HANLON'S RAZOR:
Never attribute to malice that which
can be explained adequately by stupidity.

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It speaks, and yet says nothing.
-- SHAKESPEARE, commenting on television, in ROMEO AND JULIET
   (as noted by Marshall McLuhan)

Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared 
than a thousand bayonets.
-- NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

"Open the pod bay door, Hal".
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
-- 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

The only thing worse than being talked about behind your back,
is not being talked about at all.

In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak
because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I
didn't speak because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade
unionists, and I didn't speak because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I
was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no
one was left to speak up.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller

It is of more importance to the community that innocence should be
protected than it is that guilt should be punished, for guilt and
crimes are so frequent in the world that all of them cannot be
punished, and many times they happen in such a manner that it is not
of much consequence to the public whether they are punished or not.
But when innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned,
especially to die, the subject will exclaim, "It is immaterial to me
whether I behave well or ill, for virtue is no security". And if such
sentiment as this should take place in the mind of the subject there
would be an end to all security whatsoever.
-- John Adams

ALL I NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN THE MARINES
 - Eat all of your vegetables.
 - Make your bed every day.
 - Warm, moist footwear leads to 
   severe problems with fungus.
 - When someone tells you to, run
   full speed at another person and
   stab them with a bayonet.
----- Steve Posner

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world
will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang von G”the

"The loss of free speech is regrettable, 
but it is a cheap price to pay." 
-- San Francisco Police Chief Richard Hongisto, 2 May 92
    (Fired after only 45 days on the job.)

"What some textbooks are doing is giving students ideas,
and ideas will never do them as much good as facts."
-- NORMA GABLER, co-founder of Educational Research Analysis,
   a schoolbook review committee (from FORUM, the newsletter
   of People for the American Way)

"When a student reads in a math book that there are
no absolutes, suddenly every value he's been taught
is destroyed. And the next thing you know, the student
turns to crime and drugs."
-- MEL GABLER, co-founder of Educational Research Analysis,
   a schoolbook review committee (from FORUM, the newsletter
   of People for the American Way)

"It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom;
it is another sight finer to fight for another man's."
-- MARK TWAIN

"I made this letter longer than usual because
 I lack the time to make it shorter."
-- PASCAL, Provincial Letters XVI

The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.
-- D.E. KNUTH ("The art of computer programming", chapter 4)

"I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
   of 40,000, or even 4,000 per hour; such a revolutionary change as the
            octonary scale should not be imposed upon mankind in general
                                       for the sake of a few individuals."
-- F.H. WALES (1936)

"The only important elements in any society
are the artistic and the criminal,
because they alone, by questioning the society's values,
can force it to change."
-- the Linguistic Ubiquitous Multiplex (Lump)
   in EMPIRE STAR by Samuel R. Delany

"Love and loyalty to an individual 
can run counter to the claims of the State.
When they do -- down with the state, say I, 
which means the State would down me."
-- E.M. FORSTER, 1938

"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 
`Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force 
every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker,
`Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."
-- GEORGE ORWELL, 1937

"What is hateful to yourself, don't do to others. That is
the whole Torah, the rest is commentary, now go study."
-- RABBI HILLEL

"But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent
of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime,
then he is not a suspect."
-- ED MEESE, in U.S. News & World Report, 15 Oct 85

"A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription
is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense
that ever entered into the head of man."
-- DANIEL WEBSTER, speech in the House of Representatives, 14 Jan 1814

"The best way to secure liberty is to exercise it."
-- JOHN BARLOW

"Cyberspace is where you are when you're talking on the telephone."
-- MITCH KAPOR

          If all problems of hyphenation have not been solved,
                         at least some progress has been made
                   since that night, when according to legend,
               an RCA Marketing Manager received a phone call
  from a disturbed customer. His 301 had just hyphenated "God".
-- PAUL E. JUSTUS, There's More to Typesetting Than Setting Type (1972)

"Travel is lethal to prejudice."
-- MARK TWAIN

Jennings' Innate Perversity of Nature Rule:
        The tendency of Nature to cause exactly the thing you are not
        prepared for, to happen. This is because Nature gets to use the 
        set of all things not known to humans, which by definition
        is infinite.

"Paradise is just like where you are right now, only much better."
-- LAURIE ANDERSON ("Language is a virus")

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
-- LANCE HANSCHE

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
-- HASSAN I SABBAH

"Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail cant cash."
-- BO DIDDLEY

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
-- NIELS BOHR

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
-- SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ORACLE

"The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents."
-- H P LOVECRAFT

"The most merciless thing in the world... is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents."
-- H P LOVECRAFT

"Take what you can use and let the rest go by."
-- KEN KESEY

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
-- SIGMUND FREUD

"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one
I've never tried before."
-- MAE WEST

"It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night."
-- WILLIE SUTTON

"If you think the United States has stood still, who built the
largest shopping center in the world?"
-- RICHARD M. NIXON

"When I sell liquor, its called bootlegging; when my patrons serve
it on Lake Shore Drive, its called hospitality."
-- AL CAPONE

"Anything anybody can say about America is true."
-- EMMETT GROGAN

"If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all."
-- SPIRO AGNEW

"If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."
-- RONALD REAGAN

He who shits on the road will meet flies on his return.
SOUTH AFRICAN SAYING

"The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this 
incredible jailbreak."
-- WAVY GRAVY

"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
-- BUCKMINSTER FULLER

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."
-- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

"America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?"
-- ALLEN GINSBERG

"It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore,
I have to beat somebody."
-- RICHARD M. NIXON

"Justice is incidental to law and order."
-- J. EDGAR HOOVER

"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."
-- GROUCHO MARX

"We are what we pretend to be."
-- KURT VONNEGUT, JR

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
-- OSCAR WILDE

"Real wealth can only increase."
-- R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true
or becomes true."
-- JOHN LILLY

Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
-- GRAFFITI

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it."
-- TALLULAH BANKHEAD

"A physicist is an atoms way of knowing about atoms."
-- GEORGE WALD

"We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish."
-- JOHN CULKIN

I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have 
been from you.
-- ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task
completely overwhelm me.
-- ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence
without civilization in between."
-- OSCAR WILDE

"If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would
presumably flunk it."
-- STANLEY GARN

"The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls."
-- FATHER ROBERT F. CAPON

"Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest
men in national government too."
-- RICHARD M. NIXON

"We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it."
-- DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

"If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution
inevitable."
-- JOHN F. KENNEDY

"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

"It takes a long time to understand nothing."
-- EDWARD DAHLBERG

"To know the world one must construct it."
-- CESARE PAVESE

"The mistake you make is in trying to figure it out."
-- TENESSEE WILLIAMS

"All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard,
ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas."
-- KINGFISH

"When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
-- CALVIN COOLIDGE

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #1

The only difference between the fool, and the criminal who
attacks a system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and
on a broader front.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #3

Self-checking systems tend to have a complexity in proportion
to the inherent unreliability of the system in which they 
are used.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #5

The error-detection and correction capabilities of any system
are the key to understanding the type of errors which they 
cannot handle.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #6

Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to
detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #7

All real programs contain errors until proven otherwise - 
which is impossible.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #8

Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the
probable cost of errors, or somebody insists on getting some
useful work done.
-- GILB'S LAW OF COMPUTER RELIABILITY #9

Thoreau's Law:
 If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of
doing you good, you should run for your life.

Vique's Law:
 A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.
-- CONFUCIUS

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good
impromptu speech.
-- MARK TWAIN

"The unnatural, that too is natural."
-- GOETHE

I used to be indecisive; now I'm not sure.
-- GRAFFITI

"I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it."
-- SAMUEL GOLDWYN

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
-- GRAFFITI

"'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability."
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty 
without any proof."
-- ASHLEY MONTAGUE

Ketterling's Law:
Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.

"Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards 
upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel."
-- H.L. MENCKEN

"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded 
on the Christian Religion."
-- GEORGE WASHINGTON

"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON

"Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations."
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON

"We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately."
-- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The Swartzberg Test:
 The validity of a science is its ability to predict.

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he 
will pick himself up and carry on..."
-- WINSTON CHURCHILL

"That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
-- THOREAU

"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and 
thinking what no one else has thought."
-- ALBER SZENT-GYORGI

"Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor."
-- TOYNBEE

We have met the enemy and he is us.
 - Walt Kelly (in POGO) -

"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them."
-- HEISENBERG

If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it 
takes all you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to 
get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
-- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, 
please your Majesty ?" he asked. "Begin at the beginning,", the 
King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: 
then stop."
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

"How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for 
somewhere else."
-- R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. 
There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work."
-- Gallagher

"Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the 
dark."
-- Robert Heinlein

None of the errors was found.
  Compiler message, Micro Data Base Systems

"...if it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if 
it is a Fact, proof is necessary."
-- Samuel Clemens

"I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes 
everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who 
makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the 
weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New 
England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make 
weather for countries that require a good article, and will take 
their custom elsewhere if they don't get it."
-- Mark Twain

The confidence of ignorance will always overcome
the indecision of knowledge.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

"We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a
very grave danger they will be misinterpreted."
 -- H. R. Haldeman, testifying in his own defense.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they
have to take you in.

America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for
one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.

"Dawn: The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer
to rise at about that time, 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."
-- MARK TWAIN

How many IBM CPUs does it take to execute a program?
Ten. Nine to hold it down, and one to cut its head off.

Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as
they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out
a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark.

PARKINSON'S LAW:  Work expands to fill the time available
for its completion.

WEILER'S LAW: Nothing is impossible for the man who does not
have to do it himself.

FINAGLE'S LAW: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it
makes it worse.

THE ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE: By definition, when you are investigating
the unknown - you do not know what you will find.

Commoner's Three Laws of Ecology
   1)  No action is without side-effects.
   2)  Nothing ever goes away.
   3)  There is no free lunch.

Harvard Law
   Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure,
   temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the
   organism will do as it damn well pleases.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization,
M. K. Gandhi said, "I think it would be an excellent idea".

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured
and then quietly strangled.

"One Galileo in two thousand years is enough."  
-- Pope Pius XII

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Observation, and not old age, brings wisdom.

A man gazing at the stars is at the mercy of every puddle on the road.

"I'll play with it first and tell you what it is later."
-- MILES DAVIS

"I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all 
these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these 
kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and
I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been
avoiding the beach."
-- LUCINDA CHILDS (PHILIP GLASS: EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH)

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
-- HASSAN I SABBAH

"I never loved another person the way I loved myself."
-- MAE WEST

"Her life was saved by rock and roll."
-- LOU REED

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce."
-- J EDGAR HOOVER

"Honest Officer, had I known my health stood in jeprody I would never
had lit one."
-- MAXIM OF THE HELLS ANGELS

"It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night."
-- WILLIE SUTTON

"The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs."
-- KARL MARX
 
"If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of
it ... it would have been much better."
-- KARL MARX'S MOTHER

Use it up ... Wear it out.
Make it do ... Or do without.
US WORLD WAR II MESSAGE

"You can't underestimate the power of fear."
-- TRICIA NIXON

"The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this 
incredible jailbreak."
-- WAVY GRAVY

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."
-- DWIGHT D EISENHOWER

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."
-- HELEN KELLER

"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns 
and detective stories."
-- ARTHUR C CLARKE

"America, how can a write a holy litany in your silly mood?"
-- ALLEN GINSBERG

"It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore,
I have to beat somebody."
-- RICHARD M NIXON

"Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearance of magic."
-- ARTHUR C CLARKE

"Justice is incidental to law and order."
-- J EDGAR HOOVER

"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."
-- ABBIE HOFFMAN

"How can you be two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"
-- FIRESIGN THEATER

"I could prove God statistically."
-- GEORGE GALLUP

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior
spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive
with our frail and feeble mind."
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true
or becomes true."
-- JOHN LILLY

Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
-- GRAFFITI

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it."
-- TALLULAH BANKHEAD

"A physicist is an atoms way of knowing about atoms."
-- GEORGE WALD

Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.
-- ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

If you cant learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
-- ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

Laws of Computer Programming
(1) Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
(2) Any given program costs more and takes longer.
(3) If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
(4) If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
(5) Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
(6) The value of a program is proportional to the 
    weight of its output.
(7) Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the
    programmer who must maintain it.
(8) Make it possible for programmers to write programs in
    English, and you will find that programmers cannot write
    in English.
-- SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2

"When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
-- CALVIN COOLIDGE

Fuller's Law of Cosmic Irreversibility:
 1 Pot T == 1 Pot P
 1 Pot P != 1 Pot T
-- R BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Gilb's Laws of Reliability
(1) Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
(3) The only difference between the fool, and the criminal who
    attacks a system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and
    on a broader front.
(5) Self-checking systems tend to have a complexity in proportion
    to the inherent unreliability of the system in which they 
    are used.
(6) The error-detection and correction capabilities of any system
    are the key to understanding the type of errors which they 
    cannot handle.
(7) Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to
    detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
(8) All real programs contain errors until proven otherwise - 
    which is impossible.
(9) Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the
    probable cost of errors, or somebody insists on getting some
    useful work done.
-- TOM GILB

"Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he
encounters needs pounding."
-- ABRAHAM KAPLAN

"The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems."
-- ROGER LEVIAN

"Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there
is some ordinance under which you can be booked."
-- ROBERT D SPRECHT (RAND CORP)

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs,
then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
-- GERALD WEINBERG

Zimmerman's Law of Complaints:
Nobody notices when things go right.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.
-- CONFUCIUS

"He hasn't one redeeming vice."
-- OSCAR WILDE

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
-- GRAFFITI

"I don't drink water. Fish fuck in it."
-- W C FIELDS

The Swartzberg Test:
 The validity of a science is its ability to predict.

"You don't have to explain something you never said."
-- CALVIN COOLIDGE

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later 
it adds up to real money.
EVERETT DIRKSEN

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he 
will pick himself up and carry on..."
-- WINSTON CHURCHILL

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

Ode to Turbulent Flow:
 Big whirls have little whirls
 Which feed on their velocity,
 And little whirls have lesser whirls
 And so on, to viscosity.