Quote-o-rama:
The Fifth Miscellaneous File
"Irish Muslims live the longest." -Imam S. "Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so." -Robert H. Jackson "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -David Sarnoff's associates, in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920's "After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an accident, it makes you wonder about history." -Dave Barry "Architecture is frozen music." -Johann Wolfgang Goethe "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein "I'm an experienced woman; I've been around... well, alright, I might not've been around, but I've been... nearby." -Mary Tyler Moore "God never gives us more angry Belgian lesbians than we can handle. It is part of His infinte mercy and wisdom." -Imam S. "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." -Brendan Behan "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." -Woodrow Wilson "The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality." -Arnold Joseph Toynbee "The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much." -Amelia Edith Barr "Sadly, the fine art of simplistic movie-making is lost on the movie-makers and so their movie is lost on us." -the Self-Made Critic, Brunching Shuttlecocks "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year," -the editor in charge of business books for Prentiss-Hall, 1957 "Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night." -Rupert Brooke "The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion..." -Henry Steel Commager "When I was young, I grew up in a part of California where there was a lot of sunshine. For some reason, that really made me appreciate darkness and shadows. Some people might think that's a little weird, but I've also come to accept that as just a part of myself." -Tim Burton "I can only bow before you superior bastardry." _Red Meat_ "To pull this off requires a bit of emotional reeducation: that humiliation and even loss really aren't the worst sensations out there. Numbness is." -Carolyn Hax "I'm supposedly a direct descendant. Or so my father always claimed. he said his grandmother had done the geneology, but I never saw it, and he was a salesman for a big paint company - and paint always makes things look better, so I don't know for sure." -David Standish "...whereas I'm willing to discuss physics on the first date." -Raven A. "Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." -Andre Gide Dr. Drew: A few thousand years from now, archaeologists are going to dig up twentieth-century man and see these plastic bags on the ribcages of all the females, and they'll think, "How strange! What is this, some sort of ritualistic behavior?" Adam: No. They'll have DVD porn, they'll know exactly what was going on. _LoveLine_ "That's an overly literal and somewhat disturbing interpretation. You must be one of our fans." truemeaningoflife.com "I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." -anonymous "The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." -W. M. Lewis "36-24-36? Only if she's 5'3"." -Sir Mix-A-Lot, "Baby's Got Back" "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 "Roll the dice. I want to see if I eat your spleen." -Igor, _Dork Tower_ "Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice." -Holbrook Jackson "There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross "In medieval Britain, actors were called rogues and vagabonds, and we are actually rogues and vagabonds, no matter how we look tonight. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, all you rogues and vagabonds." -Helen Mirren, accepting the SAG award for "Gosford Park" "It's not love's going hurts my days / But that it went in little ways." -Edna St. Vincent Millay "You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." -Marcus Aurelius "Humanitarianism needs no apology. Unless we ... feel it toward all men without exception, we shall have lost the chief redeeming force in human history." -Ralph Barton Perry "For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains." -Deuteronomy 32:22 "Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws." -Karl Kraus "You gotta be smooth and sophisticated and at the same time rugged and manly like Frank Sinatra or a samurai." -Cliff Yablonski, somethingawful.com "It's purely pragmatic self-interest to draw from the artist's strengths. It makes you look like the best author in the world." -Neil Gaiman, book signing, 6-24-97 "Liberace outlived Elvis, thereby suggesting to many there is no God, or if there is one, He lacks taste." http://www.lileks.com/ "Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian." -Robert Orben "It seems that relaying unsolicited legal advice to a friend of someone who might be in trouble (through a sex column, no less) is frowned upon at some starchier law firms." -Dan Savage, _Savage Love_ "There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ by J. K. Rowling "For once, I'd like to be called sir without it ending with 'you're making a scene.'" -anonymous "My hope is that gays will be running the world, because then there would be no more war. Just a greater emphasis on military apparel." -Rosanne Barr "Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh." -Deuteronomy 12:23 "Christina Ricci's like a great silent movie actress. She brings this kind of ambiguous quality wherein she can stand there and stare at you and you don't know whether she really likes you or hates you. She brings a lot of mystery to her characters." -Tim Burton "I can make people that are scarier than anything you can put in latex." -Joss Whedon "I've got a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel." -Edmund Blackadder "The development of this frightful means of destruction was ardently demanded by the perils of the time and situation." -Albert Einstein "The risk of loss is the shadow cast by affection. You can't adjust your whole life around it." -Carolyn Hax "Life is hard. People are good when they want to be. And the universe is a big, scary place just like high school." -Joss Whedon, on the moral center for Buffy and Angel "Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day." -Ringo Starr "I enjoy the pagan overtones of _Rawhead Rex._" -Pam S. "It was one of those days when a profound stillness settled on the countryside, not a breath of wind, the trees motionless as though listening intently to movement deep in the earth, perhaps the sluggish blood of dead Welshmen, the murdered sons of Owen Glendower." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else." -Lily Tomlin "Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and _that_ is the basic building block of the universe." -Frank Zappa "Irish Muslims live the longest!" -Imam S. "As you know, it's essential for your sanity to spend all your time with people who are exactly at your level of personal income, IQ, aesthetic sensibility, physical attractiveness and percentage of body fat. When someone in my posse gets a good job and starts combing his hair and wearing clean shirts and showering daily, we drop him." -Joel Achenbach "It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." -Ralph Waldo Emerson "In each of us, two natures are at war - the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose - what we want most to be we are." -Jekyll & Hyde "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." -Carl Jung "If only Tron had been a silent film, offered with no subtitles, without the real-world opening scenes, it would be regarded as a masterpiece of stark surreal beauty." http://www.lileks.com/ "I have been warned that if you value your soul, or whatever you may have replacing it, you should *NOT* see _Batman and Robin_." -Alex K. "You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." -Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the 'unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus "The herd seek out the great, not for their sake, but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need." -Napoleon "In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until it's too late." -Bruce Sterling "In 1939 the American comic book, much like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant." _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_ by Michael Chabon "Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research." -Malcolm X "One can never have enough socks," said Dumbledore. "Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books." _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_ by J. K. Rowling "What can one old monk do against the mightiest of the Lodge?" -Quan Lo, _Shadowfist_ "I wonder if gigolos get paid by the orgasm." -Tracy G. "It was 1985 when I started working on this, and I thought, 'What kind of world would be scary enough for Batman?' And I looked out my window." -Frank Miller theonionavclub.com interview "Face to face, no telling lies / The masks, they slide to reveal a new disguise..." -Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face" "Isn't it funny how so many people find God only after they have painted themselves into a moral corner and made life a living hell for those around them. Nobody finds Jesus on prom night." -Dennis Miller "I don't like this plan quite as much as the one with the super-robots, but I suppose it'll have to do." _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "Behold the mile that is taken should I ever give an inch." -Chop Chop Master Onion truemeaningoflife.com "In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time." _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_ by Michael Chabon "What we expect of our stars is something abnormal. We expect our stars to be bigger than life, don't we? We expect their behavior to be more generous, more forgiving, but of course they're subject to envy and anger and all the other things. Whose fault is it? I think the issue of fault is perhaps even irrelevant. We all conspire in the illusion-making: the media, the stars themselves, and we who are accepting these fictions, who are applauding these fictions, who turn on our televisions ready to watch these fictions." -Clive Barker, theonionavclub.com interview "To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves." -Claude Adrien Helvetius "A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure." -Elbridge Gerry, at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, arguing to restrict the U.S. Army to 300 men in peacetime. "The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job. But if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house." -Jeff Foxworthy Raven A.: I spent 15 minutes yesterday playing with a laser pointer. me: Did you have a cat to go with the laser pointer? That's hours of entertainment. Raven A.: I think I was the cat. "When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us." -Alexander Graham Bell "Uh... why does my character have a spell of 'Protection Against Something Stupid A Muskrat Might Do'?" -Alecia, _Dork Tower_ "A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture... A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." -Mao Tse-Tung "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." -St. Francis of Assisi "We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition." -John Le Carre, _The Spy Who Came In From the Cold_ "Come one, you can do better. I'm not here to watch ugly men and fully clothed women." -Ronnie, LaF, on web pages "Yet, much as with "Schindler's List," perhaps everyone should be forced to watch [The Star Wars Holiday Special] once, just so that nothing this abominable ever happens again." -Daniel Kraus, for Salon.com "He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven." -George Herbert "This urge to action... Do the gods instill it, or is each man's desire a god to him?" -Virgil, _Aeneid_ "I sympathize with the distaste, but I am only wishily-washily unenthused. On the other hand, I think it would be really cool if we made up original nicknames for each other. I'm jealous of my sisters frineds, who have names like "Fats", "Jesus", and "Big Dirty". I thought about spending more time with my sisters and them, in hopes i could get a cool name, but I bet they'd sense my ulterior motive and i'd get a name like 'turdburglar'." -Jack E., on nicknames "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul." -Carl Jung "We don't know what's beyond that [event horizon of the spinning black hole,] every grad student we've sent in to study this has never come back. We think they may have gone to industry." -Virginia Trimble, UMCP "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. You're not cool." -PVP, _pvponline.com_ "You are nothing but MacPhistos Vomit, and he will eat you." -DeathSpasm@hotmail.com, spamming r.g.m.misc "Did you ever hear anyone say 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?" -Joseph Henry Jackson "The business interests in this country seem to be making the most compelling case in the world that we need heavy regulation." -Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.), on the Enron-Dynegy mess "We have built a better mousetrap. It has fangs, claws and must be kept caged between missions, but it is very, very effective." -Dr. Curtis Boatman, _Shadowfist_ "I hate songs, but I like underwear." -Pat C. "If I need your opinion I'll solicit for it in my .plan file." truemeaningoflife.com "I would rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate." -George Burns "My colleague Steve Twomey asks the trenchant question: 'Why did it become desireable to have a corporate name in which it was impossible to know what the corporation did? I mean, General Electric, General Motors, U.S. Steel, Bell Telephone, International Business Machines, Ford Motor Co., Union Pacific: In every case, you could guess what they did. What the hell does PSINet do? Or Cisco Systems? Verizon? You can't tell!' Steve makes an excellent point. Companies today often sound like monsters in Godzilla movies. When Dynegy and Enron had their recent troubles it brought to mind the various battles between Mothra and Rodan." -Joel Achenbach "It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time." -Tallulah Bankhead "It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness." -Jerry Garcia "In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration." -Ansel Adams "Stella realized then that Charlie's unhappiness had locked him out of this community as effectively as hers had, and she felt a dull sense of confirmation, she felt she might have known, this is the nature of people, unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth." _Asylum_, by Patrick McGrath "World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -Marhall McLuhan "It's like talking to the skateboarding Riddler." -Adam Carolla, _LoveLine_ "It's a thankless job, but I have a lot of karma to burn off." -anonymous "Chris, every time you do that, you get moved further and further into the 'so geeky it's amazing he has a girlfriend' category." -Bill "Kragar" F. "I think it's more of a testament to how awesome I am, that I can be so geeky and yet maintain this pleasant facade of coolness." -Chris C. "In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order." -Idi Amin "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." -A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith later founded Federal Express.) [Reading a menu for a Burmese restaurant.] me: Squash fritters?! Michelle T.: I'll squash your fritters! "My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it as it is and why it exists as all." -Stephen Hawking "The star system sucks... Basically Hollywood boils down to four or five male leads. They're making giant films because they want huge returns. It's the same scripts they do over and over again. I hope it all blows up in their face." -Nick Nolte, at Cannes "Nintendo and these other companies are always talking about how realistic their graphics are. Well, what's so realistic about killer turtles shooting out of clouds and such?" _The Onion_, www.theonion.com "I think what I've learned from this is not to have a secret weapon that is also someone else's lips." -Bob the Angry Flower http://angryflower.com/ "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." -Napoleon "I think that, truly, the unit of measure for an actor is the moment, the tiny little moment. So the continuity is not as large a problem as you'd think, because what you get paid for is that tiny little moment when you're looking at the other actor and you want X, and he wants Z, and it's just you guys fronting off and bringing your will to it." -William H. Macy "This book you're holding carries a message that your first instinct will be to distrust. That message is, We can change the world." _Culture Jam_, by Kalle Lasn "Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education." -Alfred Whitney Griswold, 'Essays on Education' "The other thing I might point out is that although Diablo seems to be all about preadolescent fantasies of violent destruction, I have discovered that it is actually about shopping." -James Gorman, NYTimes.com "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled daily in high schools." -New York Times editorial, 1921
Page by: Paul M. M. Jacobus (paul@otd.com)
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