WORDS OF WISDOM

Please report or attribution errors to: chuck@clwilliamson.net

The speed of time is one second per second.

Draft beer, not people.

When subjected to extreme feminine heat and pressure,
male hydrocarbons will often produce - a diamond.

Success is more dependent on the backbone than the wishbone.

The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette.

A waist is a terrible thing to mind.

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
-- Albert Einstein

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough. -- M. C. Escher

Torture your data long enough and it will confess to anything.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

A person who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation. - John Ciardi

Mistakes are often the stepping stones to failure.

Someday, is not a day of the week.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance
and conscientious stupidity --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
-Alexander Smith

It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

It is not known with what weapon World War III will be fought,
but World War-IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.

Save the whales. Collect the whole set.

Lady Nancy Astor, Viscountess: "If you were my husband, Winston,
I should flavor your coffee with poison."
Winston Churchill: "If I WERE your husband, madam, I should drink it."

Sign for a combined Veterinarian and Taxidermist business:
Either Way You Get Your Dog Back

Free advice generally costs more than the other kind.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act.
Those who will not act, perish for that reason. -- W. H. Auden

The silver lining is always easier to find in someone else's cloud.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
-- English Professor, Ohio University

Strategy is when you run out of ammunition but keep firing anyway.

Remember, gentlemen, what a Roman emperor said:
The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.
--Napoleon Bonapart

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

A tree never hits an automobile except in self-defense.

Maybe thith ith Godth way of telling me to thape-up...
or maybe God ith angry with me...
or maybe God juth hath a weird thenth of humor.
--Grimm the dog (with his tongue frozen to a fire-plug)

As you grow older, you stand for more and fall for less.

A toast to bread, for without bread, there could be no toast.

It's confusing that narrow-minded people are thick headed.

He who can, does. He who cannot teaches. -- George Bernard Shaw

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

America is like a melting pot.
The people at the bottom get burned,
and the scum floats to the top.
-- Charlie King

If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done.

The dumber people think you are,
the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.
-- William Clayton

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
--Friedrich Nietzsche

When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws.

I never knew what true happiness was till I got married-AND THEN IT WAS TOO LATE.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake-
when you make it again. - Franklin P. Jones

Heisenberg might have been here.

A closed mouth gathers no feet.

Minds, like parachutes, only function when they are open.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is a frustrating
as reading sex manuals without the software. -- Arthur C. Clarke

Revolution: in politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
--Ambrose Bierce

Misfortune, n. --The kind of fortune that never misses.

An open mind, like an open window, should be screened to keep the bugs out.
--Virginia Hutchinson

He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.

If you steal a clean slate, does it go on your record?

Justice is incidental to law and order.- J. Edgar Hoover

Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer.

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

In the fight between the bear and alligator, the outcome is determined by the terrain,
--Barksdale

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that fits them all.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

In God we trust, all other pay cash. --Jean Shepard

The assembled justices of the Supreme Court are as bound to the law of gravity
as any avalanche... -- Daniel Dennett

Only two things in this life are certain -- death and taxes.
--Benjamin Franklin. -Too bad they don't occur in that order.

640k ought to be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates, 1981

Immortality is the genius to move others long after you yourself have stopped moving.
--Frank Rooney

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the great dark sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good things a man has done before defend him.
Bhagavad-Gita (as quoted by Robert Oppenhiemer two nights before Trinity )

How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe,
a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
--H. L. Mencken

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes

To the extent that we have wants, we are not free.
To the extent that we do not have wants, we do not act.
--Robert G Ingersoll

...it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are,
if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. - R.P. Feynman

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
--David Starr Jordan

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
--George Washington

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
--Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) Conduct of Life`

Graveyards are full of indispensable men -- Charles de Gaulle

Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo
in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset. --Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator, 1890

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? -- Abraham Lincoln

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power.
It is easy for the weak to be gentle.
Most people can bear adversity.
But if you wish to know what a man really is,
give him power. This is the supreme test.
It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power,
he never abused it, except on the side of mercy.
--Robert G. Ingersoll (On Abraham Lincon)

Your logic is only as good as the assumptions it start with. --Steve Gelle

A conclusion may simply be the place where you got tired of thinking.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays.
Clutch it, and it darts away. -- Dorothy Parker

To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation. -- St. Augustine

Failures are divided into two classes: those who thought and never did,
and those who did and never thought.-- John Charles Salak

Learn from your parents' mistakes - use birth control!

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself . -- A. Lincoln

Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned.-- .Heinrich Heine

No Dogma ever rolled over and died without a fight. -- Daniel Dennett

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself outside the ordinary range,
of what are called Statistics-- Stephen Spender

Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.
--Lewis F Richardson

Remember that nobody will ever get ahead of you as long as he is kicking
you in the seat of the pants. -- Walter Winchell

Copywight 1994 Elmer Fudd. All wights wesewved.

Southern DOS: Y'all reckon? (Yep/Nope)

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.-- African proverb

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence;
he is just using his memory. --Leonardo da Vinci

Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first and the lessons afterwards.

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy
Sunday afternoon. -Susan Ertz

Why yes -- a bulletproof vest.
--James Rodges, murderer, on his final request before the firing squad

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. --Brian W. Kernighan

The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity,
that would be clearly understood. --Alexander Haig

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River,
the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN'T SWIM.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
--Thomas Henry Huxley

Copying from one source is plagiarism; copying from many is research.

Obscenity is anything that gives a judge an erection.
--Anonymous American lawyer

Remember when it comes to giving, some people stop at nothing.

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.
--Richard Dawkins

All lies go armed, and all mistakes carry concealed weapons --Robert G. Ingersoll

Flying saucers are just an optical conclusion.

We shall find the Cube of the Rainbow,
Of that there is no doubt.
But the Arc of a Lover's conjecture
Eludes the finding out.
--Emily Dickinson (1894)

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell
--you see, I have friends in both places. --Mark Twain

It's like finding a haystack full of needles. - Leo Rosten

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. - Florynce Kennedy

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Theory: when you have ideas.
Ideology: when ideas have you.

When we talk to God, we're praying.
When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic.
- Lily Tomlin

Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate mother-fuckers.

The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish,
and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits.
When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words is to convey ideas.
When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to.
- Chuang-tzu c.369-286 BC

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

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
THAT'S relativity. - Albert Einstein

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. -John Maynard Keynes

Your manuscript is both good and original,
but the part that is good is not original,
and the part that is original is not good.
--Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

The American people know what they want, and deserve to get it,
good and hard. -- H.L. Mencken

Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass. -- French Proverb

I have the heart of a little boy.
I keep it in a jar on my desk. -- Stephen King

No one is more carnal than a recent virgin. -- John Steinbeck

More than at any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen

You can't tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation.

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. -- Abraham Lincoln

Death never knocks. Death justs walks through the door.
--Tennessee Williams

It makes a big difference if we think of God as a person or as a force.
One way you get Christianity, the other you get Star Wars.
-Jayne Kulikauskas

Now and then there arises a man, who on peril's edge, draws from the scabbard of despair,
the sword of victory. --Robert G.Ingersoll

See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron,
My God! Perhaps I am!
--Eugenics Review, July 1929

Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped. -- Groucho Marx

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. -- Ellen Parr

There is no god, and Murphy is his prophet.

The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly", meaning "many",
and the word "ticks", meaning "blood sucking parasites".
-- Larry Hardiman

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. --Timothy Leary

         EARTH 
      smog | bricks 
   AIR -- Mud -- FIRE
   seltzer | tequila 
         WATER 

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.-- Edward Abbey

Think global, act loco.

Pain is inevitable- suffering is optional.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.-- Mark Twain

Happiness is not something you experience, it's something you remember.
-Oscal Levant

You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.
- Jonathan Swift

Hell is paved with good Samaritans. - William M. Holden

Silence is argument carried out by other means. -- "Che"Guevara (1928-1967)

The U.S. Constitution isn't perfect --
but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now....

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
There is something unfair about its use.
It is hitting below the intellect. --Oscar Wilde

Most of it is crap, but in every pile of crap is a gem of stupidity.
--psyco@ace.com

Right-to-Lifers believe that life begins at the moment you agree with them.

Invest in America- buy a Congressman -- Bumper Sticker

I talk to God every day, and He's never mentioned you.
--from the movie "Ladyhawke"

The world is proof that God is a committee. --Bob Stokes

Newspaper, n:  A device incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident
and the collapse of civilization.

Hindu speaking to a "Born again" Christian:
"Of course I am born again. And again and again and again."

To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition. --Woody Allen

Freedom is not free.
Free men are not equal.
Equal men are not free.

The goal of psychotherapy: To transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
--Freud

Draw me not without cause;
Sheath me not without honor.
Engraved on the sword of ---Geroge Armstrong Custer

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
-- Derek Bok ex-president of Harvard

It should not be believed that a march of three or four days in the wrong direction can be
corrected by a countermarch. As a rule, this is to make two mistakes instead of one.
--Napoleon Bonapart

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
--Rudyard Kipling

F = m*a
Lambda = h/mv
E = mc**2
1 + e**(i*pi) = 0

Jim Bakker spells his name with 2 k's because 3 would be too obvious.
--Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect

Last year, more people were killed by firearms than in "road rage" incidents,
a trend that will continue until we develop a more accurate automobile.
--Newsweek page-56 , 1/28/98

Don't ask the monkey, ask the organ grinder.
--Lou Holtz Former Notre Dame football coach

Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur

There are four kinds of murder: criminal, excusable, rightful and praiseworthy.
This classification serves the lawyers. To the murdered it makes no difference.
--Ambrose Bierce

Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

Data isn't information. Information isn't knowledge. And knowledge isn't wisdom.

God is coming- and She is pissed
--Bumper Sticker

To define recursion, we must first define recursion.

In some parts of Africa, instead of saying "good night" people say "wake up living."

Boys throw stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs do not die in sport. They die in earnest.
--Bion (c. 325 - c. 255 B.C.)

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. --H. H. Williams

Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for.

Yesterday a drop of semen. Tomorrow a handful of ashes.
--Emperor Marcus Aurelius

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.-- Miguel de Cervantes (c.1613)

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something
that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.
--- Mark Twain.

... A naked man fears no pickpocket... --- Blue Wave/QWK v2.10

You are a good man, but you are in the wrong place
and you are going to die a horrible death. -- a Chinese Ghost Story

Suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,
and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
--Barry Goldwater

A slipping sear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it.
That would make you quite unpopular... with what's left of your unit.
PS magazine, the Army magazine of preventive maintenance, August 1993

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-- Andrew Jackson

Hell is truth seen too late. [Thomas Hobbes]

I.R.S.: We've got what it takes to take what you've got!

ASCII to ASCII, DOS to DOS.

The highest reward for a person's toil is not
what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
-- John Ruskin

Indecision is the key to flexibility.

Enslaved, illogical, elate,
   He greets the embarrassed Gods, nor fears
To shake the iron hand of Fate
   Or match with Destiny for beers.
An American
--Rudyard Kipling - 1894 (excerpt)

The only thing in life achieved without effort- is failure.

The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

The more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.

Computers are like Old Testament gods;  lots of rules and no mercy.
-- Joseph Campbell

The dead sleep in their moonless night. My business is with the living.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth."
-- Ludwig Borne

Knock Knock.
Who's There?
Recursion
Recursion who?
Knock Knock...

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone ever discovers exactly
what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear
and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
--Douglas Adams

And that inverted Bowl we call the sky,
Where under crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your heads to it for help
For it as impotently moves as you or I.
-- Omar

The world is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel.
-- Horace Walpole Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy"

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
-- Sir Arthur Eddington, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 9,1932.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
-- Lucretius

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects 
from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond 
the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles 
to be applied by the courts.  One's right to life, liberty, and property, 
to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other
fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; 
they depend on the outcome of no elections.
--Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson  
in a 1943 decision recognizing the right of Jehovah's Witness 
children to refrain from saluting the flag

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents
despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.  -- Aristotle

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. --Thomas Jefferson

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place,
but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the moment of temptation.

Sometimes I think I understand everything-  then I regain consciousness.

We never know we go,--when we are going
We jest and shut the door;
Fate following behind us bolts it,
And we accost no more.
--Emily Dickinson (Sonnet XLIX)

A triumph of the embalmer's art  --Gore Vidal, on Ronald Regan, 1981

If they know nothing of victory,
then at least they are spared the knowledge of defeat
--Oscar Wilde

We don't have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds;
our planet is the mental institute of the universe.
--Goethe

Poetry is an orphan of silence.
The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
--Charles Simic

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
--Watter Lippman

A dead thing can go with the stream,
but only a living thing can go against it.
--G. K. Chesterton

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.
-- Marie Curie

It may be that we have all lived before and died, and this is hell.
--A.L. Prusick

Fear can be healthier than whiskey,
once man has acquired a taste for it.
--Donald Downes

I have no trouble with my enemies.
I can take care of my enemies all right.
But my damn friends, my God damn friends.
They're the ones that keep me walking the floors at night."
--Warren G. Hardin

Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong.
No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first,
and is waiting for it. -Terry Prachet Reaper Man

The difference between a dream and a goal is an action plan.
The difference between a goal and reality- is the action.
-Zelda Iams

It's like quantum physics- It doesn't make any sense 
but it explains everything else. 
-Terry Bisson Incident at Oak Ridge

...In the haze of afternoon,
while the air flowed saffron,
I played my game for keeps --
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life...
-Stanley Kunitz Trials of Summer (excerpt)

Under certain circumstances, 
profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-- Mark Twain

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice -- Mark Twain

It would be a harmless trick, if it were not continually misunderstood 
by those hungry to misunderstand it. 

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, 
some worship power, some worship God, and 
over these ideals they dispute and 
cannot unite-- but they all worship money. 
-- Mark Twain

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon- which cuts without wounding, 
and ennobles the man who wields it.   It is a sword that heals.
  --Martin Luther King Jr.

Through love, we steal from the time that kills us, a few hours, which we 
turn now into paradise and not into hell.  In both ways time expands 
and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness and unhappiness, 
though it is both things, love is intensity:  it does not give us eternity but life, 
that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: 
here is there, and now is always.  In love, everything is two 
and everything strives to be one. -- Octavio Paz
The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism 

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, 
well-meaning, but without understanding.
-- Louis D. Brandeis

Adversity is the trial of principal.  Without it,
a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.
-- Henry Fielding

Love is a better fate than riches.
-- "Chuck" Williamson

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
--Malachy McCourt

Temptation is the trial of virtue.
--Chuck Williamson

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights.  
Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep 
voting on what to have for supper.  --Larry Flynt

If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.  
-Arthur Goldberg

To rule is easy, to govern difficult.  -Johann W. von Goethe

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, 
after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.  
--Alan Coren 

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, 
we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties . . . 
which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile. 
-- U.S. v. Robel, 1967

You only have power over people as long as you don't take 
everything away form them.  But when you've robbed a man 
of everything, he's no longer in your power- he's free again.
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The first Circle, 1968

If you hate a person, you hate something in that is part of yourself. 
What isn't a part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. 
--Hermann Hesse, Demain, 1919

Cleverness is not wisdom.
-- Euripides

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
–Ghandi

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, 
my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life 
or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense 
the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning. 
--James Joyce 1916

Trial work requires a computer mind that is rapid in challenge and response. 
It's like live TV with no rerun.  Not everyone has a mental fast ball 
and those who don't shouldn't try cases.
-- Ned Good Lawyer

No Poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.
--Jean Giraudoux  19th century Frenchman

White folks don't want peace; they want quiet.
The price you pay for peace is justice.
Until there is justice, there will be no peace and quiet.
-- Jesse Jackson

Justice?  You get justice in the next world,  in this world you get the law.
--William Gaddis

I think that there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch,
and which therefore, to some extent, justify revenge.
--Sherlock Holmes

Lawyers are like beavers; they get in the mainstream and dam it up.
--John Naisbitt

This is what has to be remembered about the law:
Beneath that cold, harsh impersonal exterior 
there beats a cold, harsh, impersonal heart.
--David Frost, British journalist

Art is the chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.
-- Stanely Kunits  Passing Through, 1995

The principles underlying all laws, rules and conventions imposed by society 
to regulate the conduct of war and those who wage it are these:
the principle of military necessity,
the principle of humanity;
the principle of chivalry.
Once these principles are negated by a nation, that nation places in jeopardy 
its status in modern society and hazards any claim to the rightness of its cause.
--US Marine Corps Officers Manual, second edition- 1964,  p. 237

Some politicians reveal a "gift for compressing the largest amount amount of words 
into the smallest amount of thought. --Winston Churchill

Not nature but the 'genius of mankind' has knotted the hangman's noose, 
with which it can execute itself at any moment-- Carl Jung 1952

Stupidity should not be painless- Bumper Sticker

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers 
and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken,  unspeakable fear. 
They are afraid of words and thoughts!  Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, 
all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse -
a little tiny mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates 
are thrown into panic.  -Winston Churchill

Trust is harder to earn than a Ph.D. and easier to loose than a set of car-keys.
- Anthony Ronzio (in a NY Times column) 2006

When we are dealing with our internal (life) clocks we are looking at a clock without hands-
we can't read the time... but we know it's ticking

When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,
-- Kurt Vonnegut

The trouble with having an open mind, of course,
is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
-- Terry Pratchett

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
--Terry Pratchett,

Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife,
and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater - love touches you, and marks you forever.
--Beth Fand Incollingo

I can be powered down (for the last time), or as Timothy Leary puts it, "deanimated."

It would be a harmless trick if it were not continually misunderstood by those hungry to misunderstand it.

The one resolution, which was in my mind long before it took the form of a resolution, is the keynote of
my life.  It is this; I always regarded as mere impertinences of fate the handicaps which were placed
upon my life almost at the beginning. I resolved that they should not crush or dwarf my soul,
but rather be made to blossom, like Aaron's rod, with flowers.
- -Helen Keller

... a carnivorous injunction, as in: "And don't touch them weasels, neither."

I cannot see why we should expect an infinite God to do better in another world than he does in this.
- Robert Ingersoll

A horse may be coaxed to drink, but a pencil must be lead.
- Stan Laurel

Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over-
-The Onion: mock news speech by GWB

We're describing the hammer here, you'll have to decide where the nails go.

A bathroom break during "Return of the King" becomes a pisser of the highest order -
not unlike having to take out the trash in the middle of losing one's virginity.

It is easy to start thinking that raising ethical issues in a technical discussion is improper,
that there is some virtue in keeping technical decisions away from ethics.
That is the worst mistake an engineer can make." -- RMS

The American order was a new idea, not a new version of an old idea.

... chamberpot at the end of the rainbow

If the minimum wasn't acceptable it wouldn't be called the minimum.
- George Muncaster (Air Force Wisdom)

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
- Noelie Altito

I was so poor growing up ... if I wasn't a boy ...I'd a had nothing to play with.
-Rodney Dangerfield

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
- Sir Winston Churchill

I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure.
--Charlton Heston - on his Alzheimer's disease

 Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
- Patrick Moynihan

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
-- Dr Seuss

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
-- Dr Seuss

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
-- Dr Seuss

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
-- Dr Seuss

What light is to the eyes -
what air is to the lungs -
what love is to the heart,
liberty is to the soul of man.
--Robert G. Ingersoll

Happiness is not having what you want... but wanting what you have.

Societies where the middle class dominates are the most likely to be stable and decent.  
The wealthy tend to be arrogant and heedless;  the economically insecure, resentful and destructive.
Members of the middle class tend to have more moderate desires, they are more open
to reasonable persuasion, and they are more likely to be linked to one another by ties of civic affection.
--Aristotle (as attributed by  William A. Galston, Wall Street Journal, 2013/11/12)

I don't have a memory problem-  I have a recall problem.
-- Sharon Williamson (my daughter)

Put fun between your legs-  ride a bike!
--Sign on a bicycle shop, Lakewood WA.

Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.
--Michael Jackson

Vision without execution is hallucination.
-- Thomas Edison

Our worst fault is our preoccupation with the faults of others.
--Kahlil Gibran

Five Cardinal Rules for Life:

(1) Make Peace with your past.
      So it won't disturb your present

(2) What other people think of you
      is none of your business.

(3) Time heals almost everything.
      Give it time.

(4) No one is in charge of your happiness. 
      Except you.

(5) Don't compare your life to others
     and don't judge them , you have no idea
     what their journey is all about.
--Tesh.com

Listen and Silent are spelled with the same letters.

But- I was coerced by circumstance.

Hate corrodes the container that holds it.

Last updated: 2021/12/3