Tuesday, July 10, 2007

George F. Will

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

Voltaire

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Voltaire

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Harlan Ellison

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.

Thomas Jefferson

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Albert Einstein

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul

Every person, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Marquis D.A.F. de Sade

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

Ambrose Bierce

Disobedience: The silver lining to the cloud of servitude.

Wernher von Braun

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Bernard Berenson

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Quintus Ennius

No sooner said than done, so acts your man of worth.

Voltaire

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly, that is the first law of nature.

Hunter S. Thompson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

Benjamin Franklin

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Alexai Sayle

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say "elevator", we say "lift" ... they say "President", we say "stupid psychopathic git".

Terry Pratchett

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Emo Philips

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Stephen King

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."

Dennis Ritchie

//UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Albert Einstein

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.

Leonard Brandwein

Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers.

William Reece Smith, Jr.

We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all.

Patrick Henry

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

Walter Kerr

Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.

Stephen King

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Robert A. Heinlein

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

Chapman Cohen

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

Ambrose Bierce

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Ambrose Bierce

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

Thomas Jefferson

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.

Dalai Lama

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Haile Selassie

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

Frederick Douglass

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.

William Ellery Channing

The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny ... In war, then, as in peace, assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark of all our rights and privileges.

Benjamin Franklin

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Voltarine de Cleyre

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Galileo Galilei

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.

Poul Anderson

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Pope John Paul I

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

Mario Cuomo

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)

While there's life, there's hope.

Stephen Jay Gould

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

R. Buckminster Fuller

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

Evan Esar

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.

Harry Golden

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.