- Montaigne
"There are two kinds of people in this world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig."
"I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse."
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free. "
"Forget about World Peace . . . Visualize Using Your Turn Signal!"
"Telnet, yay."
"I'm afraid the holodeck will be society's last invention."
"Everyone is in the best seat."
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
"Put it back in the horse!"
"If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs."
"Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer."
"Without beer I am nothing."
"I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice."
"Go to it, and good luck."
"One more drink and I'll be under the host."
"Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes."
"It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you're off the ground."
"It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis."
"Life is a series of moments, to live each one is to succeed."
"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing."
"Genius is eternal patience."
"He who has a why can endure any how."
"There are no laurels."
"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..."
"Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive."
"I don't think we sounded like ass. I thought we sounded pretty good. Not the Harlem Boys Choir, but not ass."
"Nice guy, but how did his name end up here? Somehow, I just can't picture him throwing a Christmas tree off of a balcony."
"I'd like to go to Tucson, we deserve Tucson. I deserve Tucson. They'll probably put someone down there who doesn't like Mexican food, won't go in the sun or lust after the beautiful babes. If anybody deserves Tucson it's me."
"I know the Virginia players are smart because you need a 1500 SAT to get in. I have to drop bread crumbs to get our players to and from class"
"If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses."
"The case for democracy is not esthetic."
"I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them."
"The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? ...Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills."
"God is an American."
"Crime rates are falling, so Clinton proposed spending $1.3 billion on 50,000 more police officers. America is at peace, so Clinton proposed spending $110 billion more on the military. The stock market is booming, so Clinton proposed spending another $2.7 trillion to prop up the government's bankrupt pension program, Social Security. The welfare rolls have been cut in half, so Clinton proposed spending another $1 billion on welfare-to-work programs. Apparently, there is no news so good that it doesn't necessitate more federal spending, more federal programs, and more federal laws."
"If a President of the United States ever lied to the American people he should resign."
"The White House denies the charge [of rape], but so what? I would expect nothing else. Anyway, we're not talking George Washington here. With Clinton, if there's a cherry tree down, we know who did it."
"I'd have personally given Bill Clinton a blowjob to keep Bob Rubin at Treasury."
"And by the way, I would not only reappoint Greenspan; if Greenspan would happen to die, God forbid, I would do like they did in the movie 'Weekend at Bernie's.' I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him."
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. May your chains set lightly upon you. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
"THIS IS A COOL HOLIDAY. It's the day we celebrate overthrowing the government."
"To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state."
"We design weapons, not for the bad guys, but for the good guys. The problem is, you can't design a product and insure who is going to get it. If we could design a gun for the bad guy, they would all shoot backward."
"The ability to put two rounds into the same hole from 25 meters."
"The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed."
"You should always carry a gun. Not to shoot yourself, but to know that you're always making a choice."
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
"Love is giving something you haven't got to someone who doesn't exist."
"His body was warmer than any I'd ever touched, and for a minute I had a feeling, like he was a person."
"I thought I told you to wait in the car."
"If equal affection cannot be
Let the more loving one be me."
"Girls you've got to know
When it's time to turn the page
When you're only wet
Because of the rain."
"...it's like death to say goodbye to someone you love."
"Hey, Baby! Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: You."
"It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself."
"Fate–made to fade
Passion's over-rated, anyway
Say–say my name
I need a little love to ease the pain."
"All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction."
"Eagerness is a good supplement to ability, not a good substitute for it (unless you're talking about sex–some things can be teach-as-you-go)."
"It's easy to get laid when you're famous; the trick is getting laid when you're not famous."
"In fact... it's almost easier to get famous than it is to get laid when you're not famous."
"Supermodels on my D
1,2,3
He said, '2 for you, and 2 for me'...
I got supermodels on my D"
"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."
"Don'tcha just love it when you wake up at 11:30, go to the corner, do the frisbee golf thing, check email while waiting for free food for lunch/dinner. Today has been great!!! Now all I need is a hummer."
"I have seen all things that are done under the sun. And behold, all is vanity and chase after the wind."
"We are so vain that we even care for the opinions of those we don't care for."
"I don't mind being miserable as long as I'm painting well."
"I don't like writing. I like having written."
"The most important quality any piece of writing can have is doneness."
"First of all, take the damn TV and stick it in the corner of the garage and put duct tape over it. Writers write for TV, they don't watch it themselves."
"These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories."
"[David Foster Wallace] makes the rest of us feel hollow for being so unoriginal in our writing and in our lives."
"Six thousand years ago sitting around a campfire a storyteller could have stopped at any time and asked his audience how they wanted the story to come out. But he didn't because that would have ruined the story."
"When life feels generic, it is often for the most literal reason: We were trained to filter everything in terms of genre."
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
"The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks."
"Nihilistic mystics
Apostolic alcoholics
Messianic manics
Cataclysmic and prolific
In the age of super-boredom
Hype and mediocrity
Celebrate relentlessness
Menace to society"
"Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don't ya see how late they're reactin'?
They only come, they come when they wanna
So bring the morgue truck, to embalm the goner
They don't care, 'cause they stay paid anyway
If your life is on the line, then you're dead today."
"You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists."
"Hi, this is Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five. When I'm not popping a cap in some motherfucker's ass, or chilling with my niggaz, I listen to WBER FM 90.5."
"I think you're all completely mad, and thank you very much."
The Law of Software Envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
"We don't know. Nobody's ever hooked them up before."
"You give us your corporate strategy documents and your billing records, and we'll give you dancing beans on your screen."
"Got crypto?"
"No matter how careful you are, your scripts will contain errors. In this section, you learn how to hide them."
"It is easier to get started with Windows NT than Unix, but Unix scales all the way from cheap 386 hardware (that cannot run NT) up to supercomputers (which also cannot run NT)."
"Note that you haven't seen the setHeader() method before. It can be used to, well, set a header."
"Technically, we don't push anything. We do user un-aided pull."
"I don't need to crack /etc/passwd, because I just modified su not to prompt me."
"Oh, but it's only gotten worse with time! I've had arguments over whether cell colors override background colors, about being responsible for people knowing how to properly quote strings to be inserted into databases, I've become the ODBC Advisory Council, I've even been bitten by a bird."
"God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh–but that was only because he didn't have an installed base."
"There is a lot to be said about working in an industry overwhelmingly populated by pleasant and optimistic young people. You just don't want them mapping out worst-case scenarios for you."
"Remember, these are companies that are public, losing money, and growing at more than 100 percent in an industry with no history. It's a matter of learning how to keep the plane from coming apart in the air."
"I'd rather be right here and now."
"Most places in the country face cooler temperatures and, sometimes, snow and ice. Here, in sunny California, we have sunshine and palm trees all year long. This problem has you celebrate that fact by drawing the following palm tree."
"Make money. Make as much as you can, however you can, as fast as you can. Create not for sake of creation but for the sake of the initial public offering. Get in on the ground floor. Look out for No. 1. Take shares over salary. Carpe diem and carpe the other guy's diem too, when he's not looking."
"A few weeks before an IPO, the underwriters decide on a range for the first trade, usually a couple of bucks wide. Nobody really knows how these things are chosen–outstanding shares and buzz aside–but my guess is that there's someone on Wall Street with a very special ass, and he spends his day pulling numbers out of it."
"The belt tightening has already started to strangle some major players–and don't ask what they were doing down there."
"The staff is much more rambunctious than the dogs, and they shed more hair, too. We got rid of the ferrets, though. We did that for two reasons. One, they ran up people's legs and bit them. Plus, the governor of the state of California signed a bill saying ferrets were legal, so they became boring."
"Bomb Squad...if you see me running, try to keep up."
"Check your 'constitution.' Canada may or may not be an economic colony of the US, but it's definitely a colony of the UK. When you strap on a pair and kick the redcoats out, you might get a little respect."
"But betting the way he did turns out to be a little like Russian roulette: the odds of winning are very good, but you can't play again if you lose."
"When the tide goes out, you can see who has been swimming naked."
"God was my copilot but we crashed in the mountains and I ate him."
"Sanity isn't free."
"The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium."
"Monkeys are always funny. If you can't make them chuckle with a monkey, get out of the business."
"...reminds everyone that while the Dead only knew 4 chords, they knew them well"
The First Law of Holes: "When in one, stop digging."
"As a newcomer, you might have to learn through bear-pit training. When you're in the bear pit, you either learn to train bears or you don't."
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal."
"When an answer moves beyond difficult to completely impossible, it becomes easy once again."
"Do What You Gotta Do, Motherfucker, Just Leave Me out of It, OK, Motherfucker?"
"You got a better hole, you go to it."
"The Railgun does pass through players, and will kill as many people as you can line up."
"What this world needs is a good five-dollar plasma weapon."
"Bring Mops."
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
...Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
...While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
...And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
..."'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!" -
Quoth the server, '404'."
"Their website's got bad links hanging off it like an explosion in a frankfurter factory."
"Where are the bagels? The skinheads eat all the bagels already?"
"Remember, the only thing worse than being painted by an endlessly wide brush of smug disdain is being painted by a brush of smug disdain that's not quite wide enough."
"Moviegoers can't be blamed for being skeptical about superdirector John Woo's third stab at making an American action hit... But then we see [Nicolas] Cage hurl himself out of a careening jet while firing a huge automatic pistol in each hand as every single thing in the background explodes into flame, and presto! Just like that, John Woo is a genius again."
"And folks, can't we agree on one thing: Any movie with four separate beheadings is pretty darned good entertainment."
"Starship Troopers: Based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein."
"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I don't think I can take it, and my heart fills up like a balloon, until I think it will burst."
"You are not your job.
You are not how much money you have in the bank.
You are not the car you drive.
You are not the contents of your wallet.
You are not your fucking khakis."
"I have found God, but he is insufficient."
"Facilis descensus Averni. (It is easy to go down into Hell.)"
"People think that Hell is fire and brimstone and the Devil poking you in the butt with a pitchfork, but it's not. Hell is the time when you should have walked away, but you didn't."
"Do you know how hard it is to write budgets over a year in advance? The stuff I'm asking for money for hasn't even been invented yet."
"The ultimate party–the one you're really dying to get invited to–is the one where the worst person who's going to be there is you."
"The best party in America."
"Well, why don't you do what you damn well please; everybody else does here, anyway."
"Practice Acting Kind of Random. Beauty, eh?"
"I was just reading a book about chaos. In it, it mentions a mathematician who did ground breaking work in Chaos theory using his computer which did a blazing six floating point operations per second. My computer does 120 million. I haven't discovered shit."
"A dog is just a dog, until he's got your privates in his teeth, then he's Mr. Dog."
"Don't fuck with Mr. Zero."
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country.... Some people scoff at vegetarians, but they have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate. On the average they outlive other men by about six years now."
"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of the lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."
"All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals."
"Natural selection operates over thousands of generations. For 99 percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, written language, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience."
"By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake.... But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake."
"Nature doesn't give two fucks in a rat's ass what we do to animals, any more than it wept over the extinction of the dinosaurs. We're the ones who care about animals. Don't let the dopey eyes fool you - given the chance, that cow would kill you and everyone you love."
"Do you want my dick in your mouth? No? All right, then."
"Don't let bozosity grind you down."
"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention."
"With email you can get every get-rich quick offer ever invented. Twice a day! With Usenet you can acquire 2 gigabytes of porn a day without ever having to spend a penny. With the World Wide Web you can have bad design, bad news, and bad writing delivered into your brain with a backhoe."
"Every major technological age attracts a certain dominant artistic form: the mathematical and optical innovations of the Rennaissance were best realized in the geometry of perspective painting; the industrial age worked through its social crises in the triple-decker novel.... Information space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it."
"Hey! there's a beverage involved here...."
"Every system is self-regulating, as Lenin and Marie Antoinette can tell you."
"We Americans like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength."
"Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century. "
"Because you've got to do something while you're waiting around doing nothing."
"There must have been moments when Odysseus, years after his return from the Trojan War, relaxed on a sofa with a glass of wine in his hand and muttered to Penelope, 'You know, that was actually a pretty sweet trip.' That's one of the strange things about travelling."
"Love empowers memory; you keep what your heart wants to keep."
"Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words."
"Unexplained panic sharpens the senses almost past enduring."
"...just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days."
"It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure."
"Sometimes on these gray days the past just comes rolling armylike through the fields toward my naked heart."
"'Come inside now. Come in and fuck me.'
'There's probably two things I wouldn't do,' he said. 'One is fuck you.'
'And the other?'
'I don't know. I just hope there's at least one more.'"
"Let's set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.... Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."
"I told them I was a rollerblading cybersamurai named Chet Griffin, but my fellow elite call me 'Ultimate Badass.' On TV four hours later, they showed my face talking, and, to our hysterics, subtitled across the bottom of the screen, 'Chet Griffin, known among his bike messenger friends as The Ultimate Bad Ass.' I could just see those 'friends' yodeling with rage."
"...he has an enormous tolerance for pain. Not his own, of course."
"Few people Parker shot were ever shot again."
"Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was an artist? I realized in myself the same desire as animated him. But whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life."
"As if her feelings were outside her, not in her control, like a bus she has to wait for."
"He's unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they're unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever."
"He had anticipated a masculine transit through military service, company loyalty, and a suburban marriage. What he found, instead, was the Vietnam War, corporate downsizing, and a marital crack-up. 'Every promise that's been made to me has been broken,' he said."
"It's just that none of us had the wit or the talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle."
"Everyone in England was like that, he reckoned. Nobody looked at a roller-skating bloke with wraparound shades on and thought, Hey, he looks cool, or, Wow, that looks like a fun way of getting some exercise. They just thought: wanker."
"I've got a seriously depressed, highly disturbed female patient in my ward and you are encouraging her to read Schopenhauer. Buddy, have you lost your fucking mind? What in the hell were you thinking?"
"I drifted back to the ward television and sat holding hands with Joanne as we watched soap operas, enjoying a pleasant Thorazine buzz. That night Joanne slipped into my room, removed her robe, and climbed into bed with me and fucked my brains out. She was easily the best piece of ass I experienced in my short history as a fornicator. Insane women were generally good in bed."
"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
"Philosophy is no more than man's orientation in the cosmos, and from this orientation stem the kindness, tolerance, and generosity which are the basis of all true teaching."
"If you don't realize the source
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kindhearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king."
"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?"
"In truth, the way matters but little; the will to arrive suffices."
"In Worcester, Massachusetts, thirsty patriots repaired to a local tavern and offered toasts to the prosperity of the United States and a dozen other things, including 'Perpetual itching without benefit of scratching to the enemies of America.'"
"Those who fought were clear eyed. Resistance was, at its essence, a choice between forms of death. Whatever Jews did, they would be killed. But one could die with honor by choosing to 'defend oneself to the last breath'.... In Jewish legend the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising often recalled Eleazar ben Yair and the men and women at Masada who fought the Romans on the heights in the year 73 C.E. They refused to surrender. 'Only a free life is worth living' is how Josephus retells the final speech of the Zealot leader. In Warsaw, the few had stood against the many, the pure of heart against the wicked power. They were armed by their courage. They were emboldened because they had no choice. And if victory eluded them, honor and dignity did not."
"If we go to war for economic reasons, why not for moral reasons? I don't want to get emotional about it, but for Christ's sake, man, is NEVER AGAIN just a bumper sticker?"
"At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful."
2000.01.01