$100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which time it will be worth absolutely nothing. — Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”
(1) Always hire a rich attorney
(2) Never buy from a rich salesman.
— Goldenstern’s Rules
(1) Anyone can make a decision given enough facts.
(2) A good manager can make a decision without enough facts.
(3) A perfect manager can operate in perfect ignorance.
(1) Everything depends.
(2) Nothing is always.
(3) Everything is sometimes.
(1) If it’s green or it wiggles, it’s biology.
(2) If it stinks, it’s chemistry.
(3) If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.
(1) If you like it, they don’t have it in your size.
(2) If you like it and it’s in your size, it doesn’t fit anyway.
(4) If you like it and it fits, you can’t afford it.
(5) If you like it, it fits and you can afford it, it falls apart the first time you wear it.
(1) Never draw what you can copy.
(2) Never copy what you can trace.
(3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
(1) The telephone will ring when you are outside the door, fumbling for your keys.
(2) You will reach it just in time to hear the click of the caller hanging up.
(1) Things will get worse before they get better.
(2) Who said things would get better?
— Ehrman’s Commentary
42: The answer to life, the universe, and everything. — Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Universe
640K should be enough for anybody. — Bill Gates, 1981
A “No” uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a “Yes” merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble. — Mahatma Ghandi
A “critic” is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased — he hates all creative people equally.
A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday. — Thomas Ybarra
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 favoured by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. — H L Mencken
A Law of Computer Programming: Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.
A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police. — Mr. Dooley
A Place For Everything And Everything In Its Place.
And the letters APFEAEIIP spell ‘good housekeeping’ in Fijiian.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
A Puritan is someone who is deathly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, “Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?” holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. Yet, added he, none of you can tell where it pinches me. — Plutarch
A University without students is like an ointment without a fly. — Ed Nather, professor of astronomy at UT Austin
A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on. — Carl Sandburg
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.
A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce. — Don Quinn
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain. — Mark Twain
A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A benevolent man extends his love from those that he loves to those he does not love.
A ruthless man extends his ruthlessness from those he does not love to those he loves.
— Mencius (372 - 288 BC), a disciple of Confucius
A billion here, a couple of billion there — first thing you know it adds up to be real money. — Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen
A bird in the bush can’t relieve itself in your hand.
A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead. — Newton’s little-known Seventh Law
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. — Miguel de Cervantes
A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring. — Ambrose Bierce
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. — Groucho Marx
A body at rest tends to watch television.
A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.
A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.
A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward.
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.
A chance to rediscover the profound wisdom of those who have made the difficult journey through this life before us; those who, like our Lord Jesus Christ, taught us that this life is but one passing phase of our existence and that reality lies within each one of us. — Charles, Prince of Wales, Millennium speech
A child miseducated is a child lost. — John F Kennedy
A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
A child will not spill on a dirty floor.
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together — Herbert Prochnow
A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read. — Mark Twain, “The Disappearance of Literature”
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, if feels an impulsion… this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons. — Messiah’s Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours. — Milton Berle
A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. — Parkinson
A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggest that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. — Sir Fred Hoyle
A commune is where people join together to share their lack of wealth. — R Stallman
A company is known by the men it keeps.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. — Victor Hugo
A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as twenty men working twenty years.
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 conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. — Fred Allen
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. — Alfred E Wiggam
A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. — Elbert Hubbard
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. — Franklin D Roosevelt
A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.
A consultant is an ordinary person a long way from home.
A consultation process is what some authority sets in motion preparatory to doing what it intended all along. — Keith Waterhouse
A continuing flow of paper is sufficient to continue the flow of paper. — Dyer
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample. — Rebecca West
A country man between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats. — Benjamin Franklin
A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. — Westheimer’s Discovery
A crisis is when you can’t say “let’s forget the whole thing”.
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible. — Stravinsky
A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern. — Edgar A Shoaff
A day for firm decisions! Or is it?
A day without sunshine is like night.
A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she’d look stout in a fur coat.
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. — Ogden Nash
A dozen, a gross and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more!
A drug is that substance which, when injected into a rat, will produce a scientific report.
A fair exterior is a silent recommendation. — Publilius Syrus
A famous lawyer found himself at heaven’s gates confronting St. Peter. He protested that it was all a mistake: he was only 49 and far too young to be dead. That’s odd, said St. Peter, according to the hours you’ve billed you’re 119 years old.
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. — Winston Churchill
A fav’rite has no friend! — Gray
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. — George Bernard Shaw
A fool and his money are invited places.
A fool and his money are soon elected. — Will Rogers
A fool and his money soon go partying.
A fool must now and then be right by chance.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A fox is wolf who sends flowers. — Ruth Weston
A free agent is anything but.
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular. — Adlai Stevenson
A friend in need is a pest indeed.
A friend in need, is a friend indeed. — English proverb
A friend is a present you give yourself. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good lawyer is a great liar. — Edward Ward
A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. — Patton
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
A good reputation is more valuable than money. — Publilius Syrus
A good scientific theory should be explicable to a barmaid. — Ernest Rutherford
A goodly apple rotten at the heart:
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
— William Shakespeare
A gossip is one who talks to you about others, a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself. — Lisa Kirk
A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. — William James
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
A hammer sometimes misses its mark — a bouquet never.
A handful of friends is worth more than a wagon of gold.
A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.
A hermit is a deserter from the army of humanity.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse. — William Shakespeare, “Henry VI”
A hug is the perfect gift - one size fits all, and nobody minds if you exchange it.
A hundred thousand lemmings can’t be wrong!
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. — Robert Frost
A key to the understanding of all religions is that a God’s idea of a good time is a game of Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
A kind of Batman of contemporary letters. — Philip Larkin on Anthony Burgess
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
A lawsuit has been called a method of extracting half of a debt by demanding double the payment.
A lawyer’s job is secure:who would build a robot to do nothing?
A lawyer but not a thief, Such a thing is beyond belief — 14th century rhyme
A lawyer is a liar with a permit to practice.
A leader is best if people barely know that she exists. — Lao Tzu
A liar should have a good memory. — Quintilian
A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist and too rich to be a communist.
A lie never lives to be old. — Sophocles
A lifetime isn’t nearly long enough to figure out what it’s all about.
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. — Aristotle
A limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
A little hard work may not kill me, but why take chances?
A little humility is arrogance.
A little ignorance can go a long way.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. — H H Munroe
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
— Alexander Pope
A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.
A lost life
A philosopher chap called
Jean Paul,
Said that life on this planet
was all,
He has recently died,
So unless he lied,
His thoughts mean
nothing at all.
— ‘Dipole’ in IEE newspaper
A lot of fellows nowadays have a BA, MD, or PhD. Unfortunately, they don’t have a JOB. — ‘Fats’ Domino
A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
A man’s best friend is his dogma.
A man’s fate lies in his own heart.
A man’s gotta know his limitations. — Clint Eastwood, “Dirty Harry”
A man’s house is his castle. — Sir Edward Coke
A man fell off a mountain and, as he fell, saw a branch and grabbed for it. By superhuman effort he was able to get a precarious grip on it. As he was hanging there for dear life, he looked up and cried out,
“Is anybody there?”
A deep majestic voice answered,
“Yes my son, I am here. What do you need?”
“Help me!!” cried the man.
“I will help you”, said the voice, “Just let go of the branch and you’ll be safe. All you have to do is trust.”
The man thought for a moment and cried out:
“Anybody ELSE up there?”
A man forgives only when he is in the wrong. A woman forgives always.
A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road. — Alexander Smith
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything. — Samuel Johnson
A man may well bring a horse to the water, but he cannot make him drink with he will. — John Heywood
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. — James Joyce, “Ulysses”
A man of quality does not fear a woman seeking equality.
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
A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either. — Soren Kierkegaard
A man who dies without a will has lawyers for his heirs.
A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point… and if all this could in turn be analysed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. — Feodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes From the Underground”
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
A medal glitters but also casts a shadow — Winston Churchill
A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer. — Dean Acheson
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
— Milton
A mistake is evidence someone has done something.
A moral, sensible, and well-bred man
Will not affront me, — and no other can.
— Cowper
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes. — Frost
A motion to adjourn is always in order.
A mouse is an elephant built by the Japanese.
A much-talking judge is like an ill-tuned cymbal. - Francis Bacon
A mushroom cloud has no silver lining.
A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. “Well, it’s quite nice,” he replied, but don’t you think it would be better if…”
“If what?” asked the composer.
“If… if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?”
A musician, an artist, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. — William Blake
A narcissist is anyone better-looking than you. — Gore Vidal
A nation which fails in the present to value its past will impoverish its future. — Reverend K Thom
A neighbour came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. “It is out on loan,” the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. “But I can hear it bray, over there.” “Whom do you believe,” asked Nasrudin, “me or a donkey?”
A new supply of round tuits has arrived and are available from Mary. Anyone who has been putting off work until they got a round tuit now has no excuse for further procrastination.
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 paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going on. — William S Burroughs
A pat on the back is only a few inches from a kick in the pants.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space. — Gloria Steinem
A penny saved is ridiculous.
A perfectly honest woman, a woman who never flatters, who never manages, who never cajoles, who never conceals, who never uses her eyes, who never speculates on the effect which she produces, who never is conscious of unspoken admiration, what a monster, I say, would such a female be! — Thackeray
A person forgives only when they are in the wrong.
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
A person who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal.
A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his abilities, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations to which he clings because of their supra-personal value. — Albert Einstein
A person who turns green has eschewed protein.
A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist. — Elbert Hubbard
A pessimist is an optimist with experience.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty — Winston Churchill
A physician’s ability is inversely proportional to his availability.
A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. — George Eliot
A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt —
A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they’ve blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they’ve turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby and Rover,
You’ll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You’ll never go wrong with a pig!
— Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow”
A pin has a head, but has no hair — Christina Rossetti, “Sing-Song”
A place for everything and everything in its place. — Isabella Mary Beeton, “The Book of Household Management”
A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it. — Stanley Baldwin
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. — Robert Frost
A pound of salt will not sweeten a single cup of tea.
A prediction is worth twenty explanations. — K Brecher
A president of a democracy is a man who is always ready, willing, and able to lay down your life for his country.
A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope. “That’s what I like to see”, said the priest, “A man helping his fellow man”. As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, “Well, he sure doesn’t know the first thing about shark fishing.”
A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions. — George Eliot
A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells. — Grandma Moses
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him. — Winston Churchill, 1952
A private sin is not so prejudicial in the world as a public indecency. — Miguel de Cervantes
A problem is a mountain filled with treasure. — old Chinese proverb
A problem well stated is a problem half solved. — Charles F Kettering
A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. — cartoonist Al Capp on the subject of abstract art
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
A programming language is low-level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
A programming language that does not affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with - even if he drank. — Mencken
A project expands to fill the space available.
A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave… The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities — a natural defectiveness. — Aristotle
A prosperous fool is a grievous burden. — Aeschylus
A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks you for nothing. — Joey Adams
A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free.
A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation. — Colton
A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon. — Steel City News
A reactionary is a man whose political opinions always manage to keep up with yesterday.
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
A real person has two reasons for doing anything… a good reason and the real reason.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
— Blake
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
A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space. — Thomas Carlyle, looking at the stars
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Journals”, 1831
A short cut is the longest distance between two points.
A shy, introverted child will choose a crowded public area to loudly demonstrate new acquired vocabulary.
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. — Joseph Stalin
A snake lurks in the grass. — Publilius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out. — L Ron Hubbard
A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger. — Proverbs 15:1
A soft drink turneth away company.
A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. — Mark Twain
A stagnant science is at a standstill.
A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist. — Will Durant
A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years. — Harry S Truman
A stitch in time saves nine.
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. — O’Henry
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures. — Daniel Webster
A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. — S C Johnson
A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of. — Burt Bacharach
A tautology is a thing which is tautological.
A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say. — Michael Winner, British film director
A theory is better than its explanation.
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. — Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W H”
A thing not worth doing is worth not doing well.
A thing worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody else to do.
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
— William Blake
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. — John Ciardi
A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. — Samuel Goldwyn
A waste is a terrible thing to mind. — Custodians of Love Canal
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
A whole range of activities remained largely unregulated, spontaneously generating separate forms of organisation, and existing independently of any consecrated ‘official’ To overlook the extent of private initiative would be to ignore a major impulse to early Christian expansion. In homes, whole families adopted a style of life modelled on the Apostles… — Judith Herrin, describing the church in around AD 325, “The Formation of Christendom”
A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. — Chinese proverb
A wise player ought to accept his throws and score them, not bewail his luck. — Sophocles
A wise scepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. — Lowell
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people’s attention.
A witty saying proves nothing. — Voltaire
A woman can look both moral and exciting… if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle. — Edna Ferber
A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her. — W C Fields
A woman employs sincerity only when every other form of deception has failed. — Scott
A woman forgives the audacity of which her beauty has prompted us to be guilty. — LeSage
A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
A woman is like your shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows. — Chamfort
A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy. — Nietzsche
A woman mourner was horrified when her best hat was buried with the coffin at a South African funeral — she had planned to wear it to a cocktail party later in the day, but an undertaker mistook it for a floral tribute. — “Weekend” magazine
A woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing — tender, sweet, and stupid. — Adolf Hitler
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. — Virginia Woolf
A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride — for the opening or the shutting of a door. — Stendhal
A woman who dresses to kill probably cooks the same.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. — Gloria Steinem
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Therefore, a man without a woman is like a bicycle without a fish.
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. — Jane Austen
A word processor? — Charles, Prince of Wales, on Mondial House, a building north-west of London Bridge
A word to the wise is enough. — Miguel de Cervantes
A yawn is a silent shout. — Gilbert K Chesterton
A.A.A.A.A.: An organisation for drunks who drive
ASCII: A Chinese question
AT&T Virus: Every three minutes it tells you what a great service you are getting.
Abash’d the devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely. — Milton
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends. — Herbert Hoover
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. — Edsger Dijkstra
Above all else - sky.
Above all things, reverence yourself.
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires. — La Rochefoucauld
Absence makes the heart go wander.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. — Sextus Aurelius
Absence makes the heart grow frantic.
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d.
— Cowper
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Absolutely nothing in the world is friendlier than a wet dog.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion. Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science. — Gary Zukav, “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”
Access holes will be half an inch too small. Holes that are the right size will be in the wrong place.
According to convention there is a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to convention, there is an order. In truth, there are atoms and a void. — Democritus, 400 B.C.
According to my best recollection, I don’t remember. — Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo
Accordion, n.: A bagpipe with pleats.
Accuse not Nature: she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine.
— Milton
Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
Actor:“I’m a smash hit. Why, yesterday during the last act, I had everyone glued in their seats!”
Oliver Herford:“Wonderful! Wonderful! Clever of you to think of it!”
Actor: “So what do you do for a living?”
Doris: “I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving dishes for Chinese restaurants.”
— Woody Allen, “Without Feathers”
Actresses will happen in the best regulated families. — Addison Mizner and Oliver Herford, “The Entirely New Cynic’s Calendar”, 1905
Ad astra per aspera (To the stars by aspiration).
Adam and Eve Virus: Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple.
Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit (Add little to little and there will be a big pile). — Ovid
Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo. — actress Mary Pickford, 1925
Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Admiration: Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.
Adopted kids are such a pain — you have to teach them how to look like you… — Gilda Radner
Adult, n.: One old enough to know better.
Adults think with their mouths open.
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity. — Carlyle
Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it. — Horace
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. — Thomas Jefferson
Advertising beauty products is easy. All you have to do is revile your customers by creating a disease called getting older, and then provide a remedy which does not work. — Anita Roddick, founder of ‘The Body Shop’
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. — Sinclair Lewis
Advertising is legalised lying. — H G Wells
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. — George Orwell
Advice for Life
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 12 pieces of advice on how to live one’s life:-
1. Make up your mind to be happy: learn to find pleasure in simple things.
2. Make the best of your circumstances: no one has everything and everyone has something of sorrow intermingled with the gladness of life. The trick is to make the laughter outweigh the tears.
3. Don’t take yourself too seriously: don’t think that somehow you should be protected from misfortune that befalls others.
4. You can’t please everybody: don’t let criticism hurt you.
5. Don’t let your neighbours set your standards: be yourself.
6. Do the things you enjoy doing, but always stay out of debt.
7. Don’t borrow trouble: imaginary things are harder to bear than actual ones.
8. Since hate poisons the soul, don’t cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.
9. Have many interests: if you can’t travel, read about new places.
10. Don’t hold postmortems: don’t spend your life brooding over sorrows or mistakes: don’t be one who never gets over things.
11. Do what you can for those less fortunate than yourself.
12. Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.
Advice from an old carpenter: measure twice, saw once.
Advice is a dangerous gift; be cautious about giving and receiving it.
After 35 years, I have finished a comprehensive study of European comparative law. In Germany, under the law, everything is prohibited, except that which is permitted. In France, under the law, everything is permitted, except that which is prohibited. In the Soviet Union, under the law, everything is prohibited, including that which is permitted. And in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited. — Newton Minow, Speech to the Association of American Law Schools, 1985
After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. — H L Mencken, on Shakespeare
After all, it is only the mediocre who are always at their best. — Jean Giraudoux
After hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred. — The Mahabharata
After the first death, there is no other. — Dylan Thomas
After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box. — Italian proverb
After the last of sixteen mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
After things have gone from bad to worse, the cycle will repeat itself.
After winning an argument with his wife, the wisest thing a man can do is apologise.
Afternoon, n.: That part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the morning.
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain. — Schiller
Age before beauty; and pearls before swine. — Dorothy Parker
Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself. — Plutarch
Aggressive looking housing … edge of the river should be more sacrosanct. — Charles, Prince of Wales, on the Cascades, a housing development in London’s Docklands
Ah! why, ye Gods, should two and two make four? — Alexander Pope
Ah, but a man’s grasp should exceed his reach,
Or what’s a heaven for.
— Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”
Ah, but the choice of dreams to live,
there’s the rub.
For all dreams are not equal,
some exit to nightmare
most end with the dreamer
But at least one must be lived… and died.
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray’d,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow.
— Gray
Ah, women! You can’t live with them … can’t you?
Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim. — Dijkstra
Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number. — Longfellow
Alas, I am dying beyond my means. — Oscar Wilde, as he sipped champagne on his deathbed
Alas, how love can trifle with itself. — William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”
Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. — George Bernard Shaw
Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Society and Solitude”
Alea iacta est (The die is cast). — Julius Ceaser, on crossing the River Rubicon in 49 BC
Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting for a dial tone.
Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them keeps paying for it. — Peggy Joyce
All’s well that ends well and vice-versa.
All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable. — Fran Lebowitz, “Metropolitan Life”
All I ask is the chance to prove that money doesn’t buy happiness.
All I ask of life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance.
All I know is just what I read in the papers. — Will Rogers
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. — Samuel Beckett
All I want is less to do, more time to do it in, and higher pay for not getting it done.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
— Alexander Pope
All art is a revolt against man’s fate. — Andre Malraus
All art is but imitation of nature. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures. — Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted in “The Conspiracy of Catiline”, by Sallust
All cruelty springs from weakness. — Seneca
All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means. — Chou En Lai
All extremists should be taken out and shot.
All general statements are false. (Think about it.)
All generalisations are false, including this one. — Mark Twain
All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time.
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
All heiresses are beautiful. — John Dryden
All his life he has looked away… to the horizon, to the sky, to the future. Never his mind on where he was, on what he was doing. — Yoda
All hope abandon, ye who enter here. — Dante Alighieri
All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.
All in all I’d rather have been a judge than a miner. And what’s more, being a miner, as soon as you are too old and tired and sick and stupid to do the job properly, you have to go. Well, the very opposite applies with judges. — Peter Cook
All is well that ends well. — John Heywood
All laws are simulations of reality. — John C Lilly
All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates. — Woody Allen
All men have the right to wait in line.
All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility. — Chuang-tzu
All men profess honesty as long as they can.
To believe all men honest would be folly.
To believe none so is something worse.
— John Quincy Adams
All my friends and I are crazy. That’s the only thing that keeps us sane.
All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. — Jane Wagner
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
— Alexander Pope
All papers that you save will never be needed until such time as they are disposed of, when they become essential.
All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate. — Michel Montaigne
All permanent decisions are made in a temporary state of mind. — Michel Montaigne
All pleasures contain an element of sadness. — Jonathan Eibeschutz
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. — Susan Sontag
All power corrupts, but we need electricity. — D W Jones
All probabilities are 50%: either a thing will happen or it won’t.
This is especially true when dealing with women.
Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. — Samuel Butler, “Notebooks”
All science is either physics or stamp collecting. — Ernest Rutherford
All seems infected that th’ infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundic’d eye. — Alexander Pope
All snakes who wish to remain in Ireland will please raise their right hands. — Saint Patrick
All styles are good, except the boring kind. — Voltaire
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
— J R R Tolkien
All the good from the Saviour of the world is communicated through this Book; but for the Book we could not know right from wrong. All the things desirable to man are contained in it. — Abraham Lincoln
All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. — La Rochefoucauld
All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. — Jim Fiebig
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. — Sean O’Casey
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
— William Shakespeare
All things come to him whose name is on a mailing list.
All things considered, insanity may be the only reasonable alternative.
All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn’t for money, it’s for fun. Money’s just the way we keep score.
All trails have more uphill sections that they have level or downhill sections.
All warranties expire upon payment of invoice.
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers… Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born. — Francois Fenelon
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. — Mark Twain, 1878
Almost anything is easier to get into than out of. — Agnes Allen
Although I am a pious man, I am not the less a man. — Moliere
Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more. — Mark Twain
Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn’t expect to be paid back.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. — Mark Twain
Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.
Always there remain portions of our heart into which no one is able to enter, invite them as we may.
Always try to do things in chronological order; it’s less confusing that way.
Am I not a man and a brother? — Antislavery Society of London
Am I seeing things, or is that a mirage?
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. — Charlie McCarthy
America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up. — Oscar Wilde
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. — Arnold Joseph Toynbee
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilisation. — John O’Hara
Americans are people who insist on living in the present, tense.
[Americans] are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging. — Samuel Johnson
Amnesia used to be my favourite word, but then I forgot it.
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony, or true delight?
— Milton
Amor vincit fortitvdin em. (Love overcomes force). — engraved on 12th century brooch found at Elham, Kent
An “acceptable” level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job. — Newlan’s Truism
An American’s a person who isn’t afraid to criticise the President but is always polite to traffic cops.
An American is a man with two arms and four wheels. — a Chinese child
An English judge, growing weary of the barrister’s long-winded summation, leaned over the bench and remarked, “I’ve heard your arguments, Sir Geoffrey, and I’m none the wiser!” Sir Geoffrey responded, “That may be, m’Lord, but at least you’re better informed!”
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose. — A P Herbert
An Irishman is not drunk as long as he can hang onto a single blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. — James Michener, “Space”
An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician.
An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician. — Barach
An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do. — Dylan Thomas
An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country. — Sir Henry Wotton, 1568-1639
An amendment to a motion may be amended, but an amendment to an amendment to a motion may not be amended. However, a substitute for an amendment to and amendment to a motion may be adopted and the substitute may be amended. — Montana legislature
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last. — Winston Churchill, 1954
An apple every eight hours will keep three doctors away.
An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
An atheist’s worst moment is being truly grateful with no one to thank.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters - Winston Churchill
An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and quite often picturesque liar. — Mark Twain
An expert doesn’t know any more than you do. He or she is merely better organised and uses slides.
An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. — Weinberg’s Principle
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely nothing about everything.
An honest tale speeds best being plainly told. — William Shakespeare, “Henry VI”
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible. — Russell Hoban, “Pilgermann”
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. — Albert Camus
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. — Benjamin Franklin
An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit. — Pliny the Younger
An old Jewish man reads about Einstein’s theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. “Well, zayda, it’s sort of like this. Einstein says that if you’re having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you’re sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute.” The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, “And from this he makes a living?” — Arthur Naiman, “Every Goy’s Guide to Yiddish”
An optimist believes that we live in the best of all worlds. A pessimist fears this to be true. — James Gabell, American novelist.
An original idea can never emerge from committee in its original form.
An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.
An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest. — Spanish proverb
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of purge.
Anatomy is destiny. — Sigmund Freud, in typical mood
Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, “The descent to Hades is the same from every place.” — Diogenes Laertius
And Satan trembles when he sees
The weakest saint upon his knees.
— Cowper
And any stone being mentally handled must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you. — Edwin Lutyens, architect
And did those feet, in ancient times,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
In England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon these crowded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spears! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword rest in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
— William Blake, “Jerusalem”
And do as adversaries do in law, —
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
— William Shakespeare
And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. — Kahlil Gibran
And he that will go to bed sober
Falls with the leaf still in October. — John Fletcher
And learn the luxury of doing good. — Goldsmith
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man
— A E Houseman
And many strokes, though with a little axe,
Hew down and fell the hardest-timbered oak.
— William Shakespeare
And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that — a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognised Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality. — Steve Allen
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
— William Shakespeare
And oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.
— William Shakespeare
And the crowd was stilled. One elderly man, wondering at the sudden silence, turned to the Child and asked him to repeat what he had said. Wide-eyed, the Child raised his voice and said once again, “Why, the Emperor has no clothes! He is naked!” — “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
And this I know: whether the one True Light
Kindle to Love, or Wrath-consume me quite,
One Flash of It within the Tavern caught
Better than in the Temple lost outright.
— Omar Khayyám
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
— William Shakespeare
And those that paint them truest praise them most. — Addison
And tomorrow will be like today, only more so. — Isaiah 56:12, New Standard Version
And wrinkles, the damned democrats, won’t flatter. — Byron
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything onto which it is poured.
Anger is momentary madness. — Horace
Anger kills as surely as the other vices.
Animals can be driven crazy by putting too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself. — Lazarus Long
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station… There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads… Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work. — John Ruskin
Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone. — Pyrrhus
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. — Proverbs, 26:5
Anthony’s Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop.
Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes.
Anticipated events never live up to expectations.
Any child who chatters non-stop at home will adamantly refuse to utter a word when requested to demonstrate for an audience.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which at still under development.
Any clod can have the facts, but having an opinion is an art. — Charles McCabe
Any cooking utensil placed in the dishwasher will be needed immediately thereafter for something else.
Any coward can sit in his home and criticise a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die? — Charles Lindbergh
Any excuse will serve a tyrant. — Aesop
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it.
Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid. — Hedy Lamarr
Any improbable event which would create maximum confusion if it did occur, will occur.
Any incident you survive is called experience.
Any measuring utensil used for liquid ingredients will be needed immediately thereafter for dry ingredients.
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. — Sydney J Harris
Any road followed to its end leads precisely nowhere.
Climb the mountain just a little to test it’s a mountain.
From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
— Bene Gesserit proverb, “Dune”
Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way. — Malek’s Law
Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it. — Mitchell’s Law of Committees
Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a larger object.
Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure. — Milt Barber
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. — Rich Kulawiec
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C Clarke
Any task worth doing was worth doing yesterday.
Any theory can be made to fit any facts by means of approximate, additional assumptions.
Any time a lawyer is seen but not heard, it’s a shame to wake him.
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Any time you wish to demonstrate something, the number of faults is proportional to the number of viewers.
Any tool dropped while repairing a car will roll under the vehicle to the exact geographical centre.
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
Anybody with money to burn will easily find someone to tend the fire.
Anyone can become angry — that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way — that is not easy. — Aristotle
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. — Robert Benchley
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. — Publilius Syrus
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
Anyone who follows a crowd will never be followed by a crowd.
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined. — Samuel Goldwyn
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognise that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavour, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress — in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution. — Jones’s First Law
Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot. — Groucho Marx
Anyone who uses the phrase “easy as taking candy from a baby” has never tried taking candy from a baby. — Robin Hood
Anything’s possible, but only a few things actually happen.
Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator. — Claude Shouse
Einstein’s mother must have been one heck of a physicist. — Joseph C Wang
Anything for a quiet life. — Middleton
Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening.
Anything hit with a big enough hammer will fall apart.
Anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Anything is possible, but nothing is easy.
Anything labelled “new” and/or “improved” isn’t. The label means the price went up. The label “all new”, “completely new”, or “great new” means the price went way up.
Anything not nailed down is mine. Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
Anything that is good and useful is made of chocolate.
Anything worth doing, is worth doing for a profit. — Teresias
Anything you try to fix will take longer and cost more than you thought.
Apathy is not the problem, it’s the solution
Appearances often are deceiving. — Aesop
Apple: Typically a device used to seduce men. Usually equipped with display screens and/or worms.
Apt words have power to suage the tumours of a troubl’d mind. — John Milton
Ar sca
th a che
ile a mhaireann na daoine.
(People live in one another’s shadow) or (People live by co-operating with one another)
— Irish proverb
Architecture for the poor should not be approached like the treatment for a special disease. — Dr Assan Fathay, Egyptian architect
Architecture has always been the outward expression of an inner inspiration. — Charles, Prince of Wales
Architecture, and with it the whole area of the Werkbund moves towards standardisation…. only standardisation can… once again introduce a valid, self-certain taste. — Herman Muthesius
Are Women Human?: In the year 584, in Lyon, France, 43 Catholic bishops and 20 men representing other bishops, after a lengthy debate, took a vote. The results were 32 yes, 31 no. Women were declared human by one vote.
“Are you police officers?”
“No, ma’am. We’re musicians.”
— The Blues Brothers
“Are you sure you’re not an encyclopedia salesman?”
“No, Ma’am. Just a burglar, come to ransack the flat.”
— Monty Python
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours. — Messiah’s Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
Argument is the worst sort of conversation. — Jonathan Swift
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. — Oscar Wilde
Arguments with furniture are rarely productive. — Kehlog Albran, “The Profit”
Aristippus said that a wise man’s country was the world. — Laertius, Diogenes
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. — Mickey Mouse
Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as a touchstone for our judgement. — John F Kennedy
Art is Nature speeded up and God slowed down. — Chazal
Art is a jealous mistress. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a lie which makes us realise the truth. — Picasso
Art is anything you can get away with. — Marshall McLuhan.
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. — Paul Gauguin
Art is long, life short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient. — Goethe
Art is the ability to separate the significant from the insignificant. — Poul Henningsen (1894-1967)
Art is the expression of a man’s pleasure in labour. — William Morris
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. — George Eliot
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol
Art isn’t done to decorate apartments, but to wage war against the enemy. — Picasso
Art should always be an organic and integral part of all great new buildings. — Charles, Prince of Wales
Arthur’s Laws of Love:
(1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you remind them of someone else.
(2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of yourself in person.
Artificial intelligence is better than none at all.
As Caesar was at supper the discourse was of death, — which sort was the best. “That,” said he, “which is unexpected.” — Plutarch
As I Would Have It
Our Father
Who is as a power
Through all the universe,
I would like to revere you,
And be happy in doing so.
We will take it at the start
That goodness alone
Comes from you and no evil;
We want from you the power
To earn our living
In a way that will bring us contentment,
And the power to resist harming human or animal,
And the power to forgive ourselves our misdeeds,
And the power to resist anything
That our deep heart tells us is wrong,
And the power to direct our mind
To the realisation that we are part of a great mystery
That will one day be made clear to us,
And hope that this will help us to come
Nearer to you and say,
In all humility
Thy will be done.
— Catherine Cookson, “Pure as a Lily”, 1972
As I am now so you must be;
Therefore prepare to follow me.
— epitaph in Woolwich churchyard
As I walked through the wilderness of this world. — John Bunyan, the opening line of “Pilgrim’s Progress”
As Zeus said to Narcissus, “Watch yourself.”
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 crazy as hauling timber into the woods. — Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
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
As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error. — Weisert
As goatherd learns his trade by goat, so writer learns his trade by wrote.
As long as art is the beauty parlour of civilisation, neither art nor civilisation is secure. — John Dewey
As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. — Albert Einstein
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. — Oscar Wilde
As soon as the flight attendant serves the coffee, the airliner encounters turbulence.
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 realised 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
As soon as you mention something, if it’s good it goes away and if it’s bad it happens.
As the poet said, “Only God can make a tree” — probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. — Woody Allen
As though all the riches of a great language had been abandoned for monosyllabic grunts, approved of by those too idle to learn, to develop or practise an architecture that had evolved for many centuries. — James Stevens Curl, on modernist architecture, “Victorian Architecture”
As well look for a needle in a bottle of hay. — Miguel de Cervantes
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
If God won’t have you, the devil must.
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. — Jacob Bronozoski
Ask five economists and you’ll get five different explanations (six if one went to Harvard). — Edgar R Fiedler
Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls… if thou art in the bathtub, it tolls for thee.
Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. — John Stuart Mill
Assumption is the mother of all foul-ups.
Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. — Wethern’s Law
Asynch: a place to wash dishes
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
— William Shakespeare
At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle arrive last.
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
At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore. — Kahlil Gibran
At fifty a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being as ass. — Mark Twain
At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. — Marshall Lumsden
At the foot of the mountain, thunder:
The image of Providing Nourishment.
Thus the superior man is careful of his words
And temperate in eating and drinking.
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
At times discretion should be thrown aside,
and with the foolish we should play the fool.
— Menander
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
Atlee is a very modest man. And with reason. — Winston Churchill
Auld Nature swears the lovely dears,
Her noblest work she classes, O;
Her ’prentice han’ she tried on man,
And then she made the lasses, O!
— Burns
Automatic calling unit: teenager with a telephone
Automobile: A four-wheeled vehicle that runs up hills and down pedestrians.
Automotive engine repairing law: If you drop something, it will never reach the ground.
Back when I was a boy, it was forty miles to everywhere, uphill both ways and it was always snowing.
Back when I was a boy, we had to carve our own ICs out of wood.
Bad artists always admire each other’s work. — Oscar Wilde
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. — Edmund Burke
Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.
Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.
Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats. — Woody Allen
Be a better psychiatrist and the world will beat a psychopath to your door.
Be alert! (The world needs more lerts…)
Be braver — you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. — Mark Twain
Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that’s who you become most like. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Be careful. I have an attitude and I know how to use it.
Be different: conform.
Be free and open and breezy! Enjoy! Things won’t get any better so get used to it.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. — John Howard Payne
Be just, and fear not — William Shakespeare
Be mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.
Be prepared to go mad with fixed rule and method. — Horace
Be virtuous and you will be eccentric. — Mark Twain
Be yourself — it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. — Parker’s Law
Been there, done that.
Beer — it’s not just for breakfast any more.
Beer is proof that God loves us. — Benjamin Franklin
Before I knew the best part of my life had come, it had gone.
Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty, but humility goes before honour. — Psalms 18:12
Before grand theft and a legal fee, There only stands a law degree.
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers. — Gene Wolfe, “The Claw of the Conciliator”
Beggars should be no choosers. — John Heywood
Begin in the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. — Lewis Carroll
Behold the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in the one basket” — which is but a manner of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention”; but the wise man saith, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and — watch that basket!. — Mark Twain
Behold the warranty… the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.
Being a miner, as soon as you’re too old and tired and sick and stupid to do your job properly, you have to go, where the very opposite applies with the judges. — Beyond the Fringe
Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealings with men. — Conrad
Being asked whether it was better to marry or not, Socrates replied, “Whichever you do, you will repent it.” — Diogenes Laertius
Being conservative has never been regarded as old-fashioned. But if you fight for a sensible step in the right direction which others has deserted you will be branded “reactionary”. — Poul Henningsen (1894-1967)
Being owned by someone used to be called slavery — now it’s called commitment.
Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him either. — Oscar Wilde
Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad. — Christina Rossetti
Better dead than mellow.
Better late than never. — Titus Livius (Livy)
Better late than really late.
Better living a beggar than buried an emperor.
Better three hours too soon than a minute too late. — William Shakespeare
Better to be a mouse in the jaws of a cat, than a man in the hands of a lawyer.
Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. — motto of the Christopher Society
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. — Virgil
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. — Henry David Thoreau
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Beware of desperate steps!
The darkest day,
Live till to-morrow, will have pass’d away.
— Cowper
Beware of self-styled experts: an ex is a has-been, and a spurt is a drip under pressure.
Beware of the physician who is great at getting out of trouble.
Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.
Bit rate: how often you are bitten
Bit: Similar to a nibble. Commonly eight nibbles to a mouthful.
Bit: The increment by which programmers slowly go mad.
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic
Blessed are the meek for they shall inhibit the earth.
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. — Herbert Hoover
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall forever be amused.
Blessed are those who go around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. — Alexander Pope
Blessed is he who has reached the point of no return and knows it, for he shall enjoy living. — W C Bennett
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. — George Eliot
Blessed is the user who expects nothing, as he will not be disappointed.
Blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. — Tertullian
Blore’s Razor: Given a choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.
Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.
— William Shakespeare
Boob’s Law: You always find something in the last place you look.
Books without the knowledge of life are useless. — Samuel Johnson
Bore, n.: A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary. — Walter Winchell
Bore: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. — James Thurber
Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. — Kin Hubbard
Brandy-and-water spoils two good things. — Charles Lamb
Brevity is the soul of wit. — William Shakespeare
Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character. — Jonathan Swift
British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can’t there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps. — Peter Ustinov
Broad-mindedness, n: The result of flattening high-mindedness out.
Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart. — Aeschylus
Bubble Memory: a derogatory term, usually referring to a person’s intelligence. See also “vacuum tube”.
Bugs, pl. n.: Small living things that small living boys throw on small living girls.
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. — Shaw’s Principle
Build your railway good because one day it will join up with my railway and go under the channel to the sea. — Isambard Kingdom Brunel, speaking to George Stephenson who was building the line from Redhill to Dover.
Bullwinkle: “You just leave that to my pal. He’s the brains of the outfit.”
General: “What does that make you?”
Bullwinkle: “What else? An executive…”
— Jay Ward
Bumper sticker: “All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture”
Bureaucrat, n.: A person who cuts red tape sideways. — J McCabe
Bureaucrat, n.: A politician who has tenure.
[Burne-] Jones, whose life is as pure as an archangels, whose genius is as strange and high as that of Albert Dürer or Hans Memling… — John Ruskin
Business is a good game — lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money. — Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
Business will be either better or worse. — Calvin Coolidge
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 realise 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”
But it does move. — Galileo Galilei
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit. — William Shakespeare
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
— William Shakespeare
But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
— Hilaire Belloc
But soon we will die, and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves will be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.
Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
—Thornton Wilder, “The Bridge of San Luis Ray”, 1927, following collapse of bridge that resulted in the death of five people
But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life. — Robert Louis Stevenson, from “Will o’ the Mill”
But, for my own part, it was Greek to me. — William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”
By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed. — Mark Twain
By contrast it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general any power above the second into two powers of the same degree. I have found a truly marvellous proof of this theorem but this margin is too narrow to contain it. — Pierre de Fermat, in margin of C G Bachet’s (1581-1638) Diophantus’ Arithmetica, volume II, problem 8
By definition, one divided by zero is undefined.
By doing just a little every day, you can gradually let the task completely overwhelm you.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
By nature, men are nearly alike;
by practice, they get to be wide apart.
— Confucius
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. — R Emerson
By perseverance the snail reached the Ark. — Charles Spurgeon
By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death. — Titus Lucretius Carus
By the middle 1880’s, practically all the [rail]roads except those in the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were still five feet between rails.
It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard, in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set, great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere was possible. — Robert Henry, “Trains”, 1957
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air; it is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it. — Andrea Dworkin
By the yard, life is hard.
By the inch, it’s a cinch.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean. — Mark Twain
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve. — Robert Frost
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. — Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
“C” combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language.
Cable is not a luxury, since many areas have poor TV reception. — The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, 1989
Californians are a strange people. They’ll put every chemical known to God and man up their nostrils and then laugh at you for putting sugar in your coffee.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks. — Indian proverb
Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two points. — M M Johnston
Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Can one desire too much of a good thing? — William Shakespeare
Can we ever have too much of a good thing? — Miguel de Cervantes
Canada Post doesn’t really charge 32 cents for a stamp. It’s 2 cents for postage and 30 cents for storage. — Gerald Regan, Cabinet Minister, “Financial Post”,12/31/83
Capitalism can exist in one of only two states: welfare or warfare.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. — John Maynard Keynes
Captain Penny’s Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you Can’t Fool Mom.
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
— William Shakespeare
Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than expected. Carefully planned projects take four times longer to complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their planning to reduce the time it takes.
Carpe Dieum. (I live for the duty of the day).
Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils. — Plutarch
Cato said, “I had rather men should ask why my statue is not set up, than why it is.” — Plutarch
Cato used to assert that wise men profited more by fools than fools by wise men; for that wise men avoided the faults of fools, but that fools would not imitate the good examples of wise men. — Plutarch
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function. — Garrison Keillor
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t make eight cats pull a sled through the snow.
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. — Swift
Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it. — Ambrose Bierce
Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy,
But it’s very funny — did you ever try buying them without money?
— Ogden Nash
Chance is perhaps the work of God when He did not want to sign. — Anatole France
Chance only favours the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Charity begins at home. — Publilius Terentius Afer (Terence)
Charity: A thing that begins at home and usually stays there.
Charlie Brown: “Why was I put on this earth?”
Linus: “To make others happy.”
Charlie Brown: “Why were others put on this earth?”
Charm is a way of getting the answer “Yes” — without having asked any clear question.
Cheap things are of no value, valuable things are not cheap.
Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
Children are our most valuable national resource. — Herbert Hoover
Children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and on no account to be forced thereto by whipping. — Plutarch
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next. — Franklin P Jones
Children aren’t happy without something to ignore,
And that’s what parents were created for.
— Ogden Nash
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them.
Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
— Oscar Wilde
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.
Children who never come when called will grow up to be doctors. Children who come before they are called will grow up to be lawyers.
Chinese saying: “He who speak with forked tongue, not need chopsticks.”
Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man. — Joubert
Christian, n.: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. — Gilbert K Chesterton
Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it. — George Bernard Shaw
Church bulletins:-
• Potluck supper: prayer and medication to follow.
• The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement this afternoon.
• Wednesday: the ladies of the literary group will meet. Mrs Johnson will sing ‘Put me in my little bed’ accompanied by the rector
• For those of you who have children and don’t know it we have a creche downstairs.
Churchill’s Commentary on Man: Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
Cigarette, n.: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco in between.
Circumstances make man, not man circumstances. — Mark Twain
Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances. — Herodotus
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
— Rudyard Kipling
Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the instalment plan… Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth. — Dick Gregory
Civilisation and profits go hand in hand. — Calvin Coolidge
Civilisation is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. — Mark Twain
Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron — namely, that he is a blockhead. — Ambrose Bierce
Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero… must drink brandy. — Samuel Johnson
Class schedules are designed so that every student will waste the maximum time between classes.
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shovelling the walk before it stops snowing. — Phyllis Diller
Cleanliness is next to impossible.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. — Mark Twain
Cocaine is nature’s way of telling you have too much money.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am). — Ambrose Bierce
Cogito ergo (I’m right and you’re wrong). — Blair Houghton
Coincidence, n.: You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.
Coincidences are spiritual puns. — Gilbert K Chesterton
Cold, adj.: When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own pockets.
Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter — and the bird is on the wing.
— Omar Khayyám
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
— Wordsworth
Come, landlord, fill the flowing bowl until it does run over, Tonight we will all merry be — tomorrow we’ll get sober. — John Fletcher, “The Bloody Brother”, II, 2
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. — Peter Ustinov
Command: statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in such a manner as to make the human feel as if he is in control.
Commit random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
Committee Rules:
(1) Never arrive on time, or you will be stamped a beginner.
(2) Don’t say anything until the meeting is half over; this stamps you as being wise.
(3) Be as vague as possible; this prevents irritating the others.
(4) When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed.
(5) Be the first to move for adjournment; this will make you popular — it’s what everyone is waiting for.
Committee, n.: A group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done. — Fred Allen
Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. — Clive James
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius. — Josh Billings
Common sense is not so common.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. — Albert Einstein
Common sense is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world. Everyone thinks he has enough. — Descartes, 1637
Comparisons are odious. — Marlowe
Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion.
Complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers.
Complex: Adjective used to describe problems to be avoided.
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. — Pablo Picasso
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don’t add up.
Computers make excellent and efficient servants. But I do not wish to serve under one.
Computers will never replace the wastebasket when it comes to streamlining office work.
Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more than the estimate the job will cost.
Conceit causes more conversation than wit. — La Rochefoucauld
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
— Josh Billings
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff. — Peter de Vries
Confession is good for the soul, but bad for the career.
Confessions may be good for the soul, but they are bad for the reputation. — Lord Thomas Dewar
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
Conform, go crazy, or become a writer.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. — John F Kennedy
Confucius say too much. — recent Chinese proverb
Confucius say, “Man who sleep on railroad track wake up with split personality.”
Confusion will be my epitaph
as I walk a cracked and broken path
If we make it we can all sit back and laugh
but I fear that tomorrow we’ll be crying.
— King Crimson, “In the Court of the Crimson King”
Conquering Russia is a steppe by steppe process.
Conscience doth make cowards of us all. — William Shakespeare
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. — H L Mencken
Conscience is defined as the thing that hurts when everything else feels great.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. — H L Mencken, “A Mencken Chrestomathy”
Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
Conscious is when you are aware of something and conscience is when you wish you weren’t.
Conservative: One who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead. — Leo C Rosten
Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development… might be carried as far as possible. — Corbusier
Consultants are mystical people who ask a company for a number and then give it back to them.
Continual dropping wears away a stone. — Lucretius
“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”
Correction does much, but encouragement does more. — Goethe
Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. — Walter Lippmann
Corruption is not the #1 priority of the Police Commissioner. His job is to enforce the law and fight crime. — E J Kiernan, PBA President
Could John Wayne have ever taken Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the entire Wild West on a diet of quiche and salad?
Courage is grace under pressure.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. — Mark Twain
Courage is your greatest present need.
Coward, n.: One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs. — Ambrose Bierce
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
— William Shakespeare
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month. — Wernher von Braun
Creditors have much better memories than debtors.
Crime does not pay… as well as politics. — A E Neuman
Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship. — Zeuxis
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one. — Raisa Gorbachev
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Cursor: an expert in four-letter words.
Custom is almost a second nature. — Plutarch
Custom reconciles us to everything. — Burke
Daily labour was sweetened by the daily creation of Art. — William Morris
Dare to be naive. — Richard Buckminster Fuller
“Darling,” she whispered, “will you still love me after we are married?” He considered this for a moment and then replied, “I think so. I’ve always been especially fond of married women.”
Darling, I know I’m an old ‘has been’, but it’s better than being a ‘never has been’. — elderly actress to Lynda Lee-Potter
Data expands to fill the space available for storage. — Parkinson’s Law of Data
Dealing with failure is easy: work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Dear Lord: Please make my words sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
Dear old, bloody old England of telegraph poles and tin
Seemingly so indifferent and with so little soul to win.
— John Betjeman
Death is God’s way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
Death is life’s way of telling you you’ve been fired. — R Geis
Death is nature’s way of recycling human beings.
Death is nature’s way of saying ‘Howdy’.
Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down
Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot. — Sophocles
Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. — Henry Scott-Holland
Death is the side of life turned way from us. — Maria Rilke, German poet
Debug: the act of placing shoe leather against a small creeping creature.
Decision maker, n.: The person in your office who was unable to form a task force before the music stopped.
Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is. — Charles Schultz
Defer not till to-morrow to be wise,
To-morrow’s sun to thee may never rise.
— Congreve
Delay is preferable to error. — Thomas Jefferson
Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on. — Ambrose Bierce
Democracy can only be measured on the existence of an opposition. — Poul Henningsen (1894-1967)
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. — George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management. — Senator Soaper
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. — George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don’t think.
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame. — Laurence J Peter
Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. — Jawaharlal Nehru
Democracy is that form of government where everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them. — Arman de Caillavet, 1913
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. — E B White
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. — Winston Churchill
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. — Oscar Wilde
Dentist: A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one’s mouth, pulls coins out of one’s pockets. — Ambrose Bierce
Depression is merely anger without the enthusiasm.
Deprive a mirror of its silver and even the Czar won’t see his face.
Descartes was sitting at a sidewalk cafe, having finished his meal. A waiter asked him, ‘Would you care for desert?’ ‘I think not,’ replied Descartes. Then he disappeared.
Did you ever notice that everyone in favour of birth control has already been born. — Benny Hill
Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that’s how dogs spend their lives. — Sue Murphy
Did you ever wonder what you’d say to God if He sneezed?
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined them up end to end, they’d still point in the wrong direction?
Did you know that the word ‘gullible’ isn’t in the dictionary?
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him. — John Barrymore’s dying words
Difference between savage and civilised man: one is painted, the other gilded. — Mark Twain
Diligence is the mother of good fortune. — Miguel de Cervantes
Dim collection of brick sheds groping for some symbolic significance. — Charles, Prince of Wales, on the new British Library building in London
Diogenes went to look for an honest lawyer. “How’s it going?”, someone asked him, after a few days. “Not too bad”, replied Diogenes. “I still have my lantern.”
Dionysios the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, he replied, “God forbid that it should ever befall me!” — Plutarch
Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century. Politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon. — Sir Humphrey Appleby
Diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggy” until you can find a rock.
Diplomacy is to do and say, the nastiest thing in the nicest way. — Balfour
Discretion is the better part of valour. — William Shakespeare
Disease can be cured; fate is incurable. — Chinese proverb
Dishonour will not trouble me, once I am dead. — Euripides
Distinctive, adj.: A different colour or shape than our competitors.
Distress: A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.
Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason. — Lord Chesterfield
Ditat Deus (God enriches).
Divorce is a game played by lawyers. — Cary Grant
Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it. — Mark Twain
Do not clog intellect’s sluices with bits of knowledge of questionable uses.
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched. — Aesop
Do not destroy what I [God] have made, for if you do, there will be no one left to repair the damage. — ancient Jewish tradition
Do not drink coffee in early a.m. It will keep you awake until noon.
Do not merely believe in miracles, rely on them.
Do not put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well. — Mark Twain
Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.
Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish. — Mark Twain
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
— William Shakespeare
Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all. — Sophocles
Do whatever your enemies don’t want you to do.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy. — Meher Baba
Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut.
Don’t be concerned, it will not harm you,
It’s only me pursuing something I’m not sure of,
Across my dreams, with nets of wonder,
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.
Don’t be humble… you’re not that great. — Golda Meir
Don’t believe everything you hear or anything you say.
Don’t bite the hand that has your pay check in it.
Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time. — Lt. Col. Ollie North
Don’t force it, get a larger hammer. — Anthony
Don’t get even, get odd.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. — Mark Twain
Don’t hate yourself in the morning — sleep till noon.
Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.
Don’t look back, the lemmings are gaining on you.
Don’t make your doctor your heir.
Don’t marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper. — Scottish proverb
Don’t rush me - I’m dawdling as fast as I can
Don’t smoke in bed - the ashes on the floor might be your own.
Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent. — Walt Kelly
Don’t take life too seriously — you’ll never get out of it alive.
Don’t worry about avoiding temptation — as you grow older, it starts avoiding you. — The Old Farmer’s Almanac
Don’t worry about being in a dangerous situation. You have the rest of your life to straighten it out.
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. — Howard Aiken
Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia. — Charles Schultz
Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job. — Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering
Don’t worry over what other people are thinking about you. They’re too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
Double-Blind Experiment, n.: An experiment in which the chief researcher believes he is fooling both the subject and the lab assistant. Often accompanied by a belief in the tooth fairy.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire
Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. — Paul Tillich, German theologian.
Draft beer, not people
Drama is life with the dull bits left out. — Alfred Hitchcock
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. — Henry David Thoreau
Drew’s Law of Highway Biology: The first bug to hit a clean windshield lands directly in front of your eyes.
Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony. — Robert Benchley
Drunks are rarely amusing unless they know some good songs and lose a lot a poker. — Karyl Roosevelt
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together… — Carl Zwanzig
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate and captain of your soul.
During a grouse hunt in North Carolina two intrepid sportsmen were blasting away at a clump of trees near a stone wall. Suddenly a red-faced country squire popped his head over the wall and shouted,
“Hey, you almost hit my wife.”
“Did I?” cried the hunter, aghast. “Terribly sorry. Have a shot at mine, over there.”
During a visit to America, Winston Churchill was invited to a buffet luncheon at which cold fried chicken was served. Returning for a second helping, he asked politely, “May I have some breast?”
”Mr. Churchill,” replied the hostess, “in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.” Churchill apologised profusely.
The following morning, the lady received a magnificent orchid from her guest of honour. The accompanying card read: “I would be most obliged if you would pin this on your white meat.”
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. — Al Gore, Vice President
During the time an item is on back-order, it will be available cheaper and quicker from many other sources.
Duty, n: What one expects from others. — Oscar Wilde
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. — last words of W Somerset Maugham
Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult. — Actor Edmond Gween, on his deathbed.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
Each class of men is created equal.
Each problem solved introduces a new unsolved problem.
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility; I chose arrogance — Frank Lloyd Wright, architect
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead. — James Thurber
Earth is a great, big fun house without the fun. — Jeff Berner
Eat as much as you like - just don’t swallow it. — Harry Secombe’s diet
Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow they may make it illegal.
Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet.
Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said that the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I’m down to mine and it hasn’t. — Robert Orben
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of . — Edgar R Fiedler
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”
Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know. — Daniel J Boorstin
Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine. — Irwin Edman
Education is the transmission of civilisation. — Durant, Will and Ariel
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. — B F Skinner
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
Egotist: a person of low taste more interested in himself than in me. — Ambrose Bierce
Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees. — Ronald Reagan, famous movie star and president
Eisenhower was very nice, Nixon was his only vice. — C Degen
Either I’m dead or my watch has stopped. — Groucho Marx’ last words
Electrocution, n.: Burning at the stake with all the modern improvements.
Eliminate the impossible and what ever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, speaking as Sherlock Holmes
Encyclopedia Salesmen: Invite them all in. Nip out the back door. Phone the police and tell them your house is being burgled. — Mike Harding, “The Armchair Anarchist’s Almanac”
England is perhaps the only country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. — George Orwell
Enjoy the world gently,
Enjoy the world gently;
Because if the world gets broken
No one can repair it.
Enjoy the world gently.
— Traditional Yoruba poem from W Africa
Enough is as good as a feast. — John Heywood
Entitlement cards will not be compulsory but everyone will have to have one. — John Prescott
Entropy isn’t what it used to be.
Envelopes and stamps which don’t stick when you lick them will stick to other things when you don’t want them to.
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking. — Jerome Lettvin
Error: something only humans can commit.
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end? — Tom Stoppard
Etiquette requires us to admire the human race. — Mark Twain
Etymology, n.: Some early etymological scholars came up with derivations that were hard for the public to believe. The term ‘etymology’ was formed from the Latin ‘etus’ (eaten), the root ‘mal’ (bad), and ‘logy’ (study of). It meant ‘the study of things that are hard to swallow’. — Mike Kellen
Eureka. (I have found it). — Archimedes, inventor of the lever and fluid displacement, 287-212 BC
Even God lends a hand to honest boldness. — Menander
Even a hawk is an eagle among crows.
Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred. — The Mahabharata.
Even crime wouldn’t pay if the Government ran it.
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. — Will Rogers
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to? — Clarence Darrow
Even if you persuade me, you won’t persuade me. — Aristophanes
Even moderation ought not to be practiced to excess.
Even the best of friends cannot attend each other’s funeral. — Kehlog Albran, “The Profit”
Even the boldest zebra fears the hungry lion.
Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark.
Even water tastes bad when taken on doctors orders.
Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you just how busy they are.
Ever wondered about the origins of the term “bugs” as applied to computer technology? US Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has first-hand explanation. The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the CW Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school administrators that the first computer “bug” was a real bug — a moth. At Harvard one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the “grand-daddy” of modern computers, the Mark I. “Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer,” she said. “Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, “I referred them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question.”
Everlasting peace will come to the world when the last man has slain the last but one. — Adolph Hitler
Every Englishman knows one thing — that to be an Englishman is the Best Thing There Is. — Ogden Nash
Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it.
Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every cloud engenders not a storm. — William Shakespeare, “Henry VI”
Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. — Lenny Bruce
Every four seconds a woman has a baby. Our problem is to find this woman and stop her.
Every generation laughs at old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Every great idea has a disadvantage equal to or exceeding the greatness of the idea.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. — Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible. — Frank Moore Colby
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
Every man has his fault, and honesty is his. — William Shakespeare
Every man has his price. Mine is $3.95.
Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse. — Miguel de Cervantes
Every man is like the company he is wont to keep. — Euripides
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the