Fortune Cookies

For many years I collected quotations: lines from books, plays, speeches, comedians, computer culture, proverbs, and the old Unix fortune files. I called the collection my fortune cookies, because like the little slips of paper, each one is a small thing you can turn over in your mind and get something out of. What follows is the collection, trimmed of the longest copyrighted passages but otherwise intact. Each line is offered with attribution where I had it. Some are wise, some are funny, some are just strange. Pull out whichever ones speak to you.

Verb doubling: a standard construction is to double a verb and use it as a comment on what the implied subject does. Often used to terminate a conversation. Typical examples involve WIN, LOSE, HACK, FLAME, BARF, CHOMP: “The disk heads just crashed.” “Lose, lose.” “Mostly he just talked about his — crock. Flame, flame.” “Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

Peculiar nouns: MIT AI hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases. Examples: porous => porosity generous => generosity Ergo: mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferocity

Other examples: winnitude, disgustitude, hackification.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

Spoken inarticulations: Words such as “mumble”, “sigh”, and “groan” are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises in a com link. Another expression sometimes heard is “complain!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

@BEGIN (primarily CMU) with @END, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. From the SCRIBE command of the same name. For example: @Begin(Flame) Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. @End(Flame)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

AOS (aus (East coast) ay-ahs (West coast)) [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] v. To increase the amount of something. “Aos the campfire.” Usage: considered silly. See SOS.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

ANGLE BRACKETS (primarily MIT) n. Either of the characters “<” and “>”. See BROKET.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

ARG n. Abbreviation for “argument” (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

AUTOMAGICALLY adv. Automatically, but in a way which, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), I don’t feel like explaining to you. See MAGIC. Example: Some programs which produce XGP output files spool them automagically.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BAGBITER 1. n. Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. BAGBITING: adj. Failing hardware or software. “This bagbiting system won’t let me get out of spacewar.” Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of “biting the bag”. Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

We’re sorry, the cookie you have reached is not in service, please check the cookie and dial again, or ask the operator for assistance.

Ye Olde Disclaimer of Responsibility:

The items and quotations contained in this file may or may not be coprighted material. The above-mentioned items were contrib- uted from many sources, and many are unattributed. I do not po- sess the time or the background to verify that they are non-in- fringing.

Therefore, this material is submitted ‘as is’, with the only recourse being that if you report such infringement to me, I will remove the item in question.

Let this be a warning to you:

This file is in use at several (many?) sites in the area. It is believed that the majority of offensive messages have been screened out. However, an occasional ‘zinger’ slips by. Also, people’s ideas of ‘offensive’ vary. If one message offends you, tell me the offending one and I’ll remove it.

BANG n. Common alternate name for EXCL (q.v.), especially at CMU. See SHRIEK.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BAR 1. The second metasyntactic variable, after FOO. “Suppose we have two functions FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR…” 2. Often appended to FOO to produce FOOBAR.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BARF [from the “layman” slang, meaning “vomit”] 1. interj. Term of disgust. See BLETCH. 2. v. Choke, as on input. May mean to give an error message. “The function `=’ compares two fixnums or two flonums, and barfs on anything else.” 3. BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS: adj. Said of something which would make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BELLS AND WHISTLES n. Unnecessary but useful (or amusing) features of a program. “Now that we’ve got the basic program working, let’s go back and add some bells and whistles.” Nobody seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BINARY n. The object code for a program.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BITBLT (bit’blit) 1. v. To perform a complex operation on a large block of bits, usually involving the bits being displayed on a bitmapped raster screen. See BLT. 2. n. The operation itself.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BIT BUCKET n. 1. A receptacle used to hold the runoff from the computer’s shift registers. 2. Mythical destination of deleted files, GC’ed memory, and other no-longer-accessible data. 3. The physical device associated with “NUL:”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BLETCH [from German “brechen”, to vomit (?)] 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. BLETCHEROUS: adj. Disgusting in design or function. “This keyboard is bletcherous!” Usage: slightly comic.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BLT (blit, very rarely belt) [based on the PDP-10 block transfer instruction; confusing to users of the PDP-11] 1. v. To transfer a large contiguous package of information from one place to another. 2. THE BIG BLT: n. Shuffling operation on the PDP-10 under some operating systems that consumes a significant amount of computer time. 3. (usually pronounced B-L-T) n. Sandwich containing bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BOGOSITY n. The degree to which something is BOGUS (q.v.). At CMU, bogosity is measured with a bogometer; typical use: in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say, “My bogometer just triggered.” The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat (uL).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BOUNCE (Stanford) v. To play volleyball. “Bounce, bounce! Stop wasting time on the computer and get out to the court!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BRAIN-DAMAGED [generalization of “Honeywell Brain Damage” (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Multics] adj. Obviously wrong; cretinous; demented. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BREAK v. 1. To cause to be broken (in any sense). “Your latest patch to the system broke the TELNET server.” 2. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may be examined for debugging purposes. The place where it stops is a BREAKPOINT.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BROKEN adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (of people), exhibiting extreme depression.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BROKET [by analogy with “bracket”: a “broken bracket”] (primarily Stanford) n. Either of the characters “<” and “>”. (At MIT, and apparently in The Real World (q.v.) as well, these are usually called ANGLE BRACKETS.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BUCKY BITS (primarily Stanford) n. The bits produced by the CTRL and META shift keys on a Stanford (or Knight) keyboard. Rumor has it that the idea for extra bits for characters came from Niklaus Wirth, and that his nickname was `Bucky’. DOUBLE BUCKY: adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. “The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BUG [from telephone terminology, “bugs in a telephone cable”, blamed for noisy lines; however, Jean Sammet has repeatedly been heard to claim that the use of the term in CS comes from a story concerning actual bugs found wedged in an early malfunctioning computer] n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program. (People can have bugs too (even winners) as in “PHW is a super winner, but he has some bugs.”) See FEATURE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BUM 1. v. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. The object of the verb is usually what was removed (“I managed to bum three more instructions.”) but can be the program being changed (“I bummed the inner loop down to seven microseconds.”) 2. n. A small change to an algorithm to make it more efficient.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

BUZZ v. To run in a very tight loop, perhaps without guarantee of getting out.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CATATONIA (kat-uh-toe’-nee-uh) n. A condition of suspended animation in which the system is in a wedged (CATATONIC) state.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CDR (ku’der) [from LISP] v. With “down”, to trace down a list of elements. “Shall we cdr down the agenda?” Usage: silly.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CHINE NUAL n. The Lisp Machine Manual, so called because the title is wrapped around the cover so only those letters show.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CHOMP v. To lose; to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. See BAGBITER. A hand gesture commonly accompanies this, consisting of the four fingers held together as if in a mitten or hand puppet, and the fingers and thumb open and close rapidly to illustrate a biting action. The gesture alone means CHOMP CHOMP (see Verb Doubling).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CLOSE n. Abbreviation for “close (or right) parenthesis”, used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See OPEN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

COKEBOTTLE n. Any very unusual character. MIT people complain about the “control-meta-cokebottle” commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complain about the “altmode-altmode-cokebottle” commands at MIT.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CONNECTOR CONSPIRACY [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10, none of whose connectors match anything else] n. The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything) to come up with new products which don’t fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CONS [from LISP] 1. v. To add a new element to a list. 2. CONS UP: v. To synthesize from smaller pieces: “to cons up an example”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CRETIN 1. n. Congenital loser (q.v.). 2. CRETINOUS: adj. See BLETCHEROUS and BAGBITING. Usage: somewhat ad hominem.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CRLF (cur’lif, sometimes crul’lif) n. A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). See TERPRI.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CTY (city) n. The terminal physically associated with a computer’s operating console.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

CUSPY [from the DEC acronym CUSP, for Commonly Used System Program, i.e., a utility program used by many people] (WPI) adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program which performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See RUDE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DAY MODE See PHASE (of people).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DEADLY EMBRACE n. Same as DEADLOCK (q.v.), though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. DEADLY EMBRACE is the more popular term in Europe; DEADLOCK in the United States.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DEMENTED adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. For example, a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages implying it is on the point of imminent collapse.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DIABLO (dee-ah’blow) [from the Diablo printer] 1. n. Any letter- quality printing device. 2. v. To produce letter-quality output from such a device.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DIDDLE v. To work with in a not particularly serious manner. “I diddled with a copy of ADVENT so it didn’t double-space all the time.” “Let’s diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes away.” See TWEAK and TWIDDLE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DIKE [from “diagonal cutters”] v. To remove a module or disable it. “When in doubt, dike it out.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DMP (dump) See BIN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DO PROTOCOL [from network protocol programming] v. To perform an interaction with somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For example, “Let’s do protocol with the check” at a restaurant means to ask the waitress for the check, calculate the tip and everybody’s share, generate change as necessary, and pay the bill.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DOWN 1. adj. Not working. “The up escalator is down.” 2. TAKE DOWN, BRING DOWN: v. To deactivate, usually for repair work. See UP.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DPB (duh-pib’) [from the PDP-10 instruction set] v. To plop something down in the middle.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

DWIM [Do What I Mean] 1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, what result was intended when provided with bogus input. Often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program. A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing). 2. n. The INTERLISP function that attempts to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors. See HAIRY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

ENGLISH n. The source code for a program, which may be in any language, as opposed to BINARY. Usage: slightly obsolete, used mostly by old-time hackers, though recognizable in context. At MIT, directory SYSENG is where the “English” for system programs is kept, and SYSBIN, the binaries. SAIL has many such directories, but the canonical one is [CSP,SYS].
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

EPSILON [from standard mathematical notation for a small quantity] 1. n. A small quantity of anything. “The cost is epsilon.” 2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than marginal. “We can get this feature for epsilon cost.” 3. WITHIN EPSILON OF: Close enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

EXCH (ex’chuh, ekstch) [from the PDP-10 instruction set] v. To exchange two things, each for the other.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

EXCL (eks’cul) n. Abbreviation for “exclamation point”. See BANG, SHRIEK, WOW.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

EXE (ex’ee) See BIN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FAULTY adj. Same denotation as “bagbiting”, “bletcherous”, “losing”, q.v., but the connotation is much milder.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

(These terms are all used to describe programs or portions thereof, except for the first two, which are included for completeness.) CRASH STOPPAGE BUG SCREW LOSS MISFEATURE CROCK KLUGE HACK WIN FEATURE PERFECTION (The last is never actually attained.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FENCEPOST ERROR n. The discrete equivalent of a boundary condition. Often exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: “If you build a fence 100 feet long with posts ten feet apart, how many posts do you need?” (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FINE (WPI) adj. Good, but not good enough to be CUSPY. [The word FINE is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the higher level implied by CUSPY.]
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAG DAY [from a bit of Multics history involving a change in the ASCII character set originally scheduled for June 14, 1966] n. A software change which is neither forward nor backward compatible, and which is costly to make and costly to revert. “Can we install that without causing a flag day for all users?”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAKEY adj. Subject to frequent lossages. See LOSSAGE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAME v. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. FLAME ON: v. To continue to flame. See RAVE. This punning reference to Marvel comics’ Human Torch has been lost as recent usage completes the circle: “Flame on” now usually means “beginning of flame”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAP v. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap…). Old hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and microtapes were 1, 2,… and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk!
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAVOR n. 1. Variety, type, kind. “DDT commands come in two flavors.” See VANILLA. 2. The attribute of causing something to be FLAVORFUL. “This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to…” 3. On the LispMachine, an object-oriented programming system (“flavors”); each class of object is a flavor.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLAVORFUL adj. Aesthetically pleasing. See RANDOM and LOSING for antonyms. See also the entry for TASTE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FLUSH v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous. “All that nonsense has been flushed.” Standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation. 2. To leave at the end of a day’s work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). “I’m going to flush now.” “Time to flush.” 3. To exclude someone from an activity.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FRIED adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. 2. Of people, exhausted. Said particularly of those who continue to work in such a state. Often used as an explanation or excuse. “Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file system, but I was fried when I put it in.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FROB 1. n. (MIT) The official Tech Model Railroad Club definition is “FROB = protruding arm or trunnion”, and by metaphoric extension any somewhat small thing. See FROBNITZ. 2. v. Abbreviated form of FROBNICATE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FROBNITZ, pl. FROBNITZEM (frob’nitsm) n. An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ, or more commonly to FROB. Also used are FROBNULE, FROBULE, and FROBNODULE. Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBBOZ (fruh-bahz’), pl. FROBBOTZIM, has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure via the Adventure spin-off called Zork (Dungeon). These can also be applied to non-physical objects, such as data structures.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FROG (variant: PHROG) 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See FOO. 3. n. Of things, a crock. Of people, somewhere inbetween a turkey and a toad. 4. Jake Brown (FRG@SAIL). 5. FROGGY: adj. Similar to BAGBITING (q.v.), but milder. “This froggy program is taking forever to run!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FROTZ 1. n. See FROBNITZ. 2. MUMBLE FROTZ: An interjection of very mild disgust.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FRY v. 1. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. 2. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See FRIED.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FTP (spelled out, NOT pronounced “fittip”) 1. n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the AInet. 2. v. To transfer a file using the File Transfer Program. “Lemme get this copy of Wuthering Heights FTP’d from SAIL.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

FUDGE 1. v. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. “I didn’t feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it.” 2. n. The resulting code.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GABRIEL [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL volleyball fanatic] n. An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one’s shoelaces or hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, “pulling a Gabriel”, “Gabriel mode”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GARBAGE COLLECT v., GARBAGE COLLECTION n. See GC.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GARPLY n. (Stanford) Another meta-word popular among SAIL hackers.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GC [from LISP terminology] 1. v. To clean up and throw away useless things. “I think I’ll GC the top of my desk today.” 2. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. To forget. The implication is often that one has done so deliberately. 4. n. An instantiation of the GC process.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GLASS TTY n. A terminal which has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or other printing terminal. An example is the ADM-3 (without cursor control). A glass tty can’t do neat display hacks, and you can’t save the output either.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GLITCH [from the Yiddish “glitshen”, to slide] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. 2. v. To commit a glitch. See GRITCH. 3. v. (Stanford) To scroll a display screen.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GLORK 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See FOO. 3. v. Similar to GLITCH (q.v.), but usually used reflexively. “My program just glorked itself.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GOBBLE v. To consume or to obtain. GOBBLE UP tends to imply “consume”, while GOBBLE DOWN tends to imply “obtain”. “The output spy gobbles characters out of a TTY output buffer.” “I guess I’ll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow.” See SNARF.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GORP (CMU) [perhaps from the generic term for dried hiker’s food, stemming from the acronym “Good Old Raisins and Peanuts”] Another metasyntactic variable, like FOO and BAR.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GRIND v. 1. (primarily MIT) To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting lines so that it looks pretty. Hence, PRETTY PRINT, the generic term for such operations. 2. To run seemingly interminably, performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to CRUNCH.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GRITCH 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a GLITCH (q.v.)). 2. v. To complain. Often verb-doubled: “Gritch gritch”. 3. Glitch.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GROK [from the novel “Stranger in a Strange Land”, by Robert Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning roughly “to be one with”] v. To understand, usually in a global sense.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GROVEL v. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used with “over”. “The compiler groveled over my code.” Compare GRIND and CRUNCH. Emphatic form: GROVEL OBSCENELY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GRUNGY adj. Incredibly dirty or grubby. Anything which has been washed within the last year is not really grungy. Also used metaphorically; hence some programs (especially crocks) can be described as grungy.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GUBBISH [a portmanteau of “garbage” and “rubbish”?] n. Garbage; crap; nonsense. “What is all this gubbish?”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

GUN [from the GUN command on ITS] v. To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career). “Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I gunned it.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HACKISH adj. Being or involving a hack. HACKISHNESS n.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HAIR n. The complications which make something hairy. “Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair.” Often seen in the phrase INFINITE HAIR, which connotes extreme complexity.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HAIRY adj. 1. Overly complicated. “DWIM is incredibly hairy.” 2. Incomprehensible. “DWIM is incredibly hairy.” 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: “He knows this hairy lawyer who says there’s nothing to worry about.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HAKMEM n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HARDWARILY adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. “The system is hardwarily unreliable.” The adjective “hardwary” is NOT used. See SOFTWARILY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HELLO WALL See WALL.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HIRSUTE Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for HAIRY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HOOK n. An extraneous piece of software or hardware included in order to simplify later additions or debug options. For instance, a program might execute a location that is normally a JFCL, but by changing the JFCL to a PUSHJ one can insert a debugging routine at that point.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HUMONGOUS, HUMUNGOUS See HUNGUS.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

HUNGUS (hung’-ghis) [perhaps related to current slang “humongous”; which one came first (if either) is unclear] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. “TCP is a hungus piece of code.” “This is a hungus set of modifications.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

IMPCOM See TELNET.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

INFINITE adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: “This program produces infinite garbage.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

IRP (erp) [from the MIDAS pseudo-op which generates a block of code repeatedly, substituting in various places the car and/or cdr of the list(s) supplied at the IRP] v. To perform a series of tasks repeatedly with a minor substitution each time through. “I guess I’ll IRP over these homework papers so I can give them some random grade for this semester.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

JFCL (djif’kl or djafik’l) [based on the PDP-10 instruction that acts as a fast no-op] v. To cancel or annul something. “Why don’t you jfcl that out?” [The licence plate on Geoff Goodfellow’s BMW is JFCL.]
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

JIFFY n. 1. Interval of CPU time, commonly 1/60 second or 1 millisecond. 2. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. “I’ll do it in a jiffy” means certainly not now and possibly never.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

JOCK n. Programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute force programs. The term is particularly well-suited for systems programmers.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

J. RANDOM See RANDOM.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

JRST (jerst) [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v. To suddenly change subjects. Usage: rather rare. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick; Jack jrst over the candle stick.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

JSYS (jay’sis), pl. JSI (jay’sigh) [Jump to SYStem] See UUO.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LDB (lid’dib) [from the PDP-10 instruction set] v. To extract from the middle.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LIFE n. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway, and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LINE FEED (standard ASCII terminology) 1. v. To feed the paper through a terminal by one line (in order to print on the next line). 2. n. The “character” which causes the terminal to perform this action.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LINE STARVE (MIT) Inverse of LINE FEED.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LOSER n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Especially “real loser”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LOSS n. Something which loses. WHAT A (MOBY) LOSS!: interjection.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LOSSAGE n. The result of a bug or malfunction.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

LPT (lip’-it) n. Line printer, of course.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

L– USER See — USER.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MACROTAPE n. An industry standard reel of tape, as opposed to a MICROTAPE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MARGINAL adj. 1. Extremely small. “A marginal increase in core can decrease GC time drastically.” 2. Of extremely small merit. “This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me.” 3. Of extremely small probability of winning. “The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it crapped out.” 4. MARGINALLY: adv. Slightly. “The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MICROTAPE n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a MACROTAPE. This was the official DEC term for the stuff until someone consed up the word “DECtape”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MODE n. A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. “No time to hack; I’m in thesis mode.” Usage: in its jargon sense, MODE is most often said of people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. “If you’re on a TTY, E will switch to non-display mode.” In particular, see DAY MODE, NIGHT MODE, and YOYO MODE; also COM MODE, TALK MODE, and GABRIEL MODE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MODULO prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology: one can consider saying that 4=22 “except for the 9’s” (4=22 mod 9). “Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MOON n. 1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers. See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MUMBLAGE n. The topic of one’s mumbling (see MUMBLE). “All that mumblage” is used like “all that stuff” when it is not quite clear what it is or how it works, or like “all that crap” when “mumble” is being used as an implicit replacement for obscenities.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MUMBLE interj. 1. Said when the correct response is either too complicated to enunciate or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a big long discussion. “Well, mumble.” 2. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement. “I think we should buy it.” “Mumble!” Common variant: MUMBLE FROTZ. 3. Yet another metasyntactic variable, like FOO.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MUNCH (often confused with “mung”, q.v.) v. To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to CRUNCH (q.v.), but connotes less pain.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

MUNG (variant: MUNGE) [recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good] v. 1. To make changes to a file, often large-scale, usually irrevocable. Occasionally accidental. See BLT. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

NIGHT MODE See PHASE (of people).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

NIL [from LISP terminology for “false”] No. Usage: used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the “-P” convention. See T.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

OBSCURE adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply a total lack of comprehensibility. “The reason for that last crash is obscure.” “FIND’s command syntax is obscure.” MODERATELY OBSCURE implies that it could be figured out but probably isn’t worth the trouble.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

OPEN n. Abbreviation for “open (or left) parenthesis”, used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: “Open def-fun foo, open eks close, open, plus ekx one, close close.” See CLOSE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PATCH 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. 2. v. To insert a patch into a piece of code.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PESSIMAL [Latin-based antonym for “optimal”] adj. Maximally bad. “This is a pessimal situation.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PESSIMIZING COMPILER n. A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious translation.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PHANTOM n. (Stanford) The SAIL equivalent of a DRAGON (q.v.). Typical phantoms include the accounting program, the news-wire monitor, and the lpt and xgp spoolers.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PHASE OF THE MOON n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. “This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PLUGH [from the Adventure game] v. See XYZZY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

POM n. Phase of the moon (q.v.). Usage: usually used in the phrase “POM dependent” which means flakey (q.v.).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

POP [based on the stack operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack] dialect: POPJ (pop-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure return instruction. v. To return from a digression. By verb doubling, “Popj, popj” means roughly, “Now let’s see, where were we?”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary; From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PROTOCOL See DO PROTOCOL.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PSEUDOPRIME n. A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point missing.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PTY (pity) n. Pseudo TTY, a simulated TTY used to run a job under the supervision of another job. PTYJOB (pity-job) n. The job being run on the PTY. Also a common general-purpose program for creating and using PTYs. This is DEC and SAIL terminology; the MIT equivalent is STY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PUNT [from the punch line of an old joke: “Drop back 15 yards and punt”] v. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

PUSH [based on the stack operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure call addresses are saved on the stack] dialect: PUSHJ (push-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction. v. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

QUES (kwess) 1. n. The question mark character (“?”). 2. interj. What? Also QUES QUES? See WALL.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RANDOMNESS n. An unexplainable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. Also, a hack or crock which depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or rather, the combination upon which the crock depends). “This hack can output characters 40-57 by putting the character in the accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting 6 bits — the low two bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing.” “What randomness!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RAPE v. To (metaphorically) screw someone or something, violently. Usage: often used in describing file-system damage. “So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master directory.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RAVE (WPI) v. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely annoy another person verbally. 5. To evangelize. See FLAME. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

REAL — USER n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying “real” money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (research project, course, etc.). See — USER.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RECURSION n. See RECURSION, TAIL RECURSION.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

REL See BIN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RIGHT THING, THE n. That which is “obviously” the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. “Never let your conscience keep you from doing the right thing!” “What’s the right thing for LISP to do when it reads ‘(.)’?”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

RUDE (WPI) adj. 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g. a program which is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?) design decisions. See CUSPY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SACRED adj. Reserved for the exclusive use of something (a metaphorical extension of the standard meaning). “Accumulator 7 is sacred to the UUO handler.” Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SAGA (WPI) n. A cuspy but bogus raving story dealing with N random broken people.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SAV (save) See BIN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SEMI 1. n. Abbreviation for “semicolon”, when speaking. “Commands to GRIND are prefixed by semi-semi-star” means that the prefix is “;;*”, not 1/4 of a star. 2. Prefix with words such as “immediately”, as a qualifier. “When is the system coming up?” “Semi-immediately.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SERVER n. A kind of DAEMON which performs a service for the requester, which often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SHIFT LEFT (RIGHT) LOGICAL [from any of various machines’ instruction sets] 1. v. To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way. 2. imper. Get out of that (my) seat! Usage: often used without the “logical”, or as “left shift” instead of “shift left”. Sometimes heard as LSH (lish), from the PDP-10 instruction set.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SHR (share) See BIN.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SHRIEK See EXCL. (Occasional CMU usage.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SLOP n. 1. A one-sided fudge factor (q.v.). Often introduced to avoid the possibility of a fencepost error (q.v.). 2. (used by compiler freaks) The ratio of code generated by a compiler to hand-compiled code, minus 1; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn’t do it yourself.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SLURP v. To read a large data file entirely into core before working on it. “This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K matrix and does an FFT.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SMART adj. Said of a program that does the Right Thing (q.v.) in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SMOKING CLOVER n. A psychedelic color munch due to Gosper.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SMOP [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Usage: used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SNARF v. To grab, esp. a large document or file for the purpose of using it either with or without the author’s permission. See BLT. Variant: SNARF (IT) DOWN. (At MIT on ITS, DDT has a command called :SNARF which grabs a job from another (inferior) DDT.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SOFTWARE ROT n. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if “nothing has changed”. Also known as “bit decay”.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SOFTWARILY adv. In a way pertaining to software. “The system is softwarily unreliable.” The adjective “softwary” is NOT used. See HARDWARILY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SOS 1. (ess-oh-ess) n. A losing editor, SON OF STOPGAP. 2. (sahss) v. Inverse of AOS, from the PDP-10 instruction set.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SPAZZ 1. v. To behave spastically or erratically; more often, to commit a single gross error. “Boy, is he spazzing!” 2. n. One who spazzes. “Boy, what a spazz!” 3. n. The result of spazzing. “Boy, what a spazz!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SUPDUP v. To communicate with another ARPAnet host using the SUPDUP program, which is a SUPer-DUPer TELNET talking a special display protocol used mostly in talking to ITS sites. Sometimes abbreviated to SD.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

STATE n. Condition, situation. “What’s the state of NEWIO?” “It’s winning away.” “What’s your state?” “I’m about to gronk out.” As a special case, “What’s the state of the world?” (or, more silly, “State-of-world-P?”) means “What’s new?” or “What’s going on?”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

STOPPAGE n. Extreme lossage (see LOSSAGE) resulting in something (usually vital) becoming completely unusable.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

STY (pronounced “sty”, not spelled out) n. A pseudo-teletype, which is a two-way pipeline with a job on one end and a fake keyboard-tty on the other. Also, a standard program which provides a pipeline from its controlling tty to a pseudo-teletype (and thence to another tty, thereby providing a “sub-tty”). This is MIT terminology; the SAIL and DEC equivalent is PTY.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SUPERPROGRAMMER n. See “wizard”, “hacker”. Usage: rare. (Becoming more common among IBM and Yourdon types.)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SWAPPED adj. From the use of secondary storage devices to implement virtual memory in computer systems. Something which is SWAPPED IN is available for immediate use in main memory, and otherwise is SWAPPED OUT. Often used metaphorically to refer to people’s memories (“I read TECO ORDER every few months to keep the information swapped in.”) or to their own availability (“I’ll swap you in as soon as I finish looking at this other problem.”).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

SYSTEM n. 1. The supervisor program on the computer. 2. Any large-scale program. 3. Any method or algorithm. 4. The way things are usually done. Usage: a fairly ambiguous word. “You can’t beat the system.” SYSTEM HACKER: one who hacks the system (in sense 1 only; for sense 2 one mentions the particular program: e.g., LISP HACKER)
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

T [from LISP terminology for “true”] 1. Yes. Usage: used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the “-P” convention). See NIL. 2. See TIME T.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TAIL RECURSION n. See TAIL RECURSION.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TALK MODE See COM MODE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TASTE n. (primarily MIT-DMS) The quality in programs which tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also, TASTY, TASTEFUL, TASTEFULNESS. “This feature comes in N tasty flavors.” Although TASTEFUL and FLAVORFUL are essentially synonyms, TASTE and FLAVOR are not.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TELNET v. To communicate with another ARPAnet host using the TELNET program. TOPS-10 people use the word IMPCOM since that is the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN. “I usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TERPRI (tur’pree) [from the LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP) function to start a new line of output] v. To output a CRLF (q.v.).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

THEORY n. Used in the general sense of idea, plan, story, or set of rules. “What’s the theory on fixing this TECO loss?” “What’s the theory on dinner tonight?” (“Chinatown, I guess.”) “What’s the current theory on letting losers on during the day?” “The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw…”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

THRASH v. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Swapping systems which are overloaded waste most of their time moving pages into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation), and are therefore said to thrash.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TIME T n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1. “We’ll meet on campus at time T or at Louie’s at time T+1.” 2. SINCE (OR AT) TIME T EQUALS MINUS INFINITY: A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular frob was first designed.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TOOL v.i. To work; to study. See HACK (def #9).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TTY (titty) n. Terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTY’s themselves). Sometimes used to refer to any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a job.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

TWEAK v. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with TWIDDLE. See FROBNICATE and FUDGE FACTOR.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

UP adj. 1. Working, in order. “The down escalator is up.” 2. BRING UP: v. To create a working version and start it. “They brought up a down system.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

VANILLA adj. Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, “vanilla-flavored wonton soup” means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot and sour wonton soup.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

VAXEN [from “oxen”, perhaps influenced by “vixen”] n. pl. The plural of VAX (a DEC machine).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

VIRGIN adj. Unused, in reference to an instantiation of a program. “Let’s bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again.” Also, by extension, unused buffers and the like within a program.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

VIRTUAL adj. 1. Common alternative to LOGICAL (q.v.), but never used with compass directions. 2. Performing the functions of. Virtual memory acts like real memory but isn’t.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

VISIONARY n. One who hacks vision (in an AI context, such as the processing of visual images).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WALDO [probably taken from the story “Waldo”, by Heinlein, which is where the term was first used to mean a mechanical adjunct to a human limb] Used at Harvard, particularly by Tom Cheatham and students, instead of FOOBAR as a meta-syntactic variable and general nonsense word. See FOO, BAR, FOOBAR, QUUX.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WALL [shortened form of HELLO WALL, apparently from the phrase “up against a blank wall”] (WPI) interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone. “Wall??” 2. A request for further explication.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WATERBOTTLE SOCCER n. A deadly sport practiced mainly by Sussman’s graduate students. It, along with chair bowling, is the most evident manifestation of the “locker room atmosphere” said to reign in that sphere. (Sussman doesn’t approve.) [As of 11/82, it’s reported that the sport has given way to a new game called “disc-boot”, and Sussman even participates occasionally.]
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WEDGED [from “head wedged up ass”] adj. To be in a locked state, incapable of proceeding without help. (See GRONK.) Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. “The swapper is wedged.” This term is sometimes used as a synonym for DEADLOCKED (q.v.).
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WHAT n. The question mark character (“?”). See QUES. Usage: rare, used particularly in conjunction with WOW.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WHEEL WARS [from LOTS at Stanford University] A period during which student wheels hack each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other’s files, or otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WIN [from MIT jargon] 1. v. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise. 2. BIG WIN: n. Serendipity. Emphatic forms: MOBY WIN, SUPER WIN, HYPER-WIN (often used interjectively as a reply). For some reason SUITABLE WIN is also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. See LOSE.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WINNAGE n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning. Quite rare. Usage: also quite rare.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WINNER 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer or person. 2. REAL WINNER: Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WINNITUDE n. The quality of winning (as opposed to WINNAGE, which is the result of winning). “That’s really great! Boy, what winnitude!”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

WORMHOLE n. A location in a monitor which contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to substitute a different routine. The following quote comes from “Polymorphic Systems”, vol. 2, p. 54:

WOW See EXCL.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

XGP 1. n. Xerox Graphics Printer. 2. v. To print something on the XGP. “You shouldn’t XGP such a large file.”
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

XYZZY [from the Adventure game] adj. See PLUGH.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

YOYO n. DEC service engineers’ slang for UUO (q.v.). Usage: rare at Stanford and MIT, has been found at random DEC installations.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

YOYO MODE n. State in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

YU-SHIANG WHOLE FISH n. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 11), which with a loop in its tail looks like a fish. Usage: used primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

ZERO v. 1. To set to zero. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words. 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where “zeroing” need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed.
— From the AI Hackers’ Dictionary

A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance.
— Hugh Akston

Ten score years ago, defeat the kingly foe. A wondrous dream came into being. Tame the trackless waste, no virgin land left chaste. Those shining eyes were never seeing:

Beneath the noble bird, Between the proudest words, Behind the beauty cracks appear. Once with heads held high, they sang out to the sky. Why do their shadows bow in fear?

The guns replace the plow, facades are tarnished now. The principles have been betrayed. The dream has gone stale, but still let hope prevail. But history’s debt won’t be repaid.
— Neil Peart

One humanoid escapee One android on the run Seeking freedom beneath A lonely desert sun

Trying to change its program Trying to change the mode — Crack the code Images conflicting Into data overload
— Neil Peart

Guidance systems break down A struggle to exist — To resist — A pulse of dying power In a clenching plastic fist . . .

It replays each of the days A hundred years of routines Bows its head and prays To the mother of all machines . . .
— Neil Peart

Don’t you know that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of a few?

By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner — check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
— Hugh Akston

Because he was human, because he had goodness, Because he was moral they called him insane. Delusions of grandeur, visions of splendor, A manic depressive who walks in the rain.

Cinderella Man, doing what you can, They can’t understand what it means. Cinderella Man, hang on to your plans. Try as they might they cannot steal your dreams.
— Neil Peart

The New Ideal

Pounding in your temples And a surge of adrenalin Every muscle tense — To fence The enemy within . . .

I’m not giving in To security under pressure I’m not missing out On the promise of adventure I’m not giving up On implausible dreams — Experience to extremes — Experience to extremes
— Neil Peart

Every breath a static charge — A tongue that tastes like tin Steely-eyed outside — To hide The enemy within . . .

To you — is it movement or is it action? Is it contact or just reaction? And you — revolution or just resistance? Is it living, or just existence? Yeah you — it takes a little more persistence To get up and go the distance . . .
— Neil Peart

The editorials went on speaking of self-denial as the road to future progress, of self-sacrifice as the moral imperative, of greed as the enemy, of love as the solution — their threadbare phrases as sickeningly sweet as the odor of ether in a hospital.

The word ‘We’ is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black is lost in the gray of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.
— Equality 7-2521

Who is John Galt?

Why didn’t he?

Because he found that it couldn’t be brought down.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
— Howard Roark

Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.
— Robert Stadler

There are those who think that life is nothing left to chance. A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance. A planet of playthings we dance on the strings Of powers we cannot perceive. The stars aren’t aligned, or the gods are malign, Blame is better to give than receive.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free will.

There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand. The cards were stacked against them. They weren’t born in Lotus land. All was preordained, a prisoner in chains, A victim of venomous fate. Kicked in the face, you can pray for a place In heaven’s unearthly estate.

Each of us, a cell of awareness imperfect and incomplete. Genetic blends with uncertain ends on a fortune hunt that’s far too fleet.
— Neil Peart

The Prime Movers

… there’s nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.
— Francisco d’Anconia

The Fifth Concerto of Richard Halley

The Fourth Concerto of Richard Halley

You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it’s possible?

… But it’s only temporary!

There is no such thing as a temporary suicide.
— Hank Rearden

Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish — man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish — man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish — man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom — by instinct.
— Ayn Rand

Existence exists — and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
— John Galt

Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct. Now I saw that one man was to be bound by it, but the other was not, one was to obey a rule, the other was to assert an arbitrary wish — his need — and the law was to stand on the side of the wish. Justice was to consist of upholding the un- justifiable.
— Judge Narragansett

It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch — someone, she thought bitterly, who had reversed the principle of the Twentieth Century motor and was now turning kinetic energy into static.

Visionary Leadership

… the vision of a fat, unhygenic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice gather into gems.

He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why — if one small part committed treason to that idea — the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.

Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
— not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless; John Galt

… it is done by a man who cannot afford to fail, one whose unique position depends upon the fact that all he does must succeed. A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer — an absurd extravagance of energy — but the nut is very effectually crushed all the same.
— Sherlock Holmes

… But the pain remained — and a helpless wonder. The thing he saw was so much more real than the reality of paper, office and commission. He could not understand what made others blind to it, and what made their indifference possible. He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say. He had never known that. And the reality which permitted it could never become quite real to him.

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.
— John Galt

Wheels within wheels in a spiral array, A pattern so grand and complex. Time after time we lose sight of the way, Our causes can’t see their effects …

Art as expression, not as market campaigns. We’ll still capture our imaginations. Given the same state of integrity, It will surely help us along.

The most endangered species, the honest man. Will it still survive annihilation? Forming a world, state of integrity, Sensitive, open and strong.
— Neil Peart

The San Sebastian Mines

It was like blaming the victim of a holdup, for corrupting the integrity of the thug … and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victim, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists.

It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank — to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning, — it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. — The noble soul has reverence for itself.
— Friedrich Nietzche

How did you manage to remain unmangled?

… To place nothing — nothing — above the verdict of my own mind … The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight … that feeling … is the highest, noblest, and only good on earth.
— Dagny Taggart

We can walk our road together, If our goals are all the same. We can run alone and free, If we pursue a different aim.

Let the truth of love be lighted. Let the love of truth shine clear. Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty, With the heart and mind united In a single, perfect sphere.
— Neil Peart

Recognition of the fact —

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his fire — until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

This was reality … this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live — she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.

When brute force is on the march, compromise is the red carpet. When reason is attacked, common sense is not enough.
— Ayn Rand

“Leaders of underdeveloped nations, spurning ‘capitalism’, boast of special brands of ‘Socialism’. Leopold Senghor of Senegal says ‘Socialism is a sense of community which is a return to Africanism.’ Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika insists ‘no underdeveloped country can afford to be anything but Socialist.’ Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba claims Mohammed’s companions ‘were Socialists before the invention of the word.’ And Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk contends ‘our Socialism is first and foremost an application of Buddhism.'”

Waiting for the winds of change to sweep the clouds away. Waiting for the rainbow’s end to cast its gold your way. Countless ways, you pass the days.

Waiting for someone to come and turn your world around. Looking for an answer to the questions you have found. Looking for an open door.

Well, you don’t get something for nothing. You can’t have freedom for free. You won’t get wise with the sleep still in your eyes, No matter what your dream might be.
— Neil Peart

The Looter of The Spirit

You want it to be unearned … You want handouts, but of a different kind … It’s the spirit that you want to loot … the unearned in spirit … You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without the necessity of … being …
— Cherryl Taggart

Whoever you are — you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand — the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality, and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: ‘I am, therefore I’ll think.’
— John Galt

What is the nature of that ‘superior’ world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit.
— John Galt

No, your place in life is where you want to be. Don’t let them tell you that you owe it all to me. Keep on looking forward, no use in looking around. Hold your head above the crowd, they want to bring you down.

Live for yourself, there’s no one else more worth living for, Begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more.

Well, I know they’ve told you, selfishness is wrong. Yet it was for me, not you, that I came to write this song.

Anthem of the heart, anthem of the mind, A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind. We marvel after those who sought, And wondered in the world they wrought.
— Neil Peart

They’re holding us by our love of it, and we’ll go on paying so long as there’s one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We’ll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we’ll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism. I know what we’re paying, but — price is no object any longer.
— Dagny Taggart

It’s a battle in which one must make one’s stand clear.

A battle? What battle? I don’t fight the disarmed. I hold the whip hand.

Are they? They have a weapon against you. It’s their only weapon but it’s a terrible one.

When the dragons grow too mighty To slay with pen or sword, I grow weary of the battle And the storm I walk toward. When all around is madness And there’s no safe port in view, I long to turn my path homeward To stop a while with you.

When life becomes as bare And as cold as winter skies, There’s a beacon in the darkness, In a distant pair of eyes. In vain to search for honor And in vain to search for truth, But these things can still be given, Your love has shown me through.
— Neil Peart

The nation that once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production is now told that it is achieved by squalor … You can’t have your cake and let your neighbor eat it, too.
— Francisco d’Anconia

Architecture is not a business, not a career, but a crusade and a consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth.
— Henry Cameron

… the essential division between these two camps is: those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth — and those determined not to allow either to become possible. The majority of mankind spend their lives and psychological energy in the middle, swinging between these two, struggling not to allow the issue to be named. This does not change the nature of the issue.
— Ayn Rand

We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something — and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being.
— Ayn Rand

Many journeys end here, But the secret’s told the same. Life is just a candle And a dream must give it flame.
— Neil Peart

I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.
— Ideal

And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.

This god, this one word: ‘I’
— Equality 7-2521

One of these centuries the brutes, private or public, who believe that they can rule their betters by force, will learn the lesson of what happens when brute force encounters mind and force.
— Ragnar Danneskjold

What made you come to it?

My refusal to be born with any original sin. I have never felt guilty of my ability … I have never felt guilty of being a man … I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it, and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.
— John Galt

I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
— John Galt

… don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: ‘This is mine’? Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don’t you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?
— Kira Argounova

I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction… My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
— Equality 7-2521

… But reach the thought that it requires — and the secret of the motor will be yours, as well as … any other secret you might wish to know.
— John Galt

All work is an act of philosophy. And when men learn to consider productive work — and that which is its source — as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost … The source of work? Man’s mind.
— Hugh Akston

Whoever preserves a single thought uncorrupted by any concession to the will of others, whoever brings into reality a matchstick or a patch of garden made in the image of his thought — he, and to that extent, is a man, and that extent is the sole measure of his virtue. They made no concessions. This (the valley) is the measure of what they preserved and what they are.
— Hugh Akston

Society, Kira, is a stupendous whole.

If you write a whole line of zeroes, it’s still — nothing.
— Kira Argounova

There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble with the trees, For the maples want more sunlight and the oaks ignore their pleas.

The trouble with the maples, and they’re quite convinced they’re right, Is that the oaks are just too lofty and they grab up all the light. But the oaks can’t help their feelings if they like the way they’re made And they wonder why the maples can’t be happy in their shade.

There is trouble in the forest and the creatures all have fled, For the maples scream “Oppression!” and the oaks just shake their heads.

So the maples formed a union and demanded equal rights. “The oaks are just too greedy. We will make them give us light.” Now there’s no more oak oppression, for they passed a noble law, And the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe and saw.
— Neil Peart

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
— Sherlock Holmes

We are those who do not disconnect the values of our minds from the actions of our bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values — those who make steel, railroads, and happiness.
— Dagny Taggart

These walls that still surround me, Still contain the same old me. Just one more who’s searching for The world that ought to be.
— Neil Peart

Like a steely blade in a silken sheath We don’t see what their made of. They shout about love but when push comes to shove They look for things they’re afraid of. And the knowledge that they fear Is a weapon to be used against them.

He’s not afraid of your judgment. He knows of horrors worse than your hell. He’s a little bit afraid of dying, But he’s a lot more afraid of your lying …
— Neil Peart

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:

E G O
— Equality 7-2521

The removal of a threat is not a payment, the negation of a negative is not a reward, the withdrawal of your armed hoodlums is not an incentive, the offer not to murder me is not a value.
— John Galt

… those who feel it (sympathy for evil) — feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem. These are the things I feel. You’ll find that it’s one or the other. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence. Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons. And then you’ll know what motive is the opposite of charity.

What?

Justice.
— Dagny Taggart

A lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemned from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked … The man who lies to the world is the world’s slave from then on.
— Hank Rearden

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?

I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?

To shrug.
— Francisco d’Anconia

… it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.
— John Galt

No, his mind is not for rent, But don’t put him down as arrogant. His reserve, a quiet defense For riding out the days events …

No, his mind is not for rent To any god or government. Always hopeful, yet discontent, He knows that changes aren’t permanent, But change is.
— Neil Peart

Down what drain were they poured out there, our days, our lives, and our energy? Into what bottomless, futureless sewer of the unpaid for? Here we trade achievements, not failures — values, not needs. We’re free of one another, yet we all grow together … What greater wealth is there than to own your own life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can’t stand still. It must grow or perish.
— Ellis Wyatt

They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don’t know the nature of the sanction — but, Dagny, I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them.
— Hank Rearden

The Modern Guillotine

But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.
— Equality 7-2521

What you own is your own kingdom, What you do is your own glory, What you love is your own power, What you live is your own story.

In your head is the answer, Let it guide you along. Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.
— Neil Peart

Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose minds aren’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.
— John Galt

… an oracle confronts me there. He leads me on, light years away, Through astral nights, galactic days. I see the works of afflicted hands That grace the strange, then wonders end. I see the hands of man araised With hungry mind and open eye.

They left our planet long ago, The elder race still learn and grow. Their power grows, with purpose, strong, To claim the home where they belong. Home to tear the temples down, Home to change!
— Neil Peart

The sleep is still in my eyes, The dream is still in my head. I heave a sigh and sadly smile, And lie awhile in bed. I wish that it might come to pass, Not fade like all my dreams. Just think of what my life might be, In a world like I have seen. I don’t think I can carry on, Carry on this cold and empty life.

My spirits are low in the depths of despair. My life blood … spills over.
— Neil Peart

Bad news drives good news out of the media.
— Lee Loevinger

Bad news travels fast.

Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense! Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it. The world owes Evil a debt beyond imagination. Think! Without greed ambition falters. Without vanity art becomes idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence lapses to passivity. Superstition has shamed man into self-reliance and, without stupidity, where would be the savor of superior understanding?
— Magnus Ridolf

Bare feet magnetize sharp metal objects so they always point upward from the floor — especially in the dark.
— Al Ross

Barr’s Hypothesis: Familiarity breeds content.

Bartz’s Law of Hokey Horsepuckery: The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success.
— Wayne R. Bartz

Baseball is a skilled game. It’s America’s game — it, and high taxes.
— Will Rogers

Be a defensive driver. Buy a Tiger M31.

Be alert! America needs more lerts.

Be always displeased with what thou art, if your desirest to attain to what thou art not; for where thou hast pleased thyself, there thou abidest. But if thou have enough thou perishest. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate.
— Augustine

Be calm in arguing, for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.

Be careful who you step on on the way up; you never know who you’ll pass on the way down.

Be concise in your writing and talking, especially when giving instructions to others.

Be courteous. Have genuine consideration for other people’s feelings, wishes and situations.

Be generous. Remember that it is the productivity of others that makes possible your executive position.

Be just and fear not: Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s, thy God’s, and truth’s.
— Shakespeare

Be like a duck — keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil under water.

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it; nor at any time in the extremities of it.
— Lavater

Be not diverted from your duty by any idle reflections the silly world may make upon you, for their censures are not in your power, and consequently should not be any part of your concern.
— Epictetus

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
— Alexander Pope

Be self-reliant and your success is assured.

Be sober and temperate, and you will be happy.
— Benjamin Franklin

Be sure to obtain meteorological information before leaving on vacation.

Be sure to save your money; you never know when it might be worth something again.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
— Shakespeare

Be tolerant of those who disagree with you — after all, they have a right to their ridiculous opinions.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another’s weakness, thousands have been destroyed by false appreciation of their own strength.
— Charles C. Colton

Be ye angry and sin not; let not the sun go down upon your wrath.
— Eph. iv,26

Beauty and harmony are as necessary to you as the very breath of life.

Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but if it light well, it makes virtue shine and vice blush.
— Bacon

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.

Beauty seldom recommends one woman to another.

Beauty without virtue is like a flower without perfume.

Beauty’s tears are lovelier than her smile.
— Campbell

Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
— Barrow

Beck’s Motto: Functionality; All the Functionality; And nothing but the Functionality.

Bedfellows make strange politicians.

Before a party or a trip, if it can, it will let rip.

Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.

Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.
— anonymous male chauvinist

Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.
— James III, 5

Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want.
— Irving Kristol

Being generous is inborn; being altruistic is a learned perversity. No resemblance …
— Lazarus Long

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.
— Eugene McCarthy

Believe not much them that seem to despise riches; for they despise them that despair of them; and none are worse when they come to them. Be not penny-wise; riches have wings, and sometimes they fly away of themselves, sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.
— Bacon

Benchley’s Distinction: There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.
— Robert Benchley

Benchley’s travel distinction: In America there are two classes of travel: first class and with children.

Best men are often moulded out of faults.
— Shakespeare

Bets at the first were fool-traps where the wise Like spiders lay in ambush for the flies.
— Dryden

Better Red than dead.
— Bertrand Russell

Better be alone than in bad company.

Better bend than break.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.
— Edmund Burke

Better to die a thousand deaths than wound my honor.
— Addison

Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a lamb.

Better to throw it out — than throw it in.
— Skinny Mitchell

Better to use medicines at the outset than at the last moment.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
— William Faulkner

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
— Mae West

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
— Henry David Thoreau

Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

Beware of desperate steps! — the darkest day Live till to-morrow, will have passed away.
— Cowper

Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, bear it that the opposer may beware of thee.
— Shakespeare

Beware of friends who are false and deceitful.

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
— Benjamin Franklin

Beware of people who fall at your feet. They may be reaching for the corner of the rug.

Beware the fury of a patient man.
— Dryden

Beware the man who makes cream with his mouth; he winds up making butter with his nose.
— Babbaluche the cobbler

Bicycle Law: All bicycles weigh 50 pounds: A 30-pound bicycle needs a 20-pound lock and chain. A 40-pound bicycle needs a 10-pound lock and chain. A 50-pound bicycle needs no lock and chain.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
— George Santayana

Big people are those who make us feel bigger when we are with them.

Biochemistry expands so as to fill the space and time available for its completion and publication.
— R. T. Hersh

Bismark’s law: The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they’ll sleep at night.

Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God.
— Matthew V, 9

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.

Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed.
— W. C. Bennett

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.
— Gene Franklin

Blessed is he who has reached the point of no return and knows it, for he shall enjoy living.
— W. C. Bennett

Bordeaux makes you think of mischief; Burgundy makes you tease; Champagne makes you.

Boren’s Laws of Bureaucracy: 1. When in doubt, mumble. 2. When in trouble, delegate. 3. When in charge, ponder.
— James H. Boren

Boss to employee: No, Baxter, you’re not being replaced by a computer — only a silicon chip.
— Eli Stein

Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.
— O. W. Holmes

Bow to no patron’s insolence; rely On no frail hopes, in freedom live and die.
— Seneca

Bowler’s dinner — spare ribs
— Raymond D. Love

Brave spirits are a balsam to themselves; there is a nobleness of mind that heals wounds beyond salves.
— Cartwright

Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.
— Franklin P. Jones

Brevity and superficiality are often concomitants.
— Amrom Katz

Broken Mirror Law: Everyone breaks more than the seven-year bad luck allotment to cover rotten luck throughout an entire lifetime.
— Rozanne Weissman

Brontosaurus Principle: Organizations can grow faster than their brains can manage them in relation to their environment and to their own physiology: when this occurs, they are an endangered species.
— Thomas K. Connellan

Brooks Atkinson described a Shubert play as “beautiful, if you are deaf and dumb.”

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
— Christopher J. Shaw

Bureaucratic Cop-Out Number 1: You should have seen it when I got it!
— Marshall L. Smith

Burn’s Hog Weighing Method: 1. Get a perfectly symmetrical plank and balance it across a sawhorse. 2. Put the hog on one end of the plank. 3. Pile rocks on the other end until the plank is again perfectly balanced. 4. Carefully guess the weight of the rocks.
— Robert Burns

Bus schedules are arranged so your bus will arrive at the transfer point precisely one minute after the connecting bus has left.
— John Corcoran

But I have seen the science I worshipped and the airplane I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
— Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.

But an old age serene and bright, And lovely as a Lapland night, Shall lead thee to thy grave.
— Wordsworth

But if a man happens to find himself … he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

But love is blind and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit.
— Shakespeare

But then her face, So lovely, yet so arch, so full of mirth, The overflowings of an innocent heart.
— Rogers

By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave — the motives, the desires, the wishes … we increase the feeling of freedom.
— B. F. Skinner

By establishing real money, men rule out its debasement.
— Lewis E. Lehrman

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

By following the good, you learn to be good.

By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.
— Edward Burke

By heaven we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and endless in duration.
— Benjamin Franklin

By night an atheist half believes a God.
— Edward Young

By preserving over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.
— Christopher Columbus

By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man enemy to help him.
— man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no; Lazarus Long

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.
— Shakespeare

By the time a person gets to greener pastures, he can’t climb the fence.

By the time a social science theory is formulated in such a way that it can be tested, changing circumstances have already made it obsolete.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

By the year 1984 the entire world may be run by computers. Digital Equipment Corporation will still be run by people.

By work you get money, by talk you get knowledge.
— Haliburton

Caesar had his Brutus — charles the First, his Cromwell — and George the Third (“Treason!” cried the Speaker) — may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.
— Patrick Henry

Call him wise whose actions, words and steps are all a clear because to a clear why.
— Lavater

Calmness is great advantage; he that lets another chafe may warm him at his fire, mark all his wand’rings and enjoy his frets, as cunning fencers suffer heat to tire.
— Herbert

Cameras are so simple to operate now that taking pictures is much easier than getting friends to look at them.
— Hugh Allen

Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two points.
— M. M. Johnston

Can there be a republic that does not slump under the weight of so much human desire?
— Michael Scully

Canada’s climate is nine months winter and three months late in fall.

Cant produces countercant.
— Arthur Herzog

Capital Punishment: The income tax.

Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil.
— Mohandas Ghandi

Capitalism … is outrageously unjust; it requires a continuing maldistribution of wealth in order to exist … We live in the twilight of an epoch … I am absolutely convinced that we are moving toward some kind of planned economy.
— Michael Harrington

Capitalism can exist in one of only two states: welfare or warfare.
— Bill Gray

Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land … but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive.
— J. B. S. Haldane

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal, but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal … Government in the U. S. today is a senior partner in every business in the country.
— Norman Cousins

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye.
— Shakespeare

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt; And ev’ry grin so merry, draws one out.
— Dr. Wolcott

Careful planning is the key to safe and swift travel.
— Ulysses

Celibacy is not hereditary.
— Guy Godin

Certain things shouldn’t be moved.
— Murray Teigh Bloom

Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.
— Lazarus Long

Champagne is the only wine a woman can drink and still remain beautiful.
— Mme. de Pompadour

Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativeness.
— Antony Jay

Character is a perfectly educated will.
— Novalis

Character is destiny.
— Heraclitus

Charity begins at home.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
— I Corinthians

Cheap things are of no value, valuable things are not cheap.

Check the answer you have worked out once more — before you tell it to anybody.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

Cheop’s law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

Chicago Tribune headline: THE FAME OF PLAINS IS MAINLY ON THE WANE.

Chide a friend in private and praise him in public.
— Solon

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next.
— Franklin P. Jones

Children have more energy after a hard day of play than they do after a good night’s sleep.
— Dr. R. F. Gumperson

Chill penury weighs down the heart, itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.
— Mrs. Jameson

Choose such pleasures as recreate much, and cost little.
— Fuller

Choose the company of your superiors whenever you can have it; that is the right and true pride.
— Lord Chesterfield

Christ believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
— Bertrand Russell

Cicero’s style bores me. When I have spent an hour reading him … and try to recollect what I have extracted, I usually find it nothing but wind.
— Michel de Montaigne

Circular Definition: see Circular Definition.

Circumstances can force a generalized incompetent to become competent, at least in a specialized field.
— Frank R. Freemon

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Classified material is considered lost when it cannot be found.

Clearly stated instructions will consistently produce multiple interpretations.
— Charles P. Boyle

Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
— Thorndike

Colson’s Law: If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.

Comitas comitatum, omnia comitas.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

Commend a fool for his wit, or a knave for his honesty, and they will receive you into their bosom.
— Fielding

Committee reports dealing with wages, salaries, fringe benefits, facilities, computers, employee parking, libraries, coffee breaks, secretarial support, etc., always call for dramatic expenditure increases.
— Thomas L. Martin

Committee — a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
— Fred Allen

Committee — a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.
— Milton Berle

Committee — a group of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling, to do the unnecessary.
— Stewart Harrol

Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to be appointed to do the work.

Common and vulgar people ascribe all ill that they feel to others; people of little wisdom ascribe to themselves; people of much wisdom, to no one.
— Epictetus

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Commonly, physicians, like beer, are best when they are old, and lawyers, like bread, when they are young and new.
— Fuller

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
— William James

Compared with everything else in data processing, paper is cheap; use it. But the value of a report decreases as the number of its pages increases.

Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
— St. Augustine

Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
— John Dewey

Compliments of congratulations are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink, and paper. I consider them as draughts upon good breeding, where the exchange is always greatly in favor of the drawer.
— Chesterfield

Computer-based management information systems will cure most review and control problems.
— Richard F. Moore

Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable.
— Tom Gibb

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don’t add up.

Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more than the estimate the job will cost.

Computing power increases as the square of the cost. If you want to do it twice as cheaply, you have to do it four times as slowly.
— Herb Grosch

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
— Shakespeare

Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but impairs what it would improve.
— Pope

Concerning the gods, I am not able to know to a certainty whether they exist or not. For there are many things which prevent one from knowing, especially the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of the life of man.

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for more assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.
— H. H. Munro

Confusion (entropy) is always increasing in society. Only if someone or something works extremely hard can this confusion be reduced to order in a limited region. Nevertheless, this effort will still result in an increase in the total confusion of society at large.
— Dr. W. L. Everitt

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.
— Sheridon

Conscious is when you are aware of something and conscience is when you wish you weren’t.

Consider the Malevolent Universe Theory: it really IS out to get you!

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
— Josh Billings

Consider well what your strength is equal to, and what exceeds your ability.
— Horace

Consistency is the product of small minds.
— Merle P. Martin

Contentment produces in some measure, all those effects which the alchymist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher’s stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing, by banishing the desire of them. If it cannot remove the disquietudes arising from a man’s mind, body, or fortune, it makes him easy under them.
— Addison

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
— Walter Lippmann

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man.
— Shakespeare

Count the day won when, turning on its axis, This earth imposes no additional taxes.

Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it, and conquering it.
— Richter

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.
— Samuel Johnson

Courage is grace under pressure.
— Ernest Hemingway

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)
— Lazarus Long

Courage is walking naked through a cannibal village.
— Leonard Louis Levinson

Courage is your greatest present need.

Courses of action which run only to be justified in terms of practicality ultimately prove destructive and impractical.
— Mark B. Cohen

Courtship consists of a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.
— Sterne

Coward, n. one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
— Ambrose Bierce

Coward: A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation acts normally.
— Sultana Zoraya

Cows may come and cows may go, but the bull in this place goes on FOREVER!!!

Crab apples may not be the best kind of fruit; but a tree which every year bears a great crop of crab apples is better worth cultivating than a tree which bears nothing.

Creative intelligence in its various forms and activities is what makes man.
— James Harvey Robinson

Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved with the broth.
— Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Creditors have better memories than debtors; and creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.
— Benjamin Franklin

Creditors have much better memories than debtors.

Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good; if meager, muddy vapid, and sour, both are fit only to engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous and sparkling, they improve the taste, expand the heart, and are worthy of being introduced at the symposium of the gods.
— Colton

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters — who, like deer, goats, and divers other gramniverous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.
— Washington Irving

Croll’s Query: If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of?

Cultivate a consistently pessimistic outlook.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.
— Cicero

Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.
— La Rochefoucauld

Curiosity in the humanities is a free person’s humility, and a humble person’s freedom.
— Joseph Duffy

Curley’s Law: As long as they spell the name right.

Cursed is every-one who places his hope in man.
— Saint Augustine

Custom does often reason overrule And only serves for reason to the fool.
— John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Custom is the law of fools.
— Vanburgh

Custom will often blind one to the good as well as to the evil effects of any long established system.
— Bishop Richard Whately

Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them … “justice” is a search for workable customs.
— Dr. Margaret Mader

Cut ’em off at the past!

Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
— Johnny Hart

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
— Lillian Hellman

Cynicism is disappointed idealism.
— Harry Kemelman

Cynicism is disillusioned idealism.

Cynicism is humour in ill-health.
— H. G. Wells

Cynicism — the intellectual cripple’s substitute for intelligence.
— Russell Lynes

Cynics are right nine times out of ten; what undoes them is their belief that they are right ten times out of ten.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

DEATH: The penultimate commercial transaction finalized by probate.
— Bernard Rosenberg

DECEPTION EXPERIMENT: An experiment in which the researcher is pleased to believe that the true nature of the situation is unknown to the participants. Typically the only parties deceived are the funding agency and the journal editor.

DESIGN SIMPLICITY: Costs (manufacturer’s) cut to the bone

DIAGNOSTIC: Software which runs to completion no matter how broken the hardware is.

DIPLOMACY: Lying in state.
— Ambrose Bierce

DIPLOMACY: Patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

DIPLOMACY: The art of fishing tranquilly in troubled waters.

DIPLOMACY: The art of jumping into troubled waters without making a splash.

DIRECT SALES ONLY: Manufacturer had argument with distributor

DISTINCTIVE: A different color or shape than our competitors

Double-Blind Experiment: An experiment in which the chief researcher believes he is fooling both the subject and the lab assistant. Often accompanied by a belief in the tooth fairy.

Damnable, both sides rogue.
— Shakespeare

Data Potato … du wop … du wop !!!

David Merrick, displaying … his sneaky knack for extending the life of a production beyond the reasonable expectations of the playwright’s mother.
— Walter Kerr

Deadlock’s Law: If the lawmakers make a compromise, the place where it will be felt the most is the taxpayer’s pocket.

Dear God, make me a good boy, but it’s all right with me if you’d like to take your time about it.

Death comes to all But great achievements build a monument Which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
— Georg Fabricius

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.
— Goethe

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
— Norman Cousins

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman’s task into another man’s hand.
— Sterne

Death tugs at my ear and says: “Live, I am coming.” Holmes, Sr.
— Oliver Wendell

Deceit in the conduct of war outweighs valor and is worthy of merit.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision is a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
— Gordon Graham

Decision of character is one of the most important of human qualities, philosophically considered. Speculation, knowledge, is not the chief end of man; it is action.
— Burnap

Decisions of the judges will be final unless shouted down by a really overwhelming majority of the crowd present. Abusive and obscene language may not be used by contestants when addressing members of the judging panel, or, conversely, by members of the judging panel when addressing contestants (unless struck by a boomerang).
— Benjamin Ruhe

Deep in the nature of all these noble races there lurks unmistakably the beast of prey, the blond beast, lustfully roving in search of booty and victory.
— Frederick Nietzsche

Default is more revolutionary than ideals.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Defeated, but not dismayed — crushed to the earth, but not humiliated — he seemed to grow more haughty beneath disaster, and to experience a fierce satisfaction in draining the last dregs of bitterness.
— Washington Irving

Defer not till tomorrow to be wise, Tomorrow’s sun to thee may never rise.
— Congreve

Deine schiff ist ingecommen.

Delusions are often functional. A mother’s opinions about her children’s beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
— Lazarus Long

Democracy can learn some things from Communism: for example, when a Communist politician is through, he is through.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
— George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don’t think.

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that one over again, too. Who decides?
— Lazarus Long

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.
— Jawaharlal Nehru

Democracy is not a matter of sentiment, but of foresight. Any system that doesn’t take the long run into account will burn itself out in the short run.
— Charles Yost

Democracy is that form of government where everybody gets what the majority deserves.
— James Dale Davidson

Democracy is the worst system devised by the wit of man, except for all the others.
— Winston Churchill

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
— G. K. Chesterton

Democrats buy most of the books that have been banned somewhere. Republicans form censorship committees and read them as a group.

Democrats eat the fish they catch. Republicans hang them on the wall.

Democrats give their worn-out clothes to those less fortunate. Republicans wear theirs.

Democrats keep trying to cut down on their smoking but are not successful. Neither are Republicans.

Democrats make up plans and then do something else. Republicans follow the plans their grandfathers made.

Democrats name their children after currently popular sports figures, politicians, and entertainers. Republican children are named after their parents or grandparents, depending on where the money is.

Depend on no man, on no friend, but him who can depend on himself. He only who acts conscientiously towards himself will act so towards others, and vice versa.
— Lavater

Deprive a mirror of its silver and even the Czar won’t see his face.

Despise not any man, and do not spurn any thing. For there is no man that hath not his hour, no is there any thing that hath not its place.
— Rabbi Ben Azai

Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and, therefore, they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, the Heloetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear that generates true courage.
— Burke

Detroit made a grand try at persuading the visiting Republicans that the city is not as crime-ridden as people think. The campaign was going fine until somebody stole the governor’s Lincoln Mark IV limousine.
— National Review

Dialogue: opposing factions discussing relevant issues. Formerly called an argument.
— Paul Sweeney

Did the Devil really create the world when God wasn’t looking?

Did you ever feel like the whole world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of white socks?

Did you ever hear Of the frolic fairies dear? They’re a blessed little race, Peeping up in fancy’s face, In the valley, on the hill, By the fountain and the rill; Laughing out between the leaves That the loving summer weaves.
— Mrs. Osgood

Did you hear about the earthquake committee meeting that was adjourned by a motion from the floor?

Did you hear about the shepherd who drove his sheep through town and was given a ticket for making a ewe turn?

Did you know that married men live longer than single men? So, if you want to die a slow death, get married!!!
— Dave Maynard

Did your mother have any children that lived?

Digging oolitic strata, Laid in the oligocene, Geologists are lost for data — Fossils, yes! But … A MACHINE???

Dimensions will be expressed in the least convenient terms, e. g.: Furlongs per (Fortnight)**2 = Acceleration.

Diplomacy has rarely been able to gain at the conference table what cannot be gained or held on the battlefield.

Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggie!” till you can find a rock.

Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest thing in the nicest way.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it … You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
— Will Rogers

Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability.
— Roy L. Smith

Discipline, like the bridle in the hand of a good rider, should exercise its influence without appearing to do so; should be ever active, both as a support and as a restraint, yet seem to lie easily in hand. It must always be ready to check or to pull up, as occasion may require; and only when the horse is a runaway should the action of the curb be perceptible.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
— Bacon

Divines and dying men may talk of Hell But in my heart her several torments dwell.
— Shakespeare

Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you.
— Stewart E. White

Do not believe in miracles — rely on them.

Do not clog intellect’s sluices with knowledge of questionable uses.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
— Lazarus Long

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead.

Do whatever your enemies don’t want you to do.
— Gary Novak

Do you realize how boring you are?

Do you realize that you are responsible for making this organization a cost, rather than a profit, center?

Doctors, dentists, and lawyers are only on time for appointments when you’re not.
— Roxanne Weissman

Documents should always be dated, listings should never be torn on the outside fold. Violation is indicative of someone’s (programmer’s or operator’s) inability.

Does a man speak foolishly? — suffer him gladly, for you are wise. Does he speak erroneously? — stop such a man’s mouth with sound words that cannot be gainsaid. Does he speak truly? — rejoice in the truth.
— Oliver Cromwell

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

Domestic happiness and faithful friends.

Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.
— Daniel S. Greenberg

Don’t be overly suspicious where it’s not warranted.

Don’t bite the hand that has your allowance in it.
— Lisa Tidler

Don’t care if you’re rich or not, as long as you can live comfortably and have everything you want.

Don’t disturb the perimeter (meaning don’t stir a mess unless you can be sure of the result).

Don’t forget to feel sorry for yourself.

Don’t get yourself involved with persons or situations that can’t bear inspection.

Don’t let the fact that you can’t do all you want to do keep you from doing what you can do.

Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.
— Satchel Paige

Don’t lose heart … they might want to cut it out … and they want to avoid a lengthy search.

Don’t malign the bug-eyed monster — Oh, he kidnaps girls, it’s true, But bear in mind that all he wants to Do is what YOU’RE trying to do.

Don’t permit yourself to get between a dog and a lamp-post.

Don’t play President — you’re not. The Constitution provides for only one President. Don’t forget it and don’t be seen by others as not understanding that fact.
— Donald Rumsfeld

Don’t praise the bread until it is baked.

Don’t push me I’m going 55 I’ve done 75 The fine was $49.

Don’t put all your eggs in your pocket.
— Celestine Clark

Don’t send my boy to Harvard, the dying mother said. Don’t send my boy to Harvard, I’d rather see him dead.

Don’t speak ill of your predecessors (or successors) — you did not walk in their shoes.
— Donald Rumsfeld

Don’t start something you would be afraid to see finished.

Don’t stick your foot in the ashtray, Ed.
— JWC and RCHM

Don’t stop to stomp ants when the elephants are stampeding.

Don’t store garlic near other victuals.
— Lazarus Long

Don’t talk to me about a man’s being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense — can he talk nonsense?
— William Pitt the Elder

Don’t throw stones at your neighbors, if you expect to buy their natural gas.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Don’t try to have the last word. You might get it.

Don’t turn around.

Don’t worry about avoiding temptation — as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.
— The Old Farmer’s Almanac

Don’t worry about who you step on on the way up if you don’t ever plan on coming down.

Don’t worry if you’re a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.

Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the stuff the Iranians have plenty of.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Dost thou love life? Then waste not time, for time is the stuff that life is made of.
— Benjamin Franklin

Draw your salary before spending it.

Dreading the climax of all human ills, The inflammation of his weekly bills.
— Byron

Dream after dream ensures, and still they dream that they shall still succeed, and still are disappointed.
— William Cowper

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
— Henry David Thoreau

Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
— Shakespeare

Drink Canada Dry! You might not be able to, but it IS fun trying.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
— Robert Frost

Drive is more than motivation. It is self motivation.

Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution, or of a bad memory! of a constitution so treacherously good, that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting drunk, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
— Colton

Due to lack of interest, tomorrow will be canceled.

During an exam, the pocket calculator battery will fail.
— M. M. Johnston

During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
— Bernard M. Baruch

Dust breeds.

E up x.

ENERGY SAVING: Achieved when the power switch is “off”

EXCLUSIVE: Imported product

Each morning puts a man on trial and each evening passes judgment.
— Roy L. Smith

Each person has the right to take part in the management of public affairs in his country, provided he has prior experience, a will to succeed, a college degree, influential parents, good looks, a resume, two 3X4 snapshots, and a good tax record.
— Carlos Eduardo Novaes

Each person has the right to take the subway.
— Carlos Eduardo Novaes

Each problem solved introduces a new unsolved problem.
— U. S. Dept. of Labor

Each profession talks to itself in its own unique language. Apparently there is no Rosetta Stone.

Eagleson’s Law: Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson is an optimist, the real number is more like 3 weeks.)

Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
— Benjamin Franklin

Earnestness alone makes life eternity.
— Carlyle

Ease leads to habit, as success to ease.

Eat a live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!!!

Eat my shorts!

Eat to live, and not on thy Diner’s Club Card.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Ecologists believe that a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. (On second thought, a bird in the hand is finger-licking good.)
— Stanley C. Pearson

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Economy is of itself a great revenue.
— Cicero

Economy makes men independent.

Ed Sullivan will be around as long as someone else has talent.
— Fred Allen

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.
— John Locke

Education belongs pre-eminently to the church … neutral or lay schools from which religion is excluded are contrary to the fundamental principles of education.
— Pope Pius XI

Education has in America’s whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
— Gunnar Myrdal

Education is helping the child realize his potentialities.
— Erich Fromm

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.
— Thomas Henry Huxley

Education is the transmission of civilization.
— Ariel and Will Durant

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
— B. F. Skinner

Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives: Education for living and education for making a living.
— James Mason Wood

Education: A debt due from present to future generations.
— George Peabody

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
— Frank Leahy

Eisenhower told me never to trust a Communist.
— Lyndon B. Johnson

Electrician’s breakfast — ohmlettes
— Raymond D. Love

Elevator Rules: 1. Face forward. 2. Fold hands in front. 3. Do not make eye contact. 4. Watch the numbers. 5. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. 6. Stop talking with anyone you do know when anyone you don’t know enters the elevator. 7. Avoid brushing bodies.
— Psychologist Layne Longfellow

Elevators traveling in the desired direction are always delayed and on arrival tend to run in pairs, threes of a kind, full houses, etc.
— Pete Maiken

Emotion has taught mankind to reason.
— Marquis de Vauvenargues

Emptiness on paper; Fleeting thoughts. Red Sox play at Fenway’s Green park.

Enjoy your life. If you don’t, no one else will.

Enjoy your life; be pleasant and gay, like the birds in May.

Enjoy your present pleasures so as not to injure those that are to follow.
— Seneca

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
— George Orwell

Enough research will tend to confirm your conclusions.

Enthusiasm without knowledge is like running in the dark.

Entropy has us outnumbered.
— Solomon Short

Envy is a weed that grows in all soils and climates, and is no less luxuriant in the country than in the court; is not confined to any rank of men or extent of fortune, but rages in the breasts of all degrees.
— Lord Clarendon

Epperson’s law: When a man says it’s a silly, childish game, it’s probably something his wife can beat him at.

Equality is not when a female Einstein gets promoted to assistant professor; equality is when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a male schlemiel.
— Ewald Nyquist

Equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to prove unequal talents.
— Sir Herbert Samuel

Erma Bombeck’s Rule of Medicine: Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Err is basically a synonym for Murphy, but those who quote him over the better known prophet insist he is as real as Murphy. The basis for their argument: (1) his spirit, like Murphy’s, is everywhere and (2) Err is human.

Errors like straws upon the surface flow: He who would search for pearls must dive below.
— Dryden

Ertz’s observation: Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Established technology tends to persist in the face of new technology.
— Gerritt A. Blaauw

Eternal boredom is the price of constant vigilance.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Eternal sunshine settles on its head.
— Oliver Goldsmith

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
— Wendell Phillips

Eternity stands always fronting God; a stern colossal image with blind eyes, and dim lips, that murmur evermore, “God, God, God!”
— Mrs. Browning

Even God cannot change the past.

Even a hawk is an eagle among crows.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Even if it can’t, it might.
— A. J. Barton

Even in war, moral power is to physical as three parts out of four.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

Even paranoids have enemies.
— Jim Pastore

Even the boldest zebra fears the hungry lion.

Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark.

Even things in themselves not positively advantageous, sometimes become so, by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.
— Alexander Hamilton

Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named William.
— Sam Goldwyn

Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Every action or decision of an institution must be intended to keep the institution machinery working.
— Robert N. Kharasch

Every child born in America can hope to grow up to enjoy tax loopholes.

Every dog must have its day.
— Jonathan Swift

Every editor of newspapers pays tribute to the Devil.
— La Fontaine

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are fingerposts on the road to achievement.
— Charles R. Kettering

Every great or original writer in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he must be relished.
— Wordsworth

Every man desires to live long, but no man desires to be old.
— Jonathan Swift

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
— Bernard M. Baruch

Every man has his price. Mine is $3.95.

Every man has in himself a continent of undiscovered character. Happy is he who acts the Columbus of his own soul.
— Sir J. Stevens

Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding.
— Alexander Pope

Every man has three characters — that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.
— Alphonse Karr

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit.
— Elbert Hubbard

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
— Channing

Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
— Appius Claudius

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.
— James Matthew Barrie

Every newspaper, no matter how tight the news hole, has room for a story on another newspaper increasing its newsstand price.
— Ed Zellar

Every one complains of the badness of his memory, but nobody of his judgment.
— La Rochefoucauld

Every organization is self-perpetuating. Don’t ever ask an outfit to justify itself, or you’ll be covered with facts, figures and fancy. The criterion should rather be, “What will happen if the outfit stops doing what it’s doing?” The value of an organization is easier determined this way.
— Amrom Katz

Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.

Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
— Niels Bohr

Every society is divided into two classes: prostitutes and pimps, those who do and those who sell. Every successful individual is something of both.

Every time I close the door on Reality, it comes in through the window.
— Ashleigh Brilliant

Every time you come up with a terrific idea, you find that someone else thought of it first.
— Frank Harden

Everybody believes in rugged individualism, but you’ll do better by pleasing the boss.
— Charles Merrill Smith

Everybody has 20/20 hindsight.

Everybody lies about sex.

Everybody’s gotta be someplace.
— Myron Cohen

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The trick is to have it at fifty.
— Edgar Degas

Everyone has the right, without exception, to equal pay for equal work. Except women.
— Carlos Eduardo Novaes

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Everyone must see daily, instances of people who complain from a mere habit of complaining.

Everyone needs long-range goals if for no other reason than to keep from being frustrated by short-range failures.

Everyone who stops by with unsought advice will see it immediately.

Everything bows to success, even grammar.

Everything happens at the same time with nothing in between.
— Paul Hebig

Everything is for sale; only the price is negotiable.

Everything is matter. Matter is electricity. Electricity is invisible, intangible. Therefore it is nothing. Therefore everything is nothing.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.
— Frederick Lewis Allen

Everything is nothing. Everything is all. All is one. One is inconceivable, infinite. Therefore it is nothing. Therefore everything is nothing.

Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
— Ingmar Bergman

Everything needs a little oil now and then.

Everything put together sooner or later falls apart.
— Paul Simon

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
— Albert Einstein

Everything takes longer than you expect.

Everything takes more time and money.
— Anne DeCaprio

Everything tastes more or less like chicken.
— Jeffery F. Chamberlain

Everything that exceeds the bounds of moderation has an unstable foundation.
— Seneca

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for that rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
— Erwin Knoll

Evil habits soil a fine dress more than mud; good manners, by their deeds, easily set off a lowly garb.
— Plautus

Evil thoughts intrude in an unemployed mind, as naturally as worms are generated in a stagnant pool.

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wise man can answer.

Examine the contents, not the bottle.
— The Talmud

Example is a living law, whose sway Men more than all the written laws obey.
— Sedley

Examples I could cite you more: But be contented with these four; For when one’s proofs are aptly chosen Four are as valid as four dozen.
— Prior

Exams will always contain questions not discussed in class.
— M. M. Johnston

Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labor. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in the habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advantages which, like the hands of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation.
— Sir Joshua Reynolds

Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.
— Xenephon

Excessive official restraints on information are inevitably self defeating and productive of headaches for the officials concerned.
— Edward Kennedy, AP correspondent

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.
— John G. Pollard

Executive ability is prominent in your make-up.

Expect a letter from a friend who will ask a favor of you.

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Experience is awareness of encompassing the totality of things.

Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.
— Aldous Huxley

Experience is the comb that Nature gives us when we are bald.

Experience is the one thing you have plenty of when you’re too old to get the job.

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarcely in that; for it is true, we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. Remember this: They that will not be counseled cannot be helped. If you do not hear reason she will rap you over the knuckles.
— Benjamin Franklin

Experience keeps a dear school, but it’s a hell of a campaign tactic.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Experience teaches that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations. Men would resist changes, so long as even a bare support could be ensured by an adherence to ancient courses, and perhaps even longer.
— Alexander Hamilton

Experiments are often tricky — There’s no exception to this rule, What CAN have made that rat a sticky, Slimy, rather smelly pool?

Experts do not like surprises. It makes them look bad at the home office.
— Vic Gold

Experts in advanced countries underestimate by a factor of 2 to 4 the ability of people in underdeveloped countries to do anything technical. (Examples: Japanese on warplanes, Russians on the bomb, Iranians on refineries … etc.)
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

Exploit the inevitable (which means, take credit for anything good which happens whether you had anything to do with it or not).

Extreme avarice is always mistaken; there is no passion which is oftener further away from its mark, nor upon which the present has so much power to the prejudice of the future.
— La Rochefoucauld

Eyes with the same blue witchery as those of Psyche, which caught love in his own wiles.

FAITH: An illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
— H. L. Mencken

FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks, without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce

FIELD TEST: Putting your software out to pasture.

FIELD TESTED: Manufacturer lacks test equipment

FOOLPROOF OPERATION: No provision for adjustment

FUTURISTIC: Can’t figure out another reason why it looks as it does

Facts and truth are often cousins — not brothers.
— Edward Bunker

Facts are God’s arguments, we should be careful never to misunderstand or pervert them.
— Tyron Edwards

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law.
— Louis Agassiz

Facts are to the mind the same thing as food to the body. On the due digestion of facts depends the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigor and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable in the commerce of life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts.
— Burke

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
— Aldous Huxley

Faculty purchases of equipment and supplies always increase to match the funds available, so these funds are never adequate.
— Thomas L. Martin

Fail me again and you’ll breakfast on burning coals!

Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death, To break the shock blind nature cannot shun, And lands thought smoothly on the further shore.
— Young

Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
— Eric Hoffer

Faith in immortality, like belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient question: is God unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent? or is he able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful? And is he just?

Faith is never identical with piety.
— Karl Barth

Faith is not reason’s labor, but repose.
— Young

Faith is one of those words that connotes, however irrationally, some kind of virtue in itself.
— Louis J. Halle

Faith is the soul going out of itself for all its wants.
— Boston

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
— Hebrews XI, 1.

Faith lights us through the dark to Deity.
— Davenant

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
— William James

Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.
— Walter Kaufmann

Fame may be compared to a scold: the best way to silence her is to let her alone, and she will at last be out of breath in blowing her own trumpet.
— Fuller

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Fancy gizmos don’t work.
— Jane Bryant Quinn

Far duller than a serpent’s tooth it is to spend a quiet youth.

Farewell a long farewell, to all my greatness! This is the state of man. Today he puts forth The tender leaves of hope; tomorrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost.
— Shakespeare

Fast personal decisions are likely to be wrong.

Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow.
— Cowper

Fathers alone a father’s heart can know What secret tides of still enjoyment flow When brothers love, but if their hate succeeds, They wage the war, but ’tis the father bleeds.
— Edward Young

Fear is the tax that the conscience pays to guilt.
— Sewell

Feed yourself and feed others. Then, if you have to say good-bye, it won’t matter. You will have shared love.
— Jeanne Moreau

Fellows who have no tongues are often all eyes and ears.
— Haliburton

Feminists say 60 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of women. They’re letting men hold the other 40 percent because their handbags are full.
— Earl Wilson

Few ever lived to a great age, and fewer still ever became distinguished, who were not in the habit of early rising.
— Todd

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.
— Shakespeare

Few of us ever test our powers of deduction, except when filling out an income tax form.

Few people now believe in the devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number.

Few persons have sufficient wisdom to prefer censure which is useful to them, to praise which deceives them.
— La Rochefoucauld

Few young men of high gifts and fine tastes look forward to entering public life, for the probability of disappointments and vexations of a life in Congress so far outweigh its attractions that nothing but exceptional ambition or a strong sense of public duty suffices to draw such men into it. Law, education, literature, the higher walks of commerce, finance, or railway work offer a better prospect of enjoyment or distinction.
— Lord James Bryce

Fie! What a spendthrift he is of his tongue!
— Shakespeare

Field’s revelation: If you see a man holding a clipboard and looking official, the chances are good that he is supposed to be doing something menial.

Finagle’s Fifth Rule: Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something that either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

Finagle’s Fourth Law: No matter what occurs, there is always someone who believes it happened according to his pet theory.

Finagle’s Very Fundamental Finding: If a string has one end, then it has another end.

Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.
— James Stephens

Find happiness in your work, or you may never find it anywhere else.

Find out the cost before you get in.

Fine’s Corollary: Functionality breeds Contempt.

P.O. Box 35 Baffled Greek, Michigan

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land.
— Alexander Pope

Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all.
— Shakespeare

First Law of Bridge: It’s always the partner’s fault.

First Law of Office Holders: Get re-elected.

First Law of Wing-Walking: Never leave hold of what you’ve got until you’ve got hold of something else.
— Donald Herzberg

First get an absolute conquest over thyself, and then thou wilt easily govern thy wife.
— Fuller

First impressions are of major importance in business matters.
— J. Pierpont Finch

First must give place to last, because last must have his time to come; but last gives place to nothing, for there is not another to succeed.
— Bunyan

Fish or cut bait!

Flattery is a sort of bad money, to which our vanity gives currency.
— La Rochefoucauld

Flowers are like the pleasures of the world.
— Shakespeare

Flying saucers on occasion Show themselves to human eyes. Aliens fume, put off invasion While they brand these tales as lies.

Food that tastes the best has the highest number of calories.
— Rozanne Weissman

Fools are certain, but wise men hesitate.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
— Alexander Pope

For 40 years I have analyzed stocks and other money markets. Now I have made a remarkable discovery. The Confederate dollar has risen in value 7.4 percent a year since 1965. It has outperformed the German mark, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc.
— Vincent W. Allen

For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.
— Richard Clopton

For every credibility gap there is a gullibility gap.
— Senator Stuart Symington

For every human problem, there is a neat plain solution — and it is always wrong.
— H. L. Mencken

For every inch that is not a fool is rogue.
— Dryden

For every proverb that confidently asserts its little bit of wisdom, there is usually an equal and opposite proverb that contradicts it.
— Richard Boston

For evil news rides post, while good news baits.
— Milton

For forms of government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administer’d is best.
— Alexander Pope

For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.
— Johnson

For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as reason is free to combat it.
— Thomas Jefferson

For in religion as in friendship, they who profess most are ever the least sincere.
— Sheridan

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.
— Alexander Pope

For my part I can compare her to nothing but the sun; for, like him, she takes no rest, nor ever sets in one place by to rise in another.
— Dryden

For nations that waste their inheritances — even nations that are profligate — usually do so in ways more subtle than individuals. Bad habits and bad advice take longer to inflict their damage; nations, too, have their reckonings, but they can survive many more nights before the hangover.
— Michael Scully

For oh! so wildly do I love him That paradise itself were dim And joyless, if not shared with him.
— Moore

For perfect happiness, remember two things: 1. Be content with what you’ve got. 2. Be sure you’ve got plenty.

For several years more I maintained public relations with the Almighty. But privately, I ceased to associate with him.
— Jean-Paul Sartre

Author’s Note: “This is a scurvy tune …”

For specialization is a process that begins as an attempt to develop experts who will then inform the whole body. It can end, however, and sometimes does, in the removal of any inclination to question the supposed “experts” — who themselves are sometimes not all that expert.
— Michael Scully

For the first time in history, one bag of groceries produces two bags of trash.
— Robert Orben

For the memory of love is sweet, Though the love itself were in vain And what I have lost of pleasure, Assuage what I find of pain.
— Lyster

For the rule of the wise over the less wise to be advantageous … it must come about by a process of consent. And the requirement of consent can be understood only in the light of, and by recognition of, natural equality.
— Harry V. Jaffa

For the tenth time, dull Daphnis, said Chloe, You have told me my bosom is snowy; You’ve made much fine verse on Each part of my person, Now DO something — there’s a good boy!

For they can conquer who believe they can.
— Virgil

For they say, if money go before, all ways do lie open.
— Shakespeare

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.
— Thucydides

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it.
— Luke 14:28

Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
— Shakespeare

Forecasters tend to learn less and less about more and more, until in the end they know nothing about everything.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Forecasting is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Forever floats that standard sheet! Where breathes the foe that falls before us, With freedom’s soil beneath our feet, And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
— Joseph Rodman Drake

Forewarned is half an octopus.

Forget the feelings and rights of other people.

Forget the good things in life and concentrate on the bad.

Forget your opponents. Always play against par.
— Sam Snead

Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
— Robert Frost

Forgiveness is better than revenge, for forgiveness is the sign of a gentle nature, but revenge is the sign of a savage nature.
— Epictetus

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

Fortune is a woman. It is necessary, if you wish to master her, to take her by force before she has a chance to resist.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.
— Bacon

Fortune truly helps those who are of good judgment.

Four be the things I’d have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
— Dorothy Parker

Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.
— Socrates

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, it is damn near zero.
— David Ellis

Free and fair discussion will ever by found the firmest friend to truth.
— George Campbell

Free enterprise ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and drive out the small entrepreneur. In their conglomerate forms, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the legitimacy of the state.
— Gore Vidal

Free enterprise: A huge area of the American economy is still noticeable to observers with peripheral vision after they subtract the public sector, conglomerates, federally supported agriculture, monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies.
— Bernard Rosenberg

Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
— Lazarus Long

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.
— Clarence Darrow

Freedom hath a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe’er contented never know.
— Cowper

Freedom is not enough.
— Lyndon B. Johnson

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
— Albert Camus

Freedom to live one’s life with the window of the soul open to new thoughts, new ideas, new aspirations.
— Harold Ickes

Fried’s 23rd Law: Ideas endure and prosper in inverse proportion to their soundness and validity.

Friends may come and friends may go, but enemies accumulate.
— Dr. Thomas Jones

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You, too? I thought I was the only one.”
— C. S. Lewis

Friendship is no plant of hasty growth; Tho’ planted in esteem’s deep fixed soil, The gradual culture of kind intercourse Must bring it to perfection.
— Joanna Baillie

Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
— Cicero

Friendship’s the wine of life.
— Young

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
— John D. MacDonald.

From listening comes wisdom and from speaking repentance.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot he is all mirth; he has twice or thrice cut Cupid’s bowstring, and the little hangman dare not shoot at him; he hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks.
— Shakespeare

From the errors of others a wise man corrects his own.
— Publilius Syrus

From the time we first begin to know, We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.
— Pomfret

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive; They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academies, That show, contain, and nourish all the world, Else, none at all in aught proves excellent.
— Shakespeare

Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty. He that is extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.
— Johnson

Fudge Factor: A physical factor occasionally showing up in experiments as a result of stopping a stopwatch a little early to compensate for reflex error.

Fudge Factor: The numerical factor by which experimental results must be multiplied to be in agreement with theory.

GIGO: Garbage in, Gospel out.

GOD: The contrapuntal genius of human fate.

GOD: but a word invoked to explain the world.

Gallantry consists in saying the most empty things in an agreeable manner.
— La Rochefoucauld

Game is an ill you may with ease obtain, A sad oppression to be born with pain; And when you would the noisy clamor drown, You’ll find it hard to lay the burden down.
— Cooke

Gaming is the son of avarice, but the father of despair.

Garage mechanic to customer: There’s nothing mechanically wrong with your car, sir — it’s just an underachiever.
— David Brown

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying; And that same flower that blooms today, To-morrow shall be dying.
— Herrick

Generalizedness of incompetence is directly proportional to highestness in hierarchy.
— Guy Godin

Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion: that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which man is not to press too boldly.
— Bacon

Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.
— Felix Cohen

Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals.

Genius does what it must, talent does what it can.

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

Genius is the highest type of reason — talent the highest type of understanding.
— Hickok

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Genius, in one respect, is like gold — a number of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.

Genuine religion is not so much a matter of feeling as a matter of principle.
— Alexander Pope

Genuine status is a rare and precious jewel, and also rather easy to simulate.
— Charles Merrill Smith

Get Ahead!!! You could use one.

Get a shot off FAST! This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.
— Lazarus Long

Get the Hell out of my way!
— John Galt

Get thee behind me, Satan, and push me along!

Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.
— Pope

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
— Mark Twain

Getting on the cover of TIME guarantees the existence of opposition in the future.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
— Abraham Kaplan

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice.
— Shakespeare

Give him an inch and he’ll screw you.
— Dave Farber

Give me health and a day, and I will make ridiculous the pomp of emperors.
— Emerson

Give me liberty or give me death!
— Patrick Henry

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
— Giuseppe Garibaldi

Give me to drink, Mandragora, That I may sleep away this gap of time.
— Shakespeare

Give them a number or give them a date, but never both.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.
— Shakespeare

Give us, O give us, the man who is cheerful in his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time — he will do it better — he will persevere longer.
— Carlyle

Give your decisions, never your reasons; your decisions may be right, your reasons are sure to be wrong.
— Earl of Mansfield

Given a choice between two bald political candidates, the American people will vote for the less bald of the two.
— Vic Gold

Given enough time, what you put off doing today will eventually get done by itself.
— G. Gestra

Go fry an egg!

Go kiss a Wookiee!

Go to friends for advice; to women for pity; to strangers for charity; to relatives for nothing.

Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society, as the social ramble ain’t restful.
— Satchel Paige

Go where the money is.
— Bank robber Willie Sutton

God and the devil are an effort after specialization and division of labour.

God blesses still the generous thought And still the fitting word He speeds, And truth, at His requiring taught, He quickens into deeds.
— Whittier

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not be rattled like a muffin man’s bell.
— Carlyle

God gives us relatives; thank God we can chose our friends.

God helps those who have 7 percent mortgages.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

God is not a cosmic bellboy!

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent — it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash, and in small bills.
— Lazarus Long

God made man, and therefore let him pass for man.
— Shakespeare

God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants His footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.
— Cowper

God will forgive me; that’s His business.

God will not give any soldier ammunition who is not willing to go into battle.

God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless.
— Augustine

Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our own deeds.
— Miguel de Cervantes

Good breeding shows itself most where, to an ordinary eye, it appears least.
— Addison

Good conversation, like a defensive driver, yields the right of way.
— William Walter De Bolt

Good health and good sense are two of life’s greatest blessings.

Good health will be yours for a long time.

Good healthy attitudes are the ones everyone agrees with, because if we didn’t agree with it, it wouldn’t be very healthy.

Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness its poison.
— Stanislaus

Good intentions always randomize behavior.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Good intentions are far more difficult to cope with than malicious behavior.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Good is recognized only when it goes away, evil when it comes.

Good judgment comes from experience. And experience — well that comes from having bad judgment.

Good managers learn to share decisions with others even though they alone must accept responsibility for the results.

Good news from afar can bring you a welcome visitor.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say — good night till it be morrow.
— Shakespeare

Good parking places are always on the other side of the street.
— Dr. R. F. Gumperson

Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.
— William Saroyan

Good salesmen and good repairmen will never go hungry.
— Robert E. Schenk

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.
— Max Beerbohm

Good wine and brave men don’t last long.

Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.
— Milton

Goodness is beauty in its best estate.
— Marlowe

Goodwill is achieved by many actions; it can be lost by one.

Goulden’s Axiom of the Bouncing Can (ABC): If you drop a full can of beer, and remember to rap the top sharply with your knuckle prior to opening, the ensuing gush of foam will be between 89 and 94 percent of the volume that would splatter you if you didn’t do a damned thing and went ahead and pulled the top immediately.
— Joseph C. Goulden

Government action and inaction both gravely impair business confidence.
— Mark Epernay

Government expands to absorb revenue — and then some.
— Tom Wicker

Government spending? I don’t know what it’s all about. I don’t know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn’t know much.
— Will Rogers

Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves from the over-taxed.

Governments, like physicians, must simultaneously be the masters and the servants of those whom they govern.
— Harry V. Jaffa

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in Venice; but his reasons are as two grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff; you seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.
— Shakespeare

Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases. (aka the Mule)
— Magnifico Giganticus

Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build up their philosophy of life.
— A. J. Cronin

Gravity is a mystery of the body, invented to conceal the defects of the mind.
— La Rochefoucauld

Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds.
— Petrarch

Great souls by instinct to each other turn. Demand alliance, and in friendship burn.
— Addison

Greener’s Law: Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
— Lamartine

Gummidge’s Law: The amount of expertise varies in inverse proportion to the number of statements understood by the general public.

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken — there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
— Maxwell Bodenheim

HAND CRAFTED: Machine that assembles it is operated without gloves

HIGH ACCURACY: Unit on which all parts fit

HYPOTHESIS: A prediction based on theory formulated after an experiment is performed designed to account for the ludicrous series of events which have taken place.

Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best nightcap.
— Kincaid

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by any man, but coaxed down stairs one step at a time.
— Mark Twain

Habit is the easiest way to be wrong again.

Habit with him was all the test of truth; “It must be right: I’ve done it from my youth.”
— George Crabbe

Half of being smart is knowing what you’re dumb at.
— Solomon Short

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted. (Sarcasm is the sour cream of wit.)
— Fred Allen

Happiness at age ten was finding an empty six pack of returnable Coke bottles. The poor kids these days will never know that they missed, which is why we have a generation gap.
— Richard N. Farmer

Happiness is a paycheck every week.

Happiness is having friends who laugh at your stories when they’re not so funny and sympathize with you in your troubles even when they’re not so bad.

Happiness is in direct proportion to the distance from the home office. Contradictory Corollary: The diner who is furthest from the kitchen is a nervous eater.
— Al Blanchard

Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.
— La Rochefoucauld

Happiness is just an illusion, filled with sadness and confusion.

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
— Dryden

Harris’s Law: Any philosophy that can be put “in a nutshell” belongs there.
— James Gibbons Hunekerm

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.
— Robert Cody

Have you ever seen a plant with its leaves curled up? Have you watered it and watched its leaves spread out again? Almost as quick as that can be the response of a child’s mind to a teacher who knows how to nourish it.
— Morris Mandel

He alone is an acute observer who can observe minutely without being observed.
— Lavater

He became mellow before he became ripe.
— Alexander Woollcott

He compares your nastiness to that of a man who rises in the morning and finds that the shoe he has just put his foot in has been used the night before as a chamber pot.

He conquers who endures.
— Persius

He deservedly loses his own property who covets that of another.
— Phoedrus

He doth bestride the narrow world, Like a Colossus; and we paltry men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
— Shakespeare

He experienced that nervous agitation to which brave men as well as cowards are subject; with this difference, that the one sinks under it, like the vine under the hailstorm, and the other collects his energies to shake it off, as the cedar of Lebanon is said to elevate its boughs to disperse the snow which accumulates upon them.
— Sir Walter Scott

He had had had where he should have had had had.

He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith

He has more goodness in his little finger Than you have in your whole body.
— Jonathan Swift

He has, I know not what, of greatness in his looks, and of high fate, that almost awes me.
— John Dryden

He hated to set precedents; those who did so were sometimes promoted, more frequently they joined their ancestors.
— Robert A. Heinlein

He hath out-villained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him.
— Shakespeare

He hath riches sufficient, who hath enough to be charitable.
— Sir Thomas Browne

He is a legend in his own mind.
— Ron Randall

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

He is the encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn; and Eygpt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britian, America, lie folded already in the first man.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is the most wretched of men who has never felt adversity.

He is truly wise who gains wisdom from another’s mishap.

He jests at scars who never felt a wound.
— Shakespeare

He kept him as the apple of his eye.

He knew what’s what, and that’s as high As metaphysics wit can fly.
— Meta

He lives by rule who lives himself to please.
— Crabbe

He may look like a clown, but here is the soul of a leader.

He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil.
— Shakespeare

He that despairs, degrades the Deity, and seems to intimate, that He is insufficient, or not just to his word; and in vain hath read the Scriptures, the world and man.
— Feltham

He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it may be a saint; that boasteth of it is a devil.
— Fuller

He that hath a beard is more than a youth; And he that hath none is less than a man.
— Shakespeare

He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.
— Jesus Christ

He that lives upon Hope dies farting.
— Benjamin Franklin

He that loses hope may part with anything.
— Congreve

He that never changed any of his opinions never corrected any of his mistakes; and he who was never wise enough to find out any mistakes in himself will not be charitable enough to excuse mistakes in others.

He that riseth late is not campaigning in New York today.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

He that sips of many arts, drinks of none.
— Fulton

He that spends all his life in sport is like one who wears nothing but fringes and eats nothing but sauces.
— Fuller

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject, doth like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.
— Ray

He that wants money, means and content, is without three good friends.
— Shakespeare

He that will have no books but those that are scarce, evinces about as correct a taste in literature as he would do in friendship, who would have no friends but those whom all the rest of the world have sent to coventry.
— Colton

He that will keep a monkey should pay for the glasses he breaks.
— Seldon

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.
— Francis Bacon

He that would have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding.
— Shakespeare

He travels fastest who travels alone … but he hasn’t anything to do when he gets there.

He walks as if balancing the family tree on his nose.

He was so narrow-minded he could see through a keyhole with two eyes.

He wasn’t exactly hostile to facts, but he was apathetic about them.
— Woollcott Gibbs

He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it.
— Von Knebel

He who can will. He who can’t, will teach.
— M. M. Johnston

He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.
— Lavater

He who conceals a useful truth is equally guilty with the propagator of an injurious falsehood.
— Augustine

He who envies another admits his own inferiorities.

He who fights the devil with his own weapons, must not wonder if he finds him an overmatch.
— South

He who has a shady past knows that nice guys finish last.

He who has burned his mouth blows his soup.

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

He who has no mind to trade with the devil, should be so wise as to keep from his shop.
— South

He who has not a good memory, should never take upon him the trade of lying.
— Mintaigne

He who hates vices hates mankind.

He who hath many friends hath none.
— Aristotle

He who hesitates is poor.
— Max Bialystock

He who is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

He who is most slow in making a promise, is the most faithful in the performance of it.
— Rousseau

He who laughs last probably doesn’t understand the joke.

He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.
— Goethe

He who receives a good turn should never forget it; he who does one should never remember it.
— Charron

He who reforms himself, has done more towards reforming the public, than a crowd of noisy, impotent patriots.
— Lavater

He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires and fears, is more than a king.
— Milton

He who sedulously attends, pointedly asks, calmly speaks, coolly answers, and ceases when he has no more to say, is in possession of some of the best requisites of man.
— Lavater.

He who sees only half the problem will be buried in the other half.
— Richard N. Farmer

He who sees what comes out, and why, gains wisdom.
— Richard N. Farmer

He who steals for others ends up being hanged for himself.

He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.
— Alexander Pope

He who when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth, tells it boldly and has done, is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling.
— Lavater

He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot, is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave.
— Byron

He whose pride oppresses the humble may, perhaps, be humbled, but will never be humble.
— Lavater

He writes his plays for the ages — the ages between five and twelve.
— George jean Nathan

Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; Hear both sides, and all will be in the clear.
— Haliburton

Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.
— C. Northcote Parkinson

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribed, their present fate.
— Alexander Pope

Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judge that no king can corrupt.
— Shakespeare

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
— Shakespeare

Heaven needs no press agent because it has no competition, but sin is competitive.

Heaven’s gates are not so highly arch’d as princes’ palaces; they that enter there must go upon their knees.
— Webster

Heaven — it is God’s throne. The earth — it is His footstool.
— Matthew V, 34

Hell hath no fury like a computer scorned.

Hell hath no fury like a pacifist.
— Solomon Short

Hell is a place where the motorists are French, the policemen are German, the traffic patterns are Bostonian, and the cooks are English.

Hell is not to love anymore.
— Georges Bernanos

Hell is truth seen too late.
— H. G. Adams

Help wanted — must be kindergarten graduate.

Help yourself, and Heaven will help you.
— La Fontaine

Helping one another with simple chores, watching over each others homes, sharing needs like food and firewood, simple fellowship. These things make for true community spirit.
— Conrad Meinecke

Henry James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
— T. S. Eliot

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I every met.
— William Faulkner

Her face was like an April morn, Clad in a wint’ry cloud; And clay-cold was her lily hand, That held her sable shroud.
— Mallet

Her lips are roses overwashed with dew.
— Greene

Her tears her only eloquence.
— Rogers

Here comes the orator, with his flood of words and his drop of reason.

Here is the beginning of philosophy: a recognition of the conflicts between men, a search for their cause, a condemnation of mere opinion … and the discovery of a standard of judgment.
— Epictetus

Hereafter I’ll be able to understand everything, taking all on trust.
— Tristan Corbiere

Herman’s Rule: If it works right the first time, obviously you’ve done something wrong.

Heroism — the divine relation which in all times unites a great men to other men.
— Carlyle

Hey! Respect your elders. Call me Mr. Old Fart.
— Dick Vignoni

Highways in worst need of repair naturally have low traffic counts, which results in low priority for repair work.

His back against a rock he bore. And firmly placed his foot before; “Come one, come all! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.”
— Scott

His eye was blue and calm, as is the sky in the serenest noon.
— Willis

His eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.
— Edgar Allen Poe

His face was of the doubtful kind; That wins the eye and not the mind.
— Scott

His heart was yours from the first moment that you met.

His imagination resembles the wings of an ostrich.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay

His life was formal; his actions seemed ruled with a ruler.

His style has the desperate jauntiness of a orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.
— Edmund Wilson

His zeal was hollow; his sermons were like students’ songs imperfectly recalled by a senile don.
— John Rae

History books which contain no lies are extremely dull.

History does not record anywhere, at any time, a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to face the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
— Lazarus Long

History makes men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.
— Bacon

History proves nothing.
— Bill Gray

History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.
— Clarence Darrow

History shows that money will multiply in volume and divide in value over the long run. Or expressed differently, the purchasing power of currency will vary inversely with the magnitude of the public debt.
— William H. Peterson

Hollywood’s Iron Law: Nothing succeeds like failure.

Honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar.
— Shakespeare

Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part; there all the honesty lies.
— Alexander Pope

Honor’s a good brooch to wear in a man’s hat at all times.
— Jonson

Honor’s a thing too subtle for wisdom; if honor lie in eating, he’s right honorable.
— Beaumont and Fletcher

Hope for a miracle only after everything else has failed.

Hope is a flatterer, but the most upright of parasites; for she frequents the poor man’s hut, as well as the palace of his superior.
— Shakespeare

Hope is like the cork to the net, which keeps the soul from sinking in despair; and fear is like the lead to the net, which keeps it from floating in presumption.
— Watson

Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind, which, while it cozens with a color’d friendship robs us of our best virtue — resolution.
— Lee

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is, but always to be blest.
— Alexander Pope

Hope, of all passions, most befriends us here.
— Young

Hospitality to the better sort, and charity to the poor; two virtues that are never exercised so well as when they accompany each other.
— Atterbury

How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these, A youth of labor with an age of ease.
— Oliver Goldsmith

How calmly may we commit ourselves to the hands of Him who bears up the world — of Him who has created, and who provides for the joy even of insects, as carefully as if He were their Father!
— Richter

How can I miss you if you won’t go away?

How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.
— Petrarch

How do I get out of this, Munroe?
— John Holz

How do you accomplish anything at all when the city treasury is so bare that the addition of one coin will double its contents?

How do you spot a leader? They come in all ages, shapes and conditions. Some are poor administrators, some are not overly bright. One clue: the true leader can be recognized because somehow his people consistently turn in superior performances.
— Robert Townsend

How do you tell the difference between an electrical fire and a chemical fire? You use a fire distinguisher, of course.
— Dave Ascher

How do you uncover greatness in a city so poor that a man will provoke another man into an argument just so that his donkey can be eating the other man’s grass while they argue?

How does a leader give proof of prowess in a place where a man was observed to stand all of one morning waiting for a pear on a private tree to be blown off by a wind into the street, thereby becoming public property?

How does one conduct great enterprises in a city where people trail oxen with a broom and pan in hopes of getting a free surprise?

How far high failure overleaps the bounds of low success.
— Lewis Morris

How gaily a man wakes in the morning to watch himself keep on dying.
— Henry S. Haskins

How immense appear to us the sins that we have not committed.

How many “coming men” has one known! Where on earth do they all go to?

How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to change the bulb, one to tell him how to do it, and one to tell him he’s doing it all wrong.
— Dave Ascher

How many cowards, whose hearts are all false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beards of Hercules, and frowning Mars; Who inward search’d have livers white as milk?
— Shakespeare

How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
— Holmes

How much better it is to weep at joy than joy a weeping.
— Shakespeare

How much do you think I’ll get for my autobiography? (After his arrest for attempting to assassinate Governor George C. Wallace.)
— Arthur Bremer

How sharper than a hound’s tooth it is to have a thankless serpent.

How sharper then a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.
— Shakespeare

How slow this old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, like to a stepdame, or a dowager, long withering out a young man’s revenue.
— Shakespeare

How still the evening is As hush’d on purpose to grace harmony!
— Shakespeare

How swiftly whirls the disk; Data leaps to the floating head And is known.

How you look depends on where you go.

However deceitful hope may be, yet she carries us on pleasantly to the end of life.
— La Rochefoucauld

Human industry, if left to itself, will naturally find its way to the most useful and profitable employment.
— Adam Smith

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
— T. S. Eliot

Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.
— Selden

Humility is the better part of wisdom, and is most becoming in man. But let no one disparage self-reliance; it is, of all the rest, the greatest quality of true manliness.
— Ferenc Kossuth

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.
— Romain Gary

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.
— Langston Hughes

Humor is the sense of the Absurd, which is despair refusing to take itself seriously.
— Arland Ussher

Hunger is the best sauce.

Hunger is the best seasoning for meat, and thirst for drink.
— Cicero

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
— La Rochefoucauld

Hypocrites do the devil’s drudgery in Christ’s livery.
— Matthew Henry

Hypotheses multiply so as to fill the gaps in factual knowledge concerning biological phenomena.
— James D. Regan

I admire the person in charge of this organization. He is an artist at saying nothing out of both sides of his face.

I am a firm believer in socialism and I know that the quicker you have monopoly in this country the quicker you will have socialism.
— Charles P. Steinmetz

I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.

I am but a gatherer, and a disposer of other men’s stuff.
— Watton

I am grateful for all my problems. As each of them was overcome I became stronger and more able to meet those yet to come. I grew on all my difficulties.
— J. C. Penney

I am never less at leisure than when at leisure, nor less alone than when I am alone.
— Scipio Africanus

I am not a crook.
— Richard M. Nixon

I am not senile.
— Ronald W. Reagan

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boast of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate, the scorn of all who know the worth of mind and virtue.
— Percival

I am reading Henry James … and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
— Virginia Woolf

I am so optimistic about beef prices that I’ve just leased a pot roast with an option to buy.

I believe in heaven and hell — on earth.
— Abraham L. Feinberg

I believe in instinct, not in reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wrong.
— A. C. Benson

I believe that in actual fact, philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences.
— Thomas Mann

I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war.
— John Milton

I call them as I see them. If I can’t see them, I make them up.
— Biff Barf

I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; that plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful.
— Shakespeare

I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable.

I can’t give you brains, but I can give you a diploma.
— The Wizard of Oz

I can’t help feeling a certain pride in the admiration of women. I suspect that is one of my biggest failings.
— Jose Torres

I cannot draw a cart, nor eat wild oats; if it be a man’s work I will do it.
— Shakespeare

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — which is: Try to please everybody.
— Herbert Bayard Swope

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
— Abraham Lincoln

I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.

I consider your very testy and quarrelsome people in the same light as I do a loaded gun, which may, by accident, go off and kill one.
— Shenstone

I could hold every man a debtor to his profession; from the which as men of course do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves by way of amends to be a help and ornament thereunto.
— Bacon

I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.
— Richard Lovelace

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
— Carl Jung

I could prove God statistically.
— George Gallup

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people whom I despise.

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
— Thomas Carlyle

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
— Galileo Galilei

I do not know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface.
— Justice Learned Hand

I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.
— Oliver Goldsmith

I don’t care how poor and inefficient a country is; they like to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am; but, darn it, I’m not going to give her to ’em.
— Will Rogers

I don’t even know what street Canada is on!
— Al Capone

I don’t know what’s wrong with people! All I ask them to do is exactly what I tell them.

I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.

I don’t meet competition, I crush it.
— Charles Revson

I don’t mind being pampered, but I will NOT be possessed!!!

I don’t remember ever having had the itch, and yet scratching is one of nature’s sweet pleasures, and so handy.

I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.
— Shakespeare

I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.
— Jonas Salk

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.
— Elaine Dundy

I gave her the ring; she gave me the finger.

I gave my life to learning how to live. Now that I have organized it all it’s just about over.
— Sandra Hochman

I had been driving my car for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.

I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I reached an intersection a hedge sprung up obscuring my vision. I did not see the other car.

I had rather a fool to make me merry, than experience to make me sad.
— Shakespeare

I had to hit him, he was starting to make sense.

I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of another.
— Greville

I have a SPONGE that’s drier behind the ears than you are!

I have a feeling that at any time about three million Americans can be had for any militant reaction against law, decency, the Constitution, the Supreme Court, compassion and the rule of reason.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

I have a fine sense of ridiculous, but no sense of humor.
— Edward Albee

I have discovered the art of fooling diplomats: I speak the truth and they never believe me.
— Camillo Di Cavour

I have ever held it as a maxim, never to do that through another, which it was possible for me to execute myself.
— Montesquieu

I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
— Henry David Thoreau

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe — that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.
— La Place

I have never been able to understand why it is that just because I am unintelligible nobody can understand me.
— Milton Mayer

I have somewhere seen it observed, that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not harm it.
— Colton

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
— Poul Anderson

I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.
— Henrik Ibsen

I hope when you know the worst you will at once leap into the river and swim through handsomely, and not, weather-beaten by the divers blasts of irresolution, stand shivering on the bank.
— Suckling

I hourly learn a doctrine of obedience.
— Shakespeare

I just DON’T understand human behaviour.
— C-3PO

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
— Socrates

I know who I am. Sometimes you go away, but I’m still here.

I like blood. It’s a primary color.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
— Thomas Jefferson

I like work; it fascinates me; I can sit and look at it for hours.

I loathe that low vice curiosity.
— Lord Byron

I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong.
— Sam Goldwyn

I must go seek some dew-drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
— Shakespeare

I must have slipped a disk – my pack hurts.

I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.
— Richard Rumbold, on the scaffold

I never fail to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

I never knew the old gentlemen with the scythe and hour-glass to bring anything but gray hairs, thin cheeks, and loss of teeth.
— Dryden

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man coming to his senses.
— William Makepeace Thakeray

I never thought that inorganic Matter could attack a man. That’s why I’m in such a panic — I’ve just seen proof it can!

I never trust a man unless I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.
— Lyndon B. Johnson

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
— Clarence Darrow

I never yet heard man or woman much abused that I was not inclined to think the better of them, and to transfer the suspicion or dislike to the one who found pleasure in pointing out the defects of another.
— Jane Porter

I noticed that some household columns suggest that people use elbow grease for cleaning. After a long and fruitless search, I still have been unable to find this amazing product. Could you tell me where to buy it?

I once had a dog who, like you, insisted on being cheerful in the morning. I got rid of him by giving him to an immigrant Japanese family — and they ate him.

I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment.

I question whether we can afford to teach mother macrame when Johnny still can’t read.
— Governor Jerry Brown

I reject get-it-done, make-it-happen thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand them better.
— Governor Jerry Brown

I remember those happy days and often wish I could speak into the ears of the dead the gratitude which was due to them in life and so ill-returned.
— Gwyn Thomas

I see a good deal of talk from Washington about lowering taxes. I hope they do get ’em lowered enough so people can afford to pay ’em.
— Will Rogers

I see no wisdom in saving up indignation for a rainy day. (If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings — including this one.)
— Heywood Broun

I see that fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
— Shakespeare

I see where we are starting to pay some attention to our neighbors to the south. We could never understand why Mexico wasn’t just crazy about us; for we have always had their good will, and oil and minerals, at heart.
— Will Rogers

I shall never ask, never refuse, never resign nor ever not run for re-election.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

I thought my window was down, but found out it was up when I put my hand through it.

I told the police that I was not injured, but on removing my hat I found that I had a skull fracture.

I trust MY judgment. I’m not sure about yours.

I understand a fury in your words, but not your words.
— Shakespeare

I was five years old before I realized there was no such thing as ALPO baby food.
— Rodney Dangerfield

I was going to include an ethnic slur in here, but I couldn’t figure out how to get you into this file.

I was on my way to the doctors with rear-end trouble when my universal joint gave way causing me to have an accident.

I was unable to stop in time and my car crashed into the other vehicle. The driver and passengers then left for a vacation with injuries.

I went to the race track once and bet on a horse that was so good that it took seven others to beat him!

I will aggravate my voice so, that I will roar you as gently as any suckling dove; I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale.
— Shakespeare

I will fight it out at this line if it takes all summer.
— General Ulysses S. Grant

I will never lie to you.
— James E. Carter

I will not be as those who spend the day in complaining of the head-ache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives the headache.
— Goethe

I will not quarrel with a slight mistake, such as our nature’s frailty may excuse.
— Roscommon

I will roar, that it will do any man’s heart good to hear me.
— Shakespeare

I would call the Democratic Left in Latin America the group which secures social advances for all the people in a framework of freedom and consent.
— Luis Munoz Marin

I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarified to nothing by the pump of unbelief; in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.
— Richter

I would suggest the taxation of all property equally whether church or corporation.

I write long epigrams, you write nothing. Yours are shorter.
— Martial

I’d rather go whoring than warring.
— Bill Gray

I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

I’ll pick up my papers, and smile at the sky. I know that the hypnotized never lie.

I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape, and bid me hold my peace.
— Shakespeare

I’m #1! Why try harder?

I’m always easy. I’m NEVER cheap!!!
— Dick Munroe

I’m going to get you for this, Croll!
— John Holz

I’m no one’s trophy!!!
— Constance Barr

I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
— Woody Allen

I’m proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is — I could be just as proud for half the money.
— Arthur Godfrey

I’ve finally figured out why airports make you walk so far out to get to your plane. It’s their way of giving your luggage a head start.

I’ve found my niche. If you’re wondering why I’m not there, there was this little hole in the bottom …
— John Croll

I’ve given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my back in my bed crying over you.

I’ve heard old cunning stagers Say fools for arguments use wagers.
— Butler

I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind.
— Mike Todd

I’ve never known an instance in the history of our company where an executive unloaded responsibilities and duties on one lower in the ranks, that he did not find himself immediately loaded from above with greater responsibility.
— Arthur F. Hall

I’ve seen better heads on half a pint of beer.

I’ve spent a fortune on my kids’ education, and a fortune on their teeth. The difference is, they use their teeth.
— Robert Orben

I’ve touch’d the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting. I shall fall, Like a bright exhalation in the evening And no man see me more.
— Shakespeare

IMPIETY: Your irreverence toward my deity.
— Ambrose Bierce

IT’S HERE AT LAST: Rush job; nobody knew it was coming

Ideal goals grow faster than the means of attaining new goals allow.
— Mallory Wober

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments, which is why we need a productivity rebate.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Idleness travels very slowly, and poverty soon overtakes her.
— Hunter

If “everybody knows” such and such, then it ain’t so, by at least ten thousand to one.
— Lazarus Long

If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
— Albert Einstein

If Europe should ever be ruined, it will be by its warriors.
— Montesquieu

If God shuts one door, he opens another.

If God wanted us to be brave, why did he give us legs?
— Marvin Kitman

If I can catch him once upon the hip I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
— Shakespeare

If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive!
— Samuel Goldwyn

If I don’t know your name, how am I supposed to tell my diary about you?

If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.

If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
— Sir Isaac Newton

If I may venture my own definition of a folk song, I should call it “an individual flowering on a common stem.”
— Ralph Vaughan Williams

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.
— Frederick the Great

If Negro freedom is taken away, or that of any minority group, the freedom of all the people is taken away.
— Paul Robeson

If Noah had consulted with modern-day weather forecasters, there would have been a ten-percent chance of him building the ark.
— Jim Fiebig

If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.

If a ball rims the cup, it is deemed to have dropped. A ball should not go sideways. This violates the laws of physics.
— Donald A. Metz

If a ball stops at the brink of the hole and hangs there, defying gravity, it is deemed to have dropped. You can’t defy the law of gravity.
— Donald A. Metz

If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then a consensus forecast is a camel’s behind.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

If a course requires a prerequisite, a student will not have had it.
— M. M. Johnston

If a great deal of time has been expended seeking the answer to a problem, with the only result being failure, the answer will be immediately obvious to the first unqualified person who comes along.

If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.
— Joseph C. Goulden

If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow weeps.
— Shakespeare

If a man does not make new acquaintances, as he advances through life, he soon will find himself alone. A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.
— Johnson

If a man is happy in his work — exerting himself to the full extent of his capabilities, and enjoying it — I’d say he’s a success.
— William Romain

If a man will go as far as he can see, he will be able to see farther when he gets there.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, and learning, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!
— Jonathan Swift

If a political candidate chooses to go into specifics on a program that affects a voter’s self-interest, the voter get interested. If the proposal involves money, he gets very interested.
— Stuart Spencer

If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.

If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.

If a putt passes over the hole without dropping, it is deemed to have dropped. The law of gravity holds that any object attempting to maintain a position in the atmosphere without something to support it must drop. The law of gravity supersedes the law of golf.
— Donald A. Metz

If a research project is not worth doing at all, it is not worth doing well.

If a student has to study, he will claim that the course is unfair.
— M. M. Johnston

If a taxpayer thinks he can cheat safely, he probably will.
— Diogenes

If a thing cannot be fitted into something smaller than itself some dope will do it.
— Eric Frank Russell

If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.
— Richard A. Leahy

If a woman attended an American high school between 1930 and 1965, chances are that no one paid attention to anything but her brains unless she took the utmost care to conceal them.
— Susan Jacoby

If all I’m offered is a choice between monopolistic privilege with regulation and monopolistic privilege without regulation, I’m afraid I have to opt for the former.
— Nicholas Johnson

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
— Socrates

If all the Chinese simultaneously jumped into the Pacific off a 10 foot platform erected 10 feet off their coast, it would cause a tidal wave that would destroy everything in this country west of Nebraska.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

If all the people in this world in which we live were as selfish as a few of the people in this world in which we live, there would be no world in which to live.
— W. L. Orme

If an apparently severe problem manifests itself, no solution is acceptable unless it is involved, expensive, and time-consuming.

If an author write better than his contemporaries, they will term him a plagiarist; if as well, a pretender; but if worse, he may stand some chance of commendation as a genius of some promise, from whom much may be expected by a due attention to their good counsel and advice.
— Colton

If an editor can reject your paper, he will.
— Maeve O’Connor

If an emergency strikes, a man should be able to leave his home with nothing more than the clothes on his back without feeling that he has left something behind.
— Henry David Thoreau

If an experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment.

If an instructor says, “It is obvious” it won’t be.
— M. M. Johnston

If an organization carries the word “united” in its name, it means it isn’t, e. g., United Nations, United Arab Republic, United Kingdom, United States.
— Professor Charles I. Issawi

If anger is not restrained, it is frequently more hurtful to us, than the injury that provokes it.
— Seneca

If another scientist thought your research was more important than his (or hers), he would drop what he is doing and do what you are doing.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.
— James I, 5,6

If anything can go wrong in an experiment, it will.

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Corollary: If anything just can’t go wrong, it will anyway.
— Francis P. Chisholm

If at first you don’t succeed that is only to be expected — there is a little bit of good even in the best of us. (No one is as good as he thinks he is.)

If at first you don’t succeed, blame it on the teacher.
— Stacey Bass

If at first you don’t succeed, try something else.
— Laurence J. Peter

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit, no use being a damn fool about things.
— W. C. Fields

If at first you don’t succeed, you must be doing something wrong.
— Charles Merrill Smith

If at first you don’t succeed, you will never succeed.

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing about average.

If beauty is only skin deep, you must have been born inside out.

If both Alsops say it’s true, it can’t be so.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

If enough reports are prepared and technical reviews are held, negative information will always filter its way to senior management.
— Richard F. Moore

If facts do not conform to theory, they must be disposed of.
— N. R. F. Maier

If good intentions are combined with stupidity, it is impossible to outthink them.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

If he [a generalist] delights to find a law he is ecstatic when he finds a law about laws. If laws in his eyes are good, laws about laws are delicious and are most praiseworthy objects of search.
— Boulding

If he had been born God, it was the clowns who would occupy the lowest rungs of hell.

If he had two ideas in his head, they would fall out with each other.
— Johnson

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.

If humanity profits from its mistakes, we have a glorious future coming up.

If it can be borrowed and it can be broken, you will borrow it and you will break it.
— W. W. Chandler

If it can be understood, it’s not finished yet.
— Paul Herbig

If it can break, it will, but only after the warranty expires.
— Sherry Graditor

If it is generally known what one is supposed to be doing, then someone will expect him to do it.
— Merle P. Martin

If it pours before seven, it has rained by eleven.

If it tastes good, you can’t have it. If it tastes awful, you’d better clean your plate.

If it works well, they’ll stop making it.

If it works, don’t fix it.
— William O’Neill

If it’s good, they’ll stop making it.
— Herblock

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted; musicians denoted; cowboys deranged; models deposed; tree surgeons debarked and dry cleaners depressed?
— Virginia Ostman

If life were a bed of roses, some people wouldn’t be happy until they developed an allergy.

If love makes the world go ’round, Why are we going to outer space?
— Margaret Gilman

If no one uses something, it isn’t needed.
— Robert Sommer

If nobody uses it, there’s a reason.
— Jane Bryant Quinn

If nuclear … therefore it must be bad; Denounce such power with a protest squeal. The scientists made it (surely they’re all mad), It’s better not to think and just to feel.
— Jack Kirwan

If on an actuarial basis there is a 50/50 chance that something will go wrong, it actually will go wrong nine times in ten.

If one is lucky enough and can accurately define all three of these parameters, task, time, and resources, then what one deals with is not the realm of R&D.

If one knows what the task is, and there is a time limit allowed for the completion of the task, then one cannot guess how much it will cost.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
— Montesquieu

If only one parking space is available it will have a blue curb (blue curbs are reserved for “STAFF”).
— M. M. Johnston

If our standard of living gets much higher, most of us won’t be able to afford it.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use; but it is made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything solemn and serious.
— Addison

If solid happiness we prize, Within our breast this jewel lies, And they are fools who roam; The world has nothing to bestow; From our own selves our joys must flow And that dear hut — our home.
— Cotton

If some people didn’t tell you, you’d never know they’d been away on vacation.

If some stress is brought to bear on a system in equilibrium, the equilibrium is displaced in the direction which tends to undo the effect of the stress.

If someone with a rural accent says, “I don’t know anything about politics,” zip up your pockets.
— Donald Rumsfeld

If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot!
— Harry S. Truman

If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions aren’t likely to be very good.
— Robert E. Machol

If the average man is made in God’s image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.

If the converse of a statement is absurd, the original statement is an insult to the intelligence and should never have been said. (This is best applied to the statements of politicians and TV pundits.)
— Arthur H. Boultbee

If the dove chooses to fly with the hawks his feathers stay white but his heart turns black.

If the enterprise dies, say that you saw it coming ages ago.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

If the experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment.

If the meek shall inherit the Earth, what will happen to us Tigers?

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails will be filled with good people.
— Daniel P. Monynihan

If the people are to be the governors, who then shall be the governed?
— Cotton Mather

If the people in a democracy are allowed to do so, they will vote away the freedoms which are essential to that democracy.
— Snell Putney

If the time and resources ($) are clearly defined, then it is impossible to know what part of the R&D task will be performed.

If the wicked flourish, and thou suffer, be not discouraged. They are fatted for destruction: thou are dieted for health.
— Fuller

If the work of God could be comprehended by reason, it would be no longer wonderful, and faith would have no merit if reason provided proof.
— Pope Gregory I

If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.
— Cowper

If there are twelve clowns in a ring, you can jump in the middle and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience, you’ll just be the thirteenth clown.
— Adam Walinsky

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will go wrong first will be the one that will do the most damage.

If there is a wrong thing to say, one will.
— Betty Hartig

If there is an opportunity to make a mistake, sooner or later the mistake will be made.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

If there is any way to do it wrong, you will.

If there is anything education does not lack today, it is critics.
— Nathan M. Pusey

If there is no reason why something shouldn’t exist, then it must exist.
— Murray Gell-Martin

If there isn’t a law, there will be.
— Harold Faber

If things are not going well with you, begin your effort at correcting the situation by carefully examining the service you are rendering, and especially the spirit in which you are rendering it.
— Roger Babson

If things can go wrong, they will — and when they do, blame it on the oil industry.

If things were left to chance, they’d be better.

If thou art a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.
— Fuller

If thou hast a loitering servant, send him of thy errand just before his dinner.
— Fuller

If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.
— Laurence J. Peter

If ugly was labor, you’d be a long day’s work.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
— Longfellow

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.
— Lord Clarendon

If we had no defects ourselves, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
— La Rochefoucauld

If we in business cannot put the brakes on this creeping socialism, the free enterprise system will become a thing of the past.
— Barton A, Cummings

If you accept the necessity for freedom of expression, it follows that in an intellectual controversy any attempt to coerce rather than to persuade … is not merely an offense against the person so coerced, but an erosion of the mechanics which make free expression work, and therefore make it possible.
— Michael Kinsley

If you add only a little to a little and do this often, soon that little will become great.
— Hesiod

If you always postpone pleasure you will never have it. Quit work and play for once.

If you anticipate bus delays by leaving your house thirty minutes early, your bus will arrive as soon as you reach the bus stop or when you light up a cigarette, whichever comes first.
— John Corcoran

If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you.
— Mignon McLaughlin

If you are concerned about being criticized, you’re in the wrong job. However you vote, and whatever you do, somebody will be out there telling you that you are: (a) wrong, (b) insensitive, (c) a bleeding heart, (d) a pawn of somebody else, (e) too wishy-washy, (f) too unwilling to compromise, (g) all of the above — consistency is not required of critics.
— Pierre S. du Pont

If you are given a clearly defined R&D goal and a definite amount of money which has been calculated to be necessary for the completion of the task, one cannot predict if and when the goal will be reached.

If you are to understand others, and have them understand you, know the big words but use the small ones.

If you break a cup or plate, it will not be the one that was already chipped or cracked.
— Denys Parsons

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No, four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
— Abraham Lincoln

If you can give your son only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.
— Bruce Barton

If you can keep your head when all about you others are losing theirs, maybe you just don’t understand the situation.

If you can’t beat them, have them join you.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
— Harry S. Truman

If you can’t do anything about something, pretend it doesn’t exist.

If you can’t measure it, I’m not interested.
— Laurence J. Peter

If you can’t remember it, it couldn’t have been important.
— Larry Groebe

If you cannot inspire a woman with love of you, fill her above the brim with love of herself — all that runs over the brim will be yours.
— Colton

If you continually give you will continually have.

If you cover a congressional committee on a regular basis, they will report the bill on your day off.
— Herb Foster

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.
— Mrs. Stowe

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.
— Donald Rumsfeld

If you disregard the advice of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and go into the quicksand of an Asian country, like a domino you will fall into the quicksand of another Asian country next to it.
— Andrew Jacobs, D-Ind.

If you don’t go to other men’s funerals they won’t go to yours.
— Clarence Day

If you don’t know what your program is supposed to do, you’d better not start writing it.
— Dijkstra

If you don’t like the answer, you shouldn’t have asked the question.
— Charles C. Abbott

If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait fifteen minutes; it will change.
— Mark Twain

If you don’t like the weather, move.

If you don’t like yourself, you can’t like other people.

If you don’t say it, they can’t repeat it.
— Wilbur C. Munnecke

If you gave to forecast, forecast often.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

If you go on a trip taking two bags with you, one containing everything you need for the trip and the other containing absolutely nothing, the second bag will be completely filled with junk acquired on the trip when you return.
— Tony Hogg

If you had your life to live over again — you’d need more money.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
— Charles F. Kettering

If you have something to do, and you put it off long enough, chances are someone else will do it for you.
— Clyde F. Adams

If you have to ask, you’re not entitled to know.
— Charles C. Abbott

If you have to scream, you’re not doing it right.
— Billy Martin

If you have to think about it, it’s too late.

If you have too many problems, maybe you should go out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.

If you jot down every silly thought that pops into your mind, you will soon find out everything you most seriously believe.
— Mignon McLaughlin

If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior.
— A. J. Liebling

If you lend a person any money, it becomes lost for any purposes of your own. When you ask for it back again, you find a friend made an enemy by your own kindness. If you begin to press still further — either you must part with that which you have entrusted, or else you must lose that friend.
— Plautus

If you lose your temper at a newspaper columnist, he’ll get rich or famous or both.
— James C. Hagerty,

If you make a mistake you right it immediately to the best of your ability.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don’t get wet you can keep.
— Will Rogers

If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.
— Fielding

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think they’ll hate you.

If you need a physician, employ these three — a cheerful mind, rest, and a temperate diet.

If you play with anything long enough, it will break.
— Louis Zahner

If you play with something long enough, you will surely break it.

If you push something hard enough it will fall over.

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it.
— Pierre Gallois

If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always depend on the support of Paul. (But don’t bet on it.)

If you see that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and you circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.

If you stop to think about it, you’re already dead.

If you submit your paper to a second editor, his journal invariably demands an entirely different reference system.
— Maeve O’Conner

If you suspect a man, don’t employ him.

If you take off your right-hand glove in very cold weather, the key will be in your left-hand pocket.

If you take pleasure in criticism, it’s time to hold you tongue.

If you take your boots off, you’ll never get them back on again.
— Milt Barber

If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it.
— Arthur Kasspe

If you think this is funny, look in a mirror.

If you try to please everybody, somebody is not going to like it.
— Donald Rumsfeld

If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends let others excel you.
— Colton

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

If you want to get along, go along.
— Sam Rayburn

If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.
— Charles F. Kettering

If you want to make an enemy, do someone a favor.
— Charles L. Geanangel

If you want to understand your government, don’t begin by reading the Constitution. (It conveys precious little of the flavor of today’s statecraft.) Instead, read selected portions of the Washington telephone directory containing listings for all the organizations with titles beginning with the word “National.”
— George Will

If you want your name spelled wrong, die.
— Al Blanchard

If you were a character string, your length would be zero.

If you were as innocent as you pretend to be, we’d never get anywhere.
— Sam Spade

If you wish to make a superior product, you must already be engaged in making an inferior product.
— Jacob A. Varela

If you wish to succeed, consult three old people.

If you wish to, you will have a good opportunity to get even.

If you wish, you will have an opportunity.

If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams — the more condensed the deeper they burn.
— Southey

If you would keep a secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.

If you’re already in a hole, there’s no use to continue digging.
— Roy W. Walters

If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.
— L. R. Pierson

If you’re confident after you’ve just finished an exam, it’s because you don’t know enough to know better.
— Jay Weisman

If you’re ever right, never let ’em forget it.
— Edgar R. Riedler

If your doing something the same way you have been doing it for ten years, the chances are you are doing it wrong.
— Charles Kettering

If your friend won’t lend you fifty dollars, he’s probably a close friend.

If your parents didn’t have any children, there’s a good chance you won’t have any.
— Clarence Day

If your stomach disputes you, pacify it with cool thoughts.
— Satchel Paige

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
— H. L. Mencken

Ignorance is no excuse.

Ignorance of one’s ignorance is the greatest ignorance.

Illegetimus non carborundum!

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
— George Bernard Shaw

Immodest words admit of no defence For want of decency is want of sense.
— Alexander Pope

Impatience dires the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
— Creon

Important things that are supposed to happen do not happen, especially when people are looking.
— Charles Fetridge

Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

Impropriety is the soul of wit.
— Somerset Maugham

In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
— Bertrand Russell

In Fame’s temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels or successful butchers of the human race.
— Zimmerman

In God we trust, all others pay cash.

In God we trust.

In a Democracy only those laws which have their bases in folkways or the approval of strong groups have a chance of being enforced.
— Abraham Myerson

In a bureaucracy accomplishment is inversely proportional to volume of paper used.
— Foster L. Fowler

In a bureaucracy every routing slip will expand until it contains the maximum number of names that can be typed in a vertical column, namely, twenty-seven.
— Daniel Melcher

In a bureaucratic system an increase in expenditure will be matched by a fall in production. Such systems will act rather like “black holes” in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources and shrinking in terms of “emitted” production.
— Dr. Max Gammon

In a bureaucratic system, useless work drives out useful work.
— Milton Friedman

In a country as big as the United States, you can find fifty examples of anything.
— Jeffery F. Chamberlain

In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, most people will choose the worst one possible.
— S. A. Rudin

In a democracy you can be respected though poor, but don’t count on it.
— Charles Merrill Smith

In a family argument, if it turns out you are right — apologize at once!
— Lazarus Long

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would take a man many months to equal it.

In a future life, may you come back as yourself.

In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion.

In a mature society, “civil servant” is semantically equal to “civil master.”
— Lazarus Long

In a medium in which a News Piece takes a minute and an “In-Depth” Piece takes two minutes, the Simple will drive out the Complex.
— Frank Mankiewicz

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, “one when he was a boy and one when he was a man.”
— Mark Twain

In a research and development orbit, only two of the existing three parameters can be defined simultaneously. The parameters are: task, time, and resources.

In a restaurant with seats which are close to each other, one will always find the decibel level of the nearest conversation to be inversely proportional to the quality of the thought going into it.
— Stuart A. Cohn

In a vain man, the smallest spark may kindle into the greatest flame, because the materials are always prepared for it.
— Hume

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yet, it is women who keep the church going.

In all the many-colored worlds of the universe no single ethical code shows a universal force. … I am convinced that virtue is but a reflection of good intent.
— Magnus Ridolf

In an attempt to kill a fly I drove into a telephone pole.

In an underdeveloped country, don’t drink the water; in a developed country, don’t breathe the air.

In an underdeveloped country, when you are absent, your job is taken away from you; in a developed country a new one is piled on you.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

In any collection of data, the figures that are obviously correct will contain errors.

In any decision situation, the amount of relevant information available is inversely proportional to the importance of the decision.
— Michael T. Minerath

In any given group, the most will do the least and the least the most.
— Merle P. Martin

In any given miscalculation, the fault will never be placed if more than one person is involved.
— Merle P. Martin

In any household, junk accumulates to fill the space available for its storage.
— Bruce O. Boston

In any human enterprise, work seeks the lowest hierarchical level.
— Charles R. Vail

In any organization, the potential is much greater for the subordinate to manage his superior than for the superior to manage his subordinate.

In any slide presentation, at least one slide will be upside down or backwards, or both.
— John Corcoran

In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill, for even tho’ vanquish’d he could argue still.
— Oliver Goldsmith

In briefings to busy people, summarize at the beginning what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then summarize at the end what you have told them.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

In business, price increases as service declines.
— James L. Davis

In case of nuclear attack: 1. Stand with feet shoulder width apart. 2. Bend over to a 90 degree angle. 3. Face backwards. 4. Kiss your ass goodbye.

In dealing with people, an ounce of sincere, good intentions is worth a pound of cleverness.

In dealing with the press do yourself a favor. Stick with one of three responses: (a) I know and I can tell you. (b) I know and I can’t tell you. (c) I don’t know.
— Dan Rather

In dealing with their own problems, faculty members are the most extreme conservatives. In dealing with other people’s problems, they are the world’s extreme liberals.
— Clark Kerr

In differing breasts what differing passions glow! Ours kindle quick, but yours extinguish slow.
— Garth

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge, it marks the first step in progress toward victory.
— Alfred North Whitehead

In handling a stinging insect, move very slowly.
— Lazarus Long

In his private heart no man much respects himself.
— Mark Twain

In larger things we are convivial; What causes trouble is the trivial.
— Richard Armour

In life there is but one bad thing and one good; both of them are women.

In lover’s quarrels, the party that loves most is always most willing to acknowledge the greater fault.
— Scott

In matters of dispute, the bank’s balance is always smaller than yours.
— Rozanne Weissman

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
— Mrs. Jameson

In my Lucia’s absence Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden; I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear, And grief, and rage and love rise up at once, And with variety of pain distract me.
— Joseph Addison

In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
— Shakespeare

In my view, God educates us through our deceptions and mistakes, in order to make us understand at last that we ought to believe only in Him, and not in man.

In order to discover anything you must be looking for something.
— Harvey Neville

In order to get a loan, you must first prove you don’t need it.
— John Cameron

In order to keep engineers and scientists cognizant of the importance of progress, load them down with forms, multiple reports, and frequent meetings.
— Richard F. Moore

In order to make [a person] covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
— Samuel Clemens

In our haste to deal with the things that are wrong, let us not upset the things that are right.

In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
— Coleridge

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
— Sir William Osler

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.

In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.

In the bottle, discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.
— Johnson

In the economic sense, our socialism was more like state capitalism … Marx had never dreamed of anything of the sort … Soviet Russia had broken with everything in her history that was revolutionary, and had got onto the usual rails of great-power imperialism.
— Svetlana Alliluyeva

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
— Michel de Montaigne

In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.
— Edward Gibbon

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
— Franz Kafka

In the game of life it’s a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.
— Bill Vaughan

In the gates of Eternity, the black hand and the white hand hold each other with an equal clasp.
— Mrs. Stowe

In the intercourse of life we please, often, by our defects than by our good qualities.
— La Rochefoucauld

In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as fail.
— Bulwer

In the long run we are all dead.
— John Maynard Keynes

In the nice bee what sense so subtly true Form pois’ness herbs extract the healing dew?
— Alexander Pope

In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes and an occasional salutary recession.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
— Benjamin Franklin

In time of trouble, men of talent are called for, but in times of ease the rich and those with powerful relatives are desired.
— Italo Bombolini

In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.
— Jerome S. Bruner

In times of crisis, it is of utmost importance not to lose one’s head.
— Marie Antoinette

In unanimity there is cowardice and uncritical thinking.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

In unanimity there may well be either cowardice or uncritical thinking.
— Donald Rumsfeld

In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory.
— Gen. Douglas MacArthur

In you can’t measure output, then you can’t measure input.
— Charles Schultze

Include me out.
— Sam Goldwyn

Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place.
— Laurence J. Peter

Incompetence tends to increase with the level of work performed. And, naturally, the individual’s staff needs will increase as his level of incompetence increases.
— Arthur J. Riggs

Incompetents often hire able assistants.
— Douglas Evelyn

Indifference is the only sure defence.
— Jody Powell

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
— Mahatma Gandhi

Infant care has to be learned from the bottom up.

Inflation is when the only thing free of charge is a run-down battery.

Information flows efficiently through organizations, except that bad news encounters high impedance in flowing upwards.
— Paul Gray

Information travels more surely to those with a lesser need to know.
— Charles P. Boyle

Innocence is always unsuspicious.
— Haliburton

Innovations in law, whether good or bad, spin an entangling weave far more often than they sew a straight stitch. Division of labor can make for great efficiency; too great a division of labor in lawmaking can instead create a crazy quilt.
— Michael Scully

Inquisitive people are the funnels of conversation; they do not take in anything for their own use, but merely to pass it to another.
— Steele

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.
— Tony Hoare

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.
— Will Rogers

Integrity has no need of rules.
— Albert Camus

Interrogator’s lunch — grilled cheese
— Raymond D. Love

Inventing is easy for staff outfits. Stating a problem is much harder. Instead of stating problems, people like to pass out half-accurate statements together with half-available solutions which they can’t finish and which they want you to finish.
— Amrom Katz

Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or somebody insists on getting some useful work done.
— Tom Gibb

Is it bang for the buck, or pennies for a pop?

Is not absence death to those who love?
— Alexander Pope

Is not light grander than fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.
— Carlyle

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?
— Charlotte

Is there no way to bring home a wandering sheep, but by worrying him to death?
— Fuller

Isn’t every computer a Digital computer?

Isn’t this a beautiful day! Just watch some bastard louse it up.

It does not matter if you fall down as long as you pick up something from the floor while you get up.
— Avery

It gives me pleasure to be praised by you whom all men praise.
— Tully

It has been said that there are two theories of history: conspiracy and blunder. If there is some truth to that, it is surely equally true that blunder seldom receives all the credit due it as an explanation of complex events.
— Michael Scully

It has long been known that one horse can run faster than another — but which one? Differences are crucial.
— Lazarus Long

It is Fortune, not wisdom that rules man’s life.

It is a blessed thing that in every age someone has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions.
— Robert G. Ingersoll

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

It is a good divine that follows his own instructions.
— Shakespeare

It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty.
— John C. Calhoun

It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
— Jean de La Brupere

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense, it is the life of the spider.
— Jonathan Swift

It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only from those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one.
— Sigmund Freud

It is a poor judge who cannot award a prize.

It is a secret known to but a few, yet no small use in the conduct of life, that if you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.
— Steele

It is a special trick of low cunning to squeeze out knowledge from a modest man, who is eminent in any science, and then to use it as legally acquired, and pass the source in total silence.
— Horace Walpole

It is a very sad thing nowadays there is so little useless information.
— Oscar Wilde

It is against the nature of man as he grows older … to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
— John Steinbeck

It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

It is amusing for someone accustomed to the traffic in New York to hear residents of places like Houston and Atlanta complain about congestion on the highways. Imagine, in rush hour they have to slow down to 35 miles an hour!
— Barry Bruce-Briggs

It is best to hope only for things possible and probable; he that hopes too much shall deceive himself at last; especially if his industry does not go along with his hopes; for hope without action is a barren undoer.
— Feltham

It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws.
— Aristotle

It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.
— Henry Allen

It is better to be always on your guard than to suffer once.

It is better to be feared than loved, more prudent to be cruel than compassionate.
— Niccolo Machievelli

It is better to burn out than fade away.
— Neil Young

It is better to decide between our enemies than our friends; for one of our friends will most likely become our enemy; but on the other hand, one of your enemies will probably become your friend.
— Bias

It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
— De Foe

It is better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.
— Tennyson

It is better to have nothing to do than to be doing nothing.
— Attilus

It is better to sound a person with whom one deals afar off, than to fall upon the point at first.
— Bacon

It is better to wear out than to rust out.

It is but poor eloquence, which only shows that the orator can talk.
— Sir Joshua Reynolds

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
— Anatole France

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
— Mark Twain

It is courage the world needs, not infallibility … courage is always the surest wisdom.
— Sir Wilfred Grenfell

It is customary for a decimal to be misplaced.

It is difficult to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys.

It is easier to harness human nature than to fight or repress it.

It is easier to run down a hill than up one.

It is easy to understand God as long as you don’t try to explain Him.

It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it tyrannous to use it like a giant.
— Shakespeare

It is far better to be deceived than to be undeceived by those we love.

It is far easier to be wise for others than to be so for oneself.
— La Rochefoucauld

It is far easier to know men than to know man.
— La Rochefoucauld

It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave than to expend it like a gentleman.
— Colton

It is fear that first brought gods into the world.

It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have.
— The Duchess of Windsor

It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.
— Benjamin Franklin

It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one’s self the seeds of the baseness the other party is accused of.
— Stanislaus

It is impossible for a man to love his wife whole-heartedly without loving all women somewhat. I suppose that the converse must be true of women.
— Lazarus Long

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
— Jonathan Swift

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.
— Woody Allen

It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.
— Jeremy Taylor

It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, it is from his leisure that he constructs the fabric of self.
— Agnes Repplier

It is in the nature of mobs to cheer fools.

It is inconceivable that three competing networks, working independently in complete secrecy, could produce by accident twenty-six new series so similar in quality.
— Marvin Kitman

It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them.
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
— Jules Becker

It is never clear just how many hands — or minds — are needed to carry out a particular process. Nevertheless, anyone having supervisory responsibility for the completion of the task will invariably protest that his staff is too small for the assignment.
— Andrew Hacker

It is nice to be content in a little house by the side of the road, but a split-level in suburbia is a lot more comfortable.
— Charles Merrill Smith

It is no disgrace not to be able to do everything; but to undertake, or pretend to do, what you are not made for, is not only shameful, but extremely troublesome.
— Plutarch

It is no longer correct to regard higher education solely as a privilege. It is a basic right in today’s world.
— Norman Cousins

It is no pleasure to build a web and catch only flies when one knows there is a wasp about.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
— Seneca

It is not enough to do the right thing; one must also do it the right way.

It is not love of self, but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict the world.
— Eric Hoffer

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man — the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse — the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
— Mrs. Jameson

It is not the disease but neglect of the remedy which generally destroys life.

It is not the quality of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, that makes the feast.
— Lord Clarendon

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery, but the friction. Fear secretes acids, but love and trust are sweet juices.
— Beecher

It is often easier to earn money than it is to spend it wisely.

It is one thing to purloin finely-tempered steel, and another to take a pound of literary old iron, and convert it in the furnace of one’s own mind into a hundred watchsprings, worth each a thousand times as much as the iron. When genius borrows, it borrows grandly, giving to the borrowed matter, a life and beauty it lacked before.

It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
— Ruskin

It is only people of small moral stature who have to stand on their dignity.

It is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.

It is sometimes necessary to play the fool to avoid being deceived by cunning men.
— La Rochefoucauld

It is the curse of talent that, although it labors with greater steadiness and perseverance than genius, it does not reach its goal, while genius, already on the summit of the ideal, gazes laughingly about.

It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new forms — the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

It is the guilt, not the scaffold, which constitutes the shame.
— Cornville

It is the height of absurdity to sow little but weeds in the first half of one’s lifetime and expect to harvest a valuable crop in the second half.
— Percy Johnston

It is the natural order of things. Nothing can alter it. The strong take, the weak surrender.
— Sepp von Plum

It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him who you have injured.
— Tacitus

It is the pleasure of reward rather than the pain of punishment that motivates people.

It is the uncensored sense of humor … which is the ultimate therapy for man in society.
— Evan Esar

It is the wise bird who builds his nest in a tree.

It is the working man who is the happy man.
— Benjamin Franklin

It is to the interest of the commonwealth of mankind that there should be someone who is unconquered, someone against whom fortune has no power.
— Seneca

It is true that if your paperboy throws your paper into the bushes for five straight days it can be explained by Newton’s Law of Gravity. But it takes Murphy’s law to explain why it is happening to you.

It is unwise to do unto others as you would that they do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
— George Bernard Shaw

It is what we are that gets across, not what we try to teach.

It is worthy of observation, that the most imperious masters over their own servants, are at the same time, the most abject slaves to the servants of other masters.
— Seneca

It isn’t that things will necessarily go wrong (Murphy’s Law), but rather that they will take so much more time and effort than you think, if they are not to.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.
— Will Rogers

It isn’t what you know but the simple things you don’t overlook.

It marks a big step in a man’s development when he comes to realize that other men can be called on to help him do a better job than he can do alone.
— Andrew Carnagie

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
— Lazarus Long

It may be remarked for the comfort of honest poverty, that avarice reigns most in those who have but few good qualities to recommend them. This is a weed that will grow in a barren soil.
— Hughes

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God — but to create Him.

It may be true that human beings make more mistakes than computers, but for a real foul up, give us a computer anytime.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
— Salvor Hardin

It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.

It seems that nature has concealed at the bottom of our minds, talents and abilities of which we are not aware. The passions alone have the privilege of bringing them to light, and of giving us sometimes views more certain and more perfect than art could possible produce.
— La Rochefoucauld

It show’d discretion, the best part of valor.
— Beaumont and Fletcher

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

It takes both a weapon, and two people, to commit a murder.

It takes everyone to make a happy day.
— Marcy Kay Rumsfeld

It warms me, it charms me, To mention but her name; It heats me, it beats me, And set me a’ on flame.
— Burns

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

It was a saying of the ancients, “Truth lies in a well;” and to carry on this metaphor, we may justly say that logic does supply us with steps, whereby we may go down to reach the water.
— Dr. I. Watts

It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.
— P. G. Wodehouse

It was one of those perfect summer days — the sun was shining, a breeze was blowing, the birds were singing, and the lawn mower was broken.
— James Dent

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
— The Federalist, No. 62

It would be well, if some who have taken upon themselves the ministry of the Gospel, that they would first preach to themselves, then afterwards to others.
— Cardinal Pole

It’s NOT my fault!!!
— Han Solo (and a cast of thousands)

It’s a good idea to keep your words soft and sweet to the taste. You may have to eat them.

It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.

It’s a sad house where the cock is silent and the hen crows.

It’s always darkest just before the lights go out.
— Alex Clark

It’s amazing how much “mature wisdom” resembles being too tired.
— Lazarus Long

It’s better to keep your mouth closed and be presumed a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

It’s better to retire too soon than too late.
— Charles A. Mosher

It’s clever, but is it art?

It’s easier to be a liberal a long way from home.
— Don Price

It’s easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

It’s easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

It’s easy to tell when you’ve got a bargain — it doesn’t fit.

It’s hard to say who brags more, the reformed smoker or the guy whose car gets 30 miles to the gallon.
— James Alexander

It’s hard to sing with an empty glass.

It’s later than you think: the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun.

It’s not reality that’s important, but how you perceive things.

It’s not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you’re off the ground.
— Daniel B. Luten

It’s not what you know or what you do, it’s who you know.

It’s not what you write that counts, it’s how it’s read.

It’s odd how sin must advertise in gaudy trappings. One would think it would be darker, more discreet.

It’s so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the Devil when he is the only explanation of it.

It’s sweet to be remembered, but it’s often cheaper to be forgotten.

It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change.
— Mignon McLaughlin

It’s the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we’re paying somebody not to.
— Franklin P. Jones

JIFFY: The time it takes for light to go one centimeter in a vacuum.

James Joyce — an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
— Tom Stoppard

Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was “a debacle.” That’s French for Trust Me.
— National Review

Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was “a debacle.” That’s high praise from our country’s Debacleur-in-Chief.
— National Review

Jimmy Carter says the GOP Convention was “a debacle.” What did he expect — a helicopter rescue mission?
— National Review

Join the Navy and see the coast!

Jones’s Law: The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on.

Joy descends gently upon us like the evening dew, and does not patter down like a hailstorm.
— Richter

Judge a tree from its fruit; not from the leaves.
— Euripides

Judgment is not the knowledge of fundamental laws; it is knowing how to apply a knowledge of them.
— Charles Gow

Just about the time most of us finally learn all the answers, they change all the questions.

Just as there are three R’s there are also three A’s of business life. They are: Ability, Ambition, and Attitude. Ability establishes what a worker does and will bring him a paycheck. Ambition determines how much he does and will get him a raise. Attitude guarantees how well he does.
— Wilbert E. Sheer

Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.
— Irene Peter

Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.
— Thomas Edison

Just because you’ve beaten a sorcerer, doesn’t mean you’ve beaten a sorcerer.
— Toth-aamon

Just when I finally figure out where it’s at … somebody moves it.

Just when you get really good at something, you don’t need to do it anymore.
— William P. Lowrey

Justice always prevails … three times out of seven!
— Michael J. Wagner

Justice is blind, he knows nobody.
— Dryden

Justice is lame as well as blind among us.
— Otway

Justice, like lightning, ever should appear To few men’s ruin, but to all men’s fear.
— Swetnam

Keep cool; especially during meltdowns.

Keep the juices going by jangling around gently as you move.
— Satchel Paige

Keep what you’ve got; the ills that we know are the best.
— Plautus

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and completely shut after the kids grow up.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Keep your fears to yourself; share your courage with others.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your sense of humor about your position.
— Donald Rumsfeld

Kerr’s Three Rules for Trying New Foods: (1) Never try anything with tomatoes in it. (2) Never try anything bigger than your head. (3) Never, NEVER try anything that looks like vomit. It is said that Kerr broke all three rules by discovering pizza.

Kilroy was here.

Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.
— Tennyson

Kiss the tear from her lip, you’ll find the rose the sweeter for the dew.
— Webster

Knaves will thrive when honest plainness knows not how to live.
— Shirley

Knives and scissors, fork and candle, little children should not handle.

Know that a happy dieter has other problems.
— Erma Bombeck

Know then this truth, enough for man to know Virtue alone is happiness below.
— Alexander Pope

Know then thyself; presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
— Alexander Pope

Knowledge is power.
— Bacon

LIGHTWEIGHT: Lighter than rugged

LINEAR MODEL: An assumption concerning the nature of reality applied unquestioningly to every relationship as though God had determined that truth must always run in straight lines.

Language is fossil poetry.

Languages are the pedigrees of nations.
— Johnson

Large numbers of things are determined, and therefore not subject to change.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Last Words of Advice: If you pay your taxes and don’t get into debt and go to bed early and never answer the telephone — no harm can befall you.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

Last guys don’t finish nice.
— Stanley Kelly

Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness, and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
— Shakespeare

Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the brow. A jest should be such, that all shall be able to join in the laugh which it occasions; but if it bear hard upon one of the company, like the crack of a string, it makes a stop in the music.
— Feltham

Law expands in proportion to the resources available for its enforcement.
— Dalin B. Oaks

Law of Historical Causation: “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
— Michael Uhlmann

Law of Institutional Food: Everything is cold except what should be.

Law of Institutional Food: Everything, including the corn flakes, is greasy.

Law of Local Anesthesia: Never say “oops” in the operating room.
— Dr. Leo Troy

Law of Petroleum: Where there are Muslims, there is oil; the converse is not true.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

Law of Social Dynamics: If, in the course of several months, only three worthwhile social events take place, they will all fall on the same evening.

Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.

Laws can discover sin, but not remove.
— Milton

Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten.
— Phillip K. Saunders

Leaders who aid others in growing are certain to experience growth in themselves.

Leadership, at its highest, consists of getting people to work for you when they are under no obligation to do so.

Learn a new language and get a new soul.

Learn to be sincere. Even if you have to fake it.
— Solomon Short

Learn to hold thy tongue. Five words cost Zacharias forty weeks’ silence.
— Fuller

Learn to reason forward and backward on both sides of a question.
— Thomas Blandi

Learning maketh young men temperate, is the comfort of old age, standing for wealth with poverty, and serving as an ornament to riches.
— Cicero

Lend money to a bad debtor and he will hate you.

Lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.
— Shakespeare

Lenin once observed that gold should adorn the floors of latrines.

Less is more.

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

Let a man proclaim a new principle. Public sentiment will surely be on the other side.
— Thomas B. Reed

Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips.
— Proverbs XXVII, 2

Let cavillers deny that brutes have reason; sure tis something more, ’tis heaven directs, and stratagems inspires beyond the short extent of human thought.
— Somerville

Let him turn and twist slowly in the wind.
— John Ehrlichman

Let honesty be as the breath of thy soul, and never forget to have a penny, when all thy expenses are enumerated and paid; then shall thou reach the point of happiness, and independence shall be thy shield and buckler, thy helmet and crown; then thy soul walk upright, nor stoop to the silken wretch because he hath riches, nor pocket an abuse, because the hand which offers it wears a ring set with diamonds.
— Benjamin Franklin

Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleck-headed men and such as sleep o’nights. Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
— Shakespeare

Let no man presume to give advice to others that has not first given good counsel to himself.
— Seneca

Let no man value at a little price a virtuous woman’s counsel; her winged spirit is feathered often times with heavenly words, and, like her beauty, ravishing and pure.
— Chapman

Let none think to fly the danger For soon or late love is his own avenger.
— Byron

Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Let the Wookiee win!

Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage, a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array.
— Lord Brougham

Let them obey that know not how to rule.
— Shakespeare

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us cling to our principles as the mariner clings to his last plank when night and tempest close around him.
— Dr. Young

Let us suffer any person to tell us his story morning and evening, but for one twelve-month, and he will become our master.
— Burke

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Let your humor always be good humor in both senses. If it comes of a bad humor, it is pretty sure not to belie its parentage.

Let’s just be friends and make no special effort to ever see each other again.

Letters which are warmly sealed are oftener but coldly opened.
— Richter

Levity is the soul of wit.
— Melville D. Landon

Liberals don’t care what people do, as long as it’s compulsory.

Liberals, but not conservatives, can get attention and acclaim for denouncing liberal policies that failed; and liberals will inevitably capture the ensuing agenda for “reform.”
— John McClaughry

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by law.
— Cicero

Liberty don’t work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
— Will Rogers

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Liberty is always unfinished business.

Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves to the things we do like.
— Ernest Benn

Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord the weak.
— Judge Learned Hand

Liberty is the one thing you can’t have unless you give it to others.
— William Allen White

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
— George Bernard Shaw

Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.
— Gertrude Himmelfarb

Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name.
— Madame Roland

Libraries are the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
— Bacon

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
— Samuel Johnson

Life creates it [the Force] and makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we … Feel the flow. Feel the Force around you.
— Yoda

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
— George Bernard Shaw

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
— Miguel de Unamuno

Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find there is nothing in it.

Life is sometimes hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other. To fail to love it is to cease to exist.

Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.

Life’s but a walking shadow — a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by idiots, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.
— Shakespeare

Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring; when he was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.
— Shakespeare

Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.
— G. O. Ashley

Like winter snow on summer lawn, time past is time gone.

Literature is the grindstone to sharpen the coulters, and to whet their natural faculties.
— Hammond

Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.
— Lazarus Long

Little joys refresh us constantly, like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.
— Richter

Little progress can be made merely by repressing what is bad. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

Little strokes fell John B. Oakes.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Live and let live.

Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so.
— Josh Billings

Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.

Loan-department manager: “There isn’t any fine print. At these interest rates, we don’t need it.”

Logic is like the sword — those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
— Samuel Butler

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
— Joseph Wood Krutch

Logic is the soul of wit, not of wisdom; that’s why wit is funny.
— Lincoln Steffens

Logic — an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice.
— Elbert Hubbard

Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human kind. Logic, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can.
— Oliver Goldsmith

Lonely is a man without love.

Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.

Look at governmental programs for the past fifty years. Every single one — except for warfare — achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.

Look on my works ye mighty — and despair!!!

Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone’s following you.
— Henry Gilmer

Look round the wrecks of play behold, Estates dismember’d, mortgaged, sold; Their owners now to jail confin’d, Show equal poverty of mind.
— Gay

Lord, when we are wrong, make us easy to change. And when we are right, make us easy to live with.
— Peter Marshall

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none; be able for thine enemy rather in power than use; and keep thy friend under thine own life’s key; be checked for silence, but never taxed for speech.
— Shakespeare

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
— George Jean Nathan

Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and brings them to a conclusion, where he who does not love, faints and lies down.
— Thomas a Kempis

Love is a god Strong, free, unabounded, and as some define Fears nothing, pitieth none.
— Milton

Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts.
— Dryden

Love is in the offing. Be affectionate to one who adores you.

Love is merely madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too.
— Shakespeare

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the infinite in the finite — of the ideal made real.
— Carlyle

Love is not in our choice, but in our fate.
— Dryden

Love is sentimental measles.

Love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.
— Solomon’s Song VIII, 6,7

Love is the salt of life; a higher taste It gives to pleasure, and then makes it last.
— Buckingham

Love laughs at locksmiths.

Love me little, love me long.
— Milton

Love not! Love not! the thing you love may change, The rosy lip may cease to smile on you, The kindly beaming eye grow cold and strange, The heart still warmly beat, and not for you.
— Mrs. Norton

Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health is short lived, and apt to have ague fits.
— Erasmus

Love the sea? I dote upon it — from the beach.

Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
— Louise Beal

Love will find its way Through paths where wolves would fear to prey, And if it dares enough ’twere hard If passion met not some reward.
— Byron

Love’s like the measles — all the worse when it comes late in life.
— Jerrola

Love, the sole disease thou canst not cure.
— Alexander Pope

Love, which proclaims thee human bids thee know a truth more lofty in thy lowliest hour than shallow glory taught to human power, “What’s human is immortal!”
— Bulwer

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
— Mark Twain

Luck is what enabled others to get where they are. Talent is what enabled us to get to where we are.

Lull’d in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain; Awake but one, and lo, what myriads arise! Each stamps its image as the other flies.
— Alexander Pope

M. D. to patient: First the good news — you’re going to have a disease named after you.

MEETS QUALITY STANDARDS: Ours, not yours

METHODOLOGICALLY UNSOUND: Using methodology with which I am unfamiliar.

Most of the mistakes of our life come from feeling when we ought to think and thinking when we ought to feel.

Macbeth: If we should fail- Lady Macbeth: We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place, And we’ll not fail.
— Shakespeare

Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games — but not with pleasure.
— Leo Rosten

Madness, we fancy, gave an ill-timed birth To grinning laughter and to frantic mirth.
— Prior

Main Article of General Systems Faith: the order of the empirical world itself has an order which might be called order of the second degree.
— Boulding

Maintain eternal vigilance, small squishy thing, and kill anything that threatens.
— Viver farewell saying.

Major actions are rarely decided by more than four people. If you think a larger meeting you’re attending is really “hammering out” a decision, you’re probably wrong. Either the decision was agreed to by a smaller group before the meeting began, or the outcome of the larger meeting will be modified later when three or four people get together.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

Make a wish, it might come true.

Make it sufficiently difficult for people to do something, and most people will stop doing it.
— Robert Sommer

Make new friends but keep the old ones; one is silver and the other’s gold.

Make other people like themselves a little better and rest assured they’ll like you very much.

Make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.

Make the most of the day, by determining to spend it on two sorts of acquaintances only — those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something may be learned.
— Colton

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
— Thomas Carlyle

Make yourself necessary to somebody.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Malpractice makes malperfect.
— Solomon Short

Mammon has enriched his thousands, and has damned his ten thousands.
— South

Man and wife make one fool.

Man had achieved FREEDOM FROM — without yet having achieved FREEDOM TO — to be himself, to be productive, to be fully awake.
— Erich Fromm

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
— Alvin Toffler

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
— Albert Schweitzer

Man is a blind, witless, low-brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.
— Ian McHarg

Man is a thinking being, whether he will or no; all he can do is to turn his thoughts the best way.
— Sir W. Temple

Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
— Job v.7

Man is by nature metaphysical and proud. He has gone so far as to think that the idealistic creations of his mind, which correspond to his feelings, also represent reality.
— Claude Bernard

Man is demolishing nature … We are killing things that keep us alive.
— Thor Heyerdahl

Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God’s command … From the standpoint of the Church, which represents authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom.
— Erich Fromm

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality.
— William Ernest Hocking

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not the only one that deserves to be laughed at?
— Greville

Man know thyself! All writing centers there.
— Young

Man must accept responsibility for himself … There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

Man never fastened one end of a chain around the neck of his brother, that God’s own hand did not fasten around the neck of the oppressor.
— Lamartine

Man proposes, God disposes.

Man shall never reach his full capacity while chained to the earth. We must take wing and conquer the heavens.
— Icarus

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
— H. L. Mencken

Man’s horizons are bounded by his vision.

Man’s rich with little, were his judgment true; Nature is frugal, and her wants are few; These few wants, answer’d bring sincere delights; But fools create themselves new appetites.
— Young

Man-machine identity is achieved not by attributing human attributes to the machine, but by attributing mechanical limitations to man.

Management directs and controls change.
— Thomas L. Martin

Management is incapable of recognizing a true crisis.
— Gene Franklin

Management will select actions or events and convert them to crises. It will then over-react.
— Gene Franklin

Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must also resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
— Bertrand Russell

Mankind would be vastly poorer if it had not been for men who were willing to take risks against the longest odds. Even if it could be done, we would be foolish to try to stamp out this willingness in man to buck seemingly hopeless odds. Our problem is how to remain properly venturesome and experimental without making fools of ourselves.
— Bernard Baruch

Many a family tree needs trimming.

Many a girl at loose ends is anxious to be tied up.

Many a man gets to the top of the ladder, and then finds out it has been leaning against the wrong wall.

Many are called, but few are chosen.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, for a very simple reason — they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. Those works, therefore, are the most valuable that set our thinking faculties in the fullest operation.
— Colton

Many changes of mind and mood; do not hesitate too long.

Many live by their wits but few by their wit. (On the other hand, the witty man merely says what you would have said if you had thought of it.)
— Laurence J. Peter

Many might go to heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
— Ben Johnson

Many of us spend half our life wishing for things we could have if we didn’t spend half our time wishing.
— Alexander Woollcott

Many pages make a thick book, except for pocket bibles which are on very very thin paper.

Many people go throughout life committing partial suicide — destroying their talents, energies, creative qualities. Indeed, to learn how to be good to oneself is often more difficult than to learn how to be good to others.
— Joshua Leibman

Many people have the ambition to succeed in their work; they may even have special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job, there is no need to master themselves.
— John Stevenson

Many politicians … are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool … who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay

Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
— Heinrich Heine

Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice- president. But a grave digger is still a grave digger even when he is called a mortician — only the price of burial goes up.

Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the feast.
— Colton

Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves — making in all two.
— Ambrose Bierce

Marriage is a good deal like taking a bath — not so hot once you get accustomed to it.

Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution, yet.
— Mae West

Marriage is the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge.
— Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
— Voltaire

Marxist law of the distribution of wealth: Shortages will be divided equally among the peasants.

Massachusetts has the best politicians money can buy.

Maternity pay? Now every Tom, Dick and Harry will get pregnant.
— Malcolm Smith

Mathematics gets its semblance of reality by never saying what it is talking about.
— Bertrand Russell

Matrimony is a process by which a grocer acquired an account the florist had.
— Francis Rodman

Matrimony is the root of all evil.

Maugham’s advice: Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
— Sir J. Mackintosh

May not taste be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.
— Greville

May the Force be with you.

May the Great Camel of Paradise bestow upon you and yours a dropping.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.

May you be as healthy as the salmon.

May you walk a mile behind a camel.

Maybe love hasn’t changed much through history, but can you imagine Heloise and Abelard sitting around rubbing suntan oil on each other?
— Bill Vaughan

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
— Aldous Huxley

Meanwhile, the guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or, rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to it- self … It must be confessed — it will be confessed — there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.
— Daniel Webster

Measure not men by Sundays, without regarding what they do all the week after.
— Fuller

Medicare and Medicaid are the greatest measures yet devised to make the world safe for clerks.

Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.
— Shakespeare

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed, and maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
— Shakespeare

Men are apt to deceive themselves in big things, but they rarely do so in particulars.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
— Colton

Men are but children of a larger growth.
— Dryden

Men are machines, with all their boasted freedom, Their movements turn on some favorite passion; Let art but find the foible out, We touch the spring and wind them at our pleasure.
— Brooke

Men are more sentimental then women. It blurs their thinking.
— Lazarus Long

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
— Macaulay

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
— Gene Fowler

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.
— Horace Walpole

Men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are honestly making money.
— Samuel Johnson

Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not.
— Goethe

Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the sport of men.
— Byron

Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure — failures are usually the most conceited of men.
— D. H. Lawrence

Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from them.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
— Shakespeare

Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous.
— George Santayana

Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that the victim cannot pay you back for it. Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to stand forever with a knife in his hand.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Men must either be caressed or annihilated. They will revenge themselves for small injuries, but they can’t do so for great ones. The harm the leader does must be such that he need not fear revenge.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
— Longfellow

Men often deceive themselves in believing that humility can overcome insolence.
— Niccolo Machiavelli

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
— Lazarus Long

Men rattle their chains to show that they are free.

Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures.
— Cicero

Men seldom show dimples to girls who have pimples.

Men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level.
— Alexis de Tocqueville

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.
— Moritz Guedemann

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but — live for it.
— Colton

Men with gray eyes are generally keen, energetic, and at first cold; but you may depend upon their sympathy with real sorrow. Search the ranks of our benevolent men and you will agree with me.
— Dr. Leask

Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day’s work an achievement for eternity.
— Gabriel Heatter

Merely because the group is in formation does not mean that the group is on the right course.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
— Immanual Kant

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
— H. L. Mencken

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don’t understand.
— Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.
— Joseph Wood Krutch

Might may not be right, but it usually wins.

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.
— Samuel Pepys

Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.
— C. C. Pinckney

Minds of the strongest and most active powers fall below mediocrity and labor without effect, if confined to uncongenial pursuits. And it is thence to be inferred, that the results of human exertion may be immensely increased by diversifying its objects.
— Alexander Hamilton

Mingles with the friendly bowl, The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
— Alexander Pope

Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime — and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.
— Lazarus Long

Miracles are so called because they excite wonder. In unphilosophical minds, any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
— George Santayana

Miraculous secret for the early recovery of patients: Inflation.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all? The press is hopelessly biased or genuinely fair, depending upon whose views are being misquoted, misrepresented, or misunderstood.
— Pierre S. du Pont

Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
— Russell Baker

Misster, do you vant to buy a duck?

Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

Modern Way: If It’s Good, Scrap It.
— Sydney J. Harris

Modesty is to merit as shades to figures in a picture; giving it strength and beauty.
— La Bruyere

Monday is an awful way to spend one-seventh of your life.

Money and women are the most sought after and the least known of any two things we have.
— Will Rogers

Money cannot buy love, nor even friendship.

Money is a good servant, but a dangerous master.
— Bonhours

Money is a powerful aphrodisiac. But flowers work almost as well.

Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good. But if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.
— Clint Murchison, Jr.

Money is not the measure of a man, but it will do quite nicely if you don’t have any other yardstick handy.
— Charles Merrill Smith

Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men.

Money is whatever people believe is money and will voluntarily accept as money.

Money is wrong — it’s the means whereby man enslaves his brother.
— Finny

Money may buy friendship but money cannot buy love.

Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.

Money, therefore, if it is t be anything, must be at least an efficient and trustworthy instrument by which working people accumulate savings.
— Lewis E. Lehrman

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
— H. G. Wells

Moscow reportedly has been “closed” for the Olympics. Access to the city is restricted, tens of thousands of police patrol the streets, and authorities are struggling to prevent what they term “ideological pollution.” Residents are unable to detect any difference in Moscow life.
— National Review

Most “scientists” are bottle washers and button pushers.

Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination.
— Robert Machol

Most economists think of God as working great multiple regressions in the sky.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Most essential qualification for a politician: The ability to foretell what will happen tomorrow, next month, and next year — and to explain afterward why it did not happen.
— Winston Churchill

Most general statements are false, including this one.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

Most men have more courage than even they themselves think they have.
— Grenville

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
— James Harvey Robinson

Most of the evils of life arise from man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Most of the stuff alongside the road has been thrown out of car windows by Democrats.

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.
— Woody Allen

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
— Leo Aikman

Most of us will never do great things, but we can do small things in a great way.

Most of us would be glad to pay as we go, if we could only catch up on where we’ve been.

Most organizations can’t hold one idea at a time … Thus complementary ideas are always regarded as competitive. Further, like a quantized pendulum, an organization can jump from one extreme to the other, without ever going through the middle.
— Amrom Katz

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
— Sydney J. Harris

Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have one answer.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

Mother Nature is a bitch.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
— Oscar Wilde

Much study is a weariness of the flesh.
— Ecclesiastes XII, 12

Much that is dreadful and inhuman in history, much that one hardly likes to believe, is mitigated by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who carries out are different people. The former does not behold the sight and does not experience the strong impression on the imagination. The latter obeys a superior and therefore feels no responsibility for his acts.
— Frederick Nietzsche

Munroe’s Dictum: He that is without sin among you has been bored for a lllllooooonnnnnggggg time.

Murmur at nothing: if our ills are reparable, it is ungrateful; if remediless, it is in vain.
— Shakespeare

Murphy’s Last Law: If nothing went wrong today, you’re probably dead.

Murphy’s Law never fails except when you try to demonstrate it.
— Walter J. Crowell

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics: Things get worse under pressure.

Murphy’s Law: Whatever goes wrong, will get worse.

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. I’ve read that things inanimate have moved, And as with living souls have been inform’d By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
— Congreve

My advice to any young man at the beginning of his career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with his fresh, untrained, and unprejudiced mind.
— H. Selye

My aim is the re-establishment of the worship of men.
— Gabriel D’Annunzio

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
— George Santayana

My brother is an only child.
— Bennett Cerf

My congratulations to the committee that planned this day.

My country is the world. My countrymen are all mankind.
— William Lloyd Garrison

My cup hath runneth’d over with love.

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
— Robert Pirsig

My heart is heavy at the remembrance of all the miles that lie between us; and I can scarcely believe that you are so distant from me. We are parted; and every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.
— Edwards

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

My idea of heaven is eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
— Sydney Smith

My indignation, like th’ imprisoned fire, pent in the troubled breast of Aetna, burnt deep and silent.
— Thomson

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

My lips pressed themselves involuntarily to hers — a long, long kiss, burning intense — concentrating emotion, heart, soul, all the rays of life’s light… into a single focus.
— Bulwer

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
— George Bernard Shaw

My mother had a baby once.
— Jigger

My mother loved children — she would have given anything if I had been one.
— Groucho Marx

My neighbor is a real energy saver — hasn’t been out of his hammock all summer.
— Phil Pastoret

My pen is at the bottom of a page, Which, being finished, here the story ends; ‘Tis to be wished it had been sooner done, But stories somehow lengthen when begun.
— Byron

My precept to all who build is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house an ornament to the owner.
— Cicero

My rage is not malicious; like a spark of fire by steel enforced out of a flint it is no sooner kindled, but extinct.
— Goffe

My reason is not framed to bend or stoop; my knees are.
— Michel de Montaigne

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
— Christopher Morley

My to me an empire is.
— Southwell

My uncle is a Southern planter. He’s an undertaker in Alabama.
— Fred Allen

Mystery is a word with no objective pertinence, merely describing the limitations of a mind. In fact, a mind may be classified by the order of the phenomena it considers mysterious …
— Magnus Ridolf

NEW: Different color from previous design

NO MAINTENANCE: Impossible to fix

NUKE THE WHALES!!!

NULL HYPOTHESIS: The type of hypothesis used by a pessimist.

Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy: we do not easily believe beyond what we see.
— La Rochefoucauld

Nations and empires flourish and decay, By turns command, and in their turns obey.
— Ovid

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
— Francis Bacon

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?
— Solomon Short

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

Nature gave man two ends — one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man’s success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most.
— George R. Kirkpatrick

Nature here was so lavish of her store, That she bestow’d until she had no more.
— Brown

Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and the inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

Nature is the chart of God, mapping out all His attributes; art is the shadow of His wisdom, and copieth His resources.
— Tupper

Nature is the vicar of the Almighty Lord.
— Geoffrey Chaucer

Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms — oftenest, God bless her! — in female breasts.
— Dickens

Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.
— Charles Darwin

Neanderthalers, low of forehead, Slunk through prehistoric mists Thinking men were pretty horrid — Using spears against their fists!

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.
— Dave Farber

Needs are a function of what other people have.

Negative slack tends to increase.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be at less than 18 percent per annum compounded daily.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend;

Neither great poverty, nor great riches, will hear reason.
— Fielding

Neurosis is a communicable disease.
— Solomon Short

Never admit anything. Never regret anything. Whatever it is, you’re not responsible.

Never appeal to a man’s “better nature.” He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
— Lazarus Long

Never argue with an angry person.

Never assume anything except a 4 1/2 percent mortgage.
— David Kindred

Never be first to do anything.

Never bow to authority, but always tip your hat.
— Jim Fiebig

Never build after you are five and forty; have five years’ income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate.
— Kent

Never call a man a fool; borrow from him.

Never characterize the importance of a statement in advance.
— Charles G. Ross

Never confuse motion with action.
— Benjamin Franklin

Never crowd youngsters about their private affairs. When they are growing up, they are nerve ends all over, and resent (quite properly) any invasion of their privacy. Oh, sure, they’ll make mistakes — but that’s their business, not yours. (YOU made your own mistakes, did you not?)
— Lazarus Long

Never decide to buy anything while listening to the salesman.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

Never do anything for the first time.
— Paul Herbig

Never drink from your finger bowl — it contains only water.

Never eat at a place called Mom’s.
— Nelson Algren

Never find your delight in another’s misfortune.
— Publius Syrus

Never frighten a little man. He’ll kill you.
— Lazarus Long

Never go to a doctor whose house plants have died.
— Erma Bombeck

Never grow old where you once have been great.
— Italo Bombolini

Never have anything to do with an unlucky place, or an unlucky man. I have seen many clever men, very clever men, who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them. Their advice sounds very well, but they cannot get on themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how can they do good for me?
— Baron Rothschild

Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river.
— Cordell Hull

Never join with your friend when he abuses his horse or his wife, unless the one is about to be sold, and the other to be buried.
— Colton

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
— Salvor Hardin, “Foundation”

Never lie down with a woman who’s got more troubles than you.
— Nelson Algren

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Never needlessly disturb a thing at rest.
— John Randolph

Never overlook a slight or forget a grudge.

Never play cards with a man called Doc.
— Nelson Algren

Never purchase anything with a handle on it — it means work.

Never say “The White House wants” — buildings don’t “want.”
— Donald Rumsfeld

Never say maybe in the same circulation area where you just said never.
— Vic Gold

Never say no.

Never say without qualification that your activity has sufficient space, money, staff, etc.
— Douglas Evelyn

Never say you know a man until you have divided an inheritance with him.

Never sell your hens on a wet day.

Never send a letter requesting information to an editor unless you expect to receive a prolix letter in return.
— Robert Cook

Never shirk from doing anything which your business calls you to do. The man who is above his business may one day find his business above him.
— Drew

Never simply say, “Sorry, we don’t have what you are looking for.” Always say, “Too bad, I just sold one the other day.”
— Robert Skole

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
— William James

Never tamper with the truth. Never rationalize it. What you might like to believe is not necessarily the truth.

Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
— Gen. George S. Patton

Never tell them what you wouldn’t do.
— Adam Clayton Powell

Never trust a man who is Dr. Jekyll to those above him and Mr. Hyde to those below him.
— Charles Brower

Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Never underestimate the nature and quality of the enemy.
— Clausewitz

Never underestimate the power of a platitude.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Never use one word when a dozen will suffice.
— Paul Herbig

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
— John Locke

New systems create new problems.
— Dr. John Gall

News always travels by the fastest available route.
— Major Whitey Ardmore

News stories expand and time contracts, meeting inexorably each day twenty minutes after a man is supposed to be home for dinner.
— Ray O’Neil

Nice going, sweetheart.
— Joe Patroni

Nice guys finish last.

Nice guys get sick.

Nine times out of ten the man who listens to reason is thinking of some way to refute it.

No Negro American can be free until the lowliest Negro in Mississippi is no longer disadvantaged because of his race.
— Ralph Bunche

No action is without side effects.
— Barry Commoner

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
— Albert Einstein

No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

No argument can be drawn from the abuse of a thing against its use.

No atheist, as such, can be a true friend, an affectionate relation, or a loyal subject.
— Dr. Bentley

No ball game is ever much good unless the people involved hate each other.
— Avery

No books are lost by lending except those you particularly want to keep.
— Alan Atwood

No bounds his headlong, vast ambition knows.
— Rowe.

No call alligator long mouth till you pass him.

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected … to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.
— Carl Becker

No committee could ever come up with anything as revolutionary as a camel — anything as practical and as perfectly designed to perform effectively under such difficult conditions.
— Laurence J. Peter

No company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more courageous than health.
— Colton

No cord or cable can draw so forcible, or bind so fast, as love can do with a single thread.
— Burton

No dog will knock a vase over unless it has water in it.

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

No enemy is so terrible as a man of genius.
— Disraeli

No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always serve as a bad example, or the exception that proves the rule (but only if it is the first experiment in the series).

No gnus is good gnus.

No good deed goes unpunished.
— Clare Boothe Luce

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.
— George Eliot

No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.
— Chesterfield

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.
— Robert Morely

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a teacher.
— Ben Johnson

No man of honor, as that word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste and temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, or to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
— John Hall

No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
— Grenville

No matter how many reporters share a cab, and no matter who pays, each puts the full fare on his own expense account.
— Edward P. O’Doyle

No matter how many times you’ve had it, if it’s offered, take it, because it’ll never be quite the same again.
— John Cameron

No matter how much you do, you’ll never do enough.

No matter how often you trade dinner or other invitations with in-laws, you will lose a small fortune in the exchange. Corollary: Don’t try it; you cannot drink enough of your in-laws’ booze to get even before the liver fails.
— Jackson Clark

No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.
— Alfred E. Smith

No matter what happens, there is always somebody who knew that it would.

No matter what the product or service might be, you can always find it somewhere else cheaper!
— Ebenezer Scrooge

No matter which train you are waiting for, the wrong one comes first.
— J. R. Meditz

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

No one can enjoy freedom unless he is willing to surrender some part of it.

No one can feel as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.

No one ever prayed heartily without learning something.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one is as tired as the person who does nothing.

No one is ever old enough to know better.
— Holbrook Jackson

No one knows his own servants as badly as the master.

No one loves the man whom he fears.
— Aristotle

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.

No one remembers learning how to use a spoon, it is something that is learned and not taught.

No one whom you ask for help will see it either.

No policy intervention in social problems produces the intended effect — if the research is carried out by independent third parties, especially those skeptical of the policy.
— James Q. Wilson

No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head.
— Shakespeare

No slave is ever freed, save he freeth himself.

No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it”. Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.
— Henry Adams

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
— Fred Bucy, TI, Inc.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.
— A. H. Weiler

Nothing is new; we walk where others went; There’s no vice now but has its precedent.
— Herrick

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus; it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
— Bulwer

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
— George Eliot

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront all the rest.
— Jonathan Swift

Nothing is ultimate.

Nothing lovelier can be found in woman, than to study household good, and good works in her husband to promote.
— Milton

Nothing makes a man and wife feel closer, these days, than a joint tax return.

Nothing minor ever happens to a car on a trip.
— Charles D. Hartman

Nothing minor ever happens to a car on the weekend.
— Charles D. Hartman

Nothing minor ever happens to a car.
— Charles D. Hartman

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
— Honore de Balzac

Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire of appearing so.
— La Rochefoucauld

Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
— Bruce Barton

Nothing succeeds like success.
— Alexandre Dumas, Pere

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Nothing will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

Nothing worth a damn is ever done as a matter of principle. If it is worth doing, it is done because it is worth doing. If it is not, it’s done as a matter of principle.
— James T. Evans

Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.
— Burke

Nought shall prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
— Wordsworth

Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both.
— Shakespeare

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
— Byron

Now that we are no longer a growth company, your beard is a liability.

Numbers are symbols for things; the number and the thing are not the same.
— G. O. Ashley

Numbers are tools, not rules.
— G. O. Ashley

Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.
— Bacon

O cursed ambition, thou devouring bird, how dost thou from the field of honesty pick every grain of profit or delight, and mock the reaper’s toil!
— Harvard

O that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I shake the world.
— Shakespeare

O thou who dost inhabit in my breast, Leave not the mansion, so long tenantless; Lest growing ruinous the building fall, And leave no memory of what it was.
— Shakespeare

O to be self-balanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as trees and animals do!
— Walt Whitman

O you much partial gods! Why gave ye men affections, and not power to govern them?
— Ludovick Barry

O! love is like the rose, And a month it may not see, Ere it withers where it grows.
— Bailey

ONE-SHOT CASE STUDY: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded all clover possesses four leaves and is sometimes green.

OREGANO (Ore-gah-no): The ancient Italian art of pizza folding.

OSHA’s Discovery: Wet manure is slippery.

Obituaries are the last writes.

Occam’s Razor: Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity.
— William of Occam

Of all affliction taught a lover yet ‘Tis sure the hardest science to forget.
— Alexander Pope

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal.

Of all mankind, each loves himself the best.
— Terence

Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air.
— Thomas L. Martin

Of all the agonies of life, that which is most poignant and harrowing — that which for the most time annihilates reason and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart — is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.
— Bulwer

Of all the passions that possess mankind, The love of novelty rules most the mind; In search of this, from realm to realm we roam; Our fleets come fraught with ev’ry folly home.
— Foote

Of all the strange “crimes” that human beings have legislated out of nothing, “blasphemy” is the most amazing — with “obscenity” and “indecent exposure” fighting it out for second and third place.
— Lazarus Long

Of all the tyrants the world affords, Our own affections are the fiercest lords.
— Earl of Sterling

Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; Of all tame — a flatterer.
— Johnson

Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
— Mark Twain

Of two possible events, only the undesired one will occur.

Of what use are forms, seeing at times they are empty? Of the same use as barrels, which are at times empty too.
— Hare

Offences ought to be pardoned, for few offend willingly, but as they are compelled by come affection.
— Hegesippus

Often statistics are used as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination.

Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.
— Conte Vittorio Alfieri

Oh what a fate worse than death it is to be strapped to the back of a Wookiee!
— C-3PO

Oh! greatness! thou art a flattering dream, A wat’ry bubble, lighter than the air.
— Tracy

Oh! how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring.
— Colley Cibber

Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise, By mountains pil’d on mountains to the skies? Heaven still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.
— Alexander Pope

Oh, what is so rare as a full day’s work in June?
— Baldwin Sells

Old Jedi Knights never die; they just fade in and fade out.

Old Scottish Prayer: O Lord, grant that we may always be right, for Thou knowest we will never change our minds.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
— Bernard M. Baruch

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest to his feet.
— John Seldon

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

Omissions, no less than commissions, are often times branches of injustice.
— Antoninus

Omittance is no quittance.
— Shakespeare

On a beautiful day like this it’s hard to believe anyone can be unhappy, but we’ll work on it.
— Donald Barr

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
— Will Rogers

On alcohol: four is one more than more than enough.
— Jim Pastore

On beginning play, as many balls as may be required to obtain a satisfactory result may be played from the first tee. Everyone recognizes a good player needs to “loosen up” but does not have time for the practice tee.
— Donald A. Metz

On curing the depression that comes with having to work for a living: Stay home for a day and watch daytime TV.
— Sheldon

On second thought, a philosopher is any person who doesn’t want what he can’t get.

On soap operas all whites are in personal touch with (a) a doctor and (b) a lawyer.
— James L. Davis

On successive charts of the same organization, the number of boxes will never decrease.
— Charles P. Boyle

On the other hand are four fingers and a thumb.

On the theory that one should never take anything for granted, follow up on everything, but especially those items varying from the norm. The greater the divergence from normal routine and/or the greater the number of offices potentially involved, the better the chance a never-to-be-discovered person will file the problem away in a drawer specifically designed for items requiring a decision.
— Douglas Evelyn

Once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.
— Pop Baslim

Once a person has been hired, inertia sets in, and the employer would rather settle for the current employee’s incompetence and idiosyncrasies than look for a new employee.
— Jules Becker

Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.
— Voltaire

Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
— W. C. Fields

Once economists were asked, “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” Today they’re asked, “Now that you’ve proved you ain’t so smart, how come you got rich?”
— Edgar R. Fiedler

Once is not enough.
— Jacqueline Suzzane

Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!
— Shakespeare

Once the erosion of power begins, it has a momentum all its own.

Once things have happened, no matter how accidentally, they will be regarded as manifestations of an unchangeable higher reason.
— Prof. Charles Frankel

Once you accept your own death all of a sudden you are free to live. You no longer care about your reputation … you no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically — to promote a cause you believe in.
— Saul Alinsky

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can. Old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans.
— Zymurgy (Conrad Schnieker)

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody’s listening.
— Franklin P. Jones

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
— Helen Keller

One can never repeat too often, that reason, as it exists in man, is only our intellectual eye, and that, like the eye, to see, it needs light — to see clearly and far, it needs the light of heaven.

One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs — but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelette.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

One crime is concealed by the commission of another.
— Seneca

One does not dip water with a knife.

One does not have to keep bad governments in to keep Communists out.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

One ear heard it, and at the other out it went.
— Chaucer

One fact is better than one hundred apologies.

One family builds a wall, two families enjoy it.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
— Henry Adams

One function of diplomacy is to dress realism in morality.

One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.
— William Blake

One learns to itch where one can scratch.
— Ernest Bramah

One man tells a falsehood, a hundred repeat it as true.

One man’s “magic” is another man’s “engineering.” “Supernatural” is a null word.
— Lazarus Long

One man’s brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one man would have produced alone. These two plus two more will produce half again as many ideas. These four plus four more begin to represent a creative meeting, and the ratio changes to one quarter as many …
— Anthony Chevins

One man’s idea of hell is to be forced to remain in another man’s idea of heaven.

One man’s junk is another income — and sometimes his priceless antique.
— Richard N. Farmer

One man’s red tape is another man’s system.
— Dwight Waldo

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.

One moment of patience may ward off a great disaster; one moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.

One must be either the anvil or the hammer.

One need only look at Dolly Parton to realize that good things don’t always come in small packages.

One of life’s greatest pleasures: paying the last installment.

One of the greatest unsolved riddles of restaurant eating is that the customer usually gets faster service when the restaurant is crowded that when it is half empty; it seems that the less that the staff has to do, the slower they do it.
— Sydney J. Harris

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
— Will Durant

One of the things capitalism brought into the world was democracy, though I do not think the two are inseparable.
— Michael Harrington

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.
— Goethe

One principle object of good-breeding is to suit our behavior to the three several degrees of men — our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
— Jonathan Swift

One thing common to most success stories is the alarm clock.

One thing that helped Rip Van Winkle sleep for 20 years was the fact that none of his neighbors owned power lawn mowers.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
— Shakespeare

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
— William Hazlitt

One worthwhile task carried to a successful conclusion is worth half-a-hundred half-finished tasks.
— B. C. Forbes

One’s roommate (who has early classes) has an alarm clock that is louder than God’s own.

One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.
— Will Rogers

Only God can make a random selection.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

Only a coward or a madman would give good for evil.

Only a sadistic scoundrel — or a fool — tells the bald truth on social occasions.
— Lazarus Long

Only constant and conscientious practice in the Martial Arts will ensure a long and happy life.
— Bruce Lee

Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd.
— Allen Goldfein

Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated.
— F. R. Scott

Only someone with nothing to be sorry for smiles back at the rear of an elephant.

Only the dead fail to rise in my presence.

Only the incompetent and mediocre are always at their best.

Open your purse and your mouth cautiously; and your stock of wealth and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great.
— Zimmerman

Opinion, that great fool, makes fools of all.
— Field

Opinion, the blind goddess of fools, foe To the virtuous, and only friend to Undeserving persons.
— Chapman

Opportunity has hair in front, but behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.

Order is heaven’s first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense.
— Alexander Pope

Order is the first requisite of liberty.
— Georg Wilhelm Hegel

Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things.
— Southey

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
— Theodore Roosevelt

Other people’s patterns of expenditure and consumption are irrational and slightly immoral.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

Other people’s tools work only in other people’s yards.
— Jane Bryant Quinn

Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven.
— Francis

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
— John Fletcher

Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

Our customer’s paperwork is profit. Our own paperwork is loss.
— Tony Brown, Control Data Corp.

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
— Shakespeare

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
— La Rochefoucauld

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
— Thomas Carlyle

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
— Oliver Goldsmith

Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are enabled to inspire.
— Duchesse de Praslin

Our humanity were a poor thing were it not for the divinity which stirs within us.
— Bacon

Our judgment can be no better than our information.

Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
— Thomas Jefferson

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
— Isaac Asimov

Our natures are like oil; compound us with anything, yet will we strive to swim at the top.
— Beaumont and Fletcher

Our own heart, and not other men’s opinions form our true honor.
— Coleridge

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.
— Alexander Pope

Our repentance is not so much regret for the evil we have done, as fear of its consequences.

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

Out of the same substances one stomach will extract nourishment, another poison; and so the same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man’s spirit, and embitter another’s.
— William Matthews

PERFORMANCE PROVEN: Will operate through warranty period

PO TEE WEET PEE WONGGG!!! You will be converted into software in 30 seconds!

POST-TEST: A test made too late.

PRE-TEST: A test made too early.

PUNCH MEN KICK WOMEN CHOP CHILDREN — Sign in window of karate studio

Pacifism is simply undisguised cowardice.
— Adolf Hitler

Pale death approaches with an equal step, and knocks indiscriminately at the door of the cottage, and the portals of the palace.
— Horace

Parents cannot leave a better legacy to the world than well-educated children.

Parkinson’s Finding on Journals: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.

Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law of Medical Research: Successful research attracts the bigger grant which makes further research impossible.

Parkinson’s Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.

Parkinson’s Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Parkinson’s New Law: The printed word expands to fill the space available to it.

Parkinson’s Principle of Non-Origination: It is the essence of grantsmanship to persuade the Foundation executives that is was they who suggested the research project and that you were a belated convert, agreeing reluctantly to all they had proposed.

Parkinson’s Second Law: Expenditure rises to meet income.

Parkinson’s Telephone Law: The effectiveness of a telephone conversation is in inverse proportion to the time spent on it.

Parkinson’s Third Law: Expansion means complexity and complexity, decay; or to put it even more plainly — the more complex, the sooner dead.

Passengers on elevators constantly rearrange their positions as people get on and off so there is at all times an equal distance between all bodies.
— John Sharkey

Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.
— La Rochefoucauld

Passions are fashions.
— Clifton Fadiman

Patience is sorrow’s salve.
— Winston Churchill

Peace is an extension of war by political means. Plenty of elbow room is pleasanter — and much safer.
— Lazarus Long

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber, and takes out our brains to make room for it.
— Colton

People are always available for work in the past tense.

People are never as happy or as unhappy as they think.

People are never so ready to believe you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much annoyed as when they take you at your word.
— Somerset Maugham

People at the top make decisions as though times were good when people at the bottom think that the organization is collapsing.
— Paul Gray

People become progressively less competent for jobs they were once well equipped to handle.
— Paul Armer

People don’t change; they only become more so.
— John Bright-Holmes

People fail many times, but they become failures only when they begin to blame someone else.

People have a way of becoming what you encourage them to be, not what you nag them to be.

People love high ideals, but they got to be about 33-percent plausible.
— Will Rogers

People may forget how fast you did a job, but they will remember how well you did it.

People see what they have been conditioned to see; they refuse to see what they don’t expect to see.
— Merle P. Martin

People seldom improve, when they have no other model but themselves to copy.
— Oliver Goldsmith

People want JUST taxes more than they want LOWER taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to wealth.

People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.
— Sterne

People who are excessively concerned about the environment invariably turn out to own a great deal of land. There are damn few unemployed and renters in the ecology movement.
— Frank Mankiewicz

People who believe that the dead never come back to life should be here at quitting time.

People who can’t figure out what to do with a Sunday afternoon are often the same ones who can’t wait for retirement.

People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
— Norman Cousins

People who fail to understand their past mistakes may be condemned to make them over again.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy half a slug who must tighten his belt.
— Lazarus Long

People who have no faith in themselves seldom have faith in others.

People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

People who lose their heads are usually the last to miss them.

People who run down others are taking a roundabout way of praising themselves.

People who take cat naps don’t usually sleep in a cat’s cradle.

People who wait until they feel like doing a job rarely do.

People who will not admit they’ve been wrong love themselves more than they love the truth.

People who write the most interesting and effective letters never answer letters. They answer people.

People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.
— David H. Comins

People will be happy in about the same degree that they are helpful.

People will believe anything if you whisper it.

People will buy anything that’s one to a customer.

Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of His creatures in this world; but that He has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I have steadfastly believed.
— Thomas Jefferson

Perfect valor is to do unwitnessed what we should be capable of doing before all the world.
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Performance is directly affected by the perversity of inanimate objects.
— Charles P. Boyle

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
— Thomas Henry Huxley

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
— George Santayana

Perhaps we are wiser, less selfish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfectly all these good things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.
— Joseph Wood Krutch

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
— Alfred North Whitehead

Persevering mediocrity is much more respectable, and unspeakably more useful than talented inconstancy.
— Dr. James Hamilton

Persons disagreeing with your facts are almost always emotional and employ faulty reasoning.

Peter’s Inversion: Internal consistency is valued more highly than efficiency.
— Laurence J. Peter

Peter’s Law: The unexpected always happens.
— Laurence J. Peter

Peter’s Paradox: Employees in a hierarchy do not really object to incompetence in their colleagues.
— Laurence J. Peter

Peter’s Placebo: An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.
— Laurence J. Peter

Peter’s Theorem: Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence.
— Laurence J. Peter

Phases of a project: 1. Exultation. 2. Disenchantment. 3. Confusion. 4. Search for the guilty. 5. Punishment of the innocent. 6. Distinction for the uninvolved.

Philosophy has the task and the opportunity of helping banish the concept that human destiny here and now is of slight importance in comparison with some supernatural destiny.
— John Dewey

Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing … As the science of the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical fact, a psychic condition that can be surpassed.
— Benedetto Croce

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
— John Keats

Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
— Bacon

Philosophy — the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree.
— T. S. Eliot

Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
— Henry Adams

Pick the right person the first time. The headaches you save will be your own.

Pills to be taken in twos always come out of the bottle in threes.
— Robert Davis

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
— Don Marquis

Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
— Lazarus Long

Platitude: a dull old saw that everyone borrows but no one sharpens.

Platonic friendship: The interval between the introduction and the first kiss.
— Sophie Irene Loeb

Pleasant prospects for the future are indicated.

Pleasure soon exhausts us and itself also; but endeavor never does.
— Richter

Pleasure that comes unlooked for is thrice welcome.
— Rogers

Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood, Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.
— Alexander Pope

Poetry has been to me “its own exceeding great reward;” it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
— Coleridge

Poetry is the eloquence of truth.
— Campbell

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poets are all who love — all who feel great truths — And tell them.
— Bailey

Policeman’s barbecue — steak-out
— Raymond D. Love

Political economy: two words that should be divorced — on grounds of incompatibility.
— The Wall Street Journal

Political power is as permanent as today’s newspaper. Ten years from now, few will know or care who the most powerful man in any state was today.
— Mark B. Cohen

Politicians who vote huge expenditures to alleviate problems get re-elected; those who propose structural changes to prevent problems get early retirement.
— John McClaughry

Politicians will always inflate when given the opportunity.

Politics isn’t too bad a profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards. If you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book.

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.
— Elbert Hubbard

Poster in Belgrade tourist office: Visit the Soviet Union before it visits you.

Pour the full tide of eloquence along, Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong.
— Alexander Pope

Poverty makes people satirical — soberly, sadly bitterly satirical.
— Friswell

Power attracts people but it cannot hold them.
— Mark B. Cohen

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
— Lord Acton

Practice does not make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.
— Vince Lombardi

Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, And this be our motto: “In God we trust;” And the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
— Francis Scott Key

Praise the sea, but keep on land.
— George Herbert

Praise was originally a pension, paid by the world.
— Jonathan Swift

Preserve the old, but know the new.

Pride makes us esteem ourselves; vanity makes us desire the esteem of others. It is just to day, as Dean Swift has done, that a man is too proud to be vain.
— Blair

Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt.
— Benjamin Franklin

Prior Laws of Politics: (1). Pay your dues. (2). Attend the meetings.
— Lyndon B. Johnson

Private and secret offices of religion are like the refreshing of a garden with the distilling and pretty drops of a water pot; but, addressed from the temple, are like rain from heaven.
— Jeremy Taylor

Private enterprise … makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest in public action.
— John F. Kennedy

Private enterprise is ceasing to be free enterprise.
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not private enterprise.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Probably no invention came more easily to man than when he thought up heaven.
— G. C. Lichtenberg

Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back.
— Pat Hein

Proclaim yourself “World Champ” of something — tiddly-winks, rope-jumping, whatever — send this notice to newspapers, radio, TV, and wait for challengers to confront you. Avoid challenges as long as possible, but continue to send news of your achievements to all media. Also, develop a newsletter and letterhead for communications.
— Will Yolen

Procrastination is the thief of time.
— Dr. Young

Productivity = (Number of secretaries X Average typing speed) / (Number of scientists). Note that when the number of scientists is zero, productivity becomes infinite.
— Robert Sommer

Profits go to the profit minded.

Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer to write programs.

Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change has its enemies.
— Robert F. Kennedy

Promptness is its own reward, if one lives by the clock instead of the sword.

Prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue.
— Francis Bacon

Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together.

Psst! Shadowfax in the seventh.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
— Holmes

Purchase not friends with gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.
— Fuller

Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen.
— Marvin Kitman

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
— James I, 27

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine, of honor.
— Hare

Purposes, as understood by the purposer, will be judged otherwise by others. Corollary: If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. Corollary: If you do something which you are sure will meet with everybody’s approval, somebody won’t like it. Corollary: Procedures devised to implement the purpose won’t quite work.
— Francis P. Chisholm

Put God to work for you and maximize your potential in out divinely ordered capitalist system.
— Norman Vincent Peale

Put an excessive value on money.

Put only the restriction on your pleasures — be cautious that they hurt no creature that has life.
— Zimmerman

Put your brain in gear before starting your mouth.

Put your trust in those who are worthy.

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
— Thomas Jefferson

Quit when you’re still behind.
— Pierre Salinger

Quit while you’re ahead. You may not get another chance.

RADICAL: A person whose left hand does know what his other left hand is doing.
— Bernard Rosenberg

RANDOMIZATION: The assignment of subjects to conditions in an experiment according to some preconceived plan. Randomness like chastity is more often claimed than maintained.

REASON: The Devil’s harlot.
— Martin Luther

REDESIGNED: Previous faults corrected, we hope

RELIABLE: Sometimes capable of giving the same results.

RELIGION: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
— Ambrose Bierce

REPUTATION: What others are not thinking about you.

REVIEWER’S NOTE: A rejection slip based upon literature and theories in vogue during the period the reviewer was studying for his or her Ph.D.

REVOLUTIONARY: It’s different from our competitors

RUGGED: Too heavy to lift

Raising pet electric eels is gaining a lot of current popularity.

Randomness: The property required to make statistical calculation come out right.

Rapoport’s Rule of the Roller-Skate Key: Certain items which are crucial to a given activity will show up with uncommon regularity until the day when that activity is planned, at which point the item in question will disappear from the face of the earth.
— Dan Rapoport

Ray’s Hangover Cure: Stay drunk!

Read and listen for what is missing. Many advisors are quite capable of stating how to improve what has been proposed, or what’s wrong. Few seem capable of sensing what isn’t there.
— Donald Rumsfeld

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
— Bacon

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
— Bacon

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.
— Sir Wilfred Grenfell

Reality is always more conservative than ideology.
— Raymond Aron

Reality is for people who can’t take science fiction.

Reason is the life of the law; nay the common law itself is nothing else but reason … The law which is the perfection of reason.
— Coke

Reason is the test of ridicule — not ridicule the test of truth.
— Warburton

Reassurance of business by a President has an unfavorable effect on confidence.
— Mark Epernay

Rebecca’s House Rules: At least one fits every occasion. 1. Throw it on the bed. 2. Fry onions. 3. Call Jenny’s mother. 4. No one’s got the corner on suffering. 5. Run it under the cold tap. 6. Everything takes practice, except being born.
— Sharon Mathews

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
— Thomas Jefferson

Recent investments will yield a slight profit.

Rechargeable batteries die at the most critical time of the most complex problem.
— John L. Shelton

Reform, like charity, must begin at home. Once at home, how will it radiate outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak and work; kindling every new light by incalculable contagion, spreading, in geometric ratio, far and wide, doing good only wherever it spreads, and not evil.
— Carlyle

Reforms come from below. No man with four aces howls for a new deal.
— John F. Parker

Regardless of whether a mission expands or contracts, administrative overhead continues to grow at a steady rate.
— Charles J. Zimmerman

Regularity is unity, unity is godlike, only the devil is unchangeable.
— Richter

Religion and Morality are the firmest foundations of the duties of men and women.
— Alexander Hamilton

Religion is the best armor that a man can have, but it is the worst cloak.
— Bunyan

Remember Gummidge’s Law and you will never be found out.

Remember that time in office is money in the campaign fund.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Remember your place, programmer, that way you may keep your head.

Remember, the more engineering projects there are, the more products there will be.
— Richard F. Moore

Remember: LSD absorbs 47 times it own weight in excess reality.

Republican boys date Democratic girls. They plan to marry Republican girls, but feel they’re entitled to a little fun first.

Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in this country. The remainder is thrown out.

Republicans employ exterminators. Democrats step on the bugs.

Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians, and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids, and taxes.

Republicans sleep in twin beds — some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats.

Republicans study the financial pages of the newspaper. Democrats put them in the bottom of the bird cage.

Republicans tend to keep their shades drawn, although there is seldom any reason why they should. Democrats ought to, but don’t.

Republicans usually wear hats and clean their paint brushes.

Research is reading two books that have never been read in order to write a third that will never be read.

Rest is the sweet sauce of labor.
— Plutarch

Restrain thy mind, and let mildness ever attend thy tongue.
— Theognis

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
— Justice William O. Douglass

Reunite Gondawanaland!!!

Rewards are usually anti-climatic — the fun is in the doing.

Rich, be not exalted; poor, be not dejected.
— Cleobulus

Right you are if you say you are — Obscurely.
— TIME, 30-Dec-77

Rocks have been shaken from their solid base, but what shall move a firm and dauntless mind?
— Joanna Baillie

Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together; And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans, Still we went coupled, and inseparable.
— Shakespeare

Rowe’s Rule: The odds are 6 to 5 that the light at the end of the tunnel is a headlight of an oncoming express train.

Rule of Parenthood: Birthday parties always end in tears.
— Phyllis C. Richman

Rule of Parenthood: Enough is never enough.
— Phyllis C. Richman

Rule of Parenthood: The sun always rises in the baby’s bedroom window.
— Phyllis C. Richman

Rule of Parenthood: Whenever you decide to take the kids home, it is always five minutes earlier that they break into fights, tears, hysteria.
— Phyllis C. Richman

Rules for Academic Deans: 1. HIDE!!!! 2. If they find you, LIE!!!!
— Father Damian C. Fandal

Run if you like, but try to keep your breath; Work like a man, but don’t be worked to death.
— Holmes

Run not into debt, either for wares sold, or money borrowed; be content to want things that are not of absolute necessity, rather than run up the score.
— Sir M. Hale

Running together all about, The servants put each other out, Till the grave master had decreed, The more haste, ever the worst speed.
— Churchill

Ryan’s Law: Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish yourself as an expert.

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED: Manufacturer’s, upon receipt of the check

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Mysterious, sometimes bizarre, manipulations performed upon the collected data of an experiment in order to obscure the fact that the results have no generalizable meaning for humanity. Commonly, computers are used, lending an additional aura of unreality to the proceedings.

SUCCESS: Living long enough to be a burden on your children.

Sam’s Axiom (1): Any line, however short, is still too long.

Sam’s Axiom (2): Work is the crabgrass of life, but money is the water that keeps it green.

Sanity and insanity overlap a fine gray line.
— Charles van Kriedt

Satan hasn’t a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.

Satire is what closes in New Haven.

Satisfaction derived from a trip goes down as Expectation goes up if Reality is unchanged. S = R/E as Reality becomes more favorable, the chance for Satisfaction goes up IF Expectation is unchanged.
— Hall T. Sprague

Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand.

Scheduled changes always mean cutbacks. (Minor schedule adjustments always affect your bus (train, whatever))
— Steve Ross

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
— Thomas Henry Huxley

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.
— Werner von Braun

Science is a flickering light in our darkness, it is but the only one we have and woe to him who would put it out.
— Morris Cohen

Science is a history of superseded theories.

Science is a wonderful thing, but it has not succeeded in maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, and that’s all we asked of it.

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
— Henri Poincaire

Science is nothing but developed perception, integrated intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
— George Santayana

Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
— C. P. Snow

Science seeks generally only the most useful systems of classification: these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true.
— S. I. Hayakawa

Scientific and humanist approaches are not competitive but supportive, and both are ultimately necessary.
— Robert C. Wood

Scientists and engineers set high performance standards for themselves; therefore, performance appraisal and career planning are perfunctory.
— Richard F. Moore

Scientists are Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity.
— Arthur Koestler

Scientists who dislike the restraints of highly organized research like to remark that a truly great research worker needs only three pieces of equipment: a pencil, a piece of paper, and a brain …. But they quote this maxim more often at academic banquets than at budget hearings.
— Don Price

Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.
— Richard Nixon

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
— Lazarus Long

Secret sources are more credible.
— Ron Nessen

Secretary’s Lament: Around here I’m a very responsible person. If anything happens, I’m responsible.

Security is mostly a superstition. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
— Helen Keller

See the world! Learn helicopter maintenance.

Seers and soothsayers read crystal balls to fine the future. Less lucky men read junk — with more success.
— Richard N. Farmer

Self-centered people are those who spend so much time talking about themselves we never get a chance to talk about ourselves.

Self-checking systems tend to have a complexity in proportion to the inherent unreliability of the system in which they are used.
— Tom Gibb

Self-defense is nature’s oldest law.
— Dryden

Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
— La Rochefoucauld

Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.
— La Rochefoucauld

Sense switches and data switches should only be used as warm furry buttons: they don’t do anything but when you push them they push back, and make you feel loved, i.e. for selective printing and tracing in debug.

Seven-eighths of everything can’t be seen.

Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won’t either.
— Joseph Fischer

Share your happiness with others today.

She balanced dignity on the tip of her nose.

She has as much originality as a Xerox machine.
— Laurence J. Peter.

She neglects her heart who studies her glass.
— Lavater

She’s learned to say things with her eyes that others waste time putting into words.

Short term success with voters on any side of a given issue can be guaranteed by creating a long-term special study commission make up of at least three divergent interest groups.
— Ray Connolly

Show me a good mouser and I’ll show you a cat with bad breath.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I’ll show you a failure.
— Thomas Alva Edison

Show us a home with young children and we’ll show you a home where every pack of cards counts out at between 37 and 51.
— Bill Vaughan

Show your affection, which will probably meet with pleasant response.

Sign in a cluttered, old-fashioned hardware store: “We’ve got it, if we can find it.”

Sign in a loan company window: “Now you can borrow enough money to get completely out of debt.”

Silence gives consent, or a horrible feeling that nobody’s listening.
— Franklin P. Jones

Simple diet is best; for many dishes bring many diseases; and rich sauces are worse than even heaping several meats upon each other.
— Pliny

Simplicity is the true test.
— Ron Randall

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
— Holmes

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other “sins” are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is NOT a sin — just stupid.)
— Lazarus Long

Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
— John Dewey

Since attaining the full use of my reason no one has ever heard me laugh.
— Earl of Chesterfield

Since blue-sky projects are targeted for major breakthroughs, they are relatively immune from planning and control.
— Richard F. Moore

Since no matter can be created or destroyed (excluding nuclear and cafeteria substances), as one attempts to remove unwanted material (i. e., trash) from one’s living space, the remaining material mutates so as to occupy 30 to 50 percent more than its original volume.

Since prehistoric man, no battle has ever gone as planned.
— Donal Graeme

Since the generality of persons act from impulse much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.
— Hare

Since we have to speak well of the dead, let’s knock them while they’re alive.
— John Sloan

Sincerity is like traveling in a plain beaten road, which commonly brings a man sooner to his journey’s end than byways, in which men often lose themselves.
— Tiliotson

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my heart and my hand to this vote.
— Daniel Webster

Sirs, adulation is a fatal thing — Rank poison for a subject, or a king.
— Dr. Wolcott

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
— Will Durant

Skiing is so much fun. The bright blue above you … AND THE BRIGHT BLUE BELOW YOU!

Skill in manipulating numbers is a talent, not evidence of divine guidance.
— G. O. Ashley

Slander meets no regard from noble minds; only the base believe what the base only utter.
— Beller

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road But looks through nature up to nature’s God.
— Alexander Pope

Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.
— Heinrich Heine

Slightly deaf students will have instructors who mumble.
— M. M. Johnston

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him.
— Benjamin Franklin

Sluggish idleness — the nurse of sin.
— Spenser

Small change can often be found under seat cushions.

Small habits well pursued, betimes, May reach the dignity of crimes.
— Hannah More

Small opportunities are often the beginnings of great achievements.

Smile! You’re on Candid Cookie!

Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

So sure are you! Tried have you? Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say? Try not. Do! Do! Or do not. There is no try.
— Yoda

So we grew together, like to a double cherry, seeming parted but yet a union in partition, two lovely berries moulded on one stem; so, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
— Shakespeare

Social Democracy rests on the assumption that it is desirable to preserve the capitalist system of private enterprise, and that the evils of this system can be sufficiently corrected by the democratic method of procedure.
— Carl Becker

Social groups are generally in disarray. To protect themselves from other groups, especially the groups just below them, groups will attempt to convey an appearance of interior order and purpose they do not possess.
— Arthur Herzog

Social institutions will change only at the speed required to protect them from attack — slowly or fast to the degree required, but usually slowly. They will put off change as long as possible.
— Arthur Herzog

Social legislation cannot repeal physical laws.
— Dalin B. Oaks

Social values and habits dictate economic activity and not the other way around.
— Alexander Hamilton

Socialism is bureaucracy of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
— Oswald Spengler

Socialism is workable only in heaven where it isn’t needed, and in hell where they’ve got it.
— Cecil Palmer

Socialism works, but nowhere as efficiently as in the beehive and the anthill.

Society can only pursue its normal course by means of a certain progression of changes.
— John, Viscount Morley

Society heaps honors on the unique, creative personality, but not until he has been dead for fifty years.
— Charles Merrill Smith

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.
— Washington Irving

Some are weatherwise, some are meteorologists.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— Bacon

Some do, some don’t.

Some hae meat that canna eat, And some would eat that want it; But we hae meat, and we can eat, Sae let the Lord be thankit.
— Burns

Some men are discovered; others are found out.

Some men become proud and insolent because they ride a fine horse, wear a feather in their hat or are dressed in a fine suit of clothes. Who does not see the folly of this? If there be any glory in such things, the glory belongs to the horse, the bird and the tailor.
— St. Frances de Sales

Some men put me in mind of half-bred horses, which often grow worse in proportion as you feed and exercise them for improvement.
— Greville

Some of it plus the rest of it is all of it.

Some people LOVE cats for what they are; others ARE cats for what they love.

Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.
— Marvin G. Gregory

Some people who slap you on the back are trying to help you swallow what they just told you.

Some people will believe anything if it is whispered to them.

Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse.
— Avery

Some play for gain; to pass time others play For nothing; both play the fool I say: Nor time nor coin I’ll lose, or idly spend; Who gets by play, proves loser in the end.
— Heath

Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall.

Someone has compared Southern California to a granola cereal, when you take away the fruits and nuts, all you have left are the flakes.

Someone is speaking well of you.

Someone is unenthusiastic about your work.

Someone whom you reject today, will reject you tomorrow.

Sometimes the best law of all is no law at all. Not all the world’s ills are susceptible to legislative correction.
— Pierre S. du Pont

Sometimes the crowd is right.

Sometimes, where a complex problem can be illuminated by many tools, one can be forgiven for applying the one he knows best.
— Robert Machol

Sorrow seems sent for out instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we would teach them to sing.
— Richter

Sorry about that, Chief!
— Maxwell Smart

Soup is the essence of meat.

Sour discontent that quarrels with our fate May give fresh smart, but not the old abate; The uneasy passion’s disingenuous wit, The ill reveals but hides the benefit.
— Sir Richard Blackmore

Space expands to house the people to perform the work that Congress creates.
— Haynes Johnson

Spanish Civil War Communique: Our troops advanced today without losing a foot of ground.

Speak little and well, if you would be esteemed as a man of merit.
— Trench

Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman.
— Dave Millman

Speak the language of the country you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other.
— Chesterfield

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants — both know too much of him.
— Colton

Speed bumps are of negligible effect when the vehicle exceeds triple the desired restraining speed.

Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye all gone? And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?
— Shakespeare

Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.
— Charles Dickens

Sprinkle’s Law: Things fall at right angles.

State: A state is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again.

Statements by respected authorities which tend to agree with a writer’s viewpoint are always handy.
— Amrom Katz

Statistics are a highly logical and precise method for saying a half-truth inaccurately.

Stay in with the Outs (the Ins will make so many mistakes you can’t afford to alienate the Outs).

Stock Market Axiom: The public is always wrong.

Stockbroker’s Declaration: The market will rally from this or lower levels.

Strong people always have strong weaknesses.

Stability is more essential to success than brilliance.
— Richard Lloyd Jones

Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

State capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

Still waters run deep.

Stockmayer’s Theorem: If it looks easy, it’s tough. If it looks tough, it’s damn near impossible.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.
— Bergen Evans

Stop searching forever. Happiness is just next to you.

Stop searching forever. Happiness is unattainable.

Strong reasons make strong actions.
— Shakespeare

Student’s snack — cramberries
— Raymond D. Love

Students who obtain an A for a course will claim that the instructor is a great teacher.
— M. M. Johnston

Success can be insured only by devising a defense against the contingency plan.
— Charles P. Boyle

Success goes to your head, failure to your heart.

Success in management — at any level — depends on the ability to pick the right people for the right jobs.

Success is being able to hire someone to mow the lawn while you play golf for exercise.

Success is doing what you like to do and making a living at it.

Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit. The game of life is to come up a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to do. Yet there is always the danger of failing as a human being. The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose.
— Richard M. Nixon

Success is overrated. Incompetence is what we should revere — it marks us off from animals.
— Stephen Pile

Success is the result of behavior that completely contradicts the usual expectations about the behavior of a successful person.
— Felix R. Paturi

Success makes us intolerant of failure, and failure makes us intolerant of success.
— William Feather

Success provides more opportunities to say things than the number of things a pundit has worth saying.
— Douglas Pike

Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit. Nelson, when young was piqued at not being noticed in a certain paragraph of the newspapers, which detailed an action wherein he had assisted. “But never mind,” said he, “I will one day have a gazette of my own.”
— Colton

Such a house broke! So noble a master fallen! All gone and not One friend to take his fortune by the arm And go along with him.
— Shakespeare

Superstition renders a man a fool, and scepticism makes him mad.
— Fielding

Support organizations can always prove success by showing service to someone … not necessarily you.
— Douglas Evelyn

Surely happiness is reflective like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror, transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and evershining benevolence.
— Washington Irving

Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: The sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seems to impart a quiet to the mind.
— Edwards

Survey taker to resident: Do you realize that that choice puts you in the two-percent lunatic fringe?
— Bernhardt

Swap read error. You lose your mind.

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, And good in everything.
— Shakespeare

Sweet is the hour of rest, Pleasant the wind’s low sigh, And the gleaming of the west, And the turf whereon we lie.
— Mrs. Hemans

Sweet speaking oft a currish heart reclaims.
— Sidney

Systems display antics.
— Dr. John Gall

Systems in general work very poorly or not at all.
— Dr. John Gall

Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach.
— Dr. John Gall

TANK: A means of transportation the Soviet army uses to visit its friends.

The maxim that “Honesty is the best policy” is one which, perhaps, no one is ever habitually guided by in practice. An honest man is always before it, and a knave is generally behind it.
— Whately

The news of the day, no matter how trivial or unimportant, always takes up more time than a married man has.
— Ray O’Neil

The people of Rome have always destroyed their greatest sons.
— Benito Mussolini

TINSTAFL! — There is no such thing as free love.
— Solomon Short

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

Take any religious mystery, any theological proposition: expressed in ordinary terms it will read like sheer nonsense to the outsider, from the ritualistic, symbolic eating of human flesh and blood practiced by all the Christian sects to the outright cannibalism practiced by some savages.
— Major Whitey Ardmore

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
— Lazarus Long

Take care to be an economist in prosperity; there is no fear of your not being one in adversity.
— Zimmerman

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
— Shakespeare

Take rather than give the tone to the company you are in. If you gave parts you will show them more or less upon every subject; and if you have not, you had better talk sillily upon a subject of other people’s than of your own choosing.
— Chesterfield

Take thy correction mildly. Kiss the rod.
— Shakespeare

Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd.
— Walter Savage Landor

Talent in staff work or sales will recurringly be interpreted as managerial ability.
— Charles P. Boyle

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherent; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.
— Coleridge

Talk not of comfort, ’tis for lighter ills; I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
— Addison

Talk of revolution is one way of avoiding reality.
— John Kenneth Galbraith

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear.

Talking is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books. A full mind must have talk, or it will grow dyspeptic.
— William Matthews

Tanstaafl!!!

Taxes are going up so fast, the government is likely to price itself out of the market.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

Tea! thou soft, thou sober sage, and venerable liquid; — thou female tongue- running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink tippling cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moments of my life, let me fall prostrate!
— Colley Cibber

Ten thousand years from now, the only story this civilization will tell will be in its junk piles — so observe what is important!
— Richard N. Farmer

Ten years of experience should add up to more than one year’s experience multiplied by ten.

Tennyson is a beautiful half of a poet.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though shot by a child.
— Bacon

That inexhaustible good nature, which is itself the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
— Irving

That is utterly preposterous.

That life is long which answers life’s great end.
— Young

That must be wonderful! I don’t understand it at all.

That only with propriety be styled refinement which, by strengthening the intellect, purifies the manners.
— Coleridge

That politics has a bearing on business confidence is unproven.
— Mark Epernay

That segment of the community with which one has the greatest sympathy as a liberal inevitably turns out to be one of the most narrow-minded and bigoted segments of the community.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

That tendency to err that programmers have been noticed to share with other human beings has often been treated as if it were an awkwardness attendant upon programming’s adolescence, which like acne would disappear with the craft’s coming of age. It has proved otherwise.
— Mark Halpren

That the birds of worry and care fly above your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.

That which has not been taught directly can never be taught directly.

That which is good to be done, cannot be done too soon; and if it is neglected to be done early, it will frequently happen that it will not be done at all.
— Bishop Mant

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
— Adlai Stevenson

That which we acquire with the most difficulty we retain the longest; as those who have earned a fortune are usually more careful with it than those who have inherited one.
— Colton

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

That’s a valiant flea that dares eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.
— Shakespeare

That’s not writing, that’s typing!
— Truman Capote

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
— Neil Armstrong

That’s one thing about these babies. They never learned to read.
— Joe Patroni

That’s only true because it’s true.

That’s the trouble with this country. The whole place is filled with penniless patriots.
— Rosa Bombolini

That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings everything to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.
— Samuel Johnson

The “think positive” leader tends to listen to his subordinates’ premonitions only during the post-mortems.
— Charles P. Boyle

The 20/80 Law: 20 percent of the customers account for 80 percent of the turnover, 20 percent of the components account for 80 percent of the cost, and so forth.
— Vilfredo Pareto

The American Republic and American business are Siamese twins; they came out of the same womb at the same time; they are born in the same principles, and when American business dies, the American republic will die, and when the American Republic dies, American business will die.
— Josiah W. Bailey

The American people aren’t interested in details.
— Lyn Nofziger

The Banana Principle: Heuristic devices don’t tell you when to stop.

The Beat-Inflation garden we planted so enthusiastically just two months ago is to be rededicated as an ecological exhibit. It illustrates zero growth.

The Bougourre Factor changes the equation to fit the Universe.

The Brain-Eye Law: To a certain extent, observational power can compensate for mental weakness.

The Communist system must be based on the will of the people, and if the people should not want that system, then that people should establish a different system.
— Nikita S. Krushchev

The Constitution … speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty.
— Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes

The Diddle factor changes things so that the equation and the universe appear to fit, without requiring any real change in either. This has the characteristic of eliminating differences by dropping the subject under discussion to zero importance.

The Eighth Commandment of Frisbee: In any crowd of spectators at least one will suggest that razor blades could be attached to the disc. (“You could maim and kill with that thing.”)
— Dan Roddick

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
— Oliver Goldsmith

The Eye-Brain Law: To a certain extent, mental power can compensate for observational weakness.

The Fifth Commandment of Frisbee: The best catches are never seen. (“Did you see that?” — “See what?”)
— Dan Roddick

The Finagle Factor is characterized by changing the universe to fit the equation.

The First Commandment of Frisbee: The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just beyond reach. This force is technically called “car suck”.
— Dan Roddick

The First Law of Bicycling: No matter which way you ride, it’s uphill and against the wind.

The Fourth Commandment of Frisbee: The higher the costs of hitting any object, the greater the certainty it will be struck. (Remember — the disc is positive — both cops and old ladies are clearly negative).
— Dan Roddick

The Generalized Thermodynamic Law (Systems Theory): More probable states are more likely to be observed than less probable states, unless specific constraints exist to keep them from occurring.

The Generalized Thermodynamic Law (Systems Theory): The things we see more frequently are more frequent: (1) because there is some physical reason to favor certain states or (2) because there is some mental reason.

The Jovian invaders sort a Bunch of captives in the nude: These for breeding, those for slaughter, And the fattest ones for food.

The Law Conservation of Energy: The total amount of energy in the universe is constant.
— Dr. John Gall

The Law of Fashion: The same dress is: indecent 10 years before its time, daring 1 year before its time, chic in its time, dowdy 3 years after its time, hideous 20 years after its time, amusing 30 years after its time, romantic 100 years after its time, beautiful 150 years after its time
— James Laver

The Law of Happy Particularities: Any general system law will have at least two particular applications.
— Gerald Weinberg

The Law of Medium Numbers: For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly. (This is more succinctly expressed by Murphy: Anything that can happen, will happen.)

The Law of Raspberry Jam: The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
— Stanley Edgar Hyman

The Law of Unhappy Peculiarities: Any general system law will have at least two peculiar exceptions.
— Gerald Weinberg

The Law of the Too, Too Solid Point: In any collection of data, the figure that is most obviously correct — beyond all need of checking — is the mistake.

The Lord giveth, Uncle Sam taketh away.

The Lord made grass, Man made booze; Who CAN you trust?

The Lump Law: If we want to learn anything, we mustn’t try to learn everything.

The Ninth Commandment of Frisbee: The greater your need to make a good catch, the greater the probability your partner will deliver his worst throw. (If you can’t touch it, you can’t trick it.)
— Dan Roddick

The Principle of Indifference: Laws should not depend on a particular choice of notation.

The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
— Sheridan

The Rockettes are so perfect you’d think they were Xeroxed.
— Irene Peter

The Russian dictatorship of the proletariat has made a a farce of the whole Marxist vision: developing a powerful, privileged ruling class to prepare for a classless society, setting up the most despotic state in history so that the state may wither away, establishing by force a colonial empire to combat imperialism and unify the workers of the world.
— Herbert J. Muller

The Second Commandment of Frisbee: The higher the quality of a catch or the comment it receives, the greater the probability of a crummy throw. (Good catch = bad throw.)
— Dan Roddick

The Second Order Rule of Bureaucracy: The more directives you issue to solve a problem, the worse it gets.
— Jack Robertson

The Seventh Commandment of Frisbee: The most powerful hex words in the sport are — “I really have this down — watch.” (Know it? Blow it!)
— Dan Roddick

The Sixth Commandment of Frisbee: The greatest single aid to distance is for the disc to be going in a direction you did not want. (Goes the wrong way = Goes a long way.)
— Dan Roddick

The Supreme court says three may keep a secret, if two of them used to work for the CIA.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

The Tenth Commandment of Frisbee: The single most difficult move with a disc is to put it down. (Just one more.)
— Dan Roddick

The Third Commandment of Frisbee: One must never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than, “Watch this!” (Keep ’em guessing.)
— Dan Roddick

The Yeti, whom we know of only By the tracks he leaves behind, Hunts the mountains, sad and lonely, For a mate to breed his kind.

The ability of our people to deceive themselves is the highest art of the nation.

The absent are always in the wrong.

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves.
— Charles Reade

The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse.
— Benjamin Franklin

The accessibility, during recovery, of small parts which fall from the work bench, varies directly with the size of the part — and inversely with its importance to the completion of the work underway.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
— John Locke

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.
— Russell Green

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over … every major advance in the technological competence of man has enforced revolutionary changes in the economic and political structure of society.
— Barry Commoner

The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.
— Dean William R. Inge

The alternative to the totalitarian state is the cooperative commonwealth.
— Norman Thomas

The amount of effort put into a campaign by a worker expands in proportion to the personal benefits that he will derive from his party’s victory.
— Milton Rakove

The amount of flak on any subject is inversely proportional to the subject’s true value.

The amount of junk carried is in direct proportion to the amount of space available.
— Tony Hogg

The amount of litter in the street is proportional to the local rate of unemployment.
— David Lloyd-Jones

The amount of pleasure derived from a cigarette is directly proportional to the number of the non-smokers in the vicinity.
— Raj K. Dhawan

The amount of quaint, authentic, rustic charm varies inversely with the pounds per square inch of water pressure in the shower. High charm, low pressure.
— Frank Mankiewicz

The amount of research devoted to a topic in human behavior is inversely proportional to its importance and interest.
— Bernard I. Murstein

The amount of success is in inverse proportion to the effort in attaining success.
— Felix R. Paturi

The amount of time you have to wait for a bus is directly proportional to the inclemency of the weather.
— John Corcoran

The amount of trash accumulated within the space occupied is exponentially proportional to the number of living bodies that enter and leave within any given amount of time.

The analogy to athletics must be pressed until all recognize that in the exercise of intellect those who lack the muscles, coordination, and will power can claim no place at the training table, let alone on the playing field.
— Jacques Barzun

The ancient sage who concocted the maxim, “Know Thyself” might have added, “Don’t Tell Anyone!”
— H. F. Henrichs

The aristocrat is right in that only a few people in any society make a real difference, but the democrat is more deeply right when he insists that we cannot predict where such valuable people are coming from and therefore have an obligation to keep all lines open.
— Sydney J. Harris

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.
— Russell Lynes

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
— William James

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
— Alfred North Whitehead

The ass is still an ass, e’en though he wears a lion’s hide.
— Shakespeare

The atom was not meant to be explored — Its splitting was the work of brazen fools. Let’s march until the Stone Age is restored, With rocks and flints our kind of splitting tools. Atomic Power? Seal it in its grave. We are Progressive. Onward to the cave!
— Jack Kirwan

The attacker must vanquish; the defender need only survive.

The attention paid to an instructor is a constant regardless of the size of the class. Thus as class size swells, the amount of attention paid per student drops in direct ratio.
— Richard J. Hernstein

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
— J. Frank Dobie

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains because the average man can see better than he can think.

The balls of sight are so formed, that one man’s eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart from within.
— Johnson

The beautiful are never desolate, But someone always loves them.
— Bailey

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
— Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)

The beginnings and the endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
— John Galsworthy

The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation or an organization to action is one of mankind’s oldest beliefs.
— Andrew Hacker

The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.
— Abigail Van Buren

The best investment you can make is hard work.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, Gang aft agley, And lea’e us nought by grief and pain, For promised joy.
— Burns

The best may slip, and the most cautious fall; He’s more than mortal that ne’er err’d at all.
— Pomfret

The best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
— Wordsworth

The best programmers, designers, and architects are lazy.
— Dick Munroe

The best prophet of the future is the past.

The best rules to form a young man are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it.
— Sir William Temple

The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
— Richard Whately

The best simpleminded test of expertise in a particular area is an ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area.
— Graham Allison

The best sort of revenge is not to be like him who did the injury.
— Antoninus

The best substitute for experience is being sixteen.

The best time for marriage will be towards thirty, for as the younger times are unfit, either to choose or to govern a wife and family, so, if thou stay long, thou shalt hardly see the education of thy children, who, being left to strangers, are in effect lost; and better were it to be unborn than ill-bred; for thereby thy posterity shall either perish or remain a shame to thy name.
— Sir Walter Raleigh

The best time to look for work is after you get the job.

The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
— Quentin Hogg,M.P.

The best way out is always through.
— Robert Frost

The best way out of a problem is through it.

The best way to get and keep good people is to give them room to grow.

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant — and let the air out of the tires.
— Dorothy Parker

The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.

The best way to publicize a governmental or political action is to attempt to hide it.
— Mark B. Cohen

The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
— Helen Keller

The better part of valor is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.
— Shakespeare

The big guys always win.
— Jeffrey F. Chamberlain

The bigger the man, the less likely he is to object to caricature.
— Guernsey Le Pelley

The biggest step you can take is the one you take when you meet the other person halfway.

The bitter part of discretion is valor.
— Henry W. Nevinson

The blush is nature’s alarm at the approach of sin and her testimony to the dignity of virtue.
— Fuller

The bread and onions you ate this morning tasted better than any feast to a man who expects to eat again, and the sun through the grills overhead is brighter for you than for any man who expects to see it rise tomorrow.
— Pandarus the Gladiator

The bread never falls but on its buttered side.

The bull wears himself out on the cape and never sees the sword.
— Dr. Randall Brooks

The bus that left the stop just before you got there is your bus.
— John Corcoran

The business of living is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves.

The candidate who is expected to do well because of experience and reputation (Douglas, Nixon) must do better than well, while the candidate expected to fare poorly (Lincoln, Kennedy) can put points on the media board by simply surviving.
— Vic Gold

The cat in gloves can do the pruning in the Rose Garden.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
— Hazlitt

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
— Samuel Johnson

The chameleon may change its color, but it is the chameleon still.
— Shakespeare

The chemist labors, weak and weary, Searching for a wonder-drug That will prove his favorite theory … And that doesn’t melt the jug.

The chief cause of problems is solutions.
— Eric Sevareid

The chief defect of a democracy is that only the political party out of office knows how to run the government.

The chief pleasure (in eating) does not consist in costly seasoning, or exquisite flavor, but in yourself. Do you seek sauce by sweating?
— Horace

The child is father of the man.
— Wordsworth

The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the church.

The cigarette smoke always drifts in the direction of the non-smoker regardless of the direction of the breeze.
— Raj K. Dhawan

The circumstances of the modern world make nonsense of the pretensions to moral or intellectual grandeur.
— Lewis Lapham

The citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.
— Milton Rakove

The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object, this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence — it is action noble, sublime, godlike action.
— Webster

The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising.

The computer is a moron!

The conclusions of most good operations research studies are obvious.
— Robert E. Machol

The confidence of the business executive in a President is inversely related to the state of business.
— Mark Epernay

The conqueror is regarded with awe, the wise man commands our esteem, but it is the benevolent man who wins our affection.

The consciousness of clean linen is in and of itself a source of moral strength only second to that of a clean conscience. A well-ironed collar, or a fresh glove, has carried many a man through the emergency in which a wrinkle or a rip would have defeated him.
— E. E. Phelps

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.
— Cicero

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
— Daniel Webster

The conventional wisdom is that power is an aphrodisiac. In truth, it’s exhausting.
— Dom Bonafede

The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: “Of course it is none of my business but –” is to place a period after the word “but.” Don’t use excessive force in supplying such moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.
— Lazarus Long

The corruption in a country is in inverse proportion to its state of development.
— Nathan Miller

The could neither of ’em speak for rage and so fell a sputtering at one another like two roasting apples.
— Congreve

The countenance may be rightly defined as the title page which heralds the contents of the human volume, but like other title pages, if sometimes puzzles, often misleads, and often says nothing to the purpose.
— William Matthews

The creditor whose appearance gladdens the the heart of a debtor, may hold his head in sunbeams and his foot on storms.
— Lavater

The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases in examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something, therefore, in true beauty that corresponds with the right reason, and it is not merely the creature of fancy.
— Grenville

The critical mass of any do-it-yourself explosive is never less than half a bucketful.
— Eric Frank Russell

The crucial memorandum will be snared in the out-basket by the paper clip of the overlaying correspondence and go to file.
— Charles P. Boyle

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Sandburg.
— Edmund Wilson

The crusades ended several centuries ago after killing thousands of people. The most important issues arouse intense passions. Earmuffs to block the shouting are inappropriate, but filter the feedback. Joining a cause and leading a constituency are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they necessarily synonymous. Neither welfare nor profits are “obscene”.
— Pierre S. du Pont

The cure for capitalism’s failing would require that a government would have to rise above the interests of one class alone.
— Robert L. Heilbroner

The cynic who doesn’t believe in anything still wants you to believe him.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

The days just prior to marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.

The decent moderation of today will be the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they burn none at all.
— Maurice Maeterlinck

The deficiency will never show itself during the dry runs.
— Charles P. Boyle

The degree of a country’s development is measured by the ratio of the price of an automobile to that of the cost of a haircut. The lower the ratio, the higher the degree of development.
— Charles P. Issawi

The degree of failure is in direct proportion to the effort expended and to the need for success.

The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts — the less you know the hotter you get.
— Bertrand Russell

The demonstrably true statements of the sciences which, especially in recent times, have the uncomfortable inclination never to stay put, although, at any given moment they are, and must be, valid for all.
— Hannah Arendt

The desire for modeling a prototype is inversely proportional to the decline of the prototype.

The desire for racial integration increases with the square of the distance from the actual event.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
— Sterne

The desire of power in excess caused angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity is no excess, neither can man or angels come into danger by it.
— Bacon

The devil can quote scripture for his purpose.
— Shakespeare

The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still.

The devil does not stay where the music is.

The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.

The devil is a gentleman who never goes where he is not welcome.

The devil is easy to identify. He appears when you’re terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn’t grant.

The devil is making his pitch.

The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic.
— Shakespeare

The devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God … But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil.

The difference between a career and a job is twenty or more hours a week.

The difference between a chef and a cook seems to be in who cleans up the kitchen.
— Paul Sweeney

The difference between a rich man and a poor man is this — the former eats when he pleases, the latter when he can get it.
— Sir Walter Raleigh

The difference between a successful career and a mediocre one sometimes consists of leaving about four or five things a day unsaid.

The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right.
— Edward Simmons

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
— Lazarus Long

The difficulty of finding any given trail marker is directly proportional to the importance of the consequences of failing to find it.
— Milt Barber

The difficulty of getting anything started increases with the square of the of the number of people involved.
— Jim MacGregor

The difficulty of the coordination task often blinds one to the fact that a fully coordinated piece of paper is not supposed to be either the major or the final product of the organization, but it often turns out that way.
— Amrom Katz

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
— John Updike

The discipline of desire is the background of character.
— John Locke

The distance between the ticket counter and your plane is directly proportional to the weight of what you are carrying and inversely proportional to the time remaining before takeoff.
— Gary Witzenburg

The distance from the gate from which your flight departs is inversely proportionate to the time remaining before the scheduled departure of the flight.
— Edward S. Mills

The distance you have to park from your apartment increases in proportion to the weight of the packages you are carrying.

The doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind.

The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.
— Henry Ward Beecher

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.
— Coleridge

The dossier is not the person.
— Dr. John Gall

The duty of the people is to tend to their affairs. The duty of government is to help them do it. This is the pasta of politics. The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.
— Italo Bombolini

The early bird catches the worm as a rule, but the guy who comes along later may be having lobster Newburg and crepes suzette.
— Charles Merrill Smith

The early morning has gold in its mouth.
— Benjamin Franklin

The early sun is gold in the mouth.

The earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb.
— Shakespeare

The earthmen dump their cola-bottles, Cans and packs and empty jars, At random… so the aesthete throttles Those who made the mess on Mars.

The easiest way to figure the cost of living is to take your income and add ten percent.

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
— Jack Rosenbaum

The easiest way to refold a road map is differently.

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
— Jean-Paul Kauffmann

The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
— Robert E. Lee

The effectiveness of a politician varies in inverse proportion to his commitment to principle.
— Sam Shaffer

The effort expended by the bureaucracy in defending any error is in direct proportion to the size of the error.
— John Nies

The effort required to correct course increases geometrically with time.

The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
— Shakespeare

The end of man is an action, and not a thought, though it were the noblest.
— Carlyle

The error-detection and correction capabilities of any system will serve as the key to understanding the type of errors which they cannot handle.
— Tom Gibb

The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.

The essence of life is taking over.

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interr’d with their bones.
— Shakespeare

The evil you teach us, we will execute, and it shall go hard but we will better the instruction.
— Shakespeare

The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date.
— Colton

The expenditure of funds is critical — engineers and scientists should not be permitted to authorize any purchase.
— Richard F. Moore

The expert judgment of an institution, when the matters involve continuation of the institution’s operations, is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless.
— Robert N. Kharasch

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be correct.

The eye sees not itself but by reflection, by some other things.
— Shakespeare

The eyes of the emperor are everywhere.
— Brodrig

The fact is, squire, the moment a man takes to a good pipe, he becomes a philosopher; it’s the poor man’s friend; it calms the mind, soothes the temper, and makes a man patient under troubles; it has made more good men good husbands, kind masters, indulgent fathers and honest fellows, than any other thing on this universal world.
— Richard Haliburton

The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society, must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
— Samuel Hendel

The faculty expands its activity to fit whatever space is available, so that more space is always required.
— Thomas L. Martin

The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people: I was saved, they were damned … Our hymns were loaded with arro- gance — self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come judgment day.
— Robert Heinlein

The farther away from the entrance of the market (theater, or any other given location) that you have to park, the closer the space vacated by the car that pulls away as you walk up to the door.
— Judith deMille Berson

The faster the plane, the narrower the seats.
— John H. Durrell

The fault lies not with our technology but with our systems.
— Roger Levin

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves that we are underlings.
— William Shakespeare

The fawning, sneaking, and flattering hypocrite, that will do, or be anything, for his own advantage.
— Stillingfleet

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.
— Will and Ariel Durant

The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods.
— Socrates

The final answer will exceed the magnitude or precision or both of the calculator.

The finding of threats to security by a security office is totally predictable, and hence the finding is totally worthless.
— Robert N. Kharasch

The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly welded by the fiercest fire.

The first 90 percent of the task takes 90 percent of the time, the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself. All sin is easy after that.
— Baily

The first creation of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense, the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the spirit.
— Bacon

The first draught a man drinks ought to be for thirst, the second for nourishment, the third for pleasure, the fourth for madness.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confuse good with immobility, and evil with activity.

The first impression one gets of a new ruler and his brains is from seeing the men he has chosen to have around him.

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next, good sense, the third, good humor, and the fourth, wit.
— Sir William Temple

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.
— Robert Heller

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
— Paul Ehrlich

The first sample is always the best.
— William K. Wright

The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
— Cecil

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.
— Victor Hugo

The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.

The first thing in the human personality that dissolves in alcohol is dignity.

The first time you buy a house you see how pretty the paint is and buy it. The second time you look to see if the basement has termites. It’s the same with men.
— Lupe Velez

The flood of my tears washed out the bridge of my nose.

The food that I like best — the food that makes me hungry just to think of — is very simple … When I cook I try never to get too far away from that kind of simplicity.
— Jeremiah Tower

The forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
— Jawaharial Nehru

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel; but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new hatched, unfledged comrade.
— Shakespeare

The fullest instruction, and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained, in free and easy chat with others.
— William Matthews

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
— Norman Mailer

The fundamental idea of good is that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value, and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.
— Albert Schweitzer

The further an individual is from the poorhouse, the more expert one becomes on the ghetto.
— James L. Davis

The fury engendered by the misspelling of a name in a column is in direct ratio to the obscurity of the mentionee.
— Alan Deitz

The gamester, if he die a martyr to his profession, is doubly ruined. He adds his soul to every other’s loss, and by the act of suicide, renounces earth to forfeit heaven.
— Colton

The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way; But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor dies.
— Dryden

The general prizes most the fortress which took the longest siege.
— Edward Garrett

The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success hasn’t been asleep.

The goal of all life is death.
— Sigmund Freud

The goal of yesterday will be the starting point of tomorrow.
— Carlyle

The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.
— Sophocles

The good are better made by ill, As odors crush’d are sweeter still.
— Rogers

The good die young — because they see it’s no use living if you’ve got to be good.

The good need fear no law, It is his safety, and the bad man’s awe.
— Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley

The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases.
— Sir Josiah Stamp

The great creative individual … is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
— John Stuart Mill

The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.
— Tryon Edwards

The great god Ra whose shrine once covered acres Is filler now for crossword-puzzle makers.

The great question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.

The great secret of life is never to be in the way of others.
— Haliburton

The great truths are too important to be new.
— Somerset Maugham

The greater the number of professionals (advanced degrees preferred) assigned to a project, the greater the progress.
— Richard F. Moore

The greatest danger to human beings is their consciousness of the trivialities of their aims.
— Gerald Brennen

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

The greatest genius is never so great as when it is chastised and subdued by the highest reason.
— Colton

The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
— Carlyle

The greatest of fools is he who imposes on himself, and in greatest concern thinks certainly he knows that which he has least studied, and of which he is profoundly ignorant.
— Shaftesbury

The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

The greatest truths are the simplest; so are the greatest men.

The greatness of kings is made at the margin; the greatness of legislatures, at the mean. That is to say, a monarch is judged by individual virtues and performance, but no legislature can be called great because it contained one or a few impressive individuals, to whom it paid no heed. The standard of judgment for monarchs and legislatures is always the same: the happiness and well-being of the people.
— Michael Scully

The guard dies, but never surrenders.
— Fougemont

The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him.

The hardest thing is to disguise your feelings when you put a lot of relatives on the train for home.

The heart is wiser than the intellect.

The heart will break, yet brokenly live on.
— Lord Byron

The herd instinct among forecasters make sheep look like independent thinkers.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
— George Orwell

The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his behind.
— Gen. Joe Stilwell

The higher the tuition, the fewer days they spend in school.
— Frank Mankiewicz

The higher you go the more dependent you become on others.

The higher, the fewer.

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
— Justice Felix Frankfurter

The history of liberty is the history of resistance … [it is a] history of the limitation of governmental power.
— Woodrow Wilson

The history of the world is the record of man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

The hole and the patch should be commensurate.
— Thomas Jefferson

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
— G. K. Chesterson

The honeymoon is over when he phones that he’ll be late for supper — and she has already left a note that it’s in the refrigerator.
— Bill Laurence

The human heart is often the victim of the sensations of the moment; success intoxicates it to presumption, and disappointment dejects and terrifies it.
— Volney

The human race never solves any of its problems — it only outlives them.
— Solomon Short

The idea is for a woman to make her life as big, as challenging as she can, and know that during that life there will be men who will love her for what she is trying to be, just as there have always been men who loved her for not trying to be anything at all.
— Lee Grant

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
— Ashley Montagu

The implied convertibility between a unit of real money produced by labor and an article of wealth created by human labor for the market must be assured. Therefore, the value of the monetary unit should have a real objective regulator.
— Lewis E. Lehrman

The importance of the man and his job, in that relative order, rises in direct proportion to the distance separating his audience from his home office.

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a crook or a martyr.
— Will Rogers

The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communication between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding.
— Thomas L. Martin

The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay!

The information you have is not what you need.

The information you have is not what you want.

The information you need is not what you can obtain.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
— Winston Churchill

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
— Mohammed

The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.
— Chesterfield

The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail you choose to hike always comes out positive.
— Milt Barber

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
— Hare

The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants.
— Adam Walinsky

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man almost nothing.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The intensity of movie publicity is in inverse ratio to the quality of the movie.
— Gene Shalit

The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows up to others, but hides us from ourselves, and we injure our own cause, in the opinion of the world, when we too passionately and eagerly defend it.
— Colton

The job of satire is to frighten and enlighten.
— Richard Condon

The keen spirit Seized the prompt occasion — makes the thought Start into instant action, and at once Plans and performs, resolves and executes.
— Hannah Moore

The knob that fires the mighty missile May make World War Three begin, Write our fate in fires of fissile — Hey! You fool! You’ve knocked it in!

The lagging activity in a project will invariably be found in the area where the highest overtime rates lie waiting.
— Charles P. Boyle

The larger the project or job, the less time there is to do it.
— George A. Daher

The larva from its dusty cranny Danny took, and laid on cloth To watch it hatch … Too bad for Danny! He thought the pupa held a moth.

The last rush-hour express bus to your neighborhood leaves five minutes before you get off work.
— John Corcoran

The last thing one knows is what to put first.
— Pascal

The last, best fruit which comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is, tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic.
— Richter

The leader who can enlist cooperation and respect, without having to pull rank, has power of the most positive kind.

The leadership of the privileged has passed away; but it has not been succeeded by the leadership of the eminent. We have entered the region of mass effects.
— Winston Churchill

The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance.

The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.
— Eileen Shanahan

The length of any meeting is inversely proportional to the length of the agenda for that meeting.
— G. Robert McLaughlin

The length of debate varies inversely with the complexity of the issue.
— Robert Knowles

The less a thing can be proved, the angrier we get when we argue about it.

The less important you are on the table of organization, the more you’ll be missed if you don’t show up for work.

The less some people know the more eager they are to tell you about it.

The less there is between you and the environment, the more you appreciate the environment.

The less you enjoy serving on committees, the more likely you are to be pressed to do so. (Explanation: If you do not like committees, you keep quiet, nod your head, and look wise while thinking of something else and thereby acquire the reputation of being a judicious and cooperative colleague; if you enjoy committees, you talk a lot, make many suggestions and are regarded by the other members as a nuisance.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

The life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of exposure on the medium.

The life of a cigarette is proportional to the intensity of the protests from the non-smokers.
— Raj K. Dhawan

The life of a pious minister is visible rhetoric.
— Hooker

The light of a hundred stars does not equal the light of the moon.

The likelihood of anything happening is in direct proportion to the amount of trouble it will cause if it does happen.
— Sam W. Warren

The limerick is furtive and mean; You must keep her in close quarantine, Or she sneaks to the slums and promptly becomes Disorderly, drunk and obscene.

The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.
— Woody Allen

The little mind who loves itself, will write and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence.
— Oliver Goldsmith

The little sweet doth kill much bitterness.

The local density of mosquitoes is inversely proportional to your remaining repellent.
— Milt Barber

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
— Sir Thomas Browne

The longer ahead you plan a special event, and the more special it is, the more likely it is to go wrong.
— David and Jane Evelyn

The longer the title, the less important the job.
— Robert Shrum

The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole.
— John Peter Zenger

The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
— I Timothy VI, 10

The luck that is ordained for you will be coveted by others.

The main beneficiaries of federal aid are those states that most oppose the principle.
— Bob Smith

The main impact of the computer has been the provision of unlimited jobs for clerks.

The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions.
— Edmund B. Chafee

The man who builds and wants wherewith to pay Provides a home from which to run away.
— Young

The man who has ceased to learn ought not to be allowed to wander around loose in these dangerous days.
— M. M. Coady

The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors, is like a potato — the only thing belonging to him is underground.
— Sir T. Overbury

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.
— Henri-Frederic Amiel

The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.

The man who sees the consistency in things is a wit, the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist.
— G. K. Chesterton

The man who smiles when things go wrong, has thought of someone he can blame it on.

The man who will live above his present circumstances is in great danger of living in a little time much beneath them.
— Addison

The manner of giving, shows the character of the giver, more than the gift itself.
— Lavater

The march of the human mind is slow.
— Edmund Burke

The master’s eye makes the horse fat.

The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay

The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen.
— Lamb

The mechanistic world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality, found its expression in a civilization which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time. Possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history.
— Ludwig von Bertalanffy

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.
— J. Paul Getty

The meek shall inherit the Earth. In three foot by six foot plots.
— Lazarus Long

The mere act of hearing or reading wise statements and sound advice does little for anyone. In the process of learning, the learner’s dynamic cooperation is required.

The mind of man is vastly like a hive; His thoughts are busy ever — all alive; But here the simile will go no further; For bees are making honey, one and all; Man’s thoughts are busy in producing gall, Committing, as it were, self-murther.
— Dr. Wolcott

The mind ought sometimes to be amused, that it may the better return to thought, and to itself.
— Phaedrus

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.
— Phoedrus

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.
— Seneca

The minute a man is convinced that he is interesting, he isn’t.

The minute you sign a client is the minute you start to lose him.
— James M. Blankenship

The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The modern child will answer you back before you’ve said anything.
— Laurence J. Peter

The moment a woman marries, some terrible revolution happens in her system; all her good qualities vanish, presto, like eggs out of a conjurers box. ‘Tis true that they appear on the other side of the box, but for the husband, they are gone forever.
— Bulwer

The moment you forecast, you know you’re going to be wrong, you just don’t know when and in which direction.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it. It probably isn’t right.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

The monarch oak, the patriarch of the trees, Shoots rising up, and spreads by slow degrees; Three centuries he grows, and three he stays Supreme in state; and in three more decays.
— Dryden

The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
— J. A. Froude

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
— Sir James Frazer

The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.
— Mme. de Stael

The more a recruit knew about a given subject, the better chance he had of receiving an assignment involving some other subject.
— Dr. R. F. Gumperson

The more campaigning, the better.
— Larry O’Brien

The more complex the idea or technology, the more simpleminded is the opposition.

The more enthusiastic, unruly, and large the candidate’s crowds in the week before the election, the less likely he is to carry the area.
— Frank Mankiewicz

The more heavily a man is supposed to be taxed, the more power he has to escape being taxed.
— Diogenes

The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint. The affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety.
— Lavater

The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence.
— Susan Jacoby

The more qualified candidates who are available, the more likely the compromise will be on the candidate whose main qualification is a non-threatening incompetence.
— Mark B. Cohen

The more right one is, the more careful he should be to express his opinion tactfully. The other fellow never likes to be proved wrong.
— John Luther

The more the change, the more it is the same thing.
— Alphonse Karr

The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do it in. Stability is achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.

The more unworkable the urban plan, the greater the probability of implementation.
— Robert Wood

The more urgent the need for decision, the less apparent becomes the identity of the decision-maker.

The more we love, the nearer we are to hate.
— La Rochefoucauld

The more wit the less courage.
— Thomas Fuller

The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie.
— Zimmerman

The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness; one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging, alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper, and steadfast as an anchor. For such a one we gladly change the great genius, the most brilliant wit, the profoundest thinker.
— Lessing

The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea … this pollution is for the most part irrecoverable.
— Rachel Carson

The most certain sign of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.
— La Rochefoucauld

The most common commodity in this country is unrealized potential.
— Calvin Coolidge

The most difficult light bulb to replace burns out first and most frequently.
— Joe Anderson

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
— Thales

The most egotistical person we’ve ever heard of is the one who remarked that he had only been wrong once in his life and that was when he thought he was wrong but wasn’t.

The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.
— Preem Palver, First Speaker

The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or at nine at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a Billiard table, or hears your voice at a Tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day.
— Benjamin Franklin

The most undesirable things are the most certain (e. g., death and taxes).
— Martin S. Kottmeyer

The most utterly lost of all days, is that in which you have not once laughed.
— Chamfort

The narrower the mind the broader the statement.
— Ted Cook

The nation had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to give the roar.
— Winston Churchill

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
— Thomas Jefferson

The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat.

The net weight of you boots is proportional to the cube of the number of hours you have been on the trail.
— Milt Barber

The new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
— Samuel Johnson

The next class is always three buildings away on a rainy day.
— M. M. Johnston

The notion of the Trinity of Gods has enfeebled the belief in one God. A multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief; and in proportion as anything is divided it is weakened.

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion … In a free society these institutions must be wholly free — which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
— Alan Barth

The number of adjectives and verbs that are added to the description of a menu item is in inverse proportion to the quality of the resulting dish.
— John Calkins

The number of errors in any piece of writing rises in proportion to the writer’s reliance on secondary sources.
— Harold Faber

The number of errors make is equal to the sum of the “squares” involved.

The number of letters written to the editor is inversely proportional to the importance of the article.
— Robert L. Marcus

The number of stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail.
— Milt Barber

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

The odds are 6:5 that if one has late classes, one’s roommate will have the earliest possible classes.

The office space and salaries of college administrators are in inverse proportion to those of the instructors.
— M. M. Johnston

The oil can is mightier than the sword.
— Everett Dirksen

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.
— Bishop Mandell Creighton

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
— Mignon McLaughlin

The only difference between a fool and a criminal who attacks a system is that the fool attacks unpredictably and on a broader front.
— Tom Gibb

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

The only important result of a meeting is agreement about next steps.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

The only programs a grown-up can possibly stand are those that cater to those pre-adolescent fantasies that most have never abandoned.
— Richard Schickel

The only rose without thorns is friendship.

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change — and we all instinctively avoid it.
— E. B. White

The only thing more reliable than Magik is one’s friends.
— Macbeth, King of Scotland.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax.

The only thing worse than an expert is someone who thinks he’s an expert.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.

The only unbreakable rule: To thine own self be true, and it follows as the night the day that you cannot be false to any man.

The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.
— Frank Kent, Baltimore Sun

The only way for a rich man to be healthy is, by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.
— Sir William Temple

The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.
— Voltaire

The only way to conquer fear is to keep doing the thing you fear to do.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them to the impossible.
— Arthur C. Clarke

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it….I can resist everything but temptation.
— Oscar Wilde

The only winner in the war of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
— Solomon Short

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
— Karl Marx

The opportunity for graft equals the plethora of legal requirements multiplied by the number of architects, engineers, and builders.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer

The organization of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank — the really big chunks always rise to the top.
— Professor John Imhoff

The organization of any program reflects the organization of the people who develop it.
— Bill Gray

The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intentions.

The other line moves faster. This applies to all lines — bank, supermarket, tollbooth, customs, and so on. And don’t try to change lines. The Other Line — the one you were in originally — will then move faster.
— Barbara Ettorre

The passions and desires, like the two twists of a rope, mutually mix one with the other, and twine inextricably round the heart; producing good if moderately indulged; but certain destruction, if suffered to become inordinate.
— Burton

The passions are the only orators that always persuade.
— La Rochefoucauld

The passions, like heavy bodies down steep hills, once in motion, move themselves, and know no ground but the bottom.
— Fuller

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
— Grey’s Elegy

The patient can oftener do without the doctor, than the doctor without the patient.
— Zimmerman

The pedestrian had no idea where to go, so I ran over him.

The pedestrian works where I work. She is a standards coordinator. Funny she should be the one I hit.

The pen is mightier than the sword; and easier to write with.

The people always want to hear when the mighty stag is brought to the ground by a pack of common dogs.
— Babbaluche the cobbler

The people most preoccupied with titles and status are usually the least deserving of them.

The people who are rising in the world take over. The people who are sinking are taken over.
— Sepp von Plum

The perpetual obstacle to human advancement is custom.
— John Stuart Mill

The person who buys the most raffle tickets has the least chance of winning.
— Dr. R. F. Gumperson

The person who considers five or six possible solutions to a problem is more apt to find the right answer than the person who only considers one or two.

The person whose clothes are extremely fine I am too apt to consider as not being possessed of any superiority of fortune, but resembling those Indians who are found to wear all the gold they have in the world in a bob at the nose.
— Oliver Goldsmith

The person you rejected yesterday could make you happy, if you say yes.

The persons hardest to convince they’re at the retirement age are children at bedtime.
— Shannon Fife

The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it.
— Karl Marx

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
— Henry Ward Beecher

The phone will not ring until you leave your desk and walk to the other end of the building.
— Linda A. Lawyer

The phrase “we(I)(you) simply MUST …” designates something that need not be done. “That goes without saying” is a red warning. “Of course” means you had best check it yourself. These small-change cliches and others like them, when read correctly, are reliable channel markers.
— Lazarus Long

The planets in their distant courses Exert a baleful influence. They stack the cards, they slow down horses — My God, their power must be immense!

The plural of spouse is spice.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
— George Bernard Shaw

The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
— Justice Robert Jackson

The primary aim of all government regulation of economic life of the community should be, not to supplant the system of private economic enterprise, but to make it work.
— Carl Becker

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
— Sydney J. Harris

The primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough voters to win the next election.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only.
— Thomas Hobbs

The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young woman increases by pyramidical progression when he is already in the company of (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3) a better looking and richer male friend.
— Ronald H. Beifeld

The probability of an event’s occurring varies directly with the perversity of the inanimate object involved and inversely with product of its desirability and the effort expended to produce it.
— Walter Mule

The problem of civil society is twofold: how to identify and select wise rulers, and how to assure that their wisdom will be used for the benefit of the ruled — or of the common good as distinct from their private good.
— Harry V. Jaffa

The problem-solving process will always break down at the point at which it is possible to determine who caused the problem.

The product of an arithmetical computation is the answer to an equation; it is not the solution to a problem.
— G. O. Ashley

The professional quality of the faculty tends to be inversely proportional to the importance it attaches to space and equipment.
— Thomas L. Martin

The profoundly wise do not declaim against superficial knowledge in others, as much as the profoundly ignorant.
— Colton

The public is not made up of people who get their names in the papers.
— Woodrow Wilson

The puritans hated bearbaiting not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
— Macaulay

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
— Bernard Malamud

The purpose of satire is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth. And our business, as I see it, is to put it back again.
— Michael Flanders

The quality of a department is inversely proportional to the number of courses it lists in its catalogue.
— Professor Joel Hildebrand

The quality of legislation passed to deal with a problem is inversely proportional to the volume of media clamor that brought it on.
— G. Ray Funkhouser

The quality of your work will be affected as much by your attitude as by your skill.

The quantity of rhetoric has been directly proportional to the lack of action.
— Arthur Herzog

The question, “Who ought to be boss?” is like asking, “Who ought to be tenor in the quartet?” Obviously the man who can sing tenor.
— Henry Ford

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
— Mark Twain

The radical novelty in modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
— Walter Lippmann

The rain has such a friendly sound to one who’s six feet underground.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

The rate of hospital admissions responds the bed availability. Or, if we insist on installing more beds, they will tend to get filled.
— Dr. Milton Roemer

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will being to think like computers.

The real fight today is against inhuman, relentless exercise of capitalistic power … The present struggle in which we are engaged is for social and industrial justice.
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis

The reason I know my youth is all spent? My get up and go got up and went.
— Len Ingebrigston

The reason for the rush is the delay and, conversely the reason for the delay is the rush.

The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as twilight approaches.
— Milt Barber

The reputation of a man is like his shadow: It sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, it is sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.

The reverence of a man’s self is, next to religion, the cheifest bridle of all vices.
— Lord Bacon

The reward of energy, enterprise, and thrift — is taxes.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The haves get more, the have-nots die.

The rider likes best the horse which needs most breaking in.
— Edward Garrett

The rights we have today we may consider natural rights, but they were won by blood, sweat, sacrifice, and death.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

The river is moving; the blackbird must be flying.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
— William Blake

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (In which case, the road to Heaven must be paved with bad ones.)
— Samuel Johnson

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with sloppy analysis!

The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still.
— Alexander Pope

The scholar without good-breeding is a pedant, the philosopher a cynic, the soldier a brute, and every man disagreeable.
— Chesterfield

The scientist is at the moving edge of what’s happening.
— Dr. Gerald M. Edelman

The seal of truth is on thy gallant form, for none but cowards lie.
— Murphy

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The seeds of our own punishment are sown at the same time we commit sin.
— Hesiod

The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by plain.
— Colton

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone, shadows of the evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection itself — a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night; the soul withdraws itself. Then stars arise, and the night is wholly.
— Longfellow

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.
— Abraham Lincoln

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to remount first principles, and to take nobody’s word about them.
— Bolingbroke

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

The shortest measurable interval of time is the time between the moment I put a little extra aside for a sudden emergency and the arrival of that emergency.

The simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by summoning up contrary instances, organizing one’s time and one’s thought for study — all these arts … cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject; they cannot be taught in one course on one year, but must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections.
— Jacques Barzun

The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of wisdom. Understanding what they are is a great step. The final test is understanding why they are held.
— Charles M. Campbell

The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.

The social problems raised by science must be faced and solved by the humanities.
— Harold Dodd

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
— John W. Gardner

The solution to a problem changes the problem.
— John Peers

The soul of this man is in his clothes.
— Shakespeare

The sound of laughter has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the universe.
— Peter Ustinov

The spaceship with its human cargo Speeds from star to blazing star. The captain, humming Handel’s Largo, Wonders where the hell they are.

The specialist learns more and more about less and less until, finally, he knows everything about nothing; whereas the generalist learns less and less about more and more until, finally, he knows nothing about everything.

The speed at which the legislative process seems to work is in inverse proportion to your enthusiasm for the bill. If you want a bill to move quickly, committee hearings, the rules committee, and legislative procedures appear to be roadblocks to democracy. If you do not want the bill to pass, such procedures are essential to furthering representative government, etc., etc.
— Pierre S. du Pont

The speed of exit of a civil servant is directly proportional to the quality of his service.
— Ralph Nader

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is always right.
— Judge Learned Hand

The spirit of public service will rise, and the bureaucracy will multiply itself much faster, in time of grave national concern.
— Taylor Branch

The splendor of an editor’s speech and the splendor of his newspaper are inversely related to the distance between the city in which he makes his speech and the city in which he publishes his paper.
— Ben Bragdikian

The squeaky hinge gets the oil.
— Gene Franklin

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but the yapping dog gets kicked.

The star of riches is shining upon you.

The stature of a science is commonly measured by the degree to which it makes use of mathematics.
— S. S. Stevens

The sterile radical is basically … conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.
— Eric Hoffer

The story of man is the history, first, of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within that system of necessary restraints.
— Justice Abe Fortas

The structure of the joke is … the juxtaposition of the trivial and the mundane … We have to reconcile the paradox of it all. The joke mirrors the paradox.
— Woody Allen

The success of any venture will be helped by prayer, even in the wrong denomination.
— Charles P. Boyle

The sufficiency of my merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient.
— Augustine

The summer day has clos’d — the sun is set; Well have they done their office, those bright hours, The latest of whose train goes swiftly out In the red west.
— Bryant

The sumptuousness of a company’s annual report is in inverse proportion to its profitability that year.
— Irving Hale

The sun goes down just when you need it the most.
— Jon Kirkup

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.
— Havelock Ellis

The superior man rises by lifting others.
— Robert Ingersoll

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.
— Mark Twain

The surest way to encourage violence is to give in to it.

The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love; The taint of earth, the odor of the skies is in it.
— Bailey

The system is a sacred tin god: never break it or dent it when you can get what you want by bending it.

The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.
— Shakespeare

The tasks to do immediately are the minor ones; otherwise you’ll forget them. The major ones are often better to defer. They usually need more time for reflection. Besides, if you forget them, they’ll remind you.
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

The tears of penitents are the wine of angels.
— St. Bernard

The telephone pole was approaching fast, I was attempting to swerve out of it’s path when it struck my front end.

The temple of our purest thoughts is — silence!
— Mrs. Hale

The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.
— James Fenimore Cooper

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is … the source of all religious fanaticism.

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
— The Communist Manifesto

The thing in the world I am most of afraid of is fear, and with good reason, that passion alone in the trouble of it exceeding other accidents.
— Montaigne

The things in this file don’t have to be in bad taste, they just have to leave a bad taste.
— Dick Munroe

The things which belong to others please us more, and that which is ours is more pleasing to other.
— Syrus

The thought of 2000 thousand people munching celery at the same time horrifies me.
— George Bernard Shaw

The three faithful things in life are money, a dog, and an old woman.

The three indispensibles of genius are understanding, feeling, and perseverance. The three things that enrich genius, are contentment of mind, the cherishing of good thoughts, and exercising the memory.
— Southey

The tide comes in and the tide goes out, and what have you got?

The time involved in work to time available for work is usually about 0.6.

The time is right to make new friends.

The time of departure will be delayed by the square of the number of people involved. Simply stated, if I wish to leave the city at 5 PM, I will most likely depart at 5:01. If I am to meet a friend, the time of departure becomes 5:04. If we were to meet another couple, we won’t be on out way before 5:16, and so on.
— Paul D. Plotnick

The tire is only flat on the bottom.
— John L. Shelton

The titles of bills — like those of Marx Brothers movies — often have little to do with the substance of the legislation. Particularly deceptive are bills containing title buzz words such as emergency, reform, service, relief, or special. Often the emergency is of the writer’s imagination; the reform, a protection of a vested interest; the service, self-serving; the relief, an additional burden on the taxpayer; and the special, something that otherwise shouldn’t be passed.
— Pierre S. du Pont

The tongue is the ambassador of the heart.
— Lyly

The total amount of evil in any system remains constant. Hence, any diminution in one direction — for instance a reduction in poverty or unemployment — is accompanied by an increase in another, e. g., crime or air pollution.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

The toughest decision a purchasing agent faces is when he is about to buy the machine designed to replace him.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
— Thomas Jefferson

The trouble with being a breadwinner nowadays is that the Government is in for such a big slice.

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.
— Franklin P. Jones

The trouble with resisting temptation is that you may not get another chance.

The trouble with some self-made men is that they worship their creator.

The trouble with the average family budget is that at the end of the money there’s too much month left.

The trouble with the average family today is that it’s hard to support it and the government on one income.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
— Edmund Burke

The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.

The true, strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
— Samuel Johnson

The truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labour and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
— Grover Cleveland

The truly brave are soft of heart and eyes, And feel for what their duty bids them do.
— Byron

The truly generous is the truly wise; And he loves not others, lives unblest.
— Horace

The truly valiant dare everything but doing an anybody an injury.
— Sir Philip Sidney

The truth is more important than the facts.
— Frank Lloyd Wright

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

The turnpike road to people’s hearts I find Lies through their mouths, or I mistake mankind.
— Dr. Wolcott

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
— Johnson

The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.
— Somerset Maugham

The universe is but one vast Symbol of God.
— Thomas Carlyle

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
— Eden Phillpots

The universe is intractably squiggly.
— Charles Suhor

The universe is laughing behind your back.

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
— J. B. S. Haldane

The universe is one of God’s thoughts.
— Friedrich Schiller

The usefulness of any meeting is inversely proportional to the attendance.
— Lane Kirkland

The user will forget mathematics in proportion to the complexity of the calculator.
— John L. Shelton

The vain beauty cares most for the conquest which employed the whole artillery of her charms.
— Edward Garrett

The value of a program is proportional to weight of its output.

The value of money has an objective regulator only when it it linked to a real commodity, like gold, itself requiring the cost of human labor to be produced. By comparison, the value of inconvertible paper money has no objective regulator, its marginal cost of production being nearly zero.
— Lewis E. Lehrman

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.
— Alexander Pope

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body, only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.
— Jonathan Swift

The vehicle in front of you is traveling slower than you are.

The veil which covers the face of futurity is woven by the hand of mercy.
— Bulwer

The venom clamors of a jealous woman poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.
— Shakespeare

The very technology that makes our living simpler makes society more complex. The more efficient we get, the more specialized we become and the more dependent.
— Thomas Griffith

The vile are only vain; the great are proud.
— Byron

The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.
— Lucretius

The way to a man’s heart is below his stomach.
— Ron Randall

The way to avoid the imputation of impudence is not to be ashamed of what we do, but never to do what we ought to be ashamed of.
— Tully

The way to conquer men is by their passions; Catch but the ruling foibles of their hearts, And all their boasted virtues shrink before you.
— Tolson

The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run!
— John Barrymore

The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything.
— Benjamin Franklin

The weak have to be decent, while the strong can choose to be decent.
— Sepp von Plum

The weather for catching fish is that weather, and no other, in which fish are caught.
— W. H. Blake

The weather’s turning very funny — Hailstones crashing from the sky, Snow and sleet … It’s even money Whether we’ll survive July!

The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm wind if it … did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.
— Heinrich Heine

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows!

The weight of your pack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the pack weight goes on increasing anyway.
— Milt Barber

The well-tended front lawn is the modern moat that keeps the barbarians — other people — at bay.

The wheel of fortune turns incessantly round, and who can say within himself, I shall today be uppermost.
— Confucius

The wheels of nature are not made to roll backward; everything presses on toward Eternity; from the birth of Time an impetuous current has set in, which bears all the sons of men toward that interminable ocean. Meanwhile Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting within its capacious bosom, whatever is pure, permanent and divine.
— Robert Hall

The which is won ill, will never wear well, for there is a curse attends it, which will waste it; and the same corrupt dispositions which incline men to the sinful ways of getting, will incline them to the like sinful ways of spending.
— Matthew Henry

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
— William James

The whole thing about matrimony is this: We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character.
— Peter DeVries

The will to win is important, but it isn’t worth a damn unless you also have the will to prepare.

The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
— Sir Walter Scott

The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
— Edward Gibbon

The wise prince must forment some emnity so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.
— Italo Bombolini

The wise shepherd never trusts his flock to a smiling wolf.

The wisest man is generally he who thinks himself the least so.
— Boileau

The wonders of the ages assembled for your edification, education, and enjoyment — for a price.
— P. T. Barnum

The word GOOD has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

The work of an unknown good man is like a vein of water flowing hidden in the underground, secretly making the ground greener.
— Thomas Carlyle

The world is all the richer for having the devil in it, so long as we keep our foot on his neck.

The world is an old woman, that mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; thereby being often cheated, she will henceforth trust nothing but the common copper.
— Carlyle

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was before you came in.
— James Baldwin

The world is more complicated than most of our theories make it out to be.
— Edmund C. Berkeley

The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox hunters.
— Shenstone

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
— Aristotle

The worst men often give the best advice.
— Bailey

The yoo-hoo you yoo-hoo into the forest is the yoo-hoo you get back.
— Merle Miller

The younger, the better.

The youth of today and of those to come after them would assess the work of the revolution in accordance with values of their own … a thousand years from now, all of them, even Marx, Engels, and Lenin, would possibly appear rather ridiculous.
— Mao Tse-tung

The zoo is not an exhibition I view with much enjoyment, when I notice beasts in a position To learn the weaknesses of men.
— John Brunner

Them what has — gets.
— Dexter B. Wakefield

They condemn what they do not understand.
— Cicero

Then happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
— Shakespeare

There ain’t any news in being good. You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
— Robert Heinlein

There are 32 points to the compass, meaning that there are 32 directions in which a spoon can squirt grapefruit; yet, the juice almost invariably flies straight into the human eye.
— Louis Sattler

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root.
— Henry David Thoreau

There are as many Communists in the freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are but three classes of men: the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.
— Lavater

There are coexisting elements in frustrating phenomena which separate expected results from achieved results.

There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so.

There are four great cyphers in the world; he that is lame among dancers, dumb among lawyers, dull among scholars, and rude amongst courtiers.
— Bishop Earle

There are in business three things necessary — knowledge, temper and time.
— Feltham

There are lots of good women who, when they get to heaven, will watch to see if the Lord goes out nights.
— Ed Howe

There are many inside dopes in politics and government.
— Mark B. Cohen

There are many people today who literally do not have a close personal friend.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

There are more horses’ backsides in the military service of the United States than there are horses.
— Robert J. Clark

There are more old drunkards than old doctors.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5, Line 166)

There are more ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream.

There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

There are no strangers here — only friends we have not met.

There are no winners in life, only survivors.

There are none more abusive to others than they that lie most open to it themselves; but the humor goes round, and he that laughs at me today will have somebody to laugh at him tomorrow.
— Seneca

There are not enough storage registers to solve the problem.
— John L. Shelton

There are scores of thousands of sects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject.

There are souls which fall from heaven like flowers, but ere they bloom are crushed under the foul tread of some brutal hoof.
— Richter

There are things on heaven and earth, Horatio, Man was not meant to know.
— Hamlet

There are those that are born to be on top and those that are born to be on bottom. Like officers and soldiers.
— Sergeant Traub

There are three faithful friends — old Bert, old Ham, and Ronald Reagan.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

There are three kinds of friends: best friends, guest friends, and pest friends.

There are three parts in truth: first, the inquiry, which is the wooing of it; secondly, the knowledge of it, which is the presence of it; and thirdly, the belief, which is the enjoyment of it.
— Bacon

There are three sides to every story — yours, mine, and all that lie between.
— Jody Kern

There are three things I always forget. Names, faces — the third I can’t remember.
— Italo Svevo

There are three things I have always loved and never understood – art, music, and women.

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it.
— Monta Crane

There are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a cox comb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove.
— Mackenzie

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did but never thought.

There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, therefore it is superior.” The other says, “This is new, therefore it is better.”

There are two sides to every argument, unless a person is personally involved, in which case there is only one.

There are two ways we can meet a difficulty: either we can alter the difficulty or we can alter ourselves to meet it.

There are very few original thinkers in the world; the greatest part of those who are called philosophers have adopted the opinions of some who went before them.
— Dugald Stewert

There comes a time when one must stop suggesting and evaluating new solutions, and get on with the job of analyzing and implementing one pretty good solution.
— Robert Machol

There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
— Charles F. Kettering

There has been a long history of optimizing the wrong things, using elaborate mechanisms to produce beautiful code in cases that hardly ever arise in practice, while doing nothing about frequently occurring situations.
— Donald Knuth

There is a four-word formula for success that applies equally well to organizations or individuals — make yourself more useful.

There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune; it is a certain manner that distinguishes us, and which seems to destine us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves; it is by this quality, that we gain the deference of other men, and it is this which commonly raises us more above them, than birth, rank, or even merit itself.
— La Rochefoucauld

There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
— Burke

There is a place for a decisive gamble where you know your enemy and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all against an unknown enemy is boldness in itself.
— Bel Riose

There is a pleasure in being mad, Which none but madmen know.
— Dryden

There is a solution to every problem; the only difficulty is finding it.

There is a statistical correlation between the number of initials in an Englishman’s name and his social class (the upper class having significantly more than three names, while members of the lower class average 2.6).

There is a tendency for the person in the most powerful position in an organization to spend all his time serving on committees and signing letters.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries: On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
— Shakespeare

There is a vast difference between putting your nose in other people’s business and putting your heart in other people’s problems.

There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes and feelings.
— William Matthews

There is always someone worse off than yourself.

There is an inverse relationship between the uniqueness of an observation and the number of investigators who report it simultaneously.
— A. B. Pardee

There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program: Your tax dollar will go farther.

There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
— Bertrand Russell

There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver, the mind cannot use its wings — the clearest proof that it is out of its element.
— Hare

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?
— Lazarus Long

There is no conflict between liberty and safety. We will have both or neither.
— Ramsey Clark

There is no courage, but in innocence, No constancy, but in an honest cause.
— Southern

There is no difference between man and man, as there is between man and beast or between man and God, that makes one by nature the ruler of another. This does not mean that there are not wide differences among men, or that it is not often to the advantage of some to be ruled by others.
— Harry V. Jaffa

There is no failure except in no longer trying.
— Elbert Hubbard

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.

There is no free lunch.
— Barry Commoner

There is no freedom without the power to defend it.

There is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.
— Seneca

There is no great genius free from some tincture of madness.
— Seneca

There is no hope — the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time.
— R. H. Stoddard

There is no market for gloom. You cannot sell it. What the world wants, needs, and will buy is cheer.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
— William James

There is no pardon FOR Murphy’s Law.

There is no pardon FROM Murphy’s Law.

There is no possible line of conduct which has not at some time and place been condemned, and which at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.
— William Lecky

There is no proposition, no matter how foolish, for which a dozen Nobel signatures cannot be collected. Furthermore, any such petition is guaranteed page-one treatment in The New York Times.
— Daniel S. Greenberg

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
— James Thurber

There is no substitute for thorough going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
— Dickens

There is no such thing as “social gambling.” Either you are there to cut the other bloke’s heart out and eat it — or you’re a sucker. If you don’t like this choice — don’t gamble.
— Lazarus Long

There is no such thing as a “dirty capitalist”, only a capitalist.
— Bill Gray

There is no such thing as a short beer. (As in, “I’m going to stop off at Joe’s for a short beer before I meet you.”)
— Virginia W. Smith

There is no such thing as an absolute truth — that is absolutely true.
— Solomon Short

There is none made so great, but he may both need the help and service, and stand in fear of the power and unkindness, even of the meanest of mortals.
— Seneca

There is not a fiercer hell than failure in a great object.
— Keats

There is not a man in the country that can’t make a living for himself and his family. But he can’t make a living for them AND the government, too, the way his government is living. What the government has got to do is live as cheap as the people.
— Will Rogers

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
— James Branch Cabell

There is not in nature a thing that makes a man so deform’d, so beastly, as doth intemperate anger.
— Webster’s Duchess of Malp.

There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering, as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us.
— Bulwer

There is nothing as cheap and weak in debate as assertion that is not backed by facts.

There is nothing like a good painstaking survey full of decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze like a Sung vase on your eyeball.
— S. J. Perelman

There is nothing more destructive of physical and mental health than the isolation of you from me, of us from them.

There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who prosper by the old order.
— Italo Bombolini

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
— Victor Hugo

There is nothing permanent except change.
— Heraclitus

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher.
— Oliver Goldsmith

There is nothing so simple that it cannot be made difficult.
— Merle P. Martin

There is nothing so unbecoming on the beach as a wet kilt.
— Bill Gray

There is one art of which man should be master — the art of reflection.
— Coleridge

There is one around here somewhere.
— John Croll

There is one inflexible rule of television. No show is too bad to be run during the summer.

There is only one thing worse than dreaming you are at a conference and waking up to find that you are at a conference: and that is the conference where you can’t fall asleep.

There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk!

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that is behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
— Elbert Hubbard

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom; he that thinks himself the happiest man really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.
— Colton

There must be an ideal world, a sort of mathematician’s paradise where everything happens as it does in textbooks.
— Bertrand Russell

There must be underinvestment in bulls … just look at the rate of return.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

There never was a devil who didn’t advise people to keep out of Hell.

There never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority.

There shall be no such thing as a lost ball. The missing ball is on or near the course somewhere and eventually will be found and pocketed by someone else. It thus becomes a stolen ball, and the player should not compound the felony by charging himself with a penalty stroke.
— Donald A. Metz

There sometimes wants only a stroke of fortune to discover numberless latent good or bad qualities, which would otherwise have been eternally concealed: as words written with a certain liquor appear only when applied to the fire.
— Greville

There was a general whisper, toss, and wriggle, But etiquette forbade them all to giggle.
— Byron

There was a sick man of Tobago Liv’d long on rice-gruel and sago; But at last, to his bliss, The physician said this — “To a roast leg of mutton you may go.”

There was a young peasant named Gorse Who fell madly in love with his horse. Said his wife, “You rapscallion, That horse is a stallion — This constitutes grounds for divorce.”

There was no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency … Inflation engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction. and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
— John Maynard Keynes

There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.
— Shakespeare

There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.
— Burton Hillis

There’s a small choice in rotten apples.
— Shakespeare

There’s at least one fool in every married couple.

There’s no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.

There’s no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I’ll have it in the face of death, or it’s useless.
— Hobar Mallow

There’s no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.
— Shakespeare

There’s no such thing as a dangerous weapon, only dangerous men.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
— Will Rogers

There’s not one wise man among twenty will praise himself.
— Shakespeare

There’s not so much danger in a known foe and a suspected friend.
— Nabb

There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Shakespeare

There’s nothing wrong with using four-letter words in explaining the facts of life to children — words like love, kiss, help, care, give, …
— Sam Levinson

There’s one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

There’s so much to say but your eyes keep interrupting me.

There’s something else I dislike just as much as creeping socialism, and that’s galloping reaction.
— Adlai Stevenson

There’s something wrong if you’re always right.
— Arnold Glasow

There’s such a thing as too much point on a pencil.
— Avery

There’s times peoples just be tired of peoples.

Thermal paper will run out before the calculation is complete.
— John L. Shelton

These are the effects of doting age: vain doubts, and idle cares, and over caution.
— John Dryden

They are able because they think they are able.
— Virgil

They begin with making falsehood appear like truth, and end with making truth itself appear like falsehood.
— Shensione

They pass best over the world who trip over it quickly; for it is but a bog — if we stop we sink.
— Queen Elizabeth

They say an elephant never forgets, but what’s he got to remember?

They say you don’t really know a person until you’ve camped out with him. Car-pooling serves the same purpose.

They that govern most make the least noise. You see, when they row in a barge, they do that drudgery work, slash and puff, and sweat, but he that governs sits quietly at the stern, and is scarce seen to stir.
— Selden

They that know no evil will suspect none.
— Ben Johnson

They who provide much wealth for their children, but neglect to improve them in virtue, do like those who feed their horses high, but never train them to the manage.
— Socrates

Things are not always as they seem.
— Mandrake the Magician

Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man’s habits change quickly enough?
— Isaac Asimov

Things move so fast today that we sometimes get the feeling our solutions may be obsolete before we can get them worked out.

Things sweet to the taste, prove in digestion sour.
— Shakespeare

Things will get worse before they get better.
— John Ehrman

Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.
— Henri Bergson

Think of what others ought to be like, then start being like that yourself.

Think that day lost whose low descending sun Views from thy hand no noble action done.
— Jacob Bobart

Think that you are exceptional and entitled to special privileges.

Think that you can control your autonomic nervous system by sheer willpower.

Think twice before saying nothing.

Think twice before speaking. But don’t say “think think click click”.

Think you are indispensable to your job, your community, your friends.

Think you are overburdened with work and that people tend to take advantage of you.

Thirty seconds on the evening news is worth a front page headline in every newspaper in the world.
— Edwin Guthman

This above all: to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day thou cans’t not then be false to any man.
— Shakespeare

This famine has a sharp and meagre face; ‘Tis death in an undress of skin and bone, Where age and youth, their landmark ta’en away, Look all one common sorrow.
— Dryden

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; and, to do that well, craves a kind of wit.
— Shakespeare

This file will self-destruct in five minutes.

This is another fine myth you’ve gotten me into!!!
— Lor L. and Har D.

This is my death … and it will profit me to understand it.
— Anne Sexton

This is nothing but a consistently pathological display of inconsistent consistencies.

This is the LAST time I take travel suggestions from Ray Bradbury!

This is the curse of every evil deed That, propagating still, it brings forth evil.
— Southey

This job is marginally better than daytime TV.
— Jim Pastore

This lane ends in 500 feet.

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.
— Dorothy Parker

This rental car is so small, I can’t see the gas gauge…

This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.
— Lazarus Long

This, too, shall pass.

Those gifts are ever the most acceptable which the giver has made precious.
— Ovid

Those men who are commended by every body, must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.
— Greville

Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do.

Those only are despicable who fear to be despised.
— La Rochefoucauld

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculed in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.
— Shakespeare

Those who are prospering do not argue about taxes.

Those who bestow too much application of trifling things, become generally incapable of great ones.
— La Rochefoucauld

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
— Sir James Barrie

Those who can — do. Those who cannot — teach. Those who cannot teach become deans.
— Thomas L. Martin

Those who cannot miss an opportunity of saying a good thing are not to be trusted with the management of any great question.
— William Hazlitt

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
— Abraham Lincoln

Those who don’t study the past will repeat its errors. Those who do will find other ways to err!
— Charles Wolf, Jr.

Those who expect the biggest tips provide the worst service.
— Rozanne Weissman

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
— Thomas Paine

Those who express random thoughts to legislative committees are often surprised and appalled to find themselves the instigators of law.
— Mark B. Cohen

Those who have the shortest distance to travel to a meeting will invariably arrive the latest.

Those who in quarrels interpose, Must often wipe a bloody nose.
— Gay

Those who invented the law of supply and demand have no right to complain when this law works against their interest.
— Anwar Sadat

Those who order sleeping drafts won’t take them.
— Robert A. Heinlein

Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are for the greater part ignorant of both the character they leave and of the character they assume.
— Edmund Burke

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
— John Lindsay

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
— Wilson Mizner

Those whose approval you seek the most give you the least.
— Rozanne Weissman

Those with the best advice offer no advice.

Thou shalt remember the Eleventh Commandment and keep it Wholly.

Thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes; what eye but such an eye, would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is full of quarrels, as an egg is full of meat.
— Shakespeare

Though I have said above that all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality. Age or virtue may give man a just precedency. Excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level … And yet all this consists with the equality which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion, one over another.
— John Locke

Though many hands make light work, too many cooks spoil the broth.

Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, yet it is our own meditation must form our judgment.
— Dr. I. Watts

Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.
— Proverbs XXVII, 22

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
— William Wordsworth

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought is the seed of action.
— Emerson

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
— Shakespeare

Threats to security will be found.
— Robert N. Kharasch

Three Laws of Politics: 1. Get elected. 2. Get re-elected. 3. Don’t get mad, get even.
— Everett Dirksen

Three things only do slaves require, food, work, and their gods, and of the three their gods must never be touched — else they grow restless.
— Precepts for Ruling

Three women and a goose make a market.

Through zeal, knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost; let a man who knows the double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
— Buddha

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightening that does the work.
— Mark Twain

Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills.
— Lazarus Long

Time is a versatile performer. It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out and will tell.
— Franklin P. Jones

Time is the chrysalis of eternity.
— Richter

Time is the old Justice, that examines all offenders.
— Shakespeare

Time paradoxes are disgusting! Never mind what care you take — You always find you got there just in Time to cause your grandad’s wake.

Time’s gradual touch has moulder’d into beauty many a tower which when it frown’d with all its battlements, was only terrible.
— Mason

Timely advis’d, the coming evil shun!
— Prior

To a Europe exhausted by nearly two centuries of religious wars, [Isaac] Newton’s works were first and foremost a message about God; that He did not behave in a capricious or arbitrary fashion, in response to either His will or human prayer, but in accordance with absolute, unwavering, and humanly discoverable laws of nature which governed him and all his works. He had become the infinitely perfect Clock-Maker, his works fathomable by the human mind.
— Forrest MacDonald

To abuse wine is to abuse life itself.

To achieve our ultimate goals is not happiness; it is to be able to solve our problems along the way.

To all, to each, a fair good night, And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light.
— Scott

To arrive at perfection, a man should have very sincere friends or inveterate enemies; because he would be made sensible of his good or ill conduct, either by the censures of the one, or the admonitions of the other.
— Diogenes

To be “matter of fact” about the world is to blunder into fantasy — and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
— Lazarus Long

To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is being educated.
— Edith Hamilton

To be angry, is to revenge the fault of others upon ourselves.
— Alexander Pope

To be free of bondage or restraint, to live under a government based on the consent of the citizens, these are basic among all freedoms … and this is the reason why a democracy is from every possible humane point of view the best form of government … What so many human beings in the modern world have failed to understand is that freedom is the greatest of all trusts.
— Ashley Montagu

To be thrown on one’s own resources is to be cast in the very lap of fortune; for our faculties undergo a development, and display an energy, of which they were previously unsusceptible.
— Benjamin Franklin

To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem.
— Marshall L. Smith

To behave with dignity is nothing less than to allow others freely to be themselves.
— Sol Chaneles

To believe in God is impossible — not to believe in him is absurd.

To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power.

To believe with certainty we must begin to doubt.
— Stanislaus

To build something that endures, it is of the greatest importance to have a long tenure in office — to rule for many years. You can achieve a quick success in a year or two, but nearly all the great tycoons have continued their building much longer.
— Antony Jay

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.
— Mark Twain

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
— Dickens

To criticize the incompetent is easy; it is more difficult to criticize the competent.

To die is landing on some distant shore.
— John Dryden

To die — to sleep — No more — and, by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks, That flesh is heir to — ‘Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.
— Shakespeare

To divest one’s self of some prejudices, would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.
— Greville

To do two things at once is to do neither.
— Publius Syrus

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antidote those miseries that must fall on us.
— Massinger

To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.
— Alexander Pope

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
— Virginia Woolf

To err is human — to forgive is not company policy.

To err is human, but it takes a computer to really foul things up.

To err may become inhuman.

To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two, and change the unit of measure to the next higher unit. Thus we allocate two days for a one-hour task.

To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D, which explains why it is so easy to find expert witnesses who contradict each other.
— B. Duggan

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
— Henri Bergson

To follow foolish precedents, and wink With both our eyes is easier than to think.
— Cowper

To gain one’s way is no escape from the responsibility for an inferior solution.
— Winston Churchill

To get action out of management, it is necessary to create the illusion of a crisis in the hope it will be acted on.
— Gene Franklin

To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of them absent.

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smoothe the ice, or add another hue To the rainbow, or, with taper-light, To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
— Shakespeare

To give happiness is to deserve happiness.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money — sincerity and integrity.
— Donald Adams

To go to law, is for two persons to kindle a fire at their own cost, to warm others, and singe themselves to cinders; and because they cannot agree, to what is truth and equity, they will both agree to unplume themselves, that others may be decorated with their feathers.
— Feltham

To have a sense of humor is to be a tragic figure.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

To her love was like the air of heaven — invisible, intangible; it yet encircled her soul, and she knew it; for in it was her life.
— Miss M’Intosh

To him nothing is impossible, who is always dreaming of his past possibilities.
— Carlyle

To justify his theft, one trade union official, caught with his hand in the till, explained that he was using the money to fight Communism.

To keep your friends treat them kindly; to kill them, treat them often.

To kill an enterprise, complain that nothing is ever published that interests you but never offer to write an article, make a suggestion, or find a writer.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, criticize the work of the organizers and members.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, don’t do what has to be done yourself, but when the members roll up their sleeves and do their very best, complain that the group is run by a bunch of ego-trippers.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, don’t go to meetings.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, get mad if you are not a member of the committee, but if you are, make no suggestions.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, if you go to the meetings, arrive late.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, never think of introducing new members.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, pay your dues as late as possible.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill an enterprise, say you have no opinion on the subject if the chair asks for it. After the meeting, say you have learned nothing, or tell everyone what should have happened.
— Jean-Charles Terrassier

To kill time, a committee meeting is the perfect weapon.

To know how to refuse is as important as to know how to consent.
— Baltasar Gracian

To know thy self is the ultimate form of aggression.
— Marion J. Levy, Jr.

To laugh at men of sense is the privilege of fools.

To live in a place where you don’t belong is to live in hell.
— Italo Bombolini

To live long, it is necessary to live slowly.
— Cicero

To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses.
— Syrus

To love and to be wise is scarcely granted to the highest.
— Laberius

To make yourself miserable, cultivate a consistently pessimistic outlook.

To make yourself miserable, don’t forget to feel sorry for yourself.

To make yourself miserable, forget the feelings and rights of other people.

To make yourself miserable, forget the good things in life and concentrate on the bad.

To make yourself miserable, never overlook a slight or forget a grudge.

To make yourself miserable, put an excessive value on money.

To make yourself miserable, think that you are exceptional and entitled to special privileges.

To make yourself miserable, think that you are indispensable to your job, your company, and your friends.

To make yourself miserable, think that you are overburdened with work and that people tend to take advantage of you.

To make yourself miserable, think that you can control your nervous system by sheer will power.

To many men well-fitting doors are not set on their tongues.
— Theognis

To mortal men great loads allotted be; But of all packs no pack like poverty.
— Herrick

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship which illumine only the track it has passed.

To profit from good advice requires as much wisdom as to give it.

To read without reflecting, is like eating without digesting.
— Bacon

To refuse praise is to seek praise twice.

To save a single life is better than to build a seven story pagoda.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be, not a virtue, but the groundwork of a virtue.
— Johnson

To some lawyers all facts are created equal.
— Justice Felix Frankfurter

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

To study an object best, understand it thoroughly before you start.

To succeed planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
— Salvor Hardin

To teach men how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing philosophy can still do.
— Bertrand Russell

To the Gay Laugh of my Mother at the Gate of the Grave.
— Sean O’Casey

To the atheist, death is the end; to the believer, the beginning; to the agnostic, the sound of silence.

To the generous mind, the heaviest debt is that of gratitude, when ’tis not in our power to repay it.
— Dr. Thomas Franklin

To the memory of the man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country.
— General Henry Lee

To the wage earner, “free enterprise” is the way his boss treats him and those around him.
— Malcolm Forbes

To those who doubt the importance of careful mate selection, remember how Adam wrecked a promising career.
— Charles Merrill Smith

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.
— John Burroughs

To understand political power aright … we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions … within the bonds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
— John Locke

To what base uses may we return! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till it find it stopping a bunghole? As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth: of earth we make loam. And why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?
— Shakespeare

To write a good love-letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and end without knowing what you have written.
— Rousseau

To write well is at once to think well, to feel rightly, and to render properly! It is to have, at the same time, mind, soul, taste.
— Buffon

Today most physicians specialize. After getting his bill, I’ve decided my doctor’s speciality is banking.
— Mickey Porter

Too much gravity argues a shallow mind.
— Lavater

Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.
— Governor Jerry Brown

Towering genius disdains the beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
— Abraham Lincoln

Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.
— Proverbs XXII, 6.

Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason.
— Sir John Harrington

Treat the other man’s faith gently: it is all he has to believe with.
— Henry S. Haskins

Trespassers will be violated!

Trinity is the word for a committed god.

Trivial matters are handled promptly; important matters are never solved.

Trouble strikes in series of threes, but when working around the house the next job after a series of threes is not the fourth job — it’s the start of a brand new series of threes.
— Avery

True dignity is never gained by place, and never won when honors are withdrawn.
— Massinger

True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, not all that could be.
— La Rochefoucauld

True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
— Charles Caleb Colton

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

True happiness will be found only in true love.

True hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
— Shakespeare

Trust me!

Trust no future howe’er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act — act in the living present! Heart within and God o’erhead!
— Longfellow

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.
— Konrad Lorenz

Truth is God’s daughter.

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of this world, all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.
— Byron

Truth is a statue, and you are all just a bunch of pigeons.

Truth needs no flowers of speech.
— Alexander Pope

Try to be like the turtle — at ease in your own shell.
— Bill Copeland

Try to divide your time evenly to keep others happy.

Try to find out who’s doing the work, not who’s writing about it, controlling it, or summarizing it.
— Amrom Katz

Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.
— Amrom Katz

Try to value useful qualities in one who loves you.

Two sure ways to tell a sexy male; the first is, he has a bad memory. I forget the second.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe — the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.
— Immanuel Kant

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do. Except in Boston.

Typesetters always correct intentional errors, but fail to correct unintentional errors.
— Alan Otten

UNMATCHED: Almost as good as the competition

UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES: Experimental techniques of unclear origin having something to do with work tiles. Observing madam in her bath without bringing forth screams.

UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE: Nothing we had before ever worked this way

Uhland’s poetry is like the famous war horse, Bayard; it possesses all possible virtues and only one fault: it is dead.
— Heinrich Heine

Umpire’s dessert — rhubarb pie
— Raymond D. Love

Unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone.
— Shakespeare

Under any system a few sharpies will beat the rest of us.
— Al Goodfather

Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true.

Under current practices, both expenditures and revenues rise to meet each other, no matter which one may be in excess.
— Joe Bolton

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.
— Oscar Levant

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean we are free from obeying them.
— Solomon Short

Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
— Tom Gibb

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
— Shakespeare

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.
— Nicolai Lenin

Unkind words do not enhance business confidence.
— Mark Epernay

Unless you put your money to work for you — you work for your money.
— Joe Miller

Until his own life is at stake, an officer can never know what is going on with his own men.

Until philosophers are kings … cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.
— Plato

Untold suffering seldom is.

Use every man after his deserts, and who shall ‘scape whipping.
— Shakespeare

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
— Henry van Dyke

Usefulness is inversely proportional to reputation for being useful.
— Daniel S. Greenberg

Usurer: A money-lender. He serves you in the present tense; he tends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the subjunctive; and ruins you in the future.
— Addison

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three — and paradise is when you have none.
— Doug Larson

Utopia has banned neurosis — Punishes illegal thought. The people nurse, in static poses, Neurotic fears of being caught.

VIRTUAL MEMORY: Memory that exists in effect, but not in fact; the usage is similar to that of the virtual particle in physics, the difference being that a virtual particle probably does exist but soon won’t, while virtual memory probably doesn’t but soon will.

VOLUNTEER SUBJECT: A college sophomore who, of his or her own free will, is allowed to choose between participating in an experiment or failing a course.

VYARZERZOMANIMORORSEZASSEZANSERAREORSES?

Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellow men. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter.
— L. G. Elliott

Vance’s Rule of 2 1/2: Any military project will take twice as long as planned, cost twice as much, and produce only half of what is wanted.
— Cyrus Vance

Variables won’t, constants aren’t.
— Don Osborn

Vastly improved review and control will result by promoting the most productive engineers to management positions.
— Richard F. Moore

Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself.
— Shakespeare

Venture not to the utmost bounds of even lawful pleasure; the limits of good and evil join.
— Fuller

Vice repeated like the wandering wind, blows dust in others’ eyes.
— Shakespeare

Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us, even in our pains.
— Colton

Victory goes to the candidate with the most accumulated or contributed wealth who has the financial sources to convince the middle class and poor that he will be on their side.
— Mark B. Cohen

Vietnam.
— Spiro Agnew

Villian, thou know’st no law of God or man; No beast so fierce, but knows some touch of pity.
— Shakespeare

Virtue itself often offends when coupled with bad manners.
— Middleton

Volume is a defense to error.
— Richard A. Leahy

Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better.
— Pierre S. du Pont

Votre bateau arriverez.

Wah! Devil machine make numbers come out! With text! In tabular report format! Computers! Bad juju!

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.
— Lazarus Long

Walter Shandy attributed most of his son’s misfortunes to the fact that at a highly critical moment his wife had asked him if he had wound the clock, a question so irrelevant that he despaired of the child’s ever being able to pursue a logical train of thought.
— Laurence Sterne

Want of prudence is too frequently the want of virtue; nor is there on earth a more powerful advocate for vice than poverty?
— Oliver Goldsmith

War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it.
— Benito Mussolini

War destroys men, but luxury mankind At once corrupts the body and the mind.
— Crown

Warning to Lawyers: Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity.
— Charles A. Beardsley

Washington is a much better place if you are asking questions rather than answering them.
— John Dean

Watch out for formal briefings, they often produce an avalanche. (Definition: A high-level snow job of massive and overwhelming proportions.)
— Amrom Katz

Watch the sun come up, breathe fresh air, exercise your body, become a garbage collector!

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Watch your step! You are beginning to act competent.

We … repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purpose.
— Will Durant

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
— Charles Kingsley

We all want our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so that we can’t tolerate.
— William James

We always remember best the irrelevant.

We are Digital Equipment Corporation … and you’re not!!!

We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
— George Eliot

We are all descendants of Adam and we are all products of racial miscegenation.
— Lester B. Pearson

We are citizens of the world: and the tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
— Woodrow Wilson

We are locked into a system of “fouling our own nest,” so long as we behave as independent, rational free-enterprisers.
— Garrett Hardin

We are more heavily taxed by our idleness, pride and folly than we are taxed by government.
— Benjamin Franklin

We are ne’er like angels ’till our passion dies.
— Dekker

We are not primarily on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

We ask advice, but we mean approbation.
— Colton

We can be Knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
— Michel de Montaigne

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
— Kenneth Clark

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
— Wernher von Braun

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
— Edward R. Murrow

We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead.
— James E. Day, Postmaster General

We cannot really be for something we don’t understand.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
— Evelyn Waugh

We find it hard to believe that other people’s thoughts are as silly as our own.
— James Harvey Robinson

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it. (A word to the wise is — unnecessary.)
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We have a degree of delight … in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
— Edmund Burke

We have had the reign of the late Avery Brundage, and now we have had eight years of Killanin, which raises the question of whether being an ass is one of the requirements for the job, or whether the job produces that effect on those who hold it.
— National Review

We have left undone the things we ought to have done, and done the things which we ought not to have done.

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
— George Bernard Shaw

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
— William James

We have watched American democracy at close hand for many years and we believe few governments are institutionally so susceptible to dictatorship as this one.
— Gerald Johnson

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union.
— Rufus Choate

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

We laugh heartily to see a whole flock of sheep jump because one did so; might not one imagine that superior beings do the same by us, and for exactly the same reason?
— Grenville

We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile.

We lie about the truth, that’s what ruins us here. And do you know why we lie about the truth? Not because we like to, but because we are scared to death of it. If we looked the truth in the eye nine out of ten of us would run to the graveyard and demand to be buried at once.
— Babbaluche the cobbler

We may now be nearing the end of our hundred-year belief in Free Lunch.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang in the Smithsonian next January.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

We must be greater than God, for we have to undo His injustice.

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.
— Maxwell Maltz

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
— Alexander Hamilton

We must reform if we would conserve.
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt

We never desire earnestly what we desire in reason.
— La Rochefoucauld

We often boast that we are never bored, yet we are so conceited that we do not perceive how often we bore others.
— La Rochefoucauld

We prefer to speak evil of ourselves than not speak of ourselves at all.

We read to say that we have read.

We see the opening of an era: it is an era of seeking beyond the confines of our atmosphere; may it be also an era of awakening to the countries of earth.
— Bertrand De Jouvenel

We shall find that it is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas than one hole in your coat.
— Colton

We should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves; and we should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God.
— Colton

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence, on pain of liquidation.
— George Bernard Shaw

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
— Mark Twain

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.
— George Bernard Shaw

We should often be ashamed of our very best actions, if the world only saw the motives which caused them.
— La Rochefoucauld

We show our present joking, giggling race, True joy consists in gravity and grace.
— Garrick

We sought the mutant due for lynching, Not a trace was there to find. I told the others — saw them flinching — “The bastard must have read my mind!”

We stand for the maintenance of private property … We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.
— Adolf Hitler

We take cunning for a sinister and crooked wisdom, and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man, not only in point of honesty but in point of ability.
— Bacon

We the Unwilling, lead by the Unknowing, are doing the impossible for the Ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little that we are now qualified to to anything with nothing.

We think we are on the right road to improvement because we are making experiments.
— Benjamin Franklin

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

We use an amalgam of mercury in modern dentistry because other metals, by themselves, are not sufficiently malleable to be worked with at the normal temperatures inside the human mouth. But mercury — mercury is just walkin’ around, right?!?
— Mike the Dentist

We were hungry when we got to Moscow, Soviet.
— Groucho Marx

We will bury you!
— Nikita Kruschev

We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
— Margaret Mead

We’d like to make a deal with the computer. We promise not to fold, spindle or mutilate if it will stop asking us to sign our name over those little holes in the space marked for signature.

We’re all going down the same road in different directions.
— Dave Farber

Weed — a plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Welcome to beautiful downtown Maynard, minicomputer capitol of the world.

Welcome to the jungle. Please obey our laws.

Were I to use the wits the good Spirit gave me, then I would say this lady cannot exist — for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.
— Magnifico Giganticus (aka the Mule)

Were we as eloquent as angels, yet should we please some men and some women much more by listening than by talking.
— Colton

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they’ll see things seriously.
— William K. Zinsser

What I’ve enjoyed most about my climb to the top is all the people I’ve got to step on!

What a man needs in gardening is a cast iron back, with a hinge in it.
— Charles Dudley Warner

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world — the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?
— Shakespeare

What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse!
— Stanislaw J. Lem

What a wonderful world it is that has boys in it!

What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it!

What ardently we wish we soon believe.
— Young

What are fears but voices airy? Whispering harm where harm is not, And deluding the unwary Till the fatal bolt is shot!
— Wordsworth

What are most of the histories of the world, but lies? Lies immortalized and consigned offer as a perpetual abuse and a flaw upon prosperity.
— South

What did you do in Russia before you were shot?
— Groucho Marx

What do you call frogs sauteed in egg and milk? Fried toads.
— Lani Anderson

What does an Englishman’s beer bottle say on the bottom? OPEN OTHER END.

What does an Englishman’s stepladder say at the top? STOP HERE.

What goes in must come back out.
— Van Mizzell, Jr.

What goes in, comes out.
— Richard N. Farmer

What is “Free” to me, but being masterless — and maybe hungry?
— Cullen the Fool

What is a church? Our honest sexton tells, ‘Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells.
— Crabbe

What is ambition? ‘Tis a glorious cheat. Angels of light walk not so dazzlingly the sapphire walls of heaven.
— Willis

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

What is becoming is honest, and whatever is honest must always be becoming.
— Cicero

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for yourself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
— Archibald MacLeish

What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?
— Thomas Carlyle

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
— Henry David Thoreau

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each lov’d one blotted from life’s page, and be alone on earth as I am now.
— Byron

What maintains one vice, would bring up two children. Remember, many a little makes a mickle; and farther, beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
— Benjamin Franklin

What makes resisting temptation difficult, for many people, is that they don’t want to discourage it completely.
— Franklin P. Jones

What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that they think themselves cleverer than we are.

What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman’s silence.
— Michelct

What men learn from history is that men do not learn from history.

What millions died that Ceasar might be great!
— Campbell

What must be noted about the many fallen political celebrities of recent years is that salvation eluded them, though they knew all the people in Washington who are useful to know.
— Daniel S. Greenberg

What must be, shall be; and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.
— Seneca

What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.

What orators lack in depth they make up in length.

What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency.

What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts — not the facts themselves.
— Jerome Cohen

What shall we do to be saved? In politics, establish a constitutional cooperative society or world government. In economics, find working compromises between free enterprise and socialism.
— Arnold Toynbee

What the orators want in depth, they give you in length.
— Montesquieu

What this country needs is a dime that will buy a good five-cent bagel.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.
— John Fischer

What this country really needs is to get out the voters the way it gets out the candidates.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
— George Bernard Shaw

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What you leave at your death, let it be without controversy, else the lawyers will be your heirs.
— Osborne

What you think means more than anything else in your life. More than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you.
— George Adams

What! canst thou say all this and never blush?
— Shakespeare

What! shall this speech be spoke for our excuse? Or shall we on without apology?
— Shakespeare

What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?

What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? … and not worrying?

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?

What’s all the fuss about? The MIRV is in the great American tradition of bombs bursting in air.

What’s all the gaudy glitter of a crown? What but the glaring meteor of ambition, that leads the wretch benighted in his errors, points to the gulf and shines upon destruction?
— Brooke

What’s gone, and what’s past help, should be past grief.
— Shakespeare

What’s good enough for our ancestors is good enough for us.

What’s good politics is bad economics; what’s bad politics is good economics; what’s good economics is bad politics; what’s bad economics is good politics. (Or, more compactly, “What’s good politics is bad economics and vice versa, vice versa.
— Eugene W. Baer

What’s more miserable than discontent?
— Shakespeare

What’s the matter with the world? Why, there ain’t but one thing wrong with every one of us — and that’s “selfishness.”
— Will Rogers

What’s worth doing is worth doing for money.
— Joseph Donahue

What? Me worry?!?

Whatever General Sherman did on his march through Georgia, we are now even.

Whatever creates the greatest inconvenience for the largest number must happen.
— Red Smith

Whatever happens in government could have happened differently and it usually would have been better if it had.
— Prof. Charles Frankel

Whatever isn’t forbidden is required.
— Murray Gell-Mann

Whatever natural right men have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendancy over others.
— Grenville

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of as half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
— Charlotte Whitton

Whatever you want to do, you have to do something else first.
— Art Kosatka

When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.
— Charles Merrill Smith

When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them.

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than she is to me?
— Montaigne

When I see a merchant over-polite to his customer, begging them to take a little brandy, and throwing his goods on the counter, thinks I, that man has an axe to grind.
— Benjamin Franklin

When I take the humor of a thing once, I am like your tailor’s needle — I go through.
— Ben Johnson

When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.
— P. L. Travers

When I was a kid I said to my father one afternoon, “Daddy, will you take me to the zoo?” He answered, “If the zoo wants you let them come and get you.”
— Jerry Lewis

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things — including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up.
— C. S. Lewis

When a customer buys a low-grade article, he feels pleased when he pays for it and displeased every time he uses it. But when he buys a well-made article, he feels extravagant when he pays for it and well pleased every time he uses it.
— Herbert N. Casson

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
— Arthur C. Clarke

When a group of newsmen go out to dinner together, the bill is to be evenly divided among them, regardless of what each one eats and drinks.
— Jack Germond

When a man blames others for his failures, it’s a good idea to credit others with his successes.
— Howard W. Newton

When a man finds not repose in himself it is in vain for him to seek it elsewhere.

When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing, he has one good reason for letting it alone.
— Sir Walter Scott

When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.
— Buddha

When a man is between the devil and the deep blue sea, his fear of drowning generally triumphs.

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
— Thomas a Kempis

When a man is wrong and won’t admit it, he is always angry.
— Haliburton

When a man says, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he’s probably ashamed to have even the devil see what he’s up to.

When a pencil point breaks, the nearest sharpener is exactly 1000 feet away.

When a person says that in the interest of saving time, he will summarize a prepared statement, he will talk only three times as long as if he had read the statement in the first place.
— Alan Otten

When a person stands on his dignity, it’s probably because he has very insecure footing.

When a rechargeable battery starts to die in the middle of a complex calculation, and the user attempts to connect house current, the calculator will clear itself.
— John L. Shelton

When a student actually does a homework problem, the instructor will not ask for it.
— M. M. Johnston

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
— Jonathan Swift

When an action has its intended effect, it also has other, unintended, effects.

When an idea is being pushed because it is “exciting,” “new,” or “innovative” — beware. An exciting, new, innovative idea can also be foolish. (If in doubt, don’t. Or do what is right. Your best question is often, “Why?”)
— Donald Rumsfeld

When are slides are shown in a darkened room, the instructor will require the students to take notes.
— M. M. Johnston

When articles rise the consumer is the first that suffers, and when they fall he is the last that gains.
— Colton

When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, “As much as the living are to the dead.”
— Diogenes Laertius

When can their glory fade? Oh! the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!
— Tennyson

When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
— General Creighton W. Abrams

When fear admits no hope of safety, Necessity makes dastards valiant men.
— Herrick

When forced to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence.
— Thomas Jefferson

When fortune sends a stormy wind, Then show a brave and present mind; And when with too indulgent gales She swells too much, then furl thy sails.
— Creech

When he is best, he is little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little worse than a beast.
— Shakespeare

When in doubt, get it out.
— Jody Powell

When in panic or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
— Dorable

When it comes to all-out war you use all the troops you have.

When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.
— Lord Falkland

When it was seen that many of the wicked seemed quite untroubled by evil consciences … then the idea of future suffering was advanced.

When it’s not needed, zoning works fine; when it is essential, it always breaks down.
— John McClaughry

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
— Charles Reade

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they are merely making a sacrifice to God of the Devil’s leavings.
— Jonathan Swift

When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.
— Calvin Coolidge

When once infidelity can persuade men that they shall die like beasts, they will soon be brought to live like beasts also.
— South

When one considers just what man is, Happy it be that short his span is.
— James Cagney

When one has an early class, one’s roommate will invariable enter the space late at night and suddenly become hyperactive, ill, violent, or all three.

When one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them?
— W. H. Auden

When one is truing to be elegant and sophisticated, one won’t.
— Betty Hartig

When other people take a long time to do something, they’re slow; when we take a long time, we’re thorough. When they don’t do something, they’re lazy; when we don’t, we’re too busy. When they succeed, they’re lucky; when we do, we deserve it.

When our friends get into power, they aren’t our friends anymore.
— M. Stanton Evans

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
— Eric Hoffer

When people are starving, life is no longer meaningless.
— John Gardner

When people have a job to do, particularly a vital but difficult one, they will invariably put it off until the last possible moment, and most of them will put it off even longer.
— Gordon L. Becker

When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window.

When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you’re away and get nothing done, there’s another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done.
— Daniel B. Luten

When prosperity comes, it’s best not to use all of it.

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus …

When several reporters share a cab on assignment, the reporter in the front seat pays for all.
— Warren Weaver

When singleness is bliss, it’s folly to be wives.
— Bill Councelman

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
— G. K. Chesterton

When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have any recourse to any other.
— Michael Uhlmann

When the blossom grows white the potatoes are good.

When the fox gnaws — smile!

When the government talks about “raising capital” it means printing it. That’s not very creative, but it’s what we’re going to do.
— Peter Drucker

When the issue is simple, and everyone understands it, debate is interminable.
— Robert Knowles

When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both are against you, call the other lawyer names.

When the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists, and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion — the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, right.
— Isaac Asimov

When the need arises — and it does — you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don’t farm it out — that doesn’t make it nicer, it makes it worse.
— Lazarus Long

When the plane you are on is late, the plane you want to transfer to is on time.

When the polls are in your favor, flaunt them.

When the polls are overwhelmingly unfavorable, (a) ridicule and dismiss them or (b) stress the volatility of public opinion.

When the polls are slightly unfavorable, play for sympathy as a struggling underdog.

When the polls are too close to call, be surprised at your own strength.

When the product is destined to fail, the delivery system will perform perfectly.
— Charles P. Boyle

When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics.
— Voltaire

When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.
— Tacitus

When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly.
— Donald Douglas

When the well is dry, we know the worth of oil.
— Poor Jimmy’s Almanac

When the wind is great, bow before it; when the wind is heavy, yield to it.

When there are two conflicting versions of a story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.
— Avery

When there is a very long road upon which there is a one-way bridge placed at random and there are two cars only on that road, it follows that: (1) the two cars are going in opposite directions and (2) they will always meet at the bridge.
— B. D. Firstbrook

When they said Canada, I thought it would be up in the mountains somewhere.
— Marilyn Monroe

When they want it bad (in a rush), they get it bad.
— John K. Meskimen

When things are going well, someone will experiment detrimentally.
— Charles P. Boyle

When things go wrong somewhere, they’re apt to go wrong everywhere.
— Vermont Royster

When traveling with children on one’s holidays, at least one child of any number of children will request a rest room stop exactly half way between any two given rest rooms.
— Mervyn Cripps

When two goats met on a bridge which was to narrow to allow either to pass or return, the goat which lay down that the other might walk over it was a finer gentleman than Lord Chesterfield.
— Cecil

When two people meet to decide how to spend a third person’s money, fraud will result.
— Herman Gross

When voting on appropriations bills, more is not necessarily better. It is as wasteful to have a B-1 bomber in every garage as it is to have a welfare program for every conceivable form of deprivation.
— Pierre S. du Pont

When we are right we can afford to keep our tempers. When we are wrong, we can’t afford not to.

When we call others dogmatic, what we really object to is their holding dogmas that are different from our own.
— Professor Charles P. Issawi

When we cannot act as we wish, we must act as we can.
— Terrence

When wool sweaters are worn, classroom temperatures are 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
— M. M. Johnston

When working toward the solution of a problem it always helps if you know the answer (provided, of course, you know there is a problem).

When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.
— Amrom Katz

When you are right be logical, when you are wrong be-fuddle.
— Gerard E. McKenna

When you are sure you’re right, you have a moral duty to impose your will upon anyone who disagrees with you.
— Robert W. Mayer

When you arrive at your campsite, it is full.
— Milt Barber

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized.

When you don’t know what to do, walk fast and look worried.

When you doubt, abstain.
— Zoroaster

When you find that flowers and shrubs will not endure a certain atmosphere, it is a very significant hint to the human creature to remove out of that neighborhood.
— Mayhew

When you go out to buy, don’t show your silver.

When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.

When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don’t know the answer either.
— Edgar R. Fiedler

When you need towns, they are very far apart.
— John Steinbeck

When you opponent is down, kick him.
— John Cameron

When you’re out of slits, you’re out of pier.

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to keep your mind on the fact that your primary objective is to drain the swamp.

Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
— H. L. Mencken

Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards on B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
— James J. Kirkpatrick

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.

Whenever in time, and wherever in the universe, any man speaks or writes in any detail about the technical management of a poem, the resulting irascibility of the reader’s response is a constant.
— Francis P. Chisholm

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.
— Bertrand Russell

Whenever one word or letter can change the entire meaning of a sentence, the probability of an error being made will be in direct proportion to the embarrassment it will cause.
— Bob Considine

Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors it is lost.
— Nikolai Lenin

Whenever two hypotheses cover the facts, use the simpler of the two.

Where are the calculations that go with the calculated risk?
— Amrom Katz

Where have you ever found that man who stopped short after the perpetration of a single crime?
— Juvenal

Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.
— Gray

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

Where love is there is no labor; and if there be labor, that labor is loved.
— Austin

Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.
— Johnson

Where no hope is left, is left no fear.
— Milton

Where possible, preserve the President’s options — he will very likely need them.
— Donald Rumsfeld

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.
— Lavater

Where true love has found a home, every new heart forms one more ring around the hearts of those who love each other, so that in the end they cannot live apart.
— Julius Stinde

Where would a shellfish sue for damages? In a small clams court.
— Oliver M. Neshamkin

Where you stand depends upon where you sit.
— Rufus Miles

Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords other men is a matter of tolerance.
— Walter Lippmann

Whereas in many branches of economic activity employment depends on the number of job openings available, in the public service, as also in the advertising business, social science investigation, and university administration, the level of unemployment regularly depends on the number of men available and devoting their time to the creation of job opportunities.

Whereas in the past the only resource for dealing with biological systems was to try to minimize the interactions between the parts, thereby often losing the real focus of interest, today nothing but time and money prevent us from treating real biological systems in all their complexity and richness.
— W. Ross Ashby

Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or mine, there is a fairy-land.
— Kingsley

Wherever public spirit prevails, liberty is secure.
— Noah Webster

Whether he is his brother’s keeper or his keeper’s brother.
— Evan Esar

While bryographic plants are typically encountered in substrata of earthly or mineral matter in concreted state, discrete substrata elements occasionally display a roughly spherical configuration which, in presence of suitable gravitational and other effects, lends itself to combined translatory and rotational motion. One notices in such cases an absence of the otherwise typical accretion of bryophyta. We therefore conclude that a rolling stone gathers no moss.

While human capacities to shape the environment, society, and human beings are rapidly increasing, policymaking capabilities to use those capacities remain the same.
— Yehezkel Dror

While the State exists, there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there is no State.
— Nikolai Lenin

While the difficulties and dangers of problems tend to increase at a geometric rate, the knowledge and manpower qualified to deal with these problems tend to increase at an arithmetic rate.
— Yehezkel Dror

Whilst thou livest keep a good tongue in thy head.
— Shakespeare

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
— Marlowe

Who fears t’ offend takes the first step to please.
— Cibber

Who loves, raves — ’tis youth’s phrenzy; but the cure Is bitterer still.
— Byron

Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.
— Lavater

Who purposely cheats his friend, would cheat his God.
— Lavater

Who said things would get better.
— John Ehrman

Who says I am not under the special protection of God?
— Adolf Hitler

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And sound casuists doubt like you and me?
— Alexander Pope

Who shall guard the guardians themselves?

Who soars too near the sun, with golden wings, melts them; to ruin his own fortune brings.
— Shakespeare

Who stole the cork from my breakfast?
— W. C. Fields

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.
— Horace

Wholly without foundation, informed sources insist, are rumors that John Anderson will announce a running-mate just as soon as he receives a confidential medical advisory on the feasibility of his being cloned.
— National Review

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and, consequently the world itself.
— Sir Walter Raliegh

Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
— Matthew V, 39

Why You Can’t Run When There’s Trouble in the Office: No matter where you stand, no matter how far or fast you flee, when it hits the fan, as much as possible will be propelled in your direction, and almost none will be returned to the source.
— John L. Shelton

Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility?

Why do five pins seem like a little, but five elephants seem like a lot?

Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?

Why don’t somebody print the truth about our present economic condition? We spent years of wild buying on credit, everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not, and now we are having to pay for it, howling like a pet coon. This would be a great world to dance in if we didn’t have to pay the fiddler.
— Will Rogers

Why don’t you slip into something more comfortable? Like thumbscrews.

Why don’t you try slipping on a pair of water moccasins?

Why dost thou court that baneful pest, ambition?
— Potter

Why should I feel another man’s mistakes more than his sickness or poverty?

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?
— Erich Fromm

Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
— Ronald Reagan

Why shouldn’t the American people take half my money from me? I took all of it from them.

Why would we have different races if God meant us to be alike and associate with each other?
— Lester Maddox

Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.
— Aristotle

Wickedness may prosper for a awhile, but in the long run, he that sets all knaves at work will pay them.
— L’Estrange

Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense and every heart is joy.
— Thomson

Wife who put husband in doghouse soon find him in cathouse.

Win her with gifts, if she respect not words; Dumb jewels often, in their silent kind, More quick than words do move a woman’s mind.
— Shakespeare

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend, and then an enemy.
— Fielding

Winged time glides on insensibly, and deceives us; and there is nothing more fleeting than years.
— Ovid

Wisdom and knowledge decrease in inverse proportion to age.
— William J. Lynott

Wisdom is considered a sign of weakness by the powerful because a wise man can lead without power but only a powerful man can lead without wisdom.
— Mark B. Cohen

Wisdom is meaningless until our own experience has given it meaning … and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.
— Bergen Evans

Wise people learn to tolerate only productive anxiety in themselves. They make tension work for them instead of against them. Their aggressiveness is outgoing and initiating, not hostile or arrogant.

Wit is cultured insolence.
— Aristotle

Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education.
— William Hazlitt

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
— William Hazlitt

Wit lies in the likeness of things that are different, and in the difference of things that are alike.
— Madame de Stael

Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity. (In other words, to step on a man’s toes without spoiling his shoeshine.)
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

With clothes the new are best, with friends the old are best.

With equal pace, impartial fate, Knocks at the palace and the cottage gate.
— Horace

With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief.
— Washington Irving

With rank goeth privileges — so it ever shall be. But also with it go responsibility and obligations, always more onerous than the privileges are pleasant.
— Robert A. Heinlein

With the press, it is safest to assume that there is no “off the record.”
— Donald Rumsfeld

Within the oyster’s shell uncouth The purest pearl may hide, Trust me you’ll find a heart of truth Within that rough inside.
— Mrs. Osgood

Without fools there would be no wisdom.

Without freedom, no one really has a name.
— Milton Acorda

Women and asses and nuts require strong hands.

Women have more strength in their looks than we have in our laws, and more power by their tears than we have by our arguments.
— Saville

Women who want equality must be prepared to give it and believe in it, and in order to do that it is not enough to state that you are as good as any man, but also it must be stated he is as good as you and both will be humans together.
— Anne Roiphe

Words are men’s daughters, but God’s sons are things.
— Johnson

Words are the voice of the heart.

Words must be weighed, not counted.

Words with a ‘k’ in them are funny. If it doesn’t have a ‘k’, it’s not funny.
— Willie Clark

Work Rule: After an employee has spent his 13 hours of labor in the office, he should spend the remaining time reading the Bible and other good books.

Work Rule: Any employee who smokes Spanish cigars, uses liquor in any form, or frequents pool and public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop, will give me good reasons to suspect his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty.

Work Rule: Death (Other Than Your Own) — This is no excuse. If you can arrange for funeral services to be held late in the afternoon, however, we can let you off an hour early, provided all you work is up to date.

Work Rule: Each clerk will bring in a bucket of water and scuttle of coal for the day’s business.

Work Rule: Each day fill lamps, clean chimneys, and trim wicks. Wash the windows once a week.

Work Rule: Entirely too much time is being spent in the washrooms. In the future, you will follow the practice of going in alphabetical order. For instance, those whose surnames begin with “A” will be allowed to go from 9 – 9:05 AM, and so on. If you are unable to go at your appointed time, it will be necessary to wait until the next day when your time comes around again.

Work Rule: Every employee should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years, so that he will not become a burden on society or his betters.

Work Rule: Leave of Absence (for an Operation) — We are no longer allowing this practice. We wish to discourage any thoughts that you may not need all of whatever you have, and you should not consider having anything removed. We hired you as you are, and to have anything removed would certainly make you less than we bargained for.

Work Rule: Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to your individual taste.

Work Rule: Men employees will be given off one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go regularly to church.

Work Rule: Office employees will daily sweep the floors, dust the furniture, shelves, and showcases.

Work Rule: Sickness — No excuses will be acceptable. We will no longer accept your doctor’s statement as proof of illness, as we believe that if you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to come to work.

Work Rule: The employee who has performed his labors faithfully and without a fault for five years, will be given an increase of five cents per day in his pay, providing profits from the business permit it.

Work Rule: This office will open at 7 AM and close at 8 PM except on the Sabbath, on which day we will remain closed. Each employee is expected to spend the Sabbath by attending church and contributing liberally to the cause of the Lord.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
— Samuel Clemens

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
— Laurence J. Peter

Work is of two kinds: (1) Altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter; (2) Telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and high paid.

Works of genius are the first things in the world.

Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid.
— Feltham

World’s shortest ghost story: The last man on earth sat down in his room. Suddenly there was a knock on the door!

Worriers spend a lot of time shoveling smoke.
— Claude McDonald

Worth seeing? Yes, but not worth going to see.

Writers desire to be paid, authors desire recognition.
— James L. Davis

Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history or truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding.
— Lady Montague

Writers, composers, entertainers and such know an awful truth: it is easier to please a million people you don’t know than to please one person you do know.
— Richard J. Needham

Writing code is easy: just get it write the first time!

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down and write it as it occurs to you. The writing is easy — it’s the occurring that’s hard.
— Stephen Leacock

Xerox: A trademark for a photocopying device that can make rapid reproductions of human error, perfectly.
— Merle L. Meacham

YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT: Finally got one that worked

Ya gotta be subtle!
— Mike Hammer

Yeccchhh! That must be a face, it has ears!

Yesterday I was on a guilt trip … today I’m on an ego trip.

Yet I argue not Against heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward.
— Milton

Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.
— Lazarus Long

Yippies, hippies, yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike — I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
— Spiro Agnew

You amass things only to enjoy them.

You are a bundle of energy always on the go.

You are a pioneer type and hold most people in contempt.

You are a quick and intelligent thinker.

You are almost there.

You are always busy.

You are aware that merit is not always rewarded.

You are building up credit for the future.

You are capable of planning your future.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion. Fortunately, the rest of us are entitled to ignore it.

You are conservative and afraid of taking risks.

You are deeply attached to your friends and acquaintances.

You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend.

You are fair-minded, just and loving.

You are far-sighted, a good planner, an ardent lover, and a faithful friend.

You are free and that is why you are lost.
— Franz Kafka

You are going to have a new love affair (with a rock).

You are going to have a new love affair.

You are heading for a land of sunshine.

But you’re not all there.

You are inclined to be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes repeatedly.

You are logical and hate disorder.

You are magnetic in your bearing.

You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face.
— Shakespeare

You are nuts.

You are optimistic and intelligent.

You are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice.

You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward.

You are secretive in your dealings but never to the extent of trickery.

You are sensitive to the atmosphere around you.

You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted.

You are standing on my toes.

You are strong enough to admit that you need help.

You are such a good salesman, you could sell a double bed to the Pope.

You are sympathetic and understanding to other people’s problems. They think you are a sucker.

You are tricky, but never to the point of dishonesty.

You believe that you are the master of your fate; the captain of your soul.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice; if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears or kindness that could kill; I will choose a path that’s clear: I will choose free will.
— Rush

You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with earth is concerned.

You can fool all of the people all of the time, but why bother when all you need is a simple majority?

You can fool the people about many things, but only a fool would be foolish enough to fool the people about money.
— Italo Bombolini

You can get anywhere in ten minutes if you go fast enough.

You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Never count on having both at once.

You can judge a leader by the size of the problems he tackles — people nearly always pick a problem their own size, and ignore or leave to others the bigger of smaller ones.
— Anthony Jay

You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back you’ve got something.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
— Dorothy Parker

You can lead a whore to Vasser, but you can’t make her think.
— Frederick B. Artz

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
— Franklin P. Jones

You can never do merely one thing.
— Garrett Hardin

You can observe a lot just by watching.
— Yogi Berra

You can only get three fingers in a bowling ball.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.
— Victor Cousin

You can tell when you’re on the right track — it’s usually uphill.

You can’t break even.

You can’t even quit the game.

You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.
— Flip Wilson

You can’t guard against the arbitrary.

You can’t tell how deep a puddle is until you step into it.

You can’t trust a man who won’t shave himself on his own hangover.

You can’t win.

You cannot antagonize and persuade at the same time.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.

You cannot discover working programs. You can only discover them broken.

You cannot establish sound social security on borrowed money.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

You cannot help small men up by tearing down big men.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

You cannot lift the wage-earner up by pulling the wage-payer down.

You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.

You compensate for your prejudices when making decisions.

You compromise on what you shouldn’t and fight for things not worth fighting for.

You consider yourself a born leader. Others think of you as pushy.

You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy.

You don’t drink beer. You rent it.

You don’t learn anything the second time you’re kicked by a mule.

You don’t need to fly to have more fun with wings.
— Joe Anderson

You enjoy the company of other people.

You feel strong enough to be gentle.

You freely express resentment at bad treatment. Then you forget it.

You get the most of what you need the least.
— Jane Bryant Quinn

You goddamn cornhuskers are all alike.
— Jim Thompson

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh — at yourself.

You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music.

You have a difficult time coping with reality.

You have a healthy appreciation of your abilities, and a keen awareness of your limitations.

You have a reckless tendency to rely on luck since you lack talent.

You have a reputation for being thoroughly reliable and trustworthy.

You have a reputation for being thoroughly unreliable and untrustworthy.

You have a strong appeal for members of the opposite sex.

You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first.

You have a truly strong individuality.

You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA and FBI.

You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA and FBI. (You are!)

You have a will that can be influenced by all with whom you come in contact.

You have an ability to sense and know higher truth.

You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself.

You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive.

You have unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly.

You have an unusual understanding of the problems of human relationship.

You have been selected for a secret mission.

You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business.

You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop.

You have many dear and loyal friends.

You have many friends and very few enemies.

You have minor influence over your associates and people resent you for flaunting your powers.

You have more respect for a capable shoeshine boy, than for a crass opportunist.

You have no friends among the ambitious.
— Ron Randall

You have the body of a 19 year old. Please return it before it gets wrinkled.

You have the power to influence all with whom you come in contact.

You have to be as fully prepared for the dull game as you are for the great game, or else you won’t be prepared for the great one.
— Red Barber

You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, “That man is a Red!” … You never hear a REAL American talk like that!
— Mayor Frank Hague

You judge others only by how well they live up to their own capacities.

You judge the acts of others only by their intentions.

You judge your own acts only by their consequences.

You keep your equilibrium no matter what position you find yourself in.

You know that people will be kind to you, given a chance.

You know what to fight for and what to compromise on.

You know when the price of winning is too high.

You know you’re paranoid when you can’t think of anything that’s your fault.
— Robert Hutchins

You lack confidence and are generally a coward.

You learn from your mistakes.

You left your footprints on my stomach when you walked out of my heart.

You like to form new friendships and make new acquaintances.

You live and learn. Or you don’t live long.

You love peace.

You love your home and want it to be beautiful.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a “realist,” he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
— Sydney Harris

You may not be able to change the whole world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
— Katha Pollitt

You need not worry about your future.

You never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems.

You never know where bottom is until you plumb for it.
— Frederick Laing

You own a dog; you feed a cat.

You plan things that you do not even attempt because of your extreme caution.

You prefer the company of the opposite sex, but are well liked by your own.

You recoil from the crude; you tend naturally toward the exquisite.

You respect those superior to yourself and try to learn from them.

You say it can’t be won The way the game is run; But if you choose to stay You wind up playin’ anyway.
— Jackson Browne

You seek to shield those you love and you like the role of the provider.

You shall be rewarded for a dastardly deed.

You shall reach the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics.

You think it is a want of judgment that he changes his opinion. Do you think it a proof that your scales are bad because they vibrate with every additional weight that is added to either side?
— Edgeworth

You try never to hurt people, and do so only when it serves a higher purpose.

You will always have good luck in your personal affairs.

You will be aided greatly by a person whom you thought to be unimportant.

You will be awarded a medal for disregarding safety in saving someone.

You will be awarded some great honor.

You will be called upon to help a friend in trouble.

You will be given a post of trust and responsibility.

You will be honored for contributing your time and skill to a worthy cause.

You will be married within a year.

You will be recognized and honored as a community leader.

You will be shot at sunrise.

You will be singled out for promotion in your work.

You will be successful in love.

You will be surprised by a loud noise.

You will be surrounded by luxury.

You will be traveling and coming into a fortune.

You will emerge from the gutter, only to trip and land in the sewer.

You will engage in a profitable business activity.

You will gain money by a speculation or lottery.

You will have good luck and overcome many hardships.

You will have long and healthy life.

You will hear good news from one you thought unfriendly to you.

You will inherit some money or a small piece of land.

You will meet an important person who will help you advance professionally.

You will need three umbrellas: one to leave at the office, one to leave at home, and one to leave on the train.
— James L. Blankenship

You will never know hunger.

You will overcome the attacks of jealous associates.

You will probably marry after a very brief courtship.

You will receive a legacy which will place you above want.

You will soon meet a person who will play an important role in your life.

You will step on the soil of many countries.

You will triumph over your enemy.

You will win success in whatever calling you adopt.

You win a few, you lose a few. But I wish this one had been rained out.

You would rather be admired than liked, although you would prefer both.

You would rather blame yourself than others, but you don’t waste much time doing either when things go wrong.

You’ll find in no park or city A monument to a committee.
— Victoria Pasternak

You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
— Dean Martin

You’re not my type. For that matter, you’re not even my species!!!

Your If is the only peace-maker — much virtue in If.
— Shakespeare

Your aims are high, and you are capable of much.

Your business will assume vast proportions.

Your dentist will buy a yacht.

Your depth of comprehension may tend to make you lax in worldly ways.

Your domestic life may be harmonious.

Your gift is princely, but it comes too late, And falls like sunbeams on a blasted blossom.
— Suckling

Your happiness is intertwined with your outlook on life.

Your heart is pure, and your mind clear, and your soul devout.

Your love life will be happy and harmonious.

Your lover will never wish to leave you.

Your mental health will be better if you have lots of fun outside of that office.
— Dr. William Menninger

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart, what is true.

Your mode of life will be changed for the better because of good news soon.

Your mode of life will be changed for the better because of new developments.