Dan's Favorite Quotations Page



WARNING:

These quotes were compiled by me, from a variety of places and I constantly add new ones. Some of these quotes will offend some people. If you feel that you might be offended, exercise your freedom of choice not to look. Once you choose to go ahead, I accept no responsibility for your indignation and outrage. Nothing is sacred beyond this point. For mature netizens only! If you have a quote you would like to suggest, send it to me: danielc@danielc.com

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"Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and had the conversation stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water..... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable...."
-John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, Presidential farewell address, January 17, 1961

"Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all." "
-unknown and Isaac Asimov, Stargate SG-1, episode 200

"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"
-Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmore, Time - Dark Side of the Moon ,
I would want this one on my tombstone, if I were not going to science....

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but we won't let them paint FUCK on their airplane because it's obscene."
- Apocalypse Now

"Love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."
-Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

"... they had held each other out of loneliness and fear and curiosity and lust and hope that this time they would find something beautiful. And in the morning they would find sheets that looked like a geographical terrain, and perhaps an overturned ash tray on the rug beside the bed, and no trace whatever of the face of love."
-Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

"The Milky Way was like a moraine of stars. Sounds of distant water clicking through a patch of meadow, the wind in the pines; black spiky horizon all around, the smooth airy gap of the pass behind. It was a blessing to feel so tired in a such a place. They had made the effort it took to regather, and here they were again, in a place so sublime no one could truly remember what it was like when they were away, so that every return had a sense of surprise, as if re-entering a miracle. Every time it felt this way. It was the California that could never be taken away."
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

"Of the millions who watch sports events, a vanishingly small percentage can play any of the games they watch with anything approaching professional skill, yet virtually all understand the rules well enough to appreciate what they see. The public must then, in the same way, understand science if it is to react intelligently. They must at least be capable of following the game, even if they can't play it."
-Singleton & Straits, Approaches to Social Research (4ed.)

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experieince."
-Thoreau, Walden

"We cast this message into the cosmos. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some - perhaps many - may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."
-President Carter, Recorded on the golden record on the Voyager spacecraft, which is now outside of the Sol system

"The road to love is littered by the bones of other ones, who by the magic of the moment were mysteriously undone."
-Gordon Lightfoot, Race Among the Ruins

"Aeschylus wrote: 'In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"
-Robert F. Kennedy, delivering an extemporaneous eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr., the evening of April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana

"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair,
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets,
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps."
-"Pablo Neruda

"Sometimes science is just doing a really good job of measuring something that nobody has ever measured before."

"... Henry Adams, the great nineteenth-century historian. He was writing just after the battle of Shiloh in April of 1862. The two days of fighting had produced more casualties than all previous American wars combined: the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War--in two days! This is what Adams said, "I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race will commit suicide by blowing up the world."
-Ken Burns, Civil War

"Children believe in monsters and adults tell them that there are no monsters, but that is not true. They are inside steel tubes within steel tubes, in the ground and under the sea and sometimes in the air. They contain unimaginable power, the very fires of hell and death itself. There are monsters indeed, and we made them, and they are out there, waiting...."
-Daniel S. E. Cascaddan, 12/99

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
-Constitution of the United States, Amendment One

"If we die, do not mourn for us. This is a risky business we're in, and we accept those risks. The space program is too valuable to this country to be halted for too long if a disaster should ever happen."
-Virgil Ivan 'Gus' Grissolm (three weeks before he was killed in the Apollo 1 fire, a few days before my birthday)

"Her method was rigorous and messy. She presented great clumps of uncapitalized, misspelled, and unpunctuated words, and demanded the clumps be put into proper sentences, meticulously punctuated and correctly spelled. She then corrected the corrections; the final document - she employed a system of different colored inks - resembled a much revised treaty between two semiliterate countries at war."
-John Irving, The Cider House Rules

"I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered."
- Sir Isaac Newton

".... I see angels and ariels in leather and in chrome, swoopin' down from heaven to carry me home. And he gave her one last kiss and died. And he gave her his Vincent to ride."
-Vincent Black Lightning, 1952

"The general is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice heretofore little known in the American Army, is growing into fashion.

He hopes, that the officers, by their example as well as their influence, will endeavor to check it. That they and their men will reflect that we can have little hope of the blessings of heaven on our army if we continue to insult it by our impiety and folly.

Added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without temptation, that every man of sense and character detests and/or despises it."
-General George Washington

"[The media] has so much bullshit that there is enough left over to start two law firms and a Christian bookstore."
-George Carlin

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
-The Management

"Mr. President, the American people vote for the sizzle, not for the steak. It is only after, that the poor bastards have to bite into the fat and gristle."

"Christian Religion is based on the economic policy that dead people don't ask for refunds."

"What makes men chase women they have no intention of marrying? The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving."

"My mother always told me that in this world you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. I recommend pleasant. You can quote me on that."
-Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Elwood P. Dowd in, "Harvey."

"The intrigue also has become an attractive nuisance for conspiracy buffs who offer explanations embellished by rumor, fantasy, misinformation and outright paranoia."
-Associated Press

Philo T. Farnsworth invented and made the first public demonstration of electronic television in 1934 and has been forgotten by history. His name was Philo T. Farnsworth, he was a genius and he deserves to be remembered. Never buy a television set from RCA!

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."
-Thomas Jefferson

"The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow."
-Dr. Robert H. Goddard

"Basic research is when I'm doing what I don't know I'm doing."
-Werner von Braun

"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it."
-Dr. Robert H. Goddard

"All roads lead [away from] Rome."

"A truck carrying copies of Roget's Thesaurus over-turned on the highway. The local newspaper reported that the onlookers were "stunned, overwhelmed, astonished, bewildered, and dumfounded."

"We got two varieties of pilots around here: we got yer prime pilots who get all the hot planes, and we got yer pudknockers who dream of gettin' the hot planes. Now what'll you two pudknockers have."
-Pancho Barnes, Pancho's Happy Bottom Fly-in Riding Club, "The Right Stuff."

"I hate telephones. Telephones are for illiterates. That is my new motto."
-Daniel S. E. Cascaddan

"Anything that can be invented, has been invented."
- Charles H. Duell The Honorable Commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (1899)

"Good times and riches, and son of a bitches: I've seen more than I can recall."
-Jimmy Buffet

Bill Gates: That's just pride fucking with you.
Kasparov: My ass goes down. The computer wins. I understand, my dark lord.......

It is everyone's duty to discuss the occasional conspiracy theory via email so that anyone actually conspiring to search for people discussing such things will be flooded with hits.

"My name is August West and I love my Baby best.... more than my maker, though he is no friend of mine."
-Dead

"Politics is the womb in which war is developed."
-General Karl von Clausewitz

"Hatred is *not* a family value."
-bumper sticker

"Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers."

"Government is a monopoly. It forbids competitors."
-Harry Browne

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; [if] it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
- Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand, 1944.

"You're now sober enough to realize "Drink Canada Dry" is a slogan and not a personal challenge."

"Q: Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605. "

"An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."

"I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting." ".... bomb Vietnam back into the stone age..."
-Curtis LeMay (General LeMay, Commander of SAC from 1947 to 1957, was known for strongly advising three different presidents that we should make an all out, first strike with our nuclear arsenal against all nuclear enemies.)

"LeMay was one of the coldest of America's cold warriors"
- http://www.cdsar.af.mil/cc/lemay.html

"Our freedom was not won a century ago, it is not won today, but is in our hands, and we are no longer marching by ones and twos but in legions of thousands, convinced now it cannot be denied by human force."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"As you know the Telecommunications Decency Act of 1996, recently passed by the craven halfwits in the American Congress, makes the mere mention of life's tenderer mysteries, let alone one's more tender body parts, a crime. Yes, dear Vicky, braying neo-Fascist religious squirrels, on a crusade to save us from ourselves, have sought to destroy freedom on the Internet and the First amendment right of free speech all in one kamakazi orgy of neanderthal recidivism."
- http://www.levity.com/eschaton/hypersextext.html

"I will kill for the good of the fight for the right to be right."
-David Bowie, one strange bird

"Society is improved one life at a time."

"A committee is a lifeform with six or more legs and no brain. "
-Robert Anson Heinlein

"1 JPEG=1K Words."
- http://www.evangelist.macaddict.com/

"My guitar wants to kill your mama."
-Frank Zappa

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt."
-Bertrand Russel

"It's a five O'clock world when the whistle blows; no one owns a piece of my time. I've got a five O'clock me inside my clothes, thinkin' that the world looks fine, yeah......oh oh hehe oh ohoh oh oh, oh oh he......"

"Advertising (n): the science of arresting the human intelligence for long enough to get money from it."
-Stephen Leacock

"GRILLING: The term given for the best way to prepare Bratwurst for devouring - on a charcoal-fired grill, outdoors. Weather conditions or temperature have no bearing on the task as true Grill Masters will face any peril of nature to prepare the succulent little sausages they have come to love."
-OFFICIAL BRATWURST GLOSSARY, Johnsonville Bratwurst of Sheboygen, WI

"Out here 'Due Process' is a bullet."
-John Wayne

"Hukt on fonix wurkd four me."-Dubya

"The 'Christian spirit' which persecutes the gay and lesbian community is the same as that which perpetrated the Crusades on the Arab world, which outlawed Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, and Darwin, which justified the enslavement and segregation of African-Americans, which kept silence during the Holocaust, and silenced women as spokespeople for God. As it always was, this cruel spirit is still in error."
-Dr. George Williamson, Senior Pastor, First Baptist Church of Granville, Ohio, whose church was disfellowed from the American Baptist Churches for extending its ministries to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people without requiring them to first become straight.

"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
-George Washington

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-Thomas Paine

"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr

Friend: Do you have a hobby?
Me: Yes, I am an avid collector.
Friend: Of what?
Me: Hobbies.

"...putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail using illegal police methods. In 1995, state and local police made roughly one million arrests for possession of drugs. Such arrests should require a search warrant, yet very few warrants were used. In hundreds of thousands of cases, otherwise honest police feel justified in illegally searching people and then lying about it under oath. They call it 'testilying' or 'white perjury.' In cities all across the country, thugs with badges have planted evidence, sold drugs, and committed other drug-related crimes that are often protected by a police code of silence... In the minds of many law-enforcement officers, the enemy is automatically guilty and must be destroyed."
- Former Kansas City and San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara
Liberator OnLine Vol. 2, No. 12

In response to the question on the final exam, "Where was the first hydrogen bomb detonated?" A student wrote: "May 25, 1978, Northwestern University. A police officer was injured when the bomb was detonated." How is that for completely failing to understand the question?

" Total U.S. nuclear weapons built, 1951-present: 67,500. Peak number of weapons in U.S. stockpile: 32,500 in 1967. U.S. nuclear bombs lost in accidents and never recovered: 11. Number of U.S. nuclear test blasts in the Pacific: 106. Number of U.S. nuclear tests in Nevada: 935. States with most deployed nuclear weapons: Washington and Georgia (1,450 each). Number of secret Presidential Emergency Facilities built for use during and after a nuclear war: 75. Number of high-level radioactive waste tanks in Washington, Idaho and South Carolina: 239. Amount of plutonium still in weapons: 47 tons."
- http://www.seattletimes.com/trinity/supplement/facts.html

"Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream."
-Pink Floyd, "Animals"

From Nacems: My cats would say they really resent not having thumbs. They cry to get into the bedroom and my husband will tell them how to open the door ("Put your hand around the knob with your thumb on top...oh, wait...you don't have a thumb..."). Or when they cry for the special canned food we keep in the cupboard, after using their nose to open the cupboard door, my husband will try to explain to them how to use the can opener ("Lay your thumb on top of this flat part and twist...oh, wait...you don't have a thumb..."
-Nancy Ann Cascaddan, my best friend.

"Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"I think we'll find a Martian sooner than we'll find a politician with the courage to say that the drug war is an overblown fraud."
-Charley Reese, a nationally syndicated columnist

"DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
- (New York Times, November 26, 1991)

"Bill Gates' 10-foot video-conferenced head appeared."
-Rik Myslewski http://www4.zdnet.com/macuser/onlinecol/myslewski20.html

"Corruptisima republica plurimae leges." (The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.)
-Tacitus, Anals III 27

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill

"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you"
-MSgt Mitch Spies, USMC(Ret)

"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind."
-General William Westmoreland

".... when I went to school all I had was a pencil and the kid sitting next to me. If he had really applied himself I could have been somebody."
-Joey Adams

"I'll never see myself in the mirror with my eyes closed."

"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."

My wife and her sister watched the funeral. I thought Elton John's rewording of, "Candle in the Wind," was particularly tasteless. He should have just played, "Funeral for a Friend," from the, "Yellow Brick Road," album. Very tacky. Very trite. It actually made me kind of angry. I will never be able to enjoy that song as much again. I felt that using it demeaned both Marilyn's memory and Di's.
-Daniel S. E. Cascaddan

"I set half the clocks in my house ahead an hour and the other half back an hour Saturday and spent 18 hours in some kind of space-time continuum loop, reliving Sunday (right up until the explosion). I was able to exit the loop only by reversing the polarity of the power source of exactly e*log(pi) clocks in the house while simultaneously rapping my dog on the snout with a rolled up Times. Accordingly, I will be in late, or early."
-Unknown

"People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
-Abe Lincoln

"The cagey kleptomaniac collegians kept the copper clapper they copped in the closet, contrite but incapable of confessing until conditions cooled. Cowards!"

"I've been struggling with reality for 35 years now and I'm happy, Doctor, I've finally won out over it."
-Jimmy Stewart, "Harvey."

"CORONER: Well, let me put it this way. The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I guess it's possible he could be out there practicing law somewhere."

"White men came and killed them, but they haven't really gone."
-David Byrne

"You cannot build character and courage by taking away a person's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln, 1861.

"The free state offers what a police state denies -- the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual."
-Justice William O. Douglas, 1953.

" How many fighter pilots does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. He holds the bulb, and the world revolves around him."
-unknown

"The four G's of good government: God, gates, guns, and get the hell off my property!"

"A dirty thought is just like a virus: it can kill all of the clean thoughts and just take over."
-HHH, Christian Slater, "Pump Up the Volume."

-"Bar-be-que (bar-bi-q) n You bought groceries, washed lettuce, chopped tomatoes, diced onions, marinated meat and cleaned everything up, but he "made dinner." -"Children (chil-dren) n What men become when they get the flu."
-Mrs. Webster's Definitions

"We think you are crazy for expecting us to tell you who we are. You see us as you want to see us..."
-Breakfast Club

[Beware of lecturers discussing] "ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams" [and] "Australopithecus spiff-arino." [and] "trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix"
-Paleoanthropology Division
Smithsonian Institution
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

"No animal alive can outrun a greased Scottsman."
-Groundskeeper Willie

"I love you like a great big rock! How big? Like a twenty-two mile, nickel-iron asteroid aimed straight at the middle of Iowa. KKKAAAAAAAAABLAM!!!!! We're talking one helluva lot here. :^)"
-DSE Cascaddan, to my wife on Valentine's Day

"Life is what happens when you make plans..."
-Nathan Swanson

"Look. I don't like you. You're a liar. You smell funny, and besides, my MOM buys Foster Farms."
-Bald Tattoo Guy

"Adventure? [Egg sandwiches?] A Jedi craves not these things."
-Yoda

"Oh I wish, I wish I hadn't squished that fish."
-Homer Simpson

"Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children."

"Self righteousness is the art form of our time."
-Garrison Keillor

"Two "buttons" I like: Don't look at me in that tone of voice. I'm pink, therefore I'm SPAM."

"The other day my daughter told me to "Grow up!", but she's the one with a safety pin in her navel."
-Redfox

"What is this place? It is Branson, Missouri. My dad says that it is what Vegas would be like if it were run by Ned Flanders."
-The Simpsons

"You are hearing me talk."
-Al Gore Doll, The Simpsons

When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the beautiful baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what's inside, since most people can't read English.
-unknown

"I didn't have a normal teenage life. A few girlfriends, a few dances, but mostly I was fighting, burning cars."
- Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega

"I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami."
- Stephen King (8/24/87)

"It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters."
- Vanna White

"If you look up the word Superfluous in the dictionary, there is a picture of Vanna White. Hell, the letters don't even turn anymore, they are switched electronically by somebody off camera when she touches them!"
- Daniel S. E. Cascaddan

"USA Today has come out with a new survey: Apparently three out of four people make up 75 percent of the population."
-David Letterman

"I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vacuum cleaners."
-Jeff Stilson

"Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God. I could be eating a slow learner."
-Lynda Montgomery

The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.
-I doubt this is true, but it sure is funny! :^)

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-Frank Zappa

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
-Benjamin Franklin

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

"In cyberspace nobody can hear you scream."
-I said that. 12/01/1997 :^)

"I guess I'll have to pass on being the first middle class white boy with a B- average in space."
-Scott Deeg, 12/97

"What do a Divorce in West Virginia, a Tornado in Kansas and a Hurricane in Florida have in common? Somebody's fixin' to lose them a house trailer."
-unknown

"If we could shrink the Earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people with all existing ratios remaining the same, it would look like this: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere (North and South) and 8 Africans. 51 would be female; 49 would be male. 70 would be non-white; 30 white. 70 would be non-Christian; 30 Christian. 50% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people and all 6 would be citizens of the United States. 80 would live in substandard housing. 70 would be unable to read. 50 would suffer from malnutrition. 1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth. Only 1 would have a college education. No one would own a computer."
-unknown

"When you enter the ocean you enter the food chain, and not necessarily at the top"
- Jacques Cousteau

"The greater the mind, the greater the need for play."
-Spock

"Computers are worthless - they only give answers."
- Pablo Picasso

"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up."
-unknown

"I'm nothing if not redundant. I also repeat myself."
-Fish on Ally McBeal

"There are those who see the world in black and white, and they manage to be okay.

There are those who can not tell black from white, and they will fail.

There are those who see every shade of grey in the world, and they are doomed forever."

"I vow to hone my coffee cup handling skills to the point that I can stand up in a kayak being tossed in a typhoon, and still not spill a drop. "
-from Chief Petty Officer Initiation (Oral Tradition)

Q: If you could live forever, would you and why?
A: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."
- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest, Presidential Candidate in 2008?

Brain: "It must be inordinately taxing to be such a boob."
Pinky: "You have no idea."

I found the following tidbit of info in the 1999 sport fishing regulations for the State of California: "Bullfrogs may be taken only by lights, spears, gigs, grabs, paddles, hook and line, dip net, bow and arrow fishing, tackle or hand." Only? Shit, the only thing they didn't mention was blowing them out of the water with high explosives!

9 APR 98: Did you hear that the Buddha's tooth arrived in Taiwan today? They literally rolled out the red carpet at the hatch of the tooth's plane. They then took the tooth to the site of a recent airline crash. Many people expressed their hope and belief that the tooth will alleviate the dark cloud (figurative this time) that has settled over their country in the last few months.

"It isn't over 'til the woman with the eating disorder uvulates."
-Brain

"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."
-P. K. Dick

"Little slab of meat In a wash of clear jelly Now I heat the pan"
-one of fourteen Spam Haiku by Joe Bryan of Chromatic Research

"I'm making a man, with blond hair and a tan, and he's good for relieving my........... tension."
-Frank N. Furter

Dogbert's New Ruling Class MOTTO: "I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either."

"Rose tint my world and keep me safe from my trouble and pain."
-Frank N. Furter

"I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection."
-Jonathon Swift

"I am a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up!"

"Superman never made any money for saving the world from Solomon Grundig. And sometimes I despair The world will never see another man like him."
-Crash Test Dummies

"In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king."

"When the going get's wierd, the wierd turn pro."
-Dr. Gonzo

"The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale."

"That he which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us. ...... We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
-William Shakespear, Henry V (act 4, scene 3)

"If you're going to bottle up your feelings, you'd better pickle them first."
-Dharma

"However for us, no expense can be spared in the pursuit of life, love, happiness and blowing stuff up."
-Dominic Giampaolo

"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again."
-TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz" in the Marin Independent Journal

"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is two wolves attempting to have a sheep for dinner and finding a well-informed well-armed sheep."

"Give me your tired, your poor, your bald, spotted masses..."
-Alien Nation

"The boat sank, get over it"
-Janci Patterson

"It felt like a six hundred pound gopher, going forty-five miles an hour."
-baseball guy at the World Series referring to the Loma Prieta earthquake

"Don't bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing's superb physics."
-Enrico Fermi on the H-bomb

"... now, it's okay to dose & eat!"
-TV Guide, p.25, AUG 15-21, SF Bay area issue

"I haven't had this much sex since I was a Boy Scout leader."
-Leslie Nielson

"The eagle may soar, but the weasel never gets sucked into a jet engine."
-unknown

"Bumming out teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel."
-Lisa Simpson

Curator: "Animals are like people, Mrs. Simpson; some are difficult because they have been mistreated or had a hard life. Some of them are just jerks."

"And all this time I've been smoking harmless tobaco."
-Mr. Burns

"UNIX *is* user friendly. Its just picky about who its friends are!"
-from some guy's sig file

"All Bibles are man-made."
-Thomas Edison

"The Monkees weren't about music, Marge. They were about rebellion and social upheaval!"
-Marge Simpson's therapist

Histor-tainment Channel Hyperbole Quote: "Peril has always been a passenger on the railroads!"

"640K (of RAM) ought to be enough for anybody."
-Bill Gates, 1981

"... cats are basically just cute little killing machines."
-Robert Stone, http://www.otaku.org/cats/Terminator.html

"We be got da worstest schools in da united states."
-campaign billboard in South Carolina, 10/98

"Do not meddle with the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and good with ketchup"
-unknown

"Excuse me, but 'Proactive' and 'Paradigm'; aren't these just words dumb people use to sound important?"
-writer on the Simpsons

"A man who envies our family is a man who needs help."
-Lisa Simpson

"There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness."
-Dave Berry

"There are only three white blues players, and Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them."
-unknown

"If you're not buying recycled products, then you're not recycling."
-unknown

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"
-George Eliot, from Adam Bede (last chptr)

"Have you ever noticed that they put advertisements in with your bills now? Like bills aren't distasteful enough, they have to stuff junk mail in there with them. I get back at them. I put garbage in with my check when I mail it in. Coffee grinds, banana peels. I write, "Could you throw this away for me? Thank you.""
-unknown

"Here's what happened when Dan Quayle invited me to dinner. My wife accused me of covert right-wing activities; Janet speculated that she had married a closet Republican, or a secret golfer. I promised her that I didn't know Dan - I'd never met him. Then we both calmed down and read the rest of Mr. Quayle's letter. Everything was correctly spelled, which was both a shock and a disappointment..."
-John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

"Who could it be? Believe it or not, it's just me."
-Greatest American Hero theme

"He had no wish to face whatever lurked in the unknown darkness, just beyond the little circle of light cast by the lamp of Science."
-Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

"One day, one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way."
-James Jones, The Thin Red Line

"The last of man's great unchained beasts lies lapping at my door. I would be glad to give it what it wants, but it would only ask for more."
-Cowboy Junkies

"It's a good day to be indigenous."
-Smoke Signals

"A friend will help you move. A true friend will help you move a body."
-unknown

"Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders."
-Mary Schmich

"Religions are cages of the mind."
-Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery

"Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought."
-a fortune cookie

Another fortune cookie: On the front it reads, "Happiness is often a rebound from hard work." On the back are lottery numbers!

"Actually, if it meant moving to easy street, I'd stoop unnervingly low. I'd sell secrets to the Russians. I'd take the picture of Princess Diana. I'd publish my spouse's manuscript under my name. I'd eat bodily waste of another human. I'd tell the British about the Boston Tea Party. I'd buy Manhattan for $24. Or Alaska for two cents an acre. I'd leave Superman in a room full of Kryptonite. I'd fix the World Series. And much more. So would most people. So would you, even though you would never admit it."
-Bradford Contemporary

"...it was in the pink tradition, I'd say, but above the average pink in pazzazz, like a pink that had been drinking gin since lunch and wanted to dance."
-Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red

"... transferred to a period, a rare other time period, when I, me, would've been a happy standout, highly esteemed and just crushingly, crushingly special."
-Daniel Woodrell, Tomato Red

"A guy can walk into a store wearing the uniform of his favorite sports team and no one thinks anything of it, but if I walk into the store dressed like a Vulcan, I'm a big geek."
-unknown

"We're monkeys; we'll go."
-David Brin

"... chaos at least has an open architecture."
-John Perry Barlow

"Do your work. You never know when routine life will delight and surprise you."
-Mary Schmich

"I am always reasonable."
-Prof. Edward Higgins

"...model aviators consider model rocketeers to be hopeless pyromaniacs who indulge in a fascination with fire and smoke while cluttering up the air with ugly, little plastic parachutes."
-G. Harry Stine, Handbook of Model Rocketry

"The secret to staying calm in a crisis is not having all the facts."
-Garrison Keeler

"At this time and I am taking you class because I fell it to an internet job at my work."
-an online student who didn't proofread

At http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/History/U_S__History/People/ is an alphabetical list of figures in US History. On that list Lee Harvey Oswald is next to Jacqueline Kennedy-Onasis and Chuck Yeager is next to The Wright Brothers. There is no mention of George Welch.

"If you feed her, she will eat."
-DSE Cascaddan, 7JUL99

"I'll do the things that need to be done. Souls are for liberal arts majors, Noonan. I was an engineer."
-Stephen King, Bag of Bones

"What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it!"
-Stephen King, Bag of Bones

"A Fermi Question, named for the physicist Enrico Fermi, is a question which requires estimation of physical quantities to get an answer. For example: If you could make crab cakes out of every horseshoe crab that ever lived, what would be the cost of vegetable oil to fry them all?"

"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth... could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio..."
-Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838

"Today's champion is tomorrow's crocodile shit."
-Monty Python

"And the cops wonder why everyone hates them. Even when you're the victim they treat you like you're a criminal or stupid. Nothing but a bunch of self righteous thugs."- after having my briefcase stolen from the trunk of his car, with my entire Summer Semester grades

"It's better to burn out, than it is to rust; the king is gone, but he's not forgotten."
-Niel Young

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
-Oscar Wilde

"Some day this war's gonna end..."
-Col. Kilgore, Apocalypse Now

"You're my blue sky. You're my sunny day. Don't you know that it makes me high when you turn your love my way...."
-Allmans

"Thirty-nine thousand screaming teenagers most certainly can be wrong!"
-Daniel S. E. Cascaddan, 17AUG99

"How are you going to distinguish between competent, relevant answers and blasts of hot air from people barely less ill-informed than you are?"
-Rick Moen

"... most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you... and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it is actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeek out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have the chance to learn."
-Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

"I believe the Battle of the Network Stars should be fought with guns!"
-Steve Martin

"That supersonic blowtorch of his has the glide ratio of a grand piano."
-Ben Bova, Moonrise

"Stress management: it is the difference between pushing your husband down the stairs and just thinking about it."
-unknown

"Nothing is more buoyant than Helium because nothing weighs less than Helium."
-Daniel S. E. Cascaddan 10/99, on the concept of a vacuum dirigible.

"Rules are for those who would be ruled."
-Space Island One (possibly he was quoting)

"This jacket worn in grateful memory of the dear animal who gave her earthly life to protect an aviator from wind and cold."
-Richard Bach, Out of My Mind

"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams..."
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"As an earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said - and calenders."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

"... just a mouthful for a dolphin, but the last dance for a flounder..."

"Are you trying to give the public eyeball conjunctivitis?"
-Daria, the Anti-teen

"If you water it and it dies, it is a plant. If you pull it out and it grows back, it is a weed."
-Gallagher

"A person is a person, no matter how small."
-Horton

"You people need a new sheriff."
-Clint Eastwood

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"You taught me to question authority, [dad]." "I meant Nixon, not me."

"I don't need sensitivity training, you strident, power-mad tart!"
-Dick Solomon

"...trying is the first step towards failure."
-Homer Simpson

"...since the Summer of 1983, the RAND Corporation had been carrying out a study for the U.S. Air Force examining the possibilities for exploiting the high energy release from matter-antimatter annihilation."
-Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons, Gsponer & Hurni, INESAP

"...antimatter research is possibly the most important and vigorous of the fourth generation nuclear weapons research and development programs."
-Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons, Gsponer & Hurni, INESAP

"An object at rest can not be stopped."
-The Evil Midnight Bomber, What Bombs at Midnight

"That's the trouble with a reputation for eccentricity; after you've got it, even the most ordinary behavior looks odd, just because it's yours."
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

"Americans are lazy and violent. We can't even be bothered to get out the car to shoot somebody."
-Dennis Leary

"I show up. I listen. I try to laugh."
-Anna Quindlen, Villanova Commencement Address

"I occupy a chair at the University."
"I hear ya! That's about all I did in school too."

"Guns don't kill people; physics kills people."
-Dick Solomon, Third Rock from the Sun

"Don't go for the geniuses; they never want to sleep."
-West Wing

"Thank you for complying with sammich day. I hereby declare sammich day to be a success. I hereby declare sammich day to be over."
-DSEC, 1/00,

"That shit don't mean nothin' to me; if I let the monster out, you're gonna do what it wants."

"It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man's face. What next? young Copperfield wondered."
-John Irving, Cider House Rules

"What a sense of security Homer had felt in that moment of laughter with friends in the enclosed dark of the moving car, and what a sense of freedom the car itself gave to him - its seemingly effortless journeying was a wonder to Homer Wells, for whom the idea of of motion (not to mention the sense of change) was accomplished only rarely and only with enormous strife."
-John Irving, Cider House Rules

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"
-Bruce Springsteen, The River

"I'm down with Bill Gates. I call him 'Money' for short. I call him up at home and make him do my tech support."
-Weird Al Yankovich, It's all about the Pentiums

Marine Forecast: "The Marines will be pissed off and highly serious today. There will be lots of pushups and running, close order drill, and gunnery practice at the range. Marines will continue to be pissed off into the foreseeable future. A pissed off Marine advisory is in effect from Point Marina to Point Lobos through Saturday. That is all."

"The creator of our universe wanted human beings to become space travelers. We were given a moon that was just far enough away to require the development of sophisticated technologies, yet close enough o allow us to be successful on our first concentrated attempt."
-Kraft Ehricke, Washington DC, 1984.

"I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world."
-Walt Whitman

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief..... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
-Wendell Berry, Peace of Wild Things

"The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell, but it goes like mad!"
-Richard P. Feynman, Lectures on Computation

"It is a pain like one percent of being kicked in the balls, only it goes on for three days."
-Nancy Cascaddan,

"What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parenthesis."
-John Irving, The Cider House Rules

"Sittin' on a fence, that's a dangerous course. You could even catch a bullet from a peace keepin' force."
-Mark Knopfler, Once Upon a Time in the West

"She was in a frictionless, three-dimensional environment, like a huge ice rink, where Newton's laws held sway in their bare simplicity."
-Stephen Baxter, Titan

"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer."
-Bruce Graham

"Cash, every movie costs two thousand one hundred eighty four dollars."
-Steve Martin, Bowfinger

"Mark point A. Then mark point B. Only one line, AB, can be drawn through these two points. Say that events, happening hadon by hadon in the unimagineably brief slice of reality that is the present, are points. Connecting these points would then create lines, and the lines figures - figures that would give shape to our lives, our world. If the world were a Euclidian space, this would make the shapes of our lives comprehensible to us. But the world is not a Euclidian space. And so all our understanding is no more than a reductive mathematics for the world. Language as a kind of geometry."
-Kim Stanely Robinson, The Blind Geometer

"Science is a system of knowledge, Paula. Not a comfort."
-Stephen Baxter, Titan

"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public."
-Dan Akroyd, Tommy Boy

"I got a good Christian raisin' and an eighth grade education, and I don't need y'all treatin' me this way."
-Willie Nelson

"A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives is that they don't know how poorly off they are."
-Stephen King, Green Mile

"The three most useless things to a pilot are the altitude above you, runway behind you, and a tenth of a second ago."
-Richard Bach

"That's not a goddamned ocean, it's some kind of a fucking mudflat. The English Channel is only about twenty feet deep. I bet the fucking periscope's sticking out of the water!"
-Patrick Robinson, HMS Unseen

"Everything around me suddenly turned into lines, black on white. It was a wiring diagram and ancient too, for there were symbols for thermonic valves - vacuum tubes - in it. And I was plugged into it, for I couldn't move and I had the feeling that if anybody turned up the gain, I'd blow out. I just realized that all of the valve symbols were caricatures of faces I knew..."
-James Blish, Spock Must Die!

"I'd be pissed off too, but I don't have the time."
-Scott Deeg, 7/00

"Many of students are able to many of their courses in by attending classes one day a week."
-A Graduate Studies Admissions Counselor at a University in the Pacific Northwest

"They ought to begin wars with a course in basic training and end them with a course in basic forgetting."
-Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

"Today the country has the fastest, the quietest, the most heavily armed submarine in the world."
-Admiral Bruce DeMars, Director US Navy Nuclear Propulsion, July 5, 2000, Groton, CT.

ADM: So, we're discussing gays in the military, huh?
MAJ: Yes, sir.
ADM: What do you think? I said what do you think?
MAJ: Sir, we're here to help the White House form a policy.
ADM: I know. I'm asking you what you think?
MAJ: Sir, we're not prejudiced about homosexuals.
ADM: You just don't want to see them serving in the armed forces.
MAJ: No, sir, I don't.
ADM: Because they pose a threat to unit discipline and cohesion.
MAJ: Yes, sir.
ADM: That's what I think too. I also think the military wasn't designed to be an instrument of social change.
MAJ: Yes, sir.
ADM: The problem with that is, that's what they were saying about me fifty years ago. 'Blacks shouldn't serve with whites, it would disrupt the unit.' You know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it. The unit changed. I'm an admiral in the U.S. Navy and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Beat that with a stick.
-West Wing

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson

"I hope I die before I get old!"
-Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend, born on May 19, 1945 and still kicking...

"They belonged in the field. That was where they worked. But this was a school, a place where young children came to learn about the world and to prepare for the future. Bannon was a soldier whose job it was to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect. In short, to kill. He had no business here, in a place of the future.The two hurried down the corridors in silence so as not to offend the spirit of the school."
-Harold Coyle, Sword Point

"It's only an insecurity about being consistent that makes people not believe in god."
-Nancy Cascaddan, 10SEP00

"I'm aware that I hung on the windy tree - swung there nights all of nine; gashed with a blade bloodied for Odin, myself an offering for myself knotted to that tree no man knows wither the root of it runs."
-Odin's Runic Poem

"The Mac is the elegant tool, and the PC is the tool that the majority of people use. It's still astonishing to me that people use PCs. It's like using the butt end of a screwdriver in place of a hammer."
-David Blatner

"You can't make an omelet without nuking the existing social order."
-David Weinberger

"For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky."
-Star Trek

"When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all ."
-Paul Simon, Kodachrome

"NATO is like 'take your daughter to work day'."
-Steve Marmel

"I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question."
-George W. Bush, In response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000 (Thanks to Peter Feld.)

"I know what all the words mean, but I don't know what the hell you're saying."
-Jack Kerouac

"It was the way we had over here: we'd cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie, and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies."
-Apocalypse Now

"She's my always companion; man, that's all I ever wanted."
-DSEC, 29DEC00

"Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he's dead"
-Lennon/McCartney, Girl

"Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me, I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-Frank Herbert, Dune

"It is easier to make a camel jump a ditch than to make a daughter listen to reason."
-Empire of the Sultans Exhibit at Portland Museum of Art

"What is the current starting salary of a San Jose Police Officer Recruit?
$41,897 - $66,942. I think that our society would benefit from paying teachers more than cops, instead of the other way around."

"You're so mother humping odd that I can't take my eyes off you."
-Saturday Night Live

"Think globally, shoot locally."
-unknown

"Oscar was one of God's own prototypes--a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die."
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich."
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"She looks like she knows the Dewey Decimanl System and isn't afraid to use it."
-Definite Maybe

"The television just keeps staring at me with it's one large, menacing eye, recording my reactions and behavior for use against me at some later date."

"The only people who do any good in this world are whores and bar tenders, and that's it."

"He could list that he was a reader and so had still available an important means of relaxation and escape. At the same time he was more than a mere reader in that he knew also the means of research through books, and thus possessed a powerful tool for reconstruction"
-Geaorge R. Stewart, Earth Abides

"Did you hear about how the dislexic sports announcer lost his job? He announced the winner of a Stock Car Race."

"Critics are people who come onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoot the wounded."
-unkown, PBS

"The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."
-Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

"Though so much had happened, and even though he might be deeply moved by that great experience, yet still he was the observer - the man who sat by the side, watching what happened, never quite losing himself in the experience."
-George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

"Three days ago I was a private, Sir!"
"I don't want to hear your problems, Captain. Just get out there and take that objective."
-When Trumpets Fade

"Few claim to have seen one, and even fewer believe in them."
-some moron TV writer, Discovery Channel Show on Bigfoot
Does that mean that some of the people who claim to have seen them, do not believe in them? It is a real shame that this level of writing is so common in television. Hyperbole filler material.

"With the garbage that is Swordfish and the stinking, radioactive fart of a film that Tomb Radier promises to be, things look bleak for action movie fans."
-David Walker, Willamette Week 13JUN01

paraphrase: "When the only tool you have is a hamnmer, every problem begins to look like a nail."
-Abraham Maslow

"Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available."
-Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

"I know the argument. But he says that the male army was a survival of the screening function delegated to the non-breeding males in the prehistoric pack. He says it was a curiously consistent fact that it was always the older males who sent the younger males into battle."
-Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
full quote

"Life sucks right now, so my natural inclination to go off about stuff is just increased by not having anything positive to occupy my already angry and cynical mind."
-DSEC, 25JUN01

"A bear is just a REALLY big dog."

"Jenna Bush's Federally Protected Wetlands Now Open For Public Drilling"
-Headline from the Onion.com, 29JUN01

"If you are receiving an EMERGENCY ACTION NOTIFICATION (EAN) from the Whitehouse:

1. Regular programming will be automatically interrupted and the station will carry all presidential messages LIVE until the EMERGENCY ACTION TERMINATION (EAT) is sent.
2. You may then return to regular programming.
3. Record all of this in the EAS log, of course.

Obviously, this is for The Big One. If you decide to bolt, please switch the white panel to the AUTO position so we can automatically let the rest of the free world know that the End is Near."
-Emergency Broadcast System
Special Case from the KOTK Black Book

"I want everything to be in one [grocery] bag, and I don't want the bag to be heavy!"
-Mother Skinner, The Simpsons

"Women enjoy being in a relationship more than normal people."
-British Men Behaving Badly

"I'd like to be in Program Planning, actually, but unfortunately I've got a degree."
-John Cleese, MPFC

"If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds."
-The Bhagavad-Gita

"If you can remember the sixities, you weren't there."
-unknown

"Superstition was probably the first abstract creation of human intelligence. It would probably be the first abstract creation of any new intelligence."

"Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there."
-unknown

"All I ask is that you just give me millions of dollars, and I will stop complaining, and I will stop bothering you!"
-DSEC, 8/01

"In that bewilderment of happiness too great to be borne, he awoke. The insides of his hands were moist, and his heart pounded. As he looked around the familiar room, that happiness faded out like a dying light, and in its place succeeded a woe, equally unutterable."
-George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

"Sometimes he found himself... escaping into the happiness of fantasy. He realized that he had always had something of this tendency. At times it had been an advantage, as when it had enabled him to readjust imaginatively when he had been left alone. But now he was escaping because the reality seemed to bleak to be faced. Repeatedly, a line of poetry, from the wide reading of all those years, came into his head when he tried to breast reality: Never glad confident morning again!"
-George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

"Here's the apocalypse, children! You wake up in your apartment, and you discover to your horror that you are inside the store. You are on the shelf! You go out on the fire escape and you discover, to your horror, a gigantic tourist is reaching down your air shaft!"
-Reverend Billy, anti-disney-store fringe theater

"Suicide. The word had a hissing trapped sound, like a snake squirming through a small crevice. It slipped between the tongue and the roof of the mouth like a convict on the lam. Suicide."
-Stephen King, Roadwork

"Only one thing that bothers me, and that's a feeling I get from time to time that I'm a character in some bad writer's book and he's already decided how things are going to turn out and why."
-Stephen King, Roadwork

"There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them."
-J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

"People always want to believe that truth can be best viewed by shining a light on it. Light is nice. Light is lovely, but truth is most often found in the dark, in the corners of our unconscious, because truth is seldom beauty. Truth is ugly and frightening, and makes us want to believe in a god. Truth is cold, and has no compassion for how you are feeling, or what you want. Truth is seldom beauty, and truth is seldom pleasant, and it can hardly ever be found in a field of wild flowers on a sunny Spring day, or in a church of any religion."
-DSEC, 13SEP01

"[Bin Laden] is the Where's Waldo of Islamic terrorism."
-unknown

"God forgive our sins. Those we have committed and those we have yet only dreamed of."
-unknown

"Stop the planet, I want off. I keep wishing that a small, efficient ship would drift silently out of the sky, and a couple of comfortably dressed people would stroll out and say, 'Oh, there you are! We are so glad to have found you. We must apologize for accidentally stranding you here as an infant. Living on this primitive planet must have been just awful for you! We are going to take you home now, and we are hoping that you will accept a position as Chair of the Department of Earth Studies at the University.'"
-DSEC, 29 SEP 01

"I'd rather stay here, with all the madmen, than to perish with all the sad men roaming free."
-David Bowie, All the Madmen

"President Joe once had a dream.
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a savior machine

They called it the prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food,
How they adored till it cried in its boredom,

Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now,
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all. "
-David Bowie, Savior Machine

"She's insatiable in appetite. What a drive!"
-Freddy Mercury, Killer Queen

"Mr. Burns, we found a Brazillian soccer team working in your reactor core."
"That plane crashed on my property!"
-The Simpsons

"It has been said on television recently that we should thank our veterans. If you want to thank your veterans, the best way is by refusing to willingly give up the freedoms they died for, in exchange for a false sense of security."

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence --- economic, political, even spiritual --- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

"What [he] would later consider was that this image [JFK, Jr. saluting his father's passing coffin] might stand as the representative moment of our country's most golden century, which had also died, although we are still marketing it."
-John Irving, The Fourth Hand

"Jerry: Would you do us a favor? Would you have a drink and let us smell you?
Kramer: You can smell me without the drink!"
- Seinfeld

"Doug Stephan: the amazing, talking sphincter! For hours and hours, every night, he just talkes right out of his ass. And I am forced to listen to him."

"I've often wondered while wandering among the aisles, hopelessly lost, if young Americans are issued with maps of Walmart at school and then have to answer questions such as 'Take me to the pet section from the CDs' and 'Next to which section are the cosmetics?' at a special end-of-the-term exam."
-Clare De Vries, I, Claudius

"The most moving image is that of the four year old JFK Jr saluting his coffin. With world-shocking deaths everyone seems to remember where they were and how they heard the news, as though that makes us part of the event somehow. Watching it all I just wish that it hadn't happened and feel that nostalgic bitter-sweet pain of knowing there is no way to turn back the clock."
-Clare De Vries, I, Claudius

"I feel confused. Low, depressed, so humble next to his honesty and yet equally repelled by it. Why do some people experience so much more than others and then are flawed by the pain? I know he's desperately trying to connect with people, but the air is too raw."
-Clare De Vries, I, Claudius

"I know what I am in the plan; I'm a man, and so is Lola!"
-Kinks

"Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry, "Lover, gold-hatted, high bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
-Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

"Mother and [first] baby are the same age."
-Gene Ray, timecube.com

"Life is based upon a perfect math or your arm would be too short to wipe your butt."
-Gene Ray, timecube.com

"He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch Sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"My experience with delusion is that they work better if you don't over-analyze them."
-Russel

"And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude. Farewell to all sentiments that gladden the heart. I substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked!"
-Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be."
-Oscar Wilde

"Have you noticed that if you listen to pigeons long enough, they start to sound like they are saying 'looser'?"
-unknown writer, Will and Grace

"If you lock the demons in the basement, they are going to blow up the house"
-Chuck Cassimano, aka. Bob Sakimano

"I make no secret of it. It's a mixture of some excellent opium for which I made a special trip to Canton in order to get the purest quality, and of the best hasheesh grown in the Orient. You mix these two ingredients in equal proportions and make them into pills, which you swallow when you need them."
-Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

"Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen."
-Alexander Dumas or maybe Pindar?, The Count of Monte Cristo

"[The house] was now alive, singing and flourishing, like those houses which we cherished for a long time and in which, when we have the misfortune to leave them, we involuntarily leave part of our soul."
-Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

"Remember the good old nineteen eighties?
When things were so uncomplicated?
I wish I could go back there again, and everything would be the same."
-Electric Light Orchestra, Ticket to the Moon

"I told him we already got one!"
-John Cleese, Holy Grail

"CNN: Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld's proud tool of government propaganda since 1979."

"Just 'cause I'm a school teacher, 'don't make me a pussy!"
-Evolution

"Harness the Homeless"
-suggested bumper sticker

"Defenestrate Your Television"
-suggested bumper sticker

"I wish for you, what you wish for me."
-Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels, Beth Shir Sholom, Santa Monica, CA, A Sermon for Erev Rosh haShanah, September 29, 2000/1 Tishrei 5761

"Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad."
-John Varley, Titan

"I'll flay myself alive for you, I'll climb 'till my hands and feet are bloody wrecks. And when I die, just write on my tombstone that I died like a soldier. Kick me when you're ready to go."
-John Varley, Titan

"Tattoo! Fetch me a drink, you diseased garden gnome!"
-Shaken not Stirred Radio Show

"And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared."
-Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

"The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."
-Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

"Sammy felt.... that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel."
-Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

"When I was young, I carried a gun, but I never got the chance to serve."
-Paul Simon, Baby Driver, Bridge Over Troubled Water

"Do you know what's green? Well, I am, for one thing. It isn't easy being green, but it's all there is to be, and I like it. It's what I want to be."
-Kermit, It's Not Easy Being Green

"Eventually, everybody gets shot."
-Mo's Dad, Simpsons

"I want it done. Get it done!"
-Richard Milhous Nixon, Secret Tapes

"They give you cash, which is just as good as money."
-unknown

"Good news has no clothes."
-Nelix, Voyageur

"Offspring can be disturbingly illogical, yet profoundly fulfilling. You should anticipate paradox."
-Tuvok, Voyageur

"No judge is entitled to interpret an ink blot on the grounds that there might be something under it."
-Robert H. Bork, Supreme Court nominee

".... said she married herself an architect. Kept her warm, and safe, and dry. She would have liked to say she loved the man, but she didn't like to lie."
-Dan Fogelberg, Auld Lang Syne

"Anyone with any sense had already left town."
-Bob Dylan, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

"When asked what a 'minority opinion' is, the man replies, 'Kill Whitie!'"
-unknown

"We exceedingly regret every event that may cause embarrassment to your administration, but we derive consolation from the reflection that your judgement will discern what is right, and that your usual prudence, decision, and firmness will surmount every obstacle to the preservation of the rights, peace, and dignity of the United States."
-Chief Justice John Jay, in a letter to President George Washington

"They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some end in view, or something which levels off as soon as the end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with; it is a way of life."
-Plutarch

"Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
.....it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."
-Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

"I'm not going to get into a debate over civil liberties consequences if pigs could fly. They can't fly."
-Steinhardt, ACLU

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American Essayist

"I do like sad songs. They make me want to lie on the floor. Lewis the Bear. Lying on the floor."
-David Byrne, True Stories

"[At NASA] We range from the people at the Cape who fill the tanks with fuel and push the big red button to the folks in Cleveland who are trying to figure out how to get the blue light to come out of the warp nacelles. "
-Dr. William H. Jones, http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=543

"Visualize success, but don't believe your eyes."
-The New Pornographers, Jackie

"....this makes perfect sense in a 'I'm-a-clueless-frigging-boob' sort of way!"
-Marc Andrew Matteo, Tretise on Daylight Savings Time

"I wish I were in Tijuana, eating barbecued iguana."
-Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio

"I was once told that I should imagine the words '...in bed' at the end of every fortune cookie I read. It is pretty funny, and I have thought of a new one. At the end of every declarative statement you see or hear in advertising (especially on television) add the words, '....if you are not very smart' and see how well it works."

"The Captain was the last to jump, the first to hit the ground, and he ain't gonna jump no more!"
-unknown, sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
-William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child

"I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his."
-Mists of Avalon

"I once had a dream that I could change pumpkins to coaches
But the world said no and sent me packing to the sea
Now pumpkins remain pumpkins, mice remain mice, and I am only me."
-Pumpkin

"There may or may not be atheists in any foxholes, but one thing is certain: there aren't any celibates."
-unknown, some tv movie

"To some extent, sanity can be a form of conformity."
-John Nash, Nobel Laureate

"Adventure is a sign of incompetence."
-Stephansen, Explorer

"God only knows what the other two were up to in there!"
- Refer Madness

"Take me to the shopping mall. Buy me a rubber band."
-David Byrne

"Love matches, as they are called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"The cellular customer you are calling has traveled outside the service area. Please hang up and return to a simpler way of life."
-Dharma

In regards to organized crime and labor unions: "What men did after work is what made us rich. No need to screw them at work as well."
-Road to Perdition

"We could use him as a footstool or a table to play scrabble on, then tie him up and beat him up and throw him out of Babylon!"
- Veggie Tales, Oh No! Daniel!

"It's really dark in there! I don't want to put my leg in there!"
-Daniella Smektala, March 2003

"You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war!"
-unknown

"Just because you don't know what I am doing, does not mean that I don't know what I am doing!"
-DSEC, 1987.

"She tells you she's an orphan, after you meet her family..."
-Black Crows, She Talks to Angels

"I'll come into your hallway and lean upon your velvet door."
-Bob Dylan, Temporarily Like Achilles

"No longer will I play the child in your big daddy boss theater of the retarded!"
-Mojo Nixon, Frenzy

"Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess, and baseball, when they are not preoccupied with science."
-Yann Martel, Life of Pi

"It's got wires that vibrate and give music. What can this thing be that I've found?"
-Rush, 2112

"I wouldn't piss in your mouth if your stomach was on fire! Where the hell's my money!?"
-Moj Nixon, Where the Hell's My Money!?

"Never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as you can."
-Virginia Reed

"With eyes closed, multihued metamorphizing, fantastic images overwhelmed me.... Sounds were transposed into visual sensations so that from each tone or noise a comparable colored picture was evoked, changing in form and color kaleidoscopically."
-Dr. Albert Hoffman of Sandoz Research Laboratories, inventor of LSD in 1938. On April 16, 1943, after accidentally absorbing some LSD through the skin of his fingers. (According to The War On Drugs III, by James A. Inciardi, p. 46)

"[Dubya is] a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America."
-Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Shrub

"Sacred cows make the best hamburgers."
-Abbot Hoffman

"The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff."
-G. W. Bush, 43rd POTUS

"I am not an American who wants to be treated like a criminal, when I have committed no crimes. I am an American who believes in America you are innocent until proven guilty, not the reverse. I am an ACLU member because they ensure all our basic freedoms remain intact."
-Moby, ACLU Ad in Rolling Stone.

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.""
-Ernest Shackelton

"It's not a fuck up if you can fix it when no one is watching."
-Scott Deeg, 06 JAN 03

"Cast your dancing spell my way. I promise to go under it."
-Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine man

It isn't easy being me, but it sure is a whole lot of fun, sometimes.
-DSEC, May 2004

"And I know what a louse like me in his house could do for you."
-Davif Bowie, Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dased, on the Space Oddity album.

"Lovers with confused thoughts confuse lovers with clear thoughts."
-Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

"My name is August West, and I love my Pearly Baker best more than my wife. More than my wine - more than my maker, though he's no friend of mine."
-Grateful Dead, Wharf Rat

"I'm looking for comfort that I can take from someone else
But after all, I know there is no one
That can save me, save me from myself
You were the only one "
-Billy Joel, C'Etait Toi

"And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart."
-Bob Dylan, If You See Her, Say Hello

"Velcro is as indiscriminate as the world's oldest profession."
-unknown

"It's not the point of art to show people what they want to see. It's important to make them examine themselves and reflect what the artist sees."
-Robert Mailer Anderson, Boonville

"Her life had been full of these paralytic instances, an ammo clip of misfired momentum, shooting out in rapid succession a series of blanks that kept her pinned in no man's land."
-Robert Mailer Anderson, Boonville

"But it was on occasssions that he did the unexpected that he felt the most alive. Time seemed to stop; hours slowed to minutes, separated into seconds, halted into pictures. Still-life images of emotion. Perfectly framed as any flicker of Citizen Kane, only not running reel to reel. It was a slide show in his mind flashed to make sense of the shifting world. And in these gluts, John felt he revealed himself, every beer bottle and doubt, cobwebbed corner and regret, shadow and memory in deep focus. This was who he was. Everything else was in-between. This was life."
-Robert Mailer Anderson, Boonville

"Well I wish I had a nickel
For every time I fell and blamed somebody else....
I've spent years losin' touch of what's right and what's real
Caught up in these missions of my own "
-Bob Seger, Lock and Load

"Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks"
[and voted for some as well]
"And I learned much from both of their styles."
-Jimmy Buffet, Son of a Son of a Sailor

"I saw something, man, but I didn't see it working here. You know what I mean?"
-Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider

"Psychology: The science of inventing words for things that do not exist."
-Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, The Butlerian Jihad

"Journalism: The carelessly inaccurate reporting of facts.
Journalist: One who is expert at nothing, but pretends to be expert at everything."

"...a map, a large one, which had been ruined by repeated and slapdash refolding. There were a number of such maps in the glove compartment of Skidbladnir, puzzle-maps, Rubik's cubes of paper so thoroughly "bollixed up," as Mr. Feld put it, that they couldn't ever really be opened anymore. They had been folded so many times and so incorrectly that they were now forever sealed by some mysterious origami of carelessness."
-Michael Chabon, Summerland

"He liked to quote that witty lady's opinion on the German language, which held that German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, so you couldn't interrupt."
-Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

"Most of the loyal subjects to the King of Beers are a bunch of cousin humping morons."
-Storm Large, My Commercial

"The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our republic."
-Justice Black, New York Times Company v. United States, 403 U.S. 670, 91 S.Ct. 2140 (1971).

"For me, this was the point where the whole project made the transition from theory to reality. I squatted next to those tracks and realized that the last obstacle had suddenly been removed, that we really were going to run the car. And to my surprise, it didn't feel good at all. Suddenly the whole thing seemed stupid and insane and dangerous and illegal as hell. But by then it was way too late to stop."
-carinthecliff@hotmail.com, Legend of the JATO Car

"Unanswered questions are far less dangerous than unquestioned answers."
-unknown

"We are stardust, we are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."
-Joni Mithcell, Woodstock

"Superman has killer weed. He gets it from Dan Rather"
-Gibby Haynes, His Problem

"You are a vacuous soldier of the gift store Gestapo!"
-author, title

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side"
-Aristotle

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
-Stephen King, Kingdom Hospital

"Ah! You want to know about the women?"
"Is that what is most important?"
"No! Sometimes they are. It depends."-The Big Blue

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill

"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog."
-unknown

"George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal."
-Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald, January 21, 2005

"Jesus has a statue of a middle-class American hypocrite on his dashboard."
-George Carlin

"My brain hurts a lot."
-David Bowie, Five Years

"Steal your face right off of your head."
-Dead, He's Gone

"... research conducted at the Center for Jesus/Elvis Studies, at Gallenberg, Tennessee..."
-unknown

"The Viet Cong hooked my genitals up to a car battery for thirty-eight hours, to get me to confess to something I actually did. You are going to have to do better than 'sorry'.""
-Greg the Bunny

"The great danger in having such a great imagination is that the real world can never really live up to my expectations."
-DSEC, 4/05

"She made me soup from the juice of a chicken."
-God the Devil and Bob

"Any sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and dearest intimacies, are with those of whom he is absolute master, is not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages---an intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality; making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose on others for his own interest or glorification."
-John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, (chptr. 3)

"In an advanced democratic country the economic order would be understood as instrumental not merely to the production and distribution of goods and services but to a much larger range of values, including democratic values. ... The producer/consumer is - in the theoretical imagination, if not in actuality - a supremely rational computer forever calculating and comparing precise increments of gain and loss at the margin and acting always to maximize net utilities. Loyalty may be of interest to historians, sociologists, advertisers, and ordinary human beings everywhere, but in the standard theoretical perspective of capitalism it is not a characteristic of rational economic actors."
-Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics(chptr. 23)

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.Ê There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things.Ê Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas.Ê Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
-Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952

"... only 1.62 x 10-33 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There's a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me -- and that's just the scanning."
-James Patrick Kelly, Think Like A Dinosaur

".... jealousy, the shadow of greed it is!"
-Yoda, Episode 3

"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
-Mr. Justice Brandeis, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262 (1932)

"Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes."
-John Lennon, Across the Universe
"And through the window in the wall
Comes streamin in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning"
-Pink Floyd, Echoes

"Life sucks no matter what, so don't be fooled by location changes."
-Daria (fortune cookie), Is It Fall Yet?

"...one's house is never again as clean as it is when you're writing your thesis."
-Barbara Boothby

"Moods are for cattle and love play, not fighting!"
-Frank Herbert?, Dune (possibly just from the Lynch film)

"Hell hath no fury like the vast robot armies of a woman scorned."
-unknown, Futurama

"The fact is that I prefer my own view, full as it is of the suggestive hubbub of commerce, to that of Mrs. Polaris, which is so placid and beautiful that it suggests to me the shame of failed ambition; but to contemplate a question one needs an uninterrupted vista, and that is why I stood at the window of my secretary. Whitecaps were chalking the bay.""
-Ethan Canin, Accountant

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light... a nostalgia, a dream."
-John Steinbeck, About Ed Rickets

"Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are - at this instant - poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?"
-Dan Simmons, Hyperion

"There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of... revenge that comes with outraging the public decency."
-Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

"I'm trying to contain an outbreak and you're driving the monkey to the airport!"
-Hank Hill

"His demeanor proclaimed a relaxed confidence that all men dreamed of and precious few obtained. His wit was obvious, his attention to others sincere, and his sense of humor legendary. I found myself disliking the son of a bitch at once."
-Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

"He is an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, dipped in kiss-my-ass sauce."
-I thought of this, but I am not sure that I did not hear it somewhere else.

"My own definition [of science fiction] is pretty unforgiving. If you can take the science out of the story, and still have a story left, it's not science fiction. More than that, if the science in the story is wrong or ridiculous, again it's not science fiction."
-Charles Sheffield

"The only question is whether or not he can escape them, sweet fantasies which might have been laced with poison all along."
-Richard Bachman (Stephen King), The Regulators, Seth Place, Seth Time

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-Robert Anson Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long

"Here lies ________. He lived for better and for worse, but he is dead for good."

"Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly endebted are we to this kinsman of death that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together."
-Thomas Dekker, excerpted from Charles SheffieldBetween the Strokes of Night

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-Theodore Roosevelt , May 7, 1918

"Believe in the power of the lesbian phone tree."
- The L Word

Q: What color are you?
"I would be infrared. Nobody can see me but insects and government storm troopers with their special goggles. When they come for me, I am just fucked anyway, so what the hell."

"I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days."
-Bull Durham

"Boy, I feel a lot safer now that [Martha Stewart's] behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her fanny off to jail."
-George Carlin

"If my wishes were changes, the world would be a MUCH better place.... for anyone who doesn't piss me off."

"... because she is crazy as a shit-house rat, and has a foul fucking mouth to boot!"
-author, title

"Even the air seemed on fire, subtly aflame with energy as it does when you are young, when the synapses are firing wildly and death is far away."
-Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

"The Farraguts were the sort of people who claimed to be sustained by tradition, but who were in fact sustained by by the much more robust pursuit of a workable improvisation, uninhibited by consistency."
-John Cheever, Falconer

About clapping applause: "It had always astonished and deeply moved him to realize that so diverse and warlike a people could have agreed to this signal of enthusiasm and assent."
-John Cheever, Falconer

"You must master your joystick as a fisherman masters bait!"
-Gimpy Undergrads

"Using drugs to help you sleep will only lead to sleep, and sleep is a gateway drug to being awake."
-They Might be Giants, Wearing a Raincoat

"Guns don't kill people, rappers do."
-Goldie Lookin' Chain, Straight Outta Newport

"Helsinki is a hard place to be afflicted with self-doubts."
-John Irving, Until I Find You

"Education is the sleeping pill that makes dreams happen."
-Peggy Hill, King of the Hill, season three, Wings of the Dope

"Soon the second Nixon administration, the presidency of the modern Warren G. Harding will be finally, thankfully finished."

"Harding was notorious for his verbal gaffes, such as his comment "I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved." [2] His errors were compounded by his insistence on writing his own speeches. Although it might not have been a mispronunciation as some thought, Harding's most famous "mistake" was his use of the word "normalcy" when the more correct word to use at the time would have been "normality." Harding decided he liked the sound of the word and made "Return to Normalcy" a recurring theme. Critic H.L. Mencken disagreed, saying of Harding, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." Mencken also coined the term "Gamalielese" to refer to Harding's distinctive style of speech. Upon Harding's death, poet E. E. Cummings said "The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Harding

"Could I ask you a hypothetical question?"
"That mode of thinking IS my life."
-system administrator, Haiku Tunnel

"Normal isn't just an illusion; it is a lie... and a particularly destructive one, at that."
-Me

"In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us - not always in one momentous even but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. For surely Mrs. Oastler was one of the thieves of Jack's childhood - not that she necessarily meant to hurt him, or that she gave the matter any thought one way or another. Leslie Oastler was simply someone who disliked innocence, or she held innocence in contempt for reasons that weren't even clear to her."
-John Irving, Until I Find You

"He spends his time living in a rock and roll fantasy.
He spends his time living on the edge of reality."
-Ray and Dave Davies, the Kinks, Misfits

"Dan is a fan, and he lives for our music; it's the only thing that gets him by."
-Ray and Dave Davies, The Kinks, A Rock and Roll Fantasy

"We're definitely on the bleeding edge; you're going to see things go wrong today."
-a space elevator team at the X-Prize Cup festival

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."
-Ojibwe saying, "Spopranos"

Survey Question: "Which of the following health and wellness issues, if any, do you currently experience?"
Answer: "My ability to move objects with my mind is slightly diminished as I get older, in direct proportion to mass of the object, for items massing more than one gigagram, especially if made of materials less dense than liquid water. I can hardly move Styrofoam at all... not even small chunks of it, but I can still throw a rail car off the tracks and into the river without even closing my eyes to concentrate on it."

"Afterward, we relaxed with a pipe of Phobos Red, reputed to be the best marijuana in the solar system. I wouldn't know; I'd never smoked anything else. It's not illegal on Mars. Some people say it will lead to hard, dangerous drugs, like alcohol, but that's not been our experience on Mars."
-John Varley, Red Lightning

"Handcrafted by blind Tibetan monks?"
"Pieced together by mute Chinese nuns. Now that's craftsmanship!"
-Joss Whedon?, Angel

"Most of the sex I've had in my life was not as personal as that kiss."
-Cameron Crowe, Elizabethtown

"Every female scientist was therefore potentially a kind of Mr. Spock, the rational side foregrounded and emphasized while the emotional side was denied, and the two co-existing at odds with one another."
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

"Male Homo Sapiens desires company of female Homo Sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast."
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain

"Tea Zone has the distinctive honor of being the one to pop my virgin bubble-tea cherry. Yes, I was seduced by the sensuous pictures of voluptuous tapioca drinks in the window; drawn in by the overwhelming desire to hold those plump, little pearls in my mouth; incapable of resisting the urge to swallow. I just had to have it. And have it, I did. What an orgasmic experience - sweet, honey tea with passion-fruit and lots of black tapioca pearls coming up through the wide-mouthed straw. Thank you, Tea Zone... I'll always remember you as my first."
-Lisa

"There's a warm, threadbare place at the back of my heart."
-Ben Arthur, End of the Day

"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For [t]oday, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!""
-Apple Computer, Inc., 1984 Superbowl Commercial, original unaired text

"And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through..."
-David Bowie, Changes

"God knows I'm good. Surely god won't look the other way."
-David Bowie, Space Oddity

"I remember times when we were young and so unsophisticated
Seems like nothing could go wrong and all the nights were long and lovely"
-Epoxies, Toys

"The tastes and looks and sounds. Her face. Were those what happiness consisted of? A smile, a glance, as the man had said - what ample borrowers of eternity they are!"
-Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting

"If it were damned, I'll be damned if I didn't do it. If it splashed, I drank it, and I laid all kinds of women."
The Great Waldo Pepper

"Andy: Where is the disaster plan?
Les: I don't know; it's in the file cabinet, I guess.
Andy: Where in the file cabinet?
Les: Try A, for apocalypse."
-WKRP in Cincinnati

"I went to see the doctor of philosophy,
with a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee.
He never did marry, nor see a b-grade movie.
He graded my performance. He said he could see through me.
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind;
got my paper and I was free!"
-Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine

Here at Schmuck, Schmuck, Schmuck, and Schmuck Marketing Associates, where our motto is, "If we can get 'em to watch it, we can get 'em to buy it." Because there is very little room in our society for the rare people who neither want to be shepherd nor sheep.
-me

"It's a [shame] about those jets. They really spoil a very nice area."
-Bill Forsyth, Local Hero

Would society rather be right or happy? What if happy and wrong is not sustainable?
-me

"All three buildings suffered from the peculiar form of governmental architecture a friend of mine had once described as "Twentieth Century Post-Gothic Paranoid": no windows in featureless walls on the ground floor, and narrow casement windows on the upper floors resembling the archer slots in medieval castles. Trust us, we're the government..."
-Allen Steele, The Jericho Iteration

"Bored now." and "I'm not coming back."
-Willow

"Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker."
-Charles M. Schulz, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

"I am the quen bee, and you are the drone... your job is to feed me, do me, and die."
-My Name is Earl

"American democracy has become a mindless spectator sport, and with no greater attachment to a real contest than professional wrestling."

"I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them. They say, 'sing while you slave,' and I just get bored."
-Bob Dylan, Maggie's Farm

"Hey, listen to me, guys, or you'll end up back in the box."
-Monkees, Head

"Lord guard and guide all those who fly
Through Thy great void above the sky
Be with them all on ev'ry flight
In radiant day or darkest night
Oh, hear our prayer, attend Thy grace
To those in peril deep in space.
-John Varley, Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo

"Why get a stretch limo? Why not get a land yacht? They have beds, so you can get it on or sleep it off."
-2 FEB 08

"It is a fine line between genius and insanity." In reality I think it is a broad, constantly changing chaotic grey region, and so even if we do not cross the line back and forth, it crosses us.

"You have clearly taught him the importance of facade. But have you taught him the importance of KNOWING it is a facade?"

"You can't tell a pilot what to do when he's not flying." [And you sure as shit can't tell him what to do when he is!]
-Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

"Information wants to be free."
-Mac, Veronica Mars

[We are all]" ...a footpring on the beach. And the tide is coming in."
-Doctor Who

"Some days, when the wind stands fair, and The Doctor comes to call, everybody lives."
-Doctor Who (2008)

"Do you think that I'm a fool? Do you think that I don't see, that ditch out in the valley, that they're diggin' just for me?"
-Steely Dan, Bad Sneakers

"I'm sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
The three is all that's good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight?
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
With just some quick arithmetic
I know I'll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see?
Another square root of a three
As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed"
-David Feinberg, Root Three Poem
featured in: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

"Are we in danger?"
"No."
"Would you tell me, if we were?"
"No."

"Friendship is the intersection between respect and voluntary love."

"Quote"
-author, title

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