Quote-o-rama:
The Fourth Miscellaneous File
"Welcome to the future, consumer. Anything not forbidden is mandatory." -Johann Bonengel, _Shadowfist_ "Utopians scare the hell out of me." http://www.lileks.com/ "There's very little you can do, really. But you should know the lines, be prepared, get sleep, and have the script analyzed so you're ready to rock and roll. And the final step is to say to yourself, 'Are you nervous? Are you ill prepared, still? Well, fuck it. Do it anyway. 'Cause you're the man.'" -William H. Macy "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." -Voltaire "If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." -Spencer Silver, on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M's "Post-It" notepads. "A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works." -Bill Vaughan, journalist "Hmm... Where can a boy get his hands on an authentic, institutional straitjacket? From the good, kinky folks at medicaltoys.com, of course! I realize this column is turning into an infomercial for medicaltoys.com, but, hey, they deserve it. I'm genuinely impressed by their web site. It's professional-looking and upbeat, and it somehow manages to make what might seem like a deeply creepy sexual fetish look like good, clean fun. But, more importantly, and what really blows me away, is how friggin' reasonable the prices are." -Dan Savage, _Savage Love_ "Life is like high school, only with money." -Frank Zappa "SUV owners can help reduce toxic emissions by parking in enclosed garages, stopping up their exhaust pipes, getting back into their cars, and tightly sealing all windows and doors." _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "Skull, what are you doing on the ceiling of my cabin?" -PVP, _pvponline.com_ "Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "Ever have one of those dreams where you're falling off a cliff? And you get scared and wake yourself up? And you feel your heartbeat in your pillow? (Just say yes, I like this analogy.) You have, oh good. So: Have you ever just let go, and let yourself fall?" -Carolyn Hax "You know what they say: If you can't lower your stress levels with the one you love, honey, lower them with the one you're with." -Dan Savage, _Savage Love_ "Right about now, Rick's seriously reconsidering his promise to never edit for content." -CRZ, 1999 "When you make an omelette, sometimes you've got to kill a few people." _Penny Arcade_ "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." -1873, Sir John Ericksen, British surgeon, Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria "Some flawed people, in extraordinary times, lose their defects." -former Mayor Ed Koch, on Rudoplh Giuliani "If I had not been born Napoleon, I would have liked to have been born Alexander." -Napoleon "Scandals have rules and manners, and one is that you don't gossip about friends in public. Friends get the benefit of the doubt." -Roxanne Roberts, Washington Post staff writer "Crime fiction is, in a way, the easiest to write; the characters need only be hardbitten and harder boiled; the ending need only be sarcastic, or tragic, or a 50-50 combo of both. Complex human needs and reaction can be reduced down to the basics. When all else fails, have someone light a cigarette." http://www.lileks.com/ "I've figured out that the guys who say, 'I mind my own business' never mind their own business, and the guys who mind their own business never make that statement. They're right up there with the people who say 'I'd like to help.' People who say they'd like to help never help. You never hear the sentence 'I'd like to help, and here I go.'" -Adam Carolla, _LoveLine_ "What does it mean when a whole culture dreams the same dream?" _Culture Jam_, byt Kalle Lasn "As many others have pointed out, one of the pitfalls of the Internet as a means of communications is that it can be used to spread misinformation as rapidly as accurate information, but all too often the former is set loose to spread far and wide, and correction comes too late, if at all." -www.snopes.com "It would be like mr toad's wild ride, only pants-y-er." -Steph H. "That's a successful t-shirt, my friends, because if you can find a way to facilitate young boys annoying their teachers, you can start lighting your cigars with $100 bills." -Scott Keith "In exchange for fabulous wealth, worldwide fame and the public's undying adulation, they've got to put up with the paparazzi following them into the toilet. This seems a fair, if Faustian, bargain." -Norah Vincent, LA Times "Right now I pretty much want to kill Aaron Sorkin and eat his brains and gain his knowledge, because I love The West Wing so much. I think his stuff is just amazing, every week. He's a big guy for me." -Joss Whedon "I look at it this way: the math classes are there so that the teachers can find out who the idiots are and send them to the industrial arts classes, where hopefully they will kill themselves in an accident. It's not necessarily a matter of using the oh-so complex Pythagorean Theorem later in life as it is a sort of socialized eugenics program." -Lewis Black, truemeaningoflife.com "There is nothing more difficult than talking about music." -Camille Saint-Saens "We're not about to start to do funny animal books unless they're really disgusting funny animal books that people are willing to pay lot of money to see." -Steve Dillon, comic book artist "I'm still working on becoming more interesting. This year, I started listening to Celtic music and collecting vintage ray guns. If you don't think that's more interesting, well, then, you agree with my wife." -Berkely Breathed "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759 "I'm like Noah. I want two of everything." -Ted Turner "Lord have mercy, Rowdy Roddy Piper has come back to kill us all." -CRZ, 1999 "It's been said that high school is the 2nd deepest pit of hell." "OK, whatever. What's the deepest?" "This site." truemeaningoflife.com "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there is a man on base." -Dave Barry "Some think that power changes a person. I don't think so. Power simply allows one to reveal his true self without fear of reprisal." -Gary Cappetta "Crows flapped up from wet earth trodden to mud by the cattle, and when she passed through the woods at the top of the hill she came upon sudden steep-sided glades overhung with ancient trees, and felt the age of the land, and how it brooded on its secrets, and in an odd way she felt at home." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "Well, all's fair in biblical allusion jokes, I guess." -Steph H. "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?" -Jean Cocteau "Scars can come in handy." _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ by J. K. Rowling "Item Two: find who invited the perky goths. Beat them." -Walden, _Dork Tower_ "After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things - terrible, yes, but great." -Ollivander, _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ by J. K. Rowling "How desperately I must want to be caught, she thought, to do this, but the thought was not accompanied by any feeling of alarm, it was the calm and tranquil voice of truth. She said she realized that regardless of the cost there is an impulse in us that cries out to declare the truth. Or destroy ourselves." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest." -C. S. Lewis "If a thing is worth doing it's worth doing badly." -G. K. Chesterton "Good intentions pave the road to Hell. They could do it with sweaters." -www.snopes.com Onion: You don't read reviews, but do you ever look at your fan sites? David Sedaris: No, I've never seen a web site. O: There are some out there. DS: Yeah, somebody told me that one of them said I had six toes. I don't have six toes. Things like that, I just always assume that if I don't see it, it doesn't exist. It'll just go away. _The Onion AV Club_ "Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort." -Charles Dickens "As the only advice columnist on the planet who regularly advises people to cheat on their partners, ethics questions aren't exactly my forte - or so the fidelity-fanatics among my readers are always telling me. So, to handle this tricky ethical question, I brought in the only ethics expert who returns my calls." _Savage Love_ "The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas." -Christopher Morley "Opera is often ironic. But scrapple rarely is. That's what I like about scrapple. It's honest." -Amber C. "And ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire." Exodus 12:10 "Basically you have a lot of kids right now, at least I can speak for New York, who have seen the entire available visual surface of the city being turned into one big For Sale sign. People are feeling, I don't know, violated. Our world is now cluttered with ads. There's no escaping them as you walk down the street. Maybe graffiti is at a wane right now in pop culture, but it's bigger than ever on the streets. There're more kids out there feeling obliged to take back that space for personal use." -Carlo McCormick, art commentator on http://www.obeygiant.com "Frankly, being naked in plays is far more horrifying because the theaters are always so chilly." -Jude Law "It's only when we feel pain, or the prospect of it, that we start to make distinctions between right and wrong." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "But it's only touching for a brief moment, and afterwards, you're left wondering if the sub-plot was actually a part of this movie, or if you made it up as you were day-dreaming during one of the mind-numbingly dull expository scenes." -the Self-Made Critic, www.brunching.com/selfmade/ "A real friend stabs you in the front." -Oscar Wilde "Nobody would tell a lie in their sleep." _House of Sleep_ by Jonathon Coe "Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire." -Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld Ken: "Just remember: you can't show fear. They can smell fear." Matt: "Women, or goths?" Ken: "Yes." _Dork Tower_ "Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable." -Gandhi "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -H.M Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927 "Redemption is difficult and it takes a long time and there isn't always a goal in sight. If you make it easy, if you find the golden key, that's kind of a false hope. The thing about a hero is that even when it doesn't look like there's light at the end of the tunnel, he's going to keep digging, just because that's who he is." -Joss Whedon "Like cramps, but more... iambic." -Amber C. "With great geekness, comes great responsibility." -PVP, _pvponline.com_ "Pragmatic concerns are never far from the thoughts of the secret lover." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "Obsessions, of course, can never be shared." _House of Sleep_ by Jonathon Coe "There is a pleasure sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know." -John Dryden "[Winchell] understood that gossip, far beyond its basic attraction as journalistic voyeurism, was a weapon of empowerment for the reader. Invading the lives of the famous and revealing their secrets brought them to heel. It humanized them, and in humanizing them demonstrated that they were no better than we and in many cases worse." -Neal Gabler, _Winchell : Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity_ "There are fallen heroes who risked their lives for the truth, and then there are media stars such as ABC's own Diane Sawyer, who not long ago took the enormous risk, right on Good Morning America, of allowing a monkey to stand on her head." _Atlantic Monthly_ "I have seen war, and I hate war." -Franklin Delano Roosevelt "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895 "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." -Robert Heinlein, 1942 "I'm dealing with the human condition, and I'm dealing with life. For me, the enemy is life, and people's struggle to prevail is essentially the theme that runs through all my books." -Will Eisner "So people finally figured out that all that money in Internet stocks is largely imaginary, and that sent the market plummeting? Gee, better not tell them about banks." _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "You mean Sam Shepard is getting Mikhail Baryshnikov's sloppy seconds?" -Jen R. "The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians. -H.L. Mencken, 1946 "It occurred to her the next day as she listlessly set about cleaning the place that nobody rises above their surroundings, not for very long." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants; and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have always fallen." -Gandhi 11:07:19 killyou 808: I host her domain, she hosts my server. 11:07:26 killyou 808: It's like a shark and a remora. 11:07:40 killyou 808: Or those birds that eat the foul shit in crocodile's teeth. 11:07:52 killyou 808: Or a guy who has a tapeworm, but likes it. "I'm dealing with the human condition, and I'm dealing with life. For me, the enemy is life, and people's struggle to prevail is essentially the theme that runs through all my books." -Will Eisner "But when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross "There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That'll be the beginning." -Louis L'Amour "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" -Song of Solomon 6:10 "Hmmm... I don't know. People are assholes naturally. They don't need any supernatural assistance." -Amber C. "True nonviolence is impossible without fearlessness." -Gandhi "If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt." -Thomas Carlyle "Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite." -Thomas Carlyle "If you're going to work in this genre, you're going to trip over the myth that is Superman. He's on the same level as Mickey Mouse. He's as important to pop culture as George Washington is to our history." -Alex Ross "Norris ultimately prevails, proving once again that there's no threat to America's safety, internal or external, that can't be solved with a little ingenuity, a lot of heart, and the help of a bearded, heavily armed sociopath." -"Films that time forgot: Invasion USA", avclub.theonion.com "I have no explanation for the tedious, sewer-centric art direction in virtually every game. Maybe publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed entirely of homesick C.H.U.D.S." -Old Man Murray "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." -Napoleon Ken: "No... dressing like a Vulcan pimp with a leather complex." Matt: "You mean a goth sophisitcate." Ken: "Whatever." _Dork Tower_ "If you are having a hard time deciding between Princeton and Yale, cry me a fucking river, Fauntleroy." _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "But hey. I, like Hebrew National, answer to a higher standard." -Steph H. "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built it with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet,'" -Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs, on attempts to Atari and Hewlett-Packard interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer "I was just thinking how I never dreamed, as a child, that I would work somewhere where I could wake up, go to work, and eat several ice cream sandwiches for breakfast for less than a dollar." -Kim S. "The Queen Mum won't de-pixelize!" -Alex K. "It seems to me that throughout the entire history of filmmaking, every year there have been about two really wonderful movies, about 10 others that are pretty good, and a whole pile of garbage. That seems to be consistent year after year, if you ask me." -William H. Macy "I prefer not to indulge in the double negative." -Jen R. "Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have." -Ronald Reagan, 1981 First Inaugural Address "For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire." -Isaiah 9:5 "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -Western Union internal memo, 1876 "It would have been both ironic and glamorous to be finished off by a four-foot glitter ball." -Boy George "Light sabres are too fast and painless. I reach for a tree stump!" "I ready my brick." _Dork Tower_ "This nation was founded on principles of non-willy-nillyness." _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed." -Dwight D. Eisenhower "Every time there's no news out there, the internet turns and eats its own like sharks fighting over chum." -Lewis Smith "It's not true that life is one damn thing after another - it's one damn thing over and over." -Edna St. Vincent Millay "'The Star Wars Holiday Special' is like a massive train wreck -- you see it coming, it makes a whole lotta noise and it's really, really long." -Daniel Kraus, for Salon.com Ray Bradbury: Well, I hope the studio executives are listening to this. Harlan Ellison: Yeah, that'll happen. Ray Harryhausen: Too late. -panel discussion, DragonCon '98 "You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow." -Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket. "I'm wildly overpaid as an entertainer in the crazy set of values that our world operates under. That's obvious. I'm not as well paid as an arms dealer, but I'm much better paid than a nurse, which is completely wrong. Having said that, the money I get for this ad is going to enable me to spend a month on Madagascar doing a program about lemurs for which I will only be paid lemur feed." -John Cleese
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
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