Quotations by Author

Anonymous

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.

Journalists separate the wheat from the chaff ... and print the chaff.

Douglas Adams

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among it current tally of 5,975,509 pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words -- and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded -- their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Edward Albee

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Jerry in Zoo Story

Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment.

Quoted in the Observer, 27/05/01.

Eric Ambler

That, he reflected, was the worst of the academic mind. It always overlooked the possibilities of violence until violence was no longer useful.

The Mask of Dimitrios
(p98, Penguin Classics, 2009)

Laurie Anderson

When love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom.
Hi, Mom!

O Superman

Hilaire Belloc

What! Here we are with the jolly world of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function ? Away with such foolery.

"On the Mania of Universities" in The Path to Rome

Ambrose Bierce

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

The Devil's Dictionary

Dick Brandon

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

(unix fortune)

Charlie Brown

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

George Bush

Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?

While touring Auschwitz, Sept. 1987

Peter de Vries

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.

Bob Dylan

People today are still living off the table scraps of the Sixties. They are still being passed around -- the music and the ideas.

"Sayings of the Week", Observer, 16/2/92

Ecclesiastes

The writing of books is endless, and too much study wears you out.

Ecclesiastes 12,12.

W. C. Fields

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

Fogel et al.

For the sake of simplicity, and without sacrificing generality, the environment will be viewed as a sequential source of symbols taken from a finite alphabet.

Artificial Intelligence Through Simulated Evolution, Fogel, Owens & Walsh, 1966

Richard Ford

What you miss of life is your life.

Independence Day

John Kenneth Galbraith

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

Galileo Galilei

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

Heinrich Heine

Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser - freilich
Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.

From Morphine

Thomas Hewitt Key

What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind.

Genghis Khan

Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and a support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are sweet as the berries of their breasts.

Genghis Khan, Paul Ratchnevsky, Blackwell.

James T. Kirk

Zephram Cochran (inventor of the Warp drive), discusses the Universal Translator with Kirk and Spock:

Cochran: "What's the theory behind this device?"

Kirk: "There are certain universal ideas and concepts common to all intelligent life. This device instantaneously compares the frequency of brain wave patterns, selects those ideas and concepts it recognises, and then provides the necessary grammar."

Spock: "Then it simply translates its findings into English."

Cochran: "You mean it speaks?"

Kirk: "With a voice, or the approximation of whatever the creature is sending in. Not 100% efficient of course, but then nothing ever is."

From Star Trek, Metamorphosis

Niccolo Machiavelli

...From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both. One can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well they are yours. They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives, their children, so long, as I said above, as danger is remote; but when you are in danger they turn against you.

"The Prince", XVII (Cruelty and compassion; and whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse). Niccolo Machiavelli, San Casciano, Italy (1520)

Adam Mars-Jones

The final logic of all passion -- whether sexual or literary -- is not fulfilment, but exhaustion.

A. A. Milne

The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.

from "The Pooh Book of Quotations"

John O'Hara

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

Alexander Pope

One call tell the contempt God holds for riches by the people whom he chooses to give them to.

Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

(It did not last: the Devil howling Ho!
Let Einstein be! restored the status quo.
-- Sir John Collins Squire)

Ernest Renan

O Seigneur, s'il y a un Seigneur, sauvez mon ame, si j'ai une ame

Prayer of a Skeptic

Cecil Rhodes

I contend we are the finest race in the world. The more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.

(speaking on the virtues of the British Empire)

Frederick William Rolfe

I cultivate the gentle art of making enemies ... A friend is necessary, one friend -- but an enemy is more necessary. An enemy keeps on alert.

Only beggars can be choosers.

Ernest Rutherford

We haven't the money, so we've got to think.

George Bernard Shaw

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

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Aaron Sloman

I vote for total abolition of all social events except between consenting participants in private. Those who want them can organise them on a rota basis. They can then even have music and smoke if they wish. Everyone else can be left to communicate with people entirely by email. If anyone tries to arrange a farewell dinner when I go, I shall be represented by a terminal at the dinner table. In fact, I am thinking of having my head replaced by one of those new neural net computers supporting NFS so that nobody will be able to be social with me except via email. I'll also be grateful if a funeral can be avoided when I die. I've already informed the Devil that I don't want a welcoming party despite all the years I have devoted to serving His aims, bless Him.

(On being invited to a party)

Swinburne

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.

From Ulysses

Dylan Thomas

An alcoholic is a man you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

Hunter S. Thompson

I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.

Trotsky

Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.

Voltaire

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

(unix fortune)

James Watson

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

"The Double Helix"

Alfred North Whitehead

Whatever be the detail with which you cram your student, the chance of his meeting in after life exactly that detail is almost infinitesimal; and if he does meet it, he will probably have forgotten what you taught him about it. The really useful training yields a comprehension of a few general principles with a thorough grounding in the way they apply to a variety of concrete details. In subsequent practice the men will have forgotten your particular details; but they will remember by an unconscious common sense how to apply principles to immediate circumstances. Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your textbooks, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learned by heart for the examination. What, in the way of detail, you continually require will stick in your memory as obvious facts like the sun and the moon; and what you casually require can be looked up in any work of reference. The function of a University is to enable you to shed details in favor of principles. When I speak of principles I am hardly even thinking of verbal formulations. A principle which has thoroughly soaked into you is rather a mental habit than a formal statement. It becomes the way the mind reacts to the appropriate stimulus in the form of illustrative circumstances. Nobody goes about with his knowledge clearly and consciously before him. Mental cultivation is nothing else than the satisfactory way in which the mind will function when it is poked up into activity.

In 'The Rhythm of Education', The Aims of Education: & Other Essays (1917)

H.H. Williams

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If someone tells me he has bought the outfit of a tightrope walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it.

To Yorick Smythies on hearing of the latter's conversion to Catholicism. Quoted by Ray Monk in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 464.

Tom Wolfe

I was aware of what had reduced me to this Student Prince Maudlin state of mind. ... I had just spent five years in graduate school, a statement that may mean nothing to people who never served such a stretch; it is explanation none the less. I'm not sure I can give you the remotest idea of what graduate school is like. Nobody ever has. ... Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book, as far as I know. Everyone used to sniff the air. How morbid. How poisonous! Nothing else like it in the world! But the subject always defeated them. It defied literary exploitation. Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it. ... In any case, by the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957 I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world'.

From an essay "The new journalism".