Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?
-- Michael Meissner Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kierkegaard The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.
-- Voltaire Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell Life is like a movie--since there aren't any commercial breaks, you have to get up and go to the
bathroom in the middle of it.
-- Nick Mirov Arts and Entertainment "One of the great dangers in having a career is getting bored." (Itzhak Perlman) I date this girl for two years--and then the nagging starts: "I wanna know your name."
-- Mike Binder And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
-- Abraham Lincoln Arts and Entertainment
For best results: wash in cold water separately, hang dry and iron with warm iron. For not so good
results: drag behind car through puddles, blow-dry on roofrack.
-- Laundry instructions on a shirt "Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." (George Washington) "God is Man's stupidest idea." (Marcel Duchamp, French Dadaist) A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.
-- Anonymous "Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mai Arts and Entertainment "REASONABLE, adj. Accessible to the infection of our own opinions. Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion and evasion." (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary) I haven't committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
-- David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes. "All grown-ups were once children, though few of them remember it." (Antoine de Saint Exupéry) Arts and Entertainment
A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
- Lao-Tzu "Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher, The Social Contract) It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
- Mark Twain I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-- William Butler Yeats, from "He wishes for the cloths of heaven" You can close your eyes to reality, but not to memories.
-- Stanislaw J. Lem Arts and Entertainment It's no credit to anyone to work to hard.
-- Ed Howe "In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." (Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 1872-1970) The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of
mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
-- Rita Mae Brown Arts and Entertainment
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." (Albert Camus) My other wife is beautiful. That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been
all along.
-- Madeleine L'Engle Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
-- Anonymous Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
-- Mark B. Cohen Arts and Entertainment "To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal consistency of the women who
love me.
-- George Bernard Shaw "By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble. By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful." (Mel Ziegler, founder of Banana Republic) Arts and Entertainment
"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say." (Kurt Vonnegut) Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft...and the only one that can be mass
produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher von Braun I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas pere Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
-- Robert Frost When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence Darrow Arts and Entertainment Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.
-- Groucho Marx The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate
men.
-- Henry B. Adams A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.
-- Fr. Jerome Cummings Arts and Entertainment
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
-- Oscar Wilde "Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution yet." (Mae West) "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics." (Plutarch) Dear Mrs, Mr, Miss, or Mr and Mrs Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action. -- C Honorable, adj. Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary
to mention all members as honorable; as, ``the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur.'
-- Bierce, A Arts and Entertainment Youth is wasted on the young.
-- George Bernard Shaw Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker
room is the temple where they worship arrested development.
-- Russell Baker Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
-- Woody Allen Arts and Entertainment
"College professors are the people who can't hack it in the real world." (William Thomas) Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the
wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without
the sympathy of the community.
-- William James My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who
take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
-- INDIRA To teach is to learn twice.
-- Joseph Joubert Arts and Entertainment The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this
is true.
-- James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion blah "A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The
gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-- Thomas Arnold Bennet Arts and Entertainment
Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
- George Bernard Shaw An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
-- Robert A. Humphrey We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind
her stands his wife.
-- Groucho Marx The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up
between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantlepiece forever.
-- Virginia Woolf Arts and Entertainment The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church.
-- G. K. Chesterton "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisi Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
-- Lily Tomlin Arts and Entertainment
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that he sometimes has to eat them.
-- Adlai Stevenson "The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) A university professor set an examination question in which he asked what is the difference
between ignorance and apathy. The professor had to give an A+ to a student who answered: I
don't know and Experience is the name every one gives his mistakes.
-- Elbert Hubbard Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
-- Thornton Wilder Arts and Entertainment When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with
the buttered side down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the 2 will hover,
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
- Lucille S. Harper Arts and Entertainment
"Wise men learn more from fools, than fools from the wise." (Anonymous) "Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) When yer in a funk, people in love are a royal pain in the patookus.
-- Portnoy, character in "Outland," comic strip by Berkely Breathed A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-- Paul Valery Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working.
- Albert Giacometti (sculptor) Arts and Entertainment Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature
intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousands times
worse tha Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
--Anon. I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
- Frederick (II) the Great Arts and Entertainment
MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two
slaves, making in all, two.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911 Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
-- Stephen Leacock When I have a kid, I wanna put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall
looking frantic.
-- Steven Wright It is a known fact that men are practical, hardheaded realists, in contrast to women, who are
romantic dreamers and actually believe that estrogenic skin cream must do something or they
couldn't cha Children should be like waffles--you should be able to throw the first one away.
-- Mary Alice Messenger Arts and Entertainment "I don't believe people die. They just go uptown. To Bloomingdales. They just take longer to get back." (Andy Warhol) Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.
-- Anonymous "A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) Arts and Entertainment
