Quotations

Végre nem butulok tovább (Finally I am becoming stupider no more)
- Paul Erdös (epitaph he wrote for himself)

Everything is your fault if you're any damn good.
- Ernest Hemingway

When you're finished changing, you're finished.
- Benjamin Franklin

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
- Lou or Jim Whitaker

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is neat, simple and wrong.
- H. L. Mencken

Be the water (not the rock).
- Chainsaw Bob

What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards? :-).
- Larry Wall

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!.
- Calvin

You know, by the time you get done with all this, the "Swiss Army Chainsaw" is going to be more like a Swiss Army Tactical Nuke.... :-).
- Brandon Allbery

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.
- Lance Morrow

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
- Wyndham Lewis

The life of the creative man is lead, directed, and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
- Saul Steinberg

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.
- Katharine Hepburn

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.
- James Ling

Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough.
- Anton Chekhov

Excerpt from a conversation between a customer support person and a customer working for a well-known military-affiliated research lab:
Support: "You're not our only customer, you know."
Customer: "But we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
- Lily Tomlin

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olsen (founder of DEC), 1977

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
- Pablo Picasso

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
- A. A. Milne

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
- James Watson

May you live all the days of your life.
- Jonathan Swift

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
- Walter Lippmann

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
- Thomas Alva Edison

When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.
- Bill Gates in New York Times 5 Jan 2001

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- Immanuel Kant

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
- Nicolas Machiavelli

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
- William James

Comfort the troubled; trouble the comfortable.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.
- Larry Wall

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)
- Larry Wall

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other have nothing to say and keep on saying it
- Robert Frost

Well done is better than well said.
- Benjamin Franklin

The goal of man should not be just to meet the standard, but to keep setting a higher one.
- Anonymous

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
- Stewart Brand

To infinity - and beyond!
- Buzz Lightyear

Fries for us are a journey.
- Tulin Tuzel, Burger King's head of product development

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't.
- Martin Fowler, The New Methodology

For myself I am an optimist-it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
- Winston Churchill

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
- Margaret Millar

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
- William James

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with.
- Steven R. Allen

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
- Bertrand Russell

Kites rise highest against the wind---not with it.
- Winston Churchill

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true science. He who knows it not, and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead. We all had this priceless talent when we were young. But as time goes by, many of us lose it. The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement. It is the essence of his being.
- Hans Selye (1907-1982)

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
- Konrad Lorenz

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
- Indiana Jones

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
- Oscar Levant

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
- Niels Bohr

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
- Wilson Mizner

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
- Seneca

If someone says 'can't', that shows you what to do.
- John Cage

If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough.
- Mario Andretti

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
- Walter Bagehot

Nature can be unforgiving. You are flying along nicely. The fuel system clogs. The engine quits. The pilot is forced to make a belly landing in the snow. You wake up and crawl from the wreckage, nose to nose with a polar bear. In 15 minutes you go from 'everything's fine' to 'dinner time.' When TSHTF, nature does not care who you are or how many credit cards you have.
- James Baloun

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.
- Maurice Maeterlink

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
- Grace Hopper

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.
- Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
- Peter de Vries

Life is not for show, but for real.
- Morton Kondracke

Sometimes a fast smack does fix the problem, you know. We treat our machines as if they are persons. We talk to them, we name them, we even sometimes plead with and try to cajole the little god inside each machine. And when the little god turns out to be evil we beat the machine to purge the demon.
- A retired psychology professor from Budapest quoted at Wired.com 5 Jun 2001

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
- Dr. Seuss

I've found my niche. If you're wondering why I'm not there, there was this little hole at the bottom.
- John Croll

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

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

When they want it bad (in a rush), they get it bad.
- John K. Meskimen

Votre Bateau Arriverez.
- Anonymous

If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it.
- Arthur Kasspe

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
- Eden Phillpots

Defer not until tomorrow to be wise; tomorrow's sun to thee may never rise.
- Congreve

Home is not so much where the heart is, as where you understand the sonsabitches.
- Unknown

The most damaging phrase in the language is: `It's always been done that way.'
- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting.
- Stephen Covey, First Things First

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
- John Maynard Keynes

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
- Alexis de Toqueville

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
- Philip K. Dick

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
- Mark Twain

Never mistake motion for action.
- Ernest Hemingway

Hell, there are no rules here we're trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
- Richard Feynman

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
- Henry Ford

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing gets lost.
- Henry James

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden

Quotations

Quotation Links

The Promethean Quotation Collage (formerly The Curmudgeon Quotelist)

Roger Smith's Collection of Humorous Quotes and One-liners

Fishing-related quotations

Whisky-related quotations