In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before.
Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)
Eunuchus, l.41
Moderation in all things.
Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)
"Andria (The Lady of Andros)", l.61
Until Lions will have their own historians,
Tales of hunting will always glorify the Hunter.
African Proverb
I don't do .INI, .BAT, or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files. I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby.
Fritz Anderson
How many people are on the Internet? By stunning coincidence, the total turns out to be exactly the same as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Paul Andrews
Seattle Times, January 14, 1996
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings. They did it by killing all those who opposed them.
Anonymous
Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
Piers Anthony
On a Pale Horse
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things, they push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
Apple Computer & TWBA Chiat/Day
Think Different
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
God did not make the natural world according to the departmental structure of research universities.
John A. Armstrong
"The Bridge", Volume 20, Number 2 (National Academy of Engineering)
"After all," sighed Narcissus the hunchback, "on me it looks good."
W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
The integrity of a writer is more threatened by appeals to his social conscious, his political or religious convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity. It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop.
W. H. Auden
Money it turned out was exactly like sex ... You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
James Baldwin
To be able to find joy in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
George Bernanos
QUOTATION: n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
A bibliophile is a lover of books; a bibliomane, a wildly enthusiastic collector. An abandoned fanatic, once he succumbs to bibliolatry, graduates into a bibliomaniac. While a bibliomaniac's spouse might easily become a bibliophobe, his arch nemesis would be a biblioclast: a destroyer of books.
Strubbe Bill
A Bibliophile in Britain
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa)
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
Sin is not what my conscience or the church's teaching or God's command forbids. It is what makes me wither, regress, sicken as a human person.
Father James Burtchell CSC
I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones.
John Cage
Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. It's just what people does.
John Carradine
The Grapes of Wrath, 1940
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
Catherine the Great
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put!
Winston Churchill
Don't bother asking someone what sort of computer they drive. If it's a Mac they'll tell you. If not, why embarrass them.
Tom Clancy
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
Arthur C. Clarke
The Odyssey File, 1985
There are two kinds of people - those who don't do what they want to do so they write down in a diary about what they haven't done, and those are too busy to write about it, because they're out doing it.
Charles Coburn
The More the Merrier, 1943
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge
To be yourself, in a world that tries, night and day, to make you just like everybody else - is to fight the greatest battle there ever is to fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings
The three preoccupations of the human mind are: sex, death and the anguish of time-space.
Salvador Dali
The government of man will be replaced by the administration of things.
Henri de Saint-Simon
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony number 9.
Erwin Dieterich
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10
I no longer have an email address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.
Umberto Eco
As quoted in The New Yorker
When I examine myself and my method of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Whoever sets himself up as judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
Albert Einstein
Where is the wisdom? Lost in the knowledge.
Where is the knowledge? Lost in the information.
T.S. Eliot
... the standard drawback of any religion - the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do.
James Fallows
The Atlantic Monthly, December 1993
Death takes no bribes.
Ben Franklin
Haste makes waste.
Ben Franklin
He that cannot obey, cannot command.
Ben Franklin
Hunger never saw bad bread.
Ben Franklin
Three good meals a day is a bad thing.
Ben Franklin
Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.
Ben Franklin
We dance round in a ring and
suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
and knows.
Robert Frost
The Secret Sits
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
Buckminster Fuller
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28
I want to be alone.
Greta Garbo
Grand Hotel, 1932
What are you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies.
John Garfield
To racketeer Lloyd Goff in "Body and Soul," 1947
Maturing is the process by which the individual becomes conscious of the equal importance of each of his fellow men.
Alvin Goesner
In a sense, taboos are merely an organization that allow certain people to exercise power over other people. Moral systems are not absolute. They are always changing and are tied to personal and economic interests.
Peter Greenaway
The New York Times, 6 Feb 1994
I'm not trying to be a hero! I'm fighting the dragon!
Ed Harris
Knightriders, 1981
Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
William Hazlitt
The public have neither shame nor gratitude.
William Hazlitt
If I had a choice of weapons with you, sir, I'd choose grammar.
Halliwell Hobbes
To Ned Sparks in "Lady for a Day," 1933
Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments of burdens ... are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion ... no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship of ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting single or collectively.
Thomas Jefferson
We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men. We ... solemnly publish and declare that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states ... And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance of the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes and our honor.
Thomas Jefferson
The Declaration of Independence
What I feared has come upon me;
What I dreaded has happened to me.
I have no peace, no quietness;
I have no rest, but only turmoil.
Job 3:25-26
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind.
Samuel Johnson
True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.
Samuel Johnson
Icons were intended to make software friendly, and easy to use. Now Microsoft applications have Tool Tips - text labels that appear when you move the mouse pointer over icons. We used to call these "menus."
D. Kalman
DBMS, September 1994
Four things to learn in life:
To think clearly without hurry or confusion;
To love everybody sincerely;
To act in everything with the highest motives;
To trust God unhesitatingly.
Helen Keller
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
Helen Keller
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott
There is no logical contradiction between religion and science, because an all-powerful deity allows you to say anything.
Richard Lewontin
"The Scientist," 17 April 1995
Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other.
Joshua Loth Liebman
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, our last best hope for Earth.
Abraham Lincoln
A committee is a form of life with six or more legs and no brain.
Lazarus Long
Yield to temptation.... It may not pass your way again.
Lazarus Long
Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.
George MacDonald
The worst that can happen to you is to die and go to Hell. But such multitudes have died before you and in Hell there are so many nice people.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Mandragora, 1524
There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison
Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
James Madison
I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.
Henri Matisse
Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
Matthew 7:12
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
John Milton
Paradise Lost, Book I, 254-55
I think I can quite safely say that the madhouse is no place for one of aesthetic disposition. It is filled to the very brim with the most ugly and vulgar people. But then, so, too, is polite society. The only difference is that, in polite society, one is at liberty to leave when one becomes bored.
Grant Morrison
"Sebastian O," Number 1
Talking to oneself, I have often thought is the best way to be sure of intelligent and witty conversation.
Grant Morrison
"Sebastian O," Number 1
We may be in the sewer but there is absolutely no need for that kind of gutter profanity.
Grant Morrison
"Sebastian O," Number 2
Why are video games so much better designed than office software? Because they are designed by people who love video games. Office software is designed by people who want to do something else on the weekend.
Ted Nelson
(Hypertext Visionary)
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
Thomas Paine
The Reader's Bill of Rights:
1. The right not to read
2. The right to skip pages
3. The right not to finish
4. The right to reread
5. The right to read anything
6. The right to escapism
7. The right to read anywhere
8. The right to browse
9. The right to read out loud
10. The right to not defend your tastes
Daniel Pennac
"Better Than Life"
Computers are useless. They only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
The Windows PC Versus Macintosh Buying Decision
If you want to encourage your kids to color outside the lines, think creatively and zig when the other kids zag, get the Mac. On the other hand, if you want to teach your kid that life if full of frustration and that anything worth getting takes plenty of patience and hard work, a Windows machine should do quite nicely.
David Plotnikoff
San Jose Mercury News
"I find realistic novels artificial and constraining. For every jewel of pedestrian realism that comes out, we have 100 works of triviality. It's grocery clerks and bank presidents coming to terms with being grocery clerks and bank presidents. The message of capitalism, 'work hard and you'll be happy,' has crept into our literature. It's all about accepting what you are. 'Stay in Kansas and work hard.' I say if the wizard is a phony, get a new wizard."
Anne Rice
Interview, "In Pittsburgh," 4-10 November 1993
Evil, like good, has its heroes.
Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
In love, the person who recovers first recovers best.
Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Only great men are marked by great faults.
Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
We are so accustomed to to adopting a mask before others that we end by being unable to recognize ourselves.
Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness - happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.
Adela Rogers St. Johns
"Vengeance is mine; I shall repay," saith the Lord.
Romans 12:19
This is the epigraph to Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.
Romans 12:9
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers ... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want ... everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear ... anywhere in the world.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Message to Congress, 6 January 1941
We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I will not change.
Comte Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Dominations and Powers
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
The Life of Reason
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
The Life of Reason
If too many people view existing technology as 'magic,' done by a sorcerer class fundamentally different and distant from themselves, too many of them may be content to use what they have and not motivated to learn how to further advance it.
Stanley Schmidt
Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.
Ben Shahn
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
George Bernard Shaw
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
No man can be a pure specialist without being, in the strict sense, an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
George Bernard Shaw
There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.
Solomon
Erotic energy holds the universe together. What is gravity but the desire of one body for another.
Starhawk
"The Sacredness of Pleasure"
All life is transitory, a dream. We all come together in the same place, at the end of time. If I don't see you again here, I will see you, in a little while, in a place where no shadows fall.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Confessions and Lamentations
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes ... and all of this ... all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Infection
I have seen what power does, and I have seen what power costs. The one is never equal to the other.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Epiphanies
It doesn't matter that his Grail may or may not exist, what matters is that he strives for the perfection of his soul and the salvation of his race and that he has never wavered or lost faith.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Grail
No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by the force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power governments, and tyrants, and armies can not stand.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: The Long, Twilight Struggle
Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Ceremonies of Light and Dark
Our thoughts form the universe, they always matter.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: The Hour of the Wolf
Summoned, I take the place that has been prepared for me.
I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star.
We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: All Alone in the Night
The blood is already on my hands. Right or wrong, ... I must follow the path ... to its end.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Knives
The truth points to itself.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: In The Beginning
The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Survivors
Then I will tell you a great secret.... Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: A Distant Star
There comes a time when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. Then you accept it, or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Chrysalis
There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always paved in pain.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Z'ha'dum
Thin air? Why is it always thin air? Never fat air, chubby air, mostly-fit-could-stand-lose-a-few-pounds air?
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Grey 17 is Missing
Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Believers
We all believe in something ... greater than ourselves, even if it's just the blind forces of chance.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: By Any Means Necessary
We are all slaves to our histories. If there is to be a bright future, we must learn to break those chains.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: GROPOS
We are the universe, trying to understand itself.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: Passing Through Gethsemane
Why does any advanced civilization seek to destroy less advanced one? Because the land is strategically valuable, because there are resources that can be cultivated and exploited, but most of all, simply because they can.
J. Michael Straczynski
Babylon 5: And Now For a Word
I am engaged in culinary necromancy.
Graham Swift
"Waterland," 1983, p. 207
In July, 1940, a German army occupies the land which 1914 to '18 a million-and-a-half Frenchmen had given their lives to defend and for which Petain himself had heroically struggled at Verdun. In July, 1940, Hitler contemplates - as in 1805 Napoleon had contemplated - the invasion of England. Only to put it off and go marching off to Russia. Just as Napoleon once did.
Now who says history doesn't go in circles?
Graham Swift
"Waterland," 1983, p. 156
What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes. While other say, Here's how to do it, he says, And here's what goes wrong. While others tell you, This is the way, this is the path, he says, And here are a few bungles, botches, blunders and fiascoes...
Graham Swift
"Waterland," 1983, p. 203
The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
Oh, please, Mother--tell me about the crazy and idiotic things you did when you were my age.
Ann Todd, Jr.
To Jeanne Crain in "Margie," 1946
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
I have no help to send, therefore I must go myself.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
Leo Tolstoy
May God be between you and harm in all the empty places where you must walk.
Traditional
Ancient Egyptian Blessing
As a wise man once pointed out, if 99.9% is good enough, 22 babies per day would be given to the wrong parents.
Unknown
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
Unknown
Everything's been different
All the day long;
Lovely things have happened;
Nothing has gone wrong.
Unknown
If you do not want them to hate you for your beliefs, do not hate them for theirs: be patient.
Unknown
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a "protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor" and when was the last time you needed one?
Unknown
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
Unknown
Kindness is a language the deaf can hear and the dumb can understand.
Unknown
Learn from the mistakes made by others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Unknown
Let the refining and improving of your own life keep you so busy that you have little time to criticize others.
Unknown
Love shortens time, charms the hours. Love is invincible. Many waters cannot quench it, nor the floods drown. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.
Unknown
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed tuo Nomine da gloriam.
Unknown
Battle Chant of the Templars
Our joys, when extended, will always increase;
And griefs, when divided, are hushed into peace.
Unknown
Pick a skin color, nationality, religion, philosophy, whatever. Somewhere there is a large group of unthinking killers who wilh take care of it for you with no questions asked.
Unknown
There are no unimportant jobs, no unimportant people, no unimportant acts of kindness.
Unknown
What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there is nothing to compare it with.
Unknown
When you come to the edge
of all the light you know
And are about to step off into
the darkness of the unknown,
Faith is knowing one of two
things will happen:
There will be something solid
to stand on or you will be
taught to fly.
Unknown
WINTEL computers are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.
Unknown
Yes, we know quite well that you will be far more powerful than your parents ever were. But you must learn patience. Stop trying to kill them or you're grounded.
Unknown
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
I won't be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them.
John Wayne
"The Shootist," 1976
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G. Wells
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Wells
"The Third Man," 1949
The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.
William Whewell
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde
Our time is a very shadow that passeth away.
Wisdom of Solomon 2:5
It's generally the way with progress that it looks much greater than it really is.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
I cannot convince myself that there is anyone so wise, so universally comprehensive in his judgment, that he can be trusted with the power to tell others: "You shall not express yourself thus, you shall not describe your own experiences; or depict the fantasies which your mind has created; or laugh at what others set up as respectable; or question old beliefs; or contradict the dogmas of the church, of our society, our economic systems, and our political orthodoxy."
Jake Zeitlin
This page was last updated on the first of May, anno Domini 2002.
Copyright 1996-2002 by Mark
Corsi.