Quotes

Mage

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though,
We are not now that strength which in elder days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
-Lord Alfred Tennyson,Ulysses.

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
-- Albert Einstein

No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.

At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.
-- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow

Be always displeased with what thou art, if you desirest to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest. But if thou have enough thou perishest. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate.
-- St. Augustine

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.
-- Horace (65-8 B.C.)

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of this world, all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.
-- Byron

Character is destiny.
-- Heraclitus (540?-480? B.C.)

Creativity in living is not without its attendant difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. And the unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time when people finally realize you were right, they'll say it was obvious all along.
-- Alan Ashley-Pitt

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
-- Miguel de Unamuno, "The Tragic Sense of Life", 1913 Coincidence, n.:
You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.
-- G. K. Chesterton

"I had to hit him -- he was starting to make sense."

"I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building."
-- Charles Schulz

It is easy-- terribly easy-- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care.
- G.B. Shaw - Candida

I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

Avoid reality at all costs.

Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate. Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and great effort pushing boulders into a single word.
It can be seen from 10,000 feet, silhouetted against the snow. Government officials exchanged memos full of circumlocutions (no Latin equivalent exists) but failed to word an appropriation bill for the destruction of this cairn, that wouldn't alert the press and embarrass both Parliament and Party.
It stands today, a monument to human spirit. If life exists on other planets, this may be the first message received from us.
-- The Realist, November, 1964.

"I didn't know it was impossible when I did it."

Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.,
-- Kelvin Throop III

Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy.

They condemn what they do not understand.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Be always displeased with what thou art, if you desirest to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest. But if thou have enough thou perishest. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate.
-- St. Augustine

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one"

Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity.
-- Alvy Ray Smith

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

I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.

"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes. Just then, he vanished.

"I don't think they could put him in a mental hospital. On the other hand, if he were already in, I don't think they'd let him out."

"Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern technology. Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat."

"I begin to see," Old Drake said heavily. "Pain is a trap. That was why you put the broken glass in your shoes that time. Fear of poverty is a trap. That's why you tried begging on the streets. You're trying to become a Superman, like those crazy boys in Chicago, the `thrill killers.' What you did to that whore last year was part of all this. What else have you done?"
"A lot." Robert shrugged. "Enough to be canonized as a saint, or to be burnt as a diabolist. None of it seems to add up, though. I still haven't found the way." He suddenly made a new effort, and the chains slipped to the floor. "Simple yoga and muscle control," he said without pride. "The chains in the mind are much harder."
-- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!

The duck hunter trained his retriever to walk on water. Eager to show off this amazing accomplishment, he asked a friend to go along on his next hunting trip. Saying nothing, he fired his first shot and, as the duck fell, the dog walked on the surface of the water, retrieved the duck and returned it to his master.

"Notice anything?" the owner asked eagerly.
"Yes," said his friend, "I see that fool dog of yours can't swim."

"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do."
-- McCloctnik the Lucid

The first time, it's a KLUDGE!
The second, a trick.
Later, it's a well-established technique!
-- Mike Broido, Intermetrics

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."
-- Dave Barry

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
-- H. L. Mencken

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.
-- John Ciardi

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
-- John Keats

I just forgot my whole philosophy of life!!!

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-- Albert Einstein

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
-- Steven Weinberg

All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein -- it rejects it.
-- P. Medawar

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.
-- The Book of Bokonon / Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I have a book by Michael Benton (of the goons fame) about how to be a magician. The first chapter gives four rules of being a magician:

Do what you do not say
Say what you do not do
Do not do what you say
Do not say what you do


People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

A large number of installed systems work by fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work.
-- Anatol Holt

A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane

'DROP THE SCYTHE, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.'
-- (Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man)

... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
-- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, especially simian ones. They are not all that subtle."
-- (Terry Pratchett, Lords And Ladies)

To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power.

"Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big, scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
-- A analysis of Neo-Nazis, from "The Badger" comic

Onward and forever on
Destination Eschaton
Nowhere to hide
Nowhere to run
From Alpha into Omega
-- The Shaman, Destination Eschaton

Any great truth can -- and eventually will -- be expressed as a cliche -- a cliche is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, "The black cat is always the last one off the fence." I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true.
-- Solomon Short

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
-- Sydney J. Harris

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

"I only touch base with reality on an as-needed basis!"
-- Royal Floyd Mengot (Klaus)

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
-- Jules de Gaultier

Impossible, adj.:
(1) I wouldn't like it and when it happens I won't approve; (2) I can't be bothered; (3) God can't be bothered. Meaning (3) may perhaps be valid but the others are 101% whaledreck.
-- Chad C. Mulligan, "The Hipcrime Vocab"

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
-- Walt Disney

Linus:

I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think only about today.

Charlie Brown:

No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will getr better.

Is simplicity best, or simply the easiest,
The narrowest path is always the holiest,
so walk on barefoot for me,
suffer some misery,
if you want my love,
if you want my love.
----- Judas

The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

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

"No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party or movement. He will always find himself out of step."
-- Sidney Hook

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.
-- Jonathan Winters in "The Twilight Zone"

Acolytes

That's just part of the deal
That's the way I feel
Put my arms around you
I'll stand in front of you,
Take the force of the blow
--Massive attack

Akashic Brotherhood

"The wise one is not learned; The learned one is not wise."
"I am learning" said Yen Hui.
"How?" asked the Master
"I have forgotten the rules of Righteousness and the levels of Virtuousness.", he answered.
"Good, but you can do better", said the Master.
Some days later Yen Hui said: "I am making progress."
"How?" asked the Master.
"I have forgotten the Rituals and Music", was the answer.
"Better, but not perfect", said the Master
Some time later Yen Hui said to the Master: "Now I will sit down and forget everything."
The Master looked up, surprised. "What do you mean, forget everything?" ha quickly asked.
"I forget my body and my senses, and I leave all illusion and knowledge behind me.", Yen Hui answered. "In the middle of Nothing I enter the source of All."
The Masted bowed: "You have transcended the limitations of Time and Knowledge. You have left me far behind you. You have found the Path."

I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment."
-- Gotama Buddha

"The Sleeper must Awaken."
- Leo Atreides, Dune (movie)

I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light---
"Let me into the darkness again."
-- Stephan Crane, "The Black Riders and Other Lines", 1895

Celestial Chorus

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell

I have ... a terrible need ... shall I say the word? ... of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.
-- Vincent van Gogh

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
-- Lao Tsu

"Nirvana? Thats the place where the powers that be and their friends hang out.
-- Zonker Harris

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
-- Indian proverb

Hail to the sun god
He sure is a fun god
Ra! Ra! Ra!

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
-- Thomas Paine "The Age of Reason"

The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately, and therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always Observable that those who are combined to destroy a people's liberties practice every art to poison their morals.
--Samuel Adams, 1772

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.
-- The Rev. Jesse Jackson

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has bought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
-- James Weldon Johnson

"And God said to Moses: I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: I AM have sent me unto you."
Exodus 3:14

"Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?"
John 10:34

"There is one body, and one spirit, even as ye are called in the hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all."
Ephesians 4:4-16

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."
-- St. Augustine

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --
Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up along delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight"

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
(Galileo Galilei)

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but--live for it.
-- Colton

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches.
-- Matthew 6:24

One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.
-- Thomas B. Reed

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

"Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness, generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible to eradicate."
-- Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)

There is only one greater folly than that of the fool who says in his heart there is no God, and that is the folly of the people that says with its head that it does not know whether there is a God or not.
-- Otto von Bismark (1815-1898)

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a common censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
-Thomas Jefferson

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill

Durken: "I will have to say that this morning, I was the leader of the universe as I knew it. This afternoon, I am only a voice in a chorus. But I think it was a good day."
--"First Contact", Stardate 44

When we are young
Wandering the face of the Earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we're only immortal --
For a limited time
"Dreamline" -- Rush My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
-- Christopher Morley

Cult of Ecstasy

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
-- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

The more things change, the more they stay insane.

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
-- Anatole France

Never drink coke in a moving elevator. The elevator's motion coupled with the chemicals in coke produce hallucinations. People tend to change into lizards and attack without warning, and large bats usually fly in the window. Additionally, you begin to believe that elevators have windows.

If you're not wasted, the day is
-Anon, graffitti

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
-- Rebecca West

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
-- Max Eastman (1883-1969)

The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
(Joe Ancis)

Moment of inner freedom
when the mind is opened & the
infinite universe revealed
& the soul is left to wander
dazed & confus'd searching
here&there for teachers & friends
---Jim MOrrison, The Opening of the Trunk

Philosophy is the highest music.
-- Plato

If you wish to travel back in time, music is the surest and most gentle of all roads.
-- Jim Fiebig

Poets are all who love -- all who feel great truths -- And tell them.
-- Bailey

Acid absorbs 47 times it's weight in excess Reality.

It's not peace I want, not mere contentment. It's boundless joy and ecstasy for me.
-- Kugell

Marijuana is nature's way of saying "high".

Arnie: "In my country, we lined all the drug dealers and drug addicts and shot them in the back of the head."
Fellow cop: "Nah, that wouldn't work here. Too many politicians."
Arnie: "Shoot them first."
-- "Red Heat"

"O Freude himmliche G|tterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium!
Wir betreten feuertrunken Himmliche dein Heiligtum.
Deine zauber binden wieder was die Mode streng geteilt.
Alle Menchen werden Bruder wo dein sanfter Fugel weilt!"
--Schiller, Ode to Joy

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden", 1854

...the wild boys runnin'
into some trippin'
learnin' to control about the big brother,
trying like hell not to blow my cover.


Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
I've read that things inanimate have moved,
And as with living souls have been inform'd
By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
-- Congreve

Mankind has been on a bad trip for a long time now.

Drugs may be the road to nowhere, but at least they're the scenic route!

[In the 60's] there was madness in any direction, at any hour ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ...
And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply `prevail'. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques.
-- Art Linkletter

It looks like blind screaming hedonism won out.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
-- Voltaire

"Life is too important to take seriously."
-- Corky Siegel

LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand.

Dreamspeakers

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
-- Edward Abbey

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?
Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part I

Eeny, Meeny, Jelly Beanie, the spirits are about to speak!
-- Bullwinkle Moose

Euthanatos

"Be without fear as the great metamorphosis begins.
Fantastic and terrifying visions are illusory, laugh at them and reject them, they cannot touch you now, go beyond.
It is your choice to become one with this source if you so will it. It is your choice to remain separate if you will this instead. Do what thou Wilt.
If you would remain separate, then you must seek a new life. In seeking rebirth, seek the emanations of love, vitality and intelligence; go where there is strength and freedom."
--Peter J. Carrol, Liber Null & Psychonaut

Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase "being born" is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses

For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.
-- Johnson

"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
-- Dave Enyeart

"...while I know many people who emphatically believe in reincarnation, I have never met or read one who could satisfactorily explain population growth."
-- Spider Robinson

Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.

Entropy isn't what it used to be.

"I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."
-- George Bernard Shaw

If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?

I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
-- Pete Seeger

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
-- Dorothy Parker

I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness;
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall,
Like a bright exhalation in the evening
And no man see me more.
-- Shakespeare

Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.
-- Ed Howe

Familiars

How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?
-- Elliot, "E.T."

Foci

"Usul no longer needs the wierding module"
- a fremen, Dune (movie)

Hollow Ones

"The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom."
-- Clarence Darrow

Children, apples of my eyes, when you feel like weeping gems, go to the garbage dumps, the dead ends of the labyrinth, the oubliettes, the cemeteries, the charnal grounds. Find yourself a spot there and surrender to the melancholy of the place, recollect the sadness around you and the misery of the world, and wish ardently that they cease. The more sincere your feelings, the clearer the gems that will form. Gems from cruelty have facets, gems from broken hearts are purple or orange, the death of a child brings forth emeralds; animals that people torment bring forth pearls and diamonds. The deeper the emotion, the more luminous the gem.
--Esther Rochon/Henry Polard

Emallgration:
Migration toward lower-tech, lower-information environments containing a lessened emphasis on consumerism.
-- Douglas Coupland, Generation X

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clair who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh.
E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech.
G is for George, smothered under a rug, H is for Hector, done in by a thug.
I is for Ida who drowned in the lake, J is for James who took lye, by mistake.
K is for Kate who was struck with an axe, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Nevil who died of enui.
O is for Olive, run through with an awl, P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl
Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire, R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire.
S is for Susan who parished of fits, T is for Titas who flew into bits.
U is for Una who slipped down a drain, V is for Victor, squashed under a train.
W is for Winie, embedded in ice, X is for Xercies, devoured by mice.
Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in, Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.
-- Edward Gorey "The Gastly Crumb Tines"

However, never daunted, I will cope with adversity in my traditional manner ... sulking and nausea.
-- Tom K. Ryan

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer

"Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored."
-- George Saunders' dying words

I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
Oh, how do I know my youth is all spent?
My get-up-and-go has got-up-and-went.
But in spite of it all, I'm able to grin,
And think of the places my get-up has been.
-- Pete Seeger

Iteration X

"A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension."
-- Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature"

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
-- Kelvin Throop III

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(phi)!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities-- potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry-- that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.
- Gregory Benford - Timescape

Marauders

Somewhere, just out of sight, the unicorns are gathering.

The Yeti, whom we know of only
By the tracks he leaves behind,
Hunts the mountains, sad and lonely,
For a mate to breed his kind.

The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.

It's just a jump to the left

And then a step to the right.
Put your hands on your hips
And pull your knees in tight.
It's the pelvic thrust
That really gets you insa-a-a-a-ane
LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!
-- Rocky Horror Picture Show

Nephandi

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Dispossessed"

'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.
-- William Shakespeare

"Messin' around with girls in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it."
-- (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

- ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL.
- "Yeah?"
- JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE.
- "Ngk", said Crowley.
-- (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)

Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but *between* them, They wait serene and primal, undimensioned and by us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod Earth's fields and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold them as They tread . . . They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest of city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known them, and what man knows Kadath? . . . Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can He spy them only dimly. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, where the spheres meet. After summer is winter; and after winter, summer. They ruled once where man rules now; where man rules now, they shall rule again.
- Abdul al-Hazred, Al Azif

"I love to eat them Smurfies
Smurfies what I love to eat
Bite they ugly heads off,
Nibble on they bluish feet."

"Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets"
-- The Brigader, "Dr. Who"

It is against the law for a monster to enter the corporate limits of Urbana, Illinois.

Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence
1. Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear bomb; use the stairs.
2. When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit the ground.
3. If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials.
4. Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to psychological problems.
5. Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge. Learn to recognize foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes, shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc.
6. Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will be scarce in the post-nuclear age.
7. Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles.
8. Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be staggering illegally.
9. Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more sanitary due to limited circulation.
10. Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on D-Day.

Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.

New World Order

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion ... In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
-- Alan Barth

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be. -- Lao Tsu 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.
-- William Ellery Channing

... 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.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre

The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
-- Abraham Lincoln

Of what you see in books, believe 75%. Of newspapers, believe 50%. And of TV news, believe 25% -- make that 5% if the anchorman wears a blazer.

Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.
-- Lewis Lapham

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Salvor Hardin, "Foundation"

"The most important question in the study of government is 'how can we prevent government from going berserk and killing off half the population?'"
-- John Kormylo

Join in the new game that's sweeping the country. It's called "Bureaucracy". Everybody stands in a circle. The first person to do anything loses.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
- George Orwell

"The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war."
-- John Hospers

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
-- Aesop

As long as I am mayor of this city [Jersey City, New Jersey] the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist". You never hear a real American talk like that.
-- Frank Hague (1896-1956)

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Don't suspect your friends -- turn them in!
-- "Brazil"

Finding out what goes on in the C.I.A. is like performing acupuncture on a rock.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981

I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority viewpoint -- no matter how distasteful to the majority.
-- Richard M. Nixon
What are our schools for if not indoctrination against Communism?
-- Richard M. Nixon

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus,
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous;
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
-- Gilbert & Sullivan, "Pirates of Penzance"

... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.
-- Stephen Crane

Order of Hermes

"L... the sign of the mourning of Isis."
(forms the letter "L" with his arms)
"V...the sign of Typhon and Apopis."
(Raises the arms over his head in an "V")
"X...the sign of Osiris risen."
(Crosses his arms on the chest, right over left. Forms an "X")
"L...V...X...LUX."
(Forms the symbols in order, stands with the arms outstretched to
the sides.)
"Virgo, Isis, mighty Mother. Scorpio, Apopis Destroyer. Sol, Osiris,
Slain and Risen..."
"Isis, Apopis, Osiris...IAO"
(Gradually rises the arms upwards to the "V" position while raising
his head and intoning the Name.)
"Let the Divine Light descend!"
--Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram

Lightning is one hell of a murder weapon--and the best part is, it can't be traced
--seen on a badge

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
-- Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)

"The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics."
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)

The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life.
- James Joseph Sylvester

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
-- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"

"The pyramid is opening!"
"Which one?"
"The one with the ever-widening hole in it!"
-- Firesign Theater, "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All"

All welfare and adversity that come to man and other creatures come through the Seven and the Twelve. Twelve signs of the Zodiac, as the Religion says are the twelve commanders on the side of light; and the seven planets are said to be the seven commanders on the side of darkness. And the seven planets oppress all creation and deliver it over to death and all manner of evil: for the twelve signs of the Zodiac and the seven planets rule the fate of the world.
-- The Menok i Xrat


Wear me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer than any flame.
-- Song of Solomon 8:6 (NEB)

Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you hold the hammer with both hands.

A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup."

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

. . . it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.
- John W.N. Sullivan

"I don't believe in astrology. But then I'm an Aquarius, and Aquarians don't believe in astrology."
-- James R. F. Quirk

Progenitors

Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones.

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
-- Watson and Crick, 1953

Subject: A HORROR MOVIE CHARACTER'S SURVIVAL GUIDE
* Don't fool with recombinant DNA technology unless you're sure you know what you are doing.
-BANDERS1@HR.HOUSE.GOV

We are all descendents of Adam and we are all products of racial miscegenation.
-- Lester B. Pearson

... So the next day, I told my clone that it was all over between us. I mean, it didn't seem fair, me working all week, and him picking up the paycheck. And then he comes in late, drunk, another dent in his Porsche, probably from ramming my old Toyota again, and goes to bed with my wife. So I bought him a ticket back East somewhere, drugged him, and checked him in as cargo.
Last I heard, he'd changed his first name and was going to some University or other, so I guess everything worked out.

... people do not attempt to mate with cats, and frogs do not attempt to mate with scientist (although the latter possibility might result in a researcher who jumps to conclusions).
-- "Genetic Algorithms" by David E. Goldberg

Acid -- better living through chemistry.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
-- Mike Adams

The scientists most esteemed by their colleagues are those who are both very original and committed to the abstract ideal of truth in the midst of clamoring demands of ego and ideology. They pass the acid test of promoting new knowledge even at the expense of losing credit for it.
-- Edward O. Wilson, "Biophilia"

"I feel like alien cells are replicating and superseding my internal organs."
-- Howard The Duck

Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.

Did you know that clones never use mirrors?
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?

Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking.
-- Jerome Lettvin

Human cardiac catheterization was introduced by Werner Forssman in 1929. Ignoring his department chief, and tying his assistant to an operating table to prevent his interference, he placed a uretheral catheter into a vein in his arm, advanced it to the right atrium [of his heart], and walked upstairs to the x-ray department where he took the confirmatory x-ray film. In 1956, Dr. Forssman was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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The chemical name for tryptophan synthetase A protein, a 1,913-letter enzyme with 267 amino acids.

Sons of Ether

"The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time."
-- Steven Wright

An experiment is reproducible until another laboratory tries to repeat it.
Dr. Alexander Kohn

"No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.'"
-- Dr. Who

Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
-- R. A. Heinlein

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.

It did not last; the devil howling "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.

Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab:
Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.

Where's that chisel?
- Albert Einstein, Young Einstein

Cahn's Axiom:
When all else fails, read the instructions.

"The way to get a new theory accepted is to propose it and then wait for all the old physicists to die."
(Max Planck)

Gyroscope, n.:
A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.
-- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary

This for instance is filed under 'h', for toy.
- Chris Knight, Real Genius

It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours *preferred* explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.
- (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
-- Vilfredo Pareto

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt.

"I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms, you've got to kill the people producing them."
-- Vladimir Kabaidze, General Director of the Ivanovo Machine Building Works

Cecil, you're my final hope
Of finding out the true Straight Dope
For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat
But none of my cats are at all like that.
This unusual animal (so it is said)
Is simultaneously alive and dead!
What I don't understand is just why he
Can't be one or the other, unquestionably.
My future now hangs in between eigenstates.
In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't.
If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way
And rescue my psyche from quantum decay.
But if this queer thing has perplexed even you,
Then I will and I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo.
-- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendium of human knowledge" by Cecil Adams

The First Commandment for Technicians:
Beware the lightening that lurketh in the undischarged capacitor, lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most untechnician-like manner.

"One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions ... like a state of sheer terror."
-- W. K. Hartmann

If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, _no matter what_. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well- grounded in consensus reality.
- Rev. Ivan Stang High Weirdness By Mail

One thing the inventors can't seem to get the bugs out of is fresh paint

Gyroscope, n.:
A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.
-- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary

"Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident."
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which removes most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to doing nothing. Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner. Certain hardware limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in the larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient power-down sequence.
An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the building, which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has bugs in it, since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer cool.

After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

First Corollary of Taber's Second Law:

Machines that piss people off get murdered.
-- Pat Taber

"Anti-gravity can be generated in any mass of matter if the poles of the atomic fields are aligned in a linear polarity. ... Interestingly, the bumble bee is an excellent example of this natural fact. Its wings are electrostatic generators in an air medium, and it is an anti-gravity flier."
-- "ANTI-GRAVITY CHARGED MASS LAW", Richard L. Clark, Ph.D

FLASH! Intelligence of mankind decreasing. Details at ... uh, when the little hand is on the ....

Frobnitz, pl. Frobnitzem (frob'nitsm) n.:
An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ, or more commonly to FROB. Also used are FROBNULE, FROBULE, and FROBNODULE. Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBBOZ (fruh-bahz'), pl. FROBBOTZIM, has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure via the Adventure spin-off called Zork (Dungeon). These can also be applied to non-physical objects, such as data structures.

Frobnicate, v.:
To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from FROBNITZ. Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the saying "to frob a frob". See TWEAK and TWIDDLE. Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and TWEAK sometimes connote points along a continuum. FROB connotes aimless manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; TWEAK connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it.

If your facts are wrong but your logic is perfect, then your conclusions are inevitably false. Therefore, by making mistakes in your logic, you have at least a random chance of coming to a correct conclusion.
Christie-Davies' Theorem

Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it works you're a hero; if it doesn't, well--nobody else has done it yet either, so you're still a valiant nerd.

Molecule, n.:
The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion ...
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Murphy's Law of Research:
Enough research will tend to support your theory.

Syndicate

They [corporations] cannot commit trespass nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
- Sir Edward Coke

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
-- Sinclair Lewis

"Do you think what we're doing is wrong?"
"Of course it's wrong! It's illegal!"
"I've never done anything illegal before."
"I thought you said you were an accountant!"

"Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery'?"
-- Jay Leno

"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability."
-- Henry Ford

The Official MBA Handbook on business cards:
Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning."

We are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave as independent, rational free-enterprisers.
-- Garrett Hardin

Technocracy

[I would] hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the useless speeding up of an already overspeeded life.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
-- Isaac Asimov

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power.
-- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking."

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty.
-- Johann von Schiller

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
-- Henri Poincair'e

Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention


Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.
-- Werner von Braun

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:


"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli

"It's bad luck to be superstitious."
-- Andrew W. Mathis

Innovation is hard to schedule.
-- Dan Fylstra

Prevalent beliefs that knowledge can be tapped from previous incarnations or from a "universal mind" (the repository of all past wisdom and creativity) not only are implausible but also unfairly demean the stunning achievements of individual human brains.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171

Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.
-- J. P. McEvoy

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat"
-- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987

"Irrationality is the square root of all evil"
-- Douglas Hofstadter

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call tragedy... The miserable fraction of Science which our United Mankind, in a wide universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted to all?
-- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
-- Matt Cartmill

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein

Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating-- or toward the abyss.
- Stephen Jay Gould

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
-- Bertrand Russell

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.
-- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus on the Half Shell"

"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."
-- Galileo Galilei

One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God.
-- J. Gustav White

The mistake you make is in trying to figure it out.
(Tenessee Williams)

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"If we are going to stick to this damned quantum-jumping, then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory."
-- Erwin Schrodinger

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
-- Vannevar Bush

No doubt, a scientist isn't necessarily penalized for being a complex, versatile, eccentric individual with lots of extra-scientific interests. But it certainly doesn't help him a bit.
-Stephen Toulmin

"The contagion is unknown to science and unrecognized by medicine (psychiatry aside); yet its wasting symptoms are plain for all to see and its lethal effects are everywhere on display. It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization."
-- Ashley Montagu & Floyd Matson --

The entire world is one big conspiracy. We are all ruled by the people whose names I dare not speak. They have implanted computer chips in our brains-in fact, over 50% of the average human is actually a computer, so we aren't actually humans, we are cyborg robots. They command us from the central command centers, completely making and controlling all thoughts and actions. Their power is so great that if you cut yourself you will see red blood instead of the machine oil that our cyborg entities actually run on. They make you think that you are actually free. They have you join *patriotic* organizations that have actually been created by them to give the impression of a free world of independent minds instead of the truth-a colorless place filled with cyborg robots unable to do anything else except obey them. There is nothing you can do about this, so you might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.
-- "Marcos"

I believe we are observing a race between the trend toward the successful social application of technology and the trend of public alienation with technology. I fear that if there is widespread disillusion with technology, scientific thought itself will not long be free and supported, and some dark ages may be upon us.
-- Clark Abt

Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer...we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-- Werner Heisenberg


"Oh dear, now I've made a terrible mess of things. And all I wanted to do was rule the universe."
-- Dr. Zachary Smith

A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth.
- O.G. Sutton

Knowledge is true opinion.
-- Plato (428-348? B.C.)

Accurate reckoning -- the entrance into the knowledge of all existing things and all obscure secrets.
-- Ahmes the Scribe (17th cent. B.C.)

"What better place to begin my reign of Communist terror and oppression than a memorial to that decadent and imperialist American, Melville Dewey, hated originator of the Dewey Decimal System!!"
-- The Tick

Finagle's Creed:

Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.

Finagle's First Law:

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

Finagle's Second Law:

No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory.

Finagle's Third Law:

In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake
Corollaries:
(1) Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
(2) The first person who stops by, whose advice you really don't want to hear, will see it immediately.

Finagle's fourth Law:

Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse.

God doesn't play dice.
-- Albert Einstein

If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.
-- David Rockefeller

Verbena

"All ye assembled at my shrine,
Mother Darksome and Divine;
Mine the Scourge and mine the Kiss
Here I charge you with this sign.

All ye assembled in my sight
Bow before my spirit bright.
Aphrodite, Arionhod,
Lover of the Horned God,
Mighty Queen of Witchery and night,
Morgan, Etoine, Nisene,
Diana, Brigid, Melusine;
So am I named by old of men,
Artemis and Cerridwen,
Hell's Dark Mistress, Heavens Queen.

No more shall ye know slavery,
Who give true worship unto me.
Ye who tread my round on Sabbath night,
Come ye naked to the rite
In token that ye be truly free.

I teach ye the mystery of rebirth;
Work ye my mysteries in mirth.
Heart joined to heart and lip to lip,
Five are the points of fellowship
That bring ye ecstasy on earth,
For I am the circle of rebirth."
--A Goddess invocation.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
-- Seneca

Real meaningful endeavours, the biggies in human existence, often require the sacrifice of others.
Chris tells Maggie to go for it -- Northern Exposure (4.18)

Gimmie That Old Time Religion
We will follow Zarathustra,
Zarathustra like we use to,
I'm a Zarathustra booster,
And he's good enough for me!

(chorus)
We will worship like the Druids,
Dancing naked in the woods,
Drinking strange fermented fluids,
And it's good enough for me!
(chorus)
In the church of Aphrodite,
The priestess wears a see-through nightie,
She's a mighty righteous sightie,
And she's good enough for me!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Give me that old time religion,
Give me that old time religion,
Give me that old time religion,
'Cause it's good enough for me!

Here in my heart, I am Helen;

I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Sta"^Hel;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.
Here in my soul I am Sappho;
Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me R'ecamier vies with Kitty O'Shea,
With Dido, and Eve, and poor nell.
I'm all of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.
-- Dorothy Parker

He who reforms himself, has done more towards reforming the public, than a crowd of noisy, impotent patriots.
-- Lavater

My love runs by like a day in June,

And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway or the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
-- Dorothy Parker

My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,

And a wild young wood-thing bore him! The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him. As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia. My own dear love, he is all my dreams --
And I wish he were in Asia.
-- Dorothy Parker

My own dear love, he is strong and bold

And he cares not what comes after. His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter. He is jubilant as a flag unfurled --
Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him. My own dear love, he is all my world --
And I wish I'd never met him.
-- Dorothy Parker

I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
-- F. H. Wales (1936)

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
-- Lew Mammel, Jr.

The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals:
As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector.
. . . Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube.

Our documentation manager was showing her two year old son around the office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we were both holding bags of popcorn. We were both holding bottles of juice. But only he had a lollipop.

He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?"

Her reply:

"He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it means to be a programmer."

THE STORY OF CREATION
or
THE MYTH OF URK
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null, and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening and there was morning, one interrupt ...
-- Rico Tudor

q: What's the difference between hardware and software ?
a: You can kick the hardware.....
-- N.R.Ellis@durham.ac.uk (NigelR. Ellis)

Computers never make mistrakes.

Play Rogue, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
-- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

:examining the entrails: n. The process of {grovel}ling through a {core dump} or hex image in an attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal. Compare {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
-- Alan Kay

"It's a great time to be alive and be a computer weenie."
-- Karl Lehenbauer, karl@hackercorp.com

:fat electrons: n. Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use special auxiliary taps on the *bottom* of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when they do that they get not ordinary or `thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by {bogon} absorption --- ESR]
Compare {bogon}, {magic smoke}.

That's nothing. alt.religion.kibology is being beamed to the universe through communications satellites at this very moment. IMMINENT DEATH OF THE NET AT THE HANDS OF SLIMY GREEN THINGS PREDICTED!
-- K.

A computer, to print out a fact,
Will divide, multiply, and subtract.

But this output can be
No more than debris,
If the input was short of exact.
-- Gigo

A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.

Manual, n.:
A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The information you need in in the others.
-- Ray Simard

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly:
"You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

"A mind would require many modifications to operate effectively after being rescued from the limitations of a mortal body. Natural human mentality is tuned for a life span's progression from impressionable plasticity to self-assured rigidity, and is thus an unpromising material for immortality. It would have to be reprogrammed for continual adaptability to be long viable."
"As a computer program, your mind can travel over information channels, for instance encoded as a laser message beamed between planets."
--Hans Moravec,Mind Children

101 USES FOR A DEAD MICROPROCESSOR

(1) Scarecrow for centipedes
(2) Dead cat brush
(3) Hair barrettes
(4) Cleats
(5) Self-piercing earrings
(6) Fungus trellis
(7) False eyelashes
(8) Prosthetic dog claws
.
.
.
(99) Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors)
(100) Killer velcro
(101) Currency

Here I sit, broken-hearted,
All logged in, but work unstarted.
First net.this and net.that,
And a hot buttered bun for net.fat.
The boss comes by, and I play the game,
Then I turn back to net.flame.
Is there a cure (I need your views),
For someone trapped in net.news?
I need your help, I say 'tween sobs,
'Cause I'll soon be listed in net.jobs.

"At the instant of the Omega Point, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which is logically possible to know."
"The totality of life at the Omega Point is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient!"
--John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle".

A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices. "The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant," said the master.
"Is Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.
"It is," came the reply.
"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.
"It is even in a video game," said the master.
"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"
The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson is over for today," he said.
-- "The Tao of Programming"

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

"The more society becomes information instead of material objects, this question of whether a person can copy things will make the difference between a world of universal prosperity or a world of constant rat race."
-- Richard M. Stallman

Since the mind is specific biocomputer it needs specific instruction and directions. The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.
Denis Waitley

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie

A Law of Computer Programming:
Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.

You can bring any calculator you like to the exam, as long as it doesn't dim the lights when you turn it on.
(Anonymous)

A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. There hair was long and unkept and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suite and they made rude noises during my presentation."
The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions?"
They are alive within the Tao.

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
-- The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-- Leonard Brandwein

C, n.:
A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.
-- Ray Simard

Canonical, adj.:
The usual or standard state or manner of something. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the use of jargon. Over his loud objections, we made a point of using jargon as much as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word "canonical" in jargon-like fashion without thinking.,

Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!"
Stallman: "What did he say?"
Steele: "He just used `canonical' in the canonical way."

Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule."
-- David Guaspari

E Pluribus Unix

/earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can.

Earth is a beta site.

"Every group has a couple of experts. And every group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits."
-- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.

flowchart, n. & v.:
[From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" + chart "a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."] 1. n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction problems in which given algorithms require geometrical representation using only the 35 basic ideograms of the ANSI template. 2. n. Neronic doodling while the system burns. 3. n. A low-cost substitute for wallpaper. 4. n. The innumerate misleading the illiterate. "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code." -- The Programmer's Little Red Vade Mecum, Mao Tse T'umps. 5. v.intrans. To produce flowcharts with no particular object in mind. 6. v.trans. To obfuscate (a problem) with esoteric cartoons.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary"

From the Pro 350 Pocket Service Guide, p. 49, Step 5 of the instructions on removing an I/O board from the card cage, comes a new experience in sound:

5. Turn the handle to the right 90 degrees. The pin-spreading sound is normal for this type of connector.

Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab:
Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.

He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.
-- Dennis Ritchie

"I bet the human brain is a kludge."
-- Marvin Minsky

"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
-- Isaac Asimov

I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.

I've built a better model than the one at Data General
For data bases vegetable, animal, and mineral
My OS handles CPUs with multiplexed duality;
My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality.
My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity,
You never have to bother checking out a bit for parity;
There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting;
My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting.
I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point:
There's lots of room in memory for variables floating-point,
Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.
-- Steve Levine, "A Computer Song" (To the tune of "Modern Major General", from "Pirates of Penzance", by Gilbert & Sullivan)

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

-- Isaac Newton
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-- Brian K. Reid

"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining."
-- Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal

Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has a 150 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 megabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks?
"Is it PC compatible?"

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.

Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology:

There's always one more bug.

Machine-Independent, adj.:
Does not run on any existing machine.

Here I sit, broken-hearted,
All logged in, but work unstarted.
First net.this and net.that,
And a hot buttered bun for net.fat.

The boss comes by, and I play the game,
Then I turn back to net.flame.
Is there a cure (I need your views),
For someone trapped in net.news?

I need your help, I say 'tween sobs,
'Cause I'll soon be listed in net.jobs.

Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.
-- R. S. Barton

Nine megs for the secretaries fair,
Seven megs for the hackers scarce,
Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs,
Three megs for system source;

One disk to rule them all,
One disk to bind them,
One disk to hold the files
And in the darkness grind 'em.

On-line, adj.:
The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.

Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche.

Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.

Real World, The n.:
1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc. 2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5. 4. The location of the status quo. 5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person.

Void Engineers

Ad astra per aspera.
(To the stars by aspiration.)

"Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."
-- Neil Armstrong

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-New York Times Editorial, 1920

"Our journey toward the stars has progressed swiftly.
In 1926 Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-propelled rocket, achieving an altitude of 41 feet. In 1962 John Glenn orbited the earth.
In 1969, only 66 years after Orville Wright flew two feet off the ground for 12 seconds, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and I rocketed to the moon in Apollo 11."
-- Michael Collins< Former astronaut and past Director of the National Air and Space Museum

186,282 miles per second:
It isn't just a good idea, it's the law!

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
-- Dave Bowman, 2001

We see the opening of an era: it is an era of seeking beyond the confines of our atmosphere; may it be also an era of awakening to the countries of earth.
-- Bertrand De Jouvenel

"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
-- Johnny Hart

There is just one thing I can promise you about the space program; your taxes will go further.
- Werner von Braun

Disc space -- the final frontier!

I don't want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have nuclear blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people ...
-- Davy Barry, "THE ALIENS ARE COMING, THE ALIENS ARE COMING!"

Flying saucers on occasion

Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
While they brand these tales as lies.

I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all.
-- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars"

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher von Braun

Mike: "The Fourth Dimension is a shambles?"
Bernie: "Nobody ever empties the ashtrays. People are SO inconsiderate."
-- Gary Trudeau, "Doonesbury"

"OK, now let's look at four dimensions on the blackboard."
-- Dr. Joy

"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again ..." An unusually long pause followed, "... but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship.


"Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."
-- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"

If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship?

Satellite Safety Tip #14:
If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

"Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to pur'^Hee of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!"
-- Harlan Ellison

Stay away from flying saucers today.

It's the good ship Enterprise
Heading out where danger lies
And you live in dread
If you're wearing a shirt that's red.
-- Doris Robin and Karen Trimble of The L.A. Filkharmonics