."

[From an article "Hey, Brough" by Michael Lallo, Sydney Morning Herald "The Guide" supplement, Feb 26 2007, p. 6]

Assorted versions of a quote attributed to Xenarchus:

• Ξέναρχος δ' ἐν ῞Υπνῳ φησίν: εἶτ' εἰσὶν οἱ τέττιγες οὐκ εὐδαίμονες, ὧν ταῖς γυναιξὶν οὐδ' ὁτιοῦν φωνῆς ἔνι
  -- Book XIII, stanza 7 of "The Deipnosophists" by Athenaeus of Naucratis (Δειπνοσοφισταί by Ἀθήναιος Nαυκράτιος) - title variously translated as "The Banquet of the Learned", "Philosophers at Dinner" etc. Greek text taken from this page.
• And Xenarchus, in his "Sleep", says "Are then the grasshoppers not happy, say you? When they have wives who cannot speak a word."
  -- Vol 3, p. 894 - Book XIII of "The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus", Translated by Charles Duke Yonge (Pub. Henry G. Bohn, London, 1854). Google Books copy of Vol 3
• And Xenarchus says in "Sleep": "Are not the male cicadas a happy lot? Their females haven't a bit of voice in them."
  -- From "The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis", Book XIII: "Concerning Women", Translated by Charles Burton Gulick for the Loeb Classical Library, 1937 (Quote taken from this web page)
• "Some authors have affirmed (says Madame Dacier) that it is only male grasshoppers who sing, and that the females are silent; and on this circumstance is founded a bon-mot of Xenarchus, the comic poet, who says 'εἶτ' εἰσὶν οἱ τέττιγες οὐκ εὐδαίμονες, ὧν ταῖς γυναιξὶν οὐδ' ὁτιοῦν φωνῆς ἔνι'; 'are not the grasshoppers happy in having dumb wives?'" This note is originally Henry Stephen's; but I chose rather to make Madame Dacier my authority for it.
  -- from p. 158 of "Odes of Anacreon", translated by Thomas Moore (Pub. Hugh Maxwell, 1804). Google Books copy of this book

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